SEQUENTIAL ━ Connor // RK800 ✔️

eight ━ the right information

• • •

Floodlights made night into day in the heart of the hayfield, desite heavy rain falling mercilessly over the grave of Joel Reed. The whole police station had arrived there once the report was filed in. Murders didn't happen often in these parts. Even a loner who liked the solitude of a life of work, surrounded by androids, wouldn't have been expected to find such a violent end around there.

The oddity of the situation made the police fret about trying to remember the procedures to uncovering the body, to setting up the scene for forensic investigations. The rain didn't help them in any case. Large raindrops slapped their jackets, splashed the mud forming on the ground underneath a now flattened circular patch in the grasses.

Umbrellas snapped open at some point, shielding the single cop walking around and snapping pictures of everything that has been beforehand identified through the evidence markers placed down. As soon as dark clouds had gathered, a makeshift tent had been raised above the open grave to preserve anything that they'd miss on first glance inside. Even with the sun now long gone over the horizon and the storm at its peak above them, the tent still stood and the corpse laid at the bottom of the shallowly dug grave, unmoving, untouched.

It was that final detail which enforced Connor's previous conclusions about the killer's panic after the victim's death.

Standing underneath the tent's cover, right on the edge of the grave, Connor has been looking down for a long while, analyzing from afar the corpse and counting on it to glue together his computing of what had happened there.

"Connor," Officer Brady joined him breathlessly, tugging off the hood of his raincoat once he took cover under the tent. He took one look at the corpse before deciding he'd rather not have that grotesque image burned on his mind — all those holes carved into the body, the whiteness of the single eye still intact, the pieces of skull visible through the eye socket bashed in, and the nakedness of the corpse as a whole. It wasn't a pleasant sight. He shook his head and looked up at Connor instead, "They got the androids lined up in the main barn where they found his shirt too. One of them must have seen something, but I heard Bobby mention their memory doesn't last long. Is that true?"

"Yes," Connor was succinct in answering, eyes still narrowed and concentrated on the corpse.

After a small break of silence in which he watched cluelessly the shine of Connor's LED, Brady sighed, "What are you piecing together now?"

"The pocket knife has his fingerprints all over it," Connor noted absentmindedly, moving his gaze to the two weapons picked from the makeshift grave and set besides it as critical evidence. The killer buried both with the body, another rushed mistake. "The shotgun does too. A Ithaca Model 37 Featherlight Upland, 12 gauge and 18.5 inch barrel, registered to Joel Reed fifteen years ago. However these prints, compared directly to those on the knife, are at least two weeks old, if not more."

"So...," Brady squinted down a the gun, "the killer gunned him down with his own weapon, in his own house. What about the stab wound in the leg then?"

"Joel put up a fight to the last moment," Connor noted that as a matter of fact, placing no emotion to it, because there was none an android could spare anyway. "I believe he was at first attacked with the gun. The killer thought the first shot in the abdominal area will be enough, but they were obviously wrong. When Joel stood up again, they panicked and their second shot missed. They had three more rounds inside the barrel at that point, or so they thought. The gun is currently empty and the crime scene inside the house only has three shotgun shells on the ground, so though the killer thought they had three more shots, in fact they only had one more, which they once again missed. In the meantime, Joel armed himself with his pocket knife."