The stairs

Chapter 4

Cassie walked up to the outlet, plugged in the phone charger, and connected to the WiFi at the mall. There were a couple of things that she wanted to check. The first thing to be done was to identify the poison used, which would help her determine the method of delivery of the poison. It was harder than she expected. Cassie's knowledge of biology was abysmal - better than most of the others in her batch, but still abysmal. Besides, most of the information she could find on the internet were about treating poisoning victims, and not about identifying which poison a dead person may have exposed to.

Lex sat down next to her. "You're in over your head, Cassie. Sure, Clark's pretty annoying, but you're going to have to work with her. Besides, if you're going to try solving mysteries further down the line..."

"I wanted to, to be honest with you. But now, I, well, I don't know any more. I want to crack this case, but it's a bit too close to home. I'm glad I didn't know Lorna all that well."

"So, what's your plan?"

"Do you have your laptop?"

"Negative. I do have my phone, but so do you..."

"I have my laptop," said Phillip, "what are you two planning?"

"Awesome. I'm going to take a photograph of the security cameras. I can't get close to them because of the police, but you're going to enhance them. You can do that, right?"

"Well, I do have some code that I wrote, but why do you want to do that, again?"

"I'll explain later," said Lex, "I'll take the photo - my camera's better, plus I'm taller."

"And could you get me some coffee from the vending machine over there, Cassie? I didn't sleep much last night - I thought I'd figure out this problem I had if I slept on it, after working on it until 8 am, and..."

"I get it, I'll get some coffee. You just focus on enhancing the photo."

When Cassie returned with the coffee, Phillip had started his laptop and was looking for the code he needed. Cassie looked at the area near the stairs. Detective Clark stood near the landing, watching everyone like a hawk. Mark was also sitting on a bench further away, fiddling with his phone. Cassie noticed that his hands were a little unsteady. Robin and Rosa were watching Lex with some interest. Beryl was also on her phone, typing furiously. Chances were, she was communicating with her friends outside.

"What are you doing?" asked Detective Clark, just as Lex was about to take the photo.

"Exactly why are we enhancing this if that idiot is going to take the photo from that range?" Phillip asked Cassie.

She sighed. "I'll see if I can rescue him."

"Yeah, why are you taking photos of the ceiling?" asked Rosa, "there is no blood splatter there or something like that, right?"

"Unless someone sprayed the ceiling with a syringe, that's highly unlikely," said Robin.

"Why would you spray the ceiling with a syringe?" asked Rosa.

"Lex, give me the phone. That's not how you look for signal."

"You didn't believe me," said Detective Clark, "Fine, there were traces of glue on the surface of the camera. It was done about one and a half hours ago, and as you might have guessed by now, someone pasted a photo of the stairs in front of the camera. Since there particular stairs are almost unused, no one noticed it. So, I will need your alibis for the time."

"I was at work at the time," said Cassie.

"I was in this mall - I think I just got here at the time. I was probably at the electronics shop, but I was browsing through some headsets as well, but that's probably after that time," said Lex.