Cop Craft – Dragnet Mirage Reloaded

Tilarna did not object. She fell silent, and seemed to be willing to wait there. Matoba walked through the front entrance of the building and stepped into the elevator, heading back up to Room 603. The main hallway was crowded with people. The residents of the apartment gathered around the entrance to Room 603, whispering worriedly.

“Move out of the way, this is the police.”

Splitting apart the crowd, Matoba walked into the room.

The room was still heavily scarred from the gunfight that had taken place within it. The dead body of the Colombian, Alvarez, lay sprawled out on the living room floor. In the bedroom was a half-open Boston bag, with various pieces of clothing scattered around it. It seemed that he had been planning to run away, and had been caught in the middle of his packing.

He examined Alvarez’s body. He found a wallet and a set of keys.

However, he did not find a cell phone.

Matoba searched through the bedroom for a landline phone, but there were none to be found. Even the phone in the living room had seemingly disappeared. Someone had come in and forcibly removed them, ripping out the phone lines in the process.

“Damn it.”

He had been tricked. Without the phone, he wouldn’t be able to recover any of Alvarez’s calls. Right as they had left the room to chase after the assassin, someone had come into the room to get rid of anything that could be used as evidence. It was a pretty bold move.

The suspect must have manipulated the assassin into fighting back and running away as a diversion. Their goal was to get Matoba and Tilarna to leave the room.

Of course, they would still be able to recover his call history by consulting the phone company. However, he could only do that by order of the court, and the process would take a while. The enemy would use that time to finish destroying all other evidence. But without the recordings, Matoba would have no idea what kind of people Alvarez had been talking with, and what they had been talking about.

Matoba returned to the main hallway and asked around to see if anyone had seen a suspicious man enter the room. No one had seen anything of the sort. But Matoba did not give up, stubbornly searching every corner of Alvarez’s room for any possible evidence. He found nothing. He had no choice but to wait for the forensics unit to arrive, but he wasn’t expecting them to find anything. 

Their enemy was clever.

Up until now, Matoba had assumed that this entire case had been caused by gang drug trafficking. He thought that it had resulted from a war over the highest quality drugs that happened to escalate into something bigger.

However, he now realized that there was much more to it.

The incredible lengths taken by the suspect to destroy all evidence reflected the severity of the case. That fairy must have been important. Or maybe it was not simply a matter of the fairy being important. Maybe there was a deeper reasoning behind all of it.

And what about Tilarna?

Though that Semanian knight’s desire to take back the fairy was genuine, she had to be hiding something. Now that he thought about it, it seemed strange for her, of all people, to come to the city to work with him. More than 10 years had passed since the Semanians began to cooperate with the Earthlings. After 10 years of cultural exchange, there’s no way they didn’t have someone more accustomed to Earth’s society.

Despite this, this little girl was the one to arrive. Was there some sort of hidden motive?

(What does this mean?)

Matoba’s mind was flooded with questions. He shook his head and clicked his tongue.

He could hear sounds coming from the street. The local police cars had finally arrived, their sirens blaring loudly. They were late. Recently, it was becoming more and more common for them to arrive late to the scene. Unfortunately, the police department did not have the men or resources to keep up with San Teresa’s steadily rising crime rate.

Matoba hurried out of the apartment building when he saw what was happening outside. Tilarna was standing in front of the dead body, arguing with the police officers.

Roth did not blame Matoba at all for rushing into Alvarez’s room without his permission. He respected Matoba’s decision to do so. If anything, Roth’s own plan had backfired, as they would have been able to capture Alvarez alive had they entered immediately.

“But more importantly, I want to talk about the time of the assassination,” Roth said on the other side of the phone call. “Was Alvarez being monitored? Did they find out about our investigation?”

Just as Roth said, it would be difficult to believe that the timing of the assassination was entirely coincidental. Maybe the suspect had known that they were planning an investigation on Alvarez, and killed him before they had the chance. How did the enemy find out so quickly?

“I have no idea. There are an endless number of possibilities.”

“What about the informant, that O’Neil guy that you talked to?”

“It’s definitely possible that he alerted the suspect. It might be his friend Kenny. It might be someone from the Seventh Branch. It might be you, and it might be. The only person we can rule out is this brave young knight here, as she doesn’t even know how to use a phone.”

Sitting in the passenger’s seat, Tilarna looked at him annoyedly.

“I do know. I read it in a book.”

“Oh, is that so? How impressive. You really know a lot of things, don’t you?”

Matoba ignored Tilarna as she glared at him angrily.

“…So, I will only include the basic details in the report. I’d like to talk about this directly.”

“That’s fine. However, be very careful. As I expected, there’s much more to this case than just gang conflict.

“Understood… Let’s go.”

Cutting off the call, Matoba stepped on the accelerator.

“Where are we going?” Tilarna asked. Her clothes had already returned to normal. The armor that she had been wearing was nowhere to be seen.

“From place to place. First, we need to make sure that O’Neil didn’t snitch. Then, we’ll confront every last one of Alvarez’s acquaintances. We’ll start with his brothers, and then we’ll ask the owner of the boat that he used to transport the fairy through the gate.”

“So he’s a smuggler, right? Do you have any idea who he may be?”

“What department do I work in?”

“The Special Vice Squad.”

“There’s your answer.”

The Special Vice Squad mainly dealt with the smuggling and trafficking of drugs, weapons and other illegal items. They were involved in countless undercover operations, and had accumulated tons of information on smugglers, many of which they still kept a close eye on.

“After the smuggler, probably his girl. But I don’t even know if he has one.”

“You think that’s gonna get you anywhere?”

“We’ll see. We’re gonna have to take this one step at a time.”