"By A Hair"

By a Hair


Following up on a lead, Deke heads out to Crescent City Mortuary to investigate if there’s a link between the owner and the strange happenings with Chief of Police Head Officer Adam Warren.

He finds the office is closed, but there’s a man who looks terribly sad outside who tries to cry but seemingly can’t. Deke attempts to take a cell phone photo slyly, but the man notices him and greets him.

The man is Dean Gardner, who tells Deke his wife Penny Gardner was with the police department working as the head of their bomb squad. He was supposed to meet with the owner of the mortuary, Seth Newman, but the owner has just sent a text that he will not be able to meet today.

Dean asks Deke if he can help him try to prove his suspicions about Penny being murdered. Dean believes Penny was murdered, as her death officially was ruled as a mugging but she was in uniform working the Super Bowl crowd control at the time.

Deke also read about the police also set up a free haircut booth at the Metrodome, offering to cut the hair of fans in shapes supporting their favorite teams.

Dean and Penny’s swanky house on Magazine Street has a second floor bedroom, kitchen and private home office where Penny did work. Dean offers to get Deke a glass of ice water and leaves the investigator alone. He notices Penny has a password protected computer, a locked file drawer, pictures of her wearing her honorary Hurricane Katrina pin with Dean and a reminder cork board.

Deke looks at the cork board and finds several items of interest: a reminder to pick up something from the Crescent City Electric Shot tech shop, a diagnostic printout of security cameras (one isn’t working at Penny’s satellite office and another isn’t working at the main police headquarters) with some not working and an appointment card reminder for the “Hair’s To You” Salon located at Royal Street and run by someone named Jerry Caré.

Deke picks the lock of the closed drawer and discovers some motherboards and electronic circuitry that radiate a strong power that sets off Deke’s senses from The Sight. He also finds a wig with blonde highlights and another business card for Jerry Caré’s salon.

After promising Dean to get to the bottom of this, Deke makes a phone call to the Desk Sergeant’s desk and gets Officer Emma Lucas. She is a newer recruit and shares the line with several other new recruits with access to the basic crime blotter. Officer Lucas tells Deke a lot of people on the force knew about Penny, but word is she was mugged. She also reminds Deke that Penny had a satellite police office in the Central Business District and to put in a good word for her with his friend Alex.

Deke does a quick check of the crime scene and senses with The Sight that the site where Penny was murdered had a ton of voodoo magic-controlled individuals around it. He also senses the voodoo magic around the Metrodome as well.

His next stop is at Penny’s office in a skyscraper at the CBD. Her office is on the 15th floor next to an Italian restaurant called “Mamma Mia!” and a vacant space that may have been a florist. Deke investigates and a sees a cooler with flowers painted alongside of it, but nothing else unusual. There’s a wall that Deke might be able to punch through that shares the same wall with Penny’s office. There’s also a ledge that someone could crawl to if the office’s windows were knocked out.

Deke goes back to the entrance of Penny’s office and notices the security camera trained on the front of the entrance seems to be out of order. Carefully, Deke successfully picks the lock but a bit more loudly than he prefers. Several people at the restaurant notice him, but Deke walks in confidently and no one seems to pay extra attention to it.

Inside Penny’s office, Deke finds two closets, a drafting table and a computer area with two drawers, one locked. Inside the closet, Deke finds parts for the bomb squad robots in both closets and a digitally locked safe in the other.

Like back at Penny’s home office, Deke at first isn’t able to crack the passwords with the computer or the safe.

Deke is able to open up the drawers, one unlocked and another he’s able to jimmy open, and makes some odd discoveries. In the first drawer is dozens and dozens of eyeballs. Some have wires attached, each with varying colors. The locked drawer includes receipts for two wigs, as well as an odd hand mold the size of his own hand. On the desk near the computer he finds receipts for more electronics from Crescent City Electric Shot, but for unusual items that don’t seem to be found in the bomb squad robots like silicon.

More investigative work reveals that Penny may have called her attacker before she met up with them by phone. There are also fingerprints on specific numbers of her digital safe.

Using his quick thinking, Deke eventually realizes Penny was contracted to build the ultimate robotic combat warrior and was killed when she didn’t deliver it. After going undercover and speaking with Penny’s hairstylist, Jerry Caré, Deke eventually realizes the key to unraveling the mystery may his client!

After unlocking more of Penny’s secret documents, uncovering circuit boards, schematics and batteries, Deke tries to head back to Dean’s house.

But he comes under fire! A sniper, targeting him drives him away from the scene and back to Dean’s house where Deke must reveal to the man an unbelievable secret:

Dean is Penny’s robot!

Unsure of what to do, Dean answers the phone as Deke looks for more evidence of the truth. But his client returns in “killer” mode after getting an odd phone call and Deke needs to pull out all the stops to get to the bottom of the mystery.