Anna leaves the secured partition and preserved silver case in the east service bay under station security custody. Detective Miller accompanies her, following Elias Voss’s scheduled maintenance trail.
They emerge into Times Square, where screens flood the crowds with shifting light. Transit cameras place Voss near a restricted service entrance beneath the pedestrian crush.
Detective Miller
The entrance is two blocks east. Cameras lose him whenever the crowd thickens, but the timing puts him there six minutes ago.
Miller’s phone vibrates. The officers sent to Voss’s listed address report an empty apartment, no equipment, and a landlord who has not seen him recently.
Detective Miller
His address is clean. Too clean. But transit just logged an access ping from a maintenance panel nearby.
A service entrance waits beneath a glowing theater marquee, half-hidden behind barriers and delivery carts. The access ping repeats once, then vanishes into the network.
Detective Miller
He is still close. We go in before he can use another blind spot.
“I use Voss's visitor pass to gain access”
SUCCESS (Superb Reasoning, rolled +1)
Anna presents Elias Voss’s visitor pass to the service entrance reader. The barcode scans cleanly, and the lock releases with a muted click.
She and Detective Miller enter a narrow utility corridor beneath the marquee. The door seals behind them, cutting the crowd noise to a distant vibration.
Detective Miller
Voss’s authorization is valid here. He used the pass exactly as intended, then piggybacked on the maintenance network.
A wall panel displays the current service map. One route is highlighted toward a communications room, with a recent access timestamp matching the vanished ping.
Detective Miller
That room is active. If he left a relay behind, it will show us where the casino connection was redirected.
Anna reaches the communications room without resistance. The pass grants entry, and inside, a maintenance console glows beside an unplugged portable router bearing fresh handling marks.
“I isolate the router and copy its connection logs”
SUCCESS (Fair Elite Digital Forensics, rolled +1)
Anna photographs the router’s ports and status lights, then disconnects its network cable. She places the device in a labeled evidence sleeve and powers it through an isolated forensic adapter.
The maintenance console recognizes the router without granting it outside access. Anna mounts a clean storage drive and begins a read-only acquisition of its connection logs.
Anna
The router has been isolated, but its internal timestamps remain intact.
A progress window fills steadily. The copied log records repeated handshakes between the communications room, the casino security network, and a prepaid cellular gateway.
Detective Miller
There’s the bridge. Voss did not simply erase footage; he redirected the casino connection through this room.
The acquisition completes with a verification hash and an exact copy of the router’s connection history. One entry stands apart, a remote session opened from a public network near Times Square.
Detective Miller
Copy secured. We can trace the session without touching the original, and this time the trail is preserved.
✓ Quest Accepted
Determine who operated the public-network session
✓ Quest Accepted
Identify the casino suspect involved in her father’s murder
+ New Item Acquired
Evidence sleeve
“I trace the preserved session against the casino suspects' movements.”
SUCCESS (Superb Investigation, rolled +1)
Anna loads the preserved session copy beside the casino access timeline, then overlays the three suspects’ recorded movements from the security office and service corridors.
The remote session opens during the same seven-second camera gap that enabled the duplicate badge. Its source route intersects each suspect’s location without placing any of them at the console.
Anna
The session used their movements as timing markers, not as the operator’s location.
Anna matches the network handshakes against the footage. The Man in the Gray Coat crosses the office entrance first, followed by the Woman with the Pearl Clutch and the Tall Bookmaker.
Detective Miller
They were staged as a moving cover. Voss waited for each sightline to clear, then used the relay to make the casino system blame the room.
The trace identifies a final relay interval immediately after the Tall Bookmaker leaves camera view. It routes through a prepaid gateway, then terminates at a temporary account created from the casino security office.
Detective Miller
We have the sequence now: Voss supplied the access, and someone inside the casino timed the suspects’ movements. The manipulation had two operators.
Quest Complete
Determine who operated the public-network session