Lost and Found

Posted on Tue Aug 27th, 2019 @ 1:41am by Lieutenant Commander William Gunnison & Captain Abigail Laurens

Annaleise walked through the ship in silence, still rattled by the scene inside the VIP quarters. It wasn't her first crime scene, even though she had only been out of the Academy for two years, she had a quick and rather analytical mind that was easily able to process what she saw. She had dealt with a few murders in the last two years, but this was by far the most violent she had been subjected to.

Smiling and nodding slightly to a crew member here and there, Annaleise finally located Lieutenant Gunnison, the Chief Operations Officer. "Lieutenant?" she called as she approached, not wanting to startle him. "I believe you're the person I need to see to locate something lost in the computers?"

"Yes," Will replied, turning to face the ensign approaching him. She was in a yellow uniform, but he didn't recognize her, which meant she was either security or engineering, since he would have known who she was if she was operations. "Or at least I like to think I'm the person to go to for such things. Let's head to my office, and you can let me know what seems to be missing, and we'll see what I can find."

Following him to his office, Annaleise took the seat that was offered to her and waited for him to sit before she spoke again. "My apologies, I didn't even give you my name, I'm sorry, I'm not normally so terribly rude," she said as she offered an apologetic smile. "I'm Ensign Annaleise Kirkland, from Security. We're investigating an incident involving one of our guests and I wanted to retrieve some security footage from overnight that would have been taken on deck 4, but when I went in all the footage from the area I'm interested has been deleted. It looks like it's also gone from the backup and the redundant failover systems as well. I was hoping you might be able to see if you can retrieve any of it?"

"Perhaps," Will said, pulling up the security logs main menu. "It is rather unusual for everything to be deleted. What's the particular area of Deck 4 and specific time frame we're talking about here?"

"Outside the VIP quarters in section D," Annaleise replied quietly. "Time wise, any time I think between midnight last night and 10am today? I was looking at the footage I could find, I can see where the victim left his quarters, but nothing else after until our crew showed up at the door."

Will tapped in the appropriate information into the console. "Hmm," he said after a moment. "Interesting that so much of this should just happen to have been erased just along the specified time frame and location, particularly the earlier part of it. However, at times there are a few ways to work around at least some of it, if one knows how. And yes," he added with a quick grin in Annaleise's direction, "fortunately I happen to be familiar with some of those methods. In fact, strange but true story - I actually covered a couple of those methods this last semester in one of the Academy courses I was teaching. This might take a bit of time, but I feel confident I should be able to pull up something that we might be able to work with here."

After working a bit with the controls, he said, "Well it looks like I've got something here, about a couple of hours or so right at the beginning. It will be somewhat fragmented and the resolution probably won't be too great, but it's something. Let's watch it and see what we've found, shall we?"

Annaleise nodded, watching the footage as it was played. He was right, it wasn't really good quality and it was pretty jittery at best, there were lots of frames missing. She grimaced slightly. "You know, if the lights were out and there was some dramatic music playing, this would almost be like watching one of those creepy horror movies. You know the ones where you're watching the monster on the screen and then it flickers and suddenly the monster is out of the screen and in front of you?" she said with a wry grin.

There was another sudden flicker and the entire scene changed. "Different camera?" Annaleise questioned. "I know this location, isn't that just near the lounge? It is, look, that's that rainbow girl from the bar! What's the time stamp on this?"

"She's Ashe Zachariah, the Raging Deity's manager," Will said. "The time stamp, as best as I can make out, would put it at about 10 minutes after midnight, and as memory serves me, she closes the lounge at midnight. And yes, this is one of the cameras near the lounge. Also, interestingly, if I understood the autopsy results on Ernesto Miranda, that was right around when the time of death was believed to be."

Will scanned through a couple of related pieces of footage. "Here's something interesting," he said after a moment. "Here, a few moments later, she seems to be talking to someone. Although the image isn't good enough to make out who, there's enough there that it doesn't look like the person is in a Starfleet uniform, or anything that looks like something an off-duty member of the crew or any of the permanent civilian contingent on board might wear." After a moment, he said, "I think we may need to have a talk with Miss Zachariah. Even if she isn't somehow involved with the late Mr. Miranda's death - which I sincerely hope and pray she isn't - she may have seen or heard something that may be important."

Annaleise nodded. "I suspect you're right," she said quietly. "We should keep watching though, see if anything else comes up on the footage that was otherwise deleted, then we can send it all to Lieutenant Matashi and Lieutenant Voroshilov and let them decide if they want to talk to her."

Will checked a bit farther into the feed. "Well, there doesn't look to be too much left that's salvageable. At this point, perhaps it would be best to bring this to the attention of Lieutenant Matashi and Lieutenant Voroshilov for evaluation."

Annaleise nodded slightly. "I think you're right. I'll let you deliver the data to them, it will help preserve the chain of evidence," she said quietly. "If they decide to pursue it then they can. Thank you Lieutenant, you must have some kind of magic touch, I swear I looked and couldn't find anything!" She offered him a quick grin. "I owe you a drink or three!"

He nodded, then transmitted the pertinent sections of video to Lieutenant Matashi and Lieutenant Voroshilov, along with a note explaining about the footage in relation to the investigation, while quietly hoping to himself that Ashe Zachariah was indeed nothing more than a possible witness.