The Rowland Case
| The Rowland Case | |||||||
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| Part of Project Red Dragoon | |||||||
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| Factions Involved | |||||||
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ShadowHaven Esper Moth Night Claws - John Holis Stormcrow |
Hermes [REDACTED] [REDACTED] [REDACTED] | ||||||
Summary
The runners are hired by Mary Rowland to investigate the murder of her husband, Grant Rowland. The runners discover that convicted murderer Hector Sanchez, who according to official records is supposed to be serving a life sentence in a Supermax prison, somehow got out of prison and was implanted with a prototype piece of cyberware that overwrites a person's memory. Sanchez did the murder in a way that is the calling card of his old gang, The Red Grins. The runners are hounded at every turn by at least two trained professionals, a hacker and a sniper, and potentially a third, as there was another person supposed to be in a max security prison in Texas at the meet.
Eventually the team manage to capture Sanchez and take him to a Laesa syndicate facility in Puyallup for interrogation. After the interrogation as the team are taking him to a doctor to look at this fancy implant, Sanchez is shot by a sniper and upon his death the implant fries itself.
Background
Eight months before the run: Hector Sanchez, mid-level gangster in the razorgang The Red Grins goes to jail with the help of the testimony of two of his fellow gangers, Miguel and Gilberto Ortiz. They testified because they felt his increasingly violent tendencies would turn on his gang.
Five days before the run: Sanchez washes up in Tacoma with a fresh set of cybernetic implants, including one that tries to replace his memories with that of Solomon Hadley, a former UCAS MARSOC marine who died from cancer nearly two years ago.
Four days before the run: Grant Rowland, former UCAS MARSOC marine, is brutally stabbed to death outside his business in northern Tacoma.
The Meet
The team meet Mrs. Johnson, Mary Rowland, at a nondescript diner in Bellevue. She tells her the facts as she knows them - her husband was brutally stabbed to death, KE are doing very little to investigate, and she thinks it might be related to his career in the Marines, which she knows little about. One of the patrons in the bar is listening in on their conversation, at least until Mrs. Johnson puts up a White Noise generator halfway into the meet. Also unbeknownst to the runners, Hermes manages to breach their DNI and listen in on their comms for long enough to hear their plan - to check into a Tacoma hotel as a base of operations for their work. He gets to work hacking into various hotels in Tacoma and collecting reservations made there. Thanks to their man in the diner, they have a list of SINs to check against.
Research from the Hotel
The team examine crime scene photos and a preliminary autopsy report provided by the Johnson. Moth picks up on the fact that one of the injuries the victim suffered was deep cuts in both corners of the mouth, the eponymous move of The Red Grins, a puyallup razorgang that to Moth's knowledge don't operate outside of Puyallup. Night Claws - John Holis sends his pet sprite off on a six-hour matrix search on Rowland himself, and after that the team decide to visit the crime scene.
The Crime Scene
At the crime scene, Esper uses Psychometry and gets a quite vivid impression of the murder - the killer overpowered Rowland and stabbed him to death, but to Esper it felt as if there were two minds in the killer's head, and that this was somehow a just act of vengeance for an egregious crime. Through various means the team rule out the usual suspects of this sort of double personality - Schizophrenia, mind magic, spirits, and personachips. They also look up who in the Red Grins might have reason to wish revenge on someone, and find the story of Hector Sanchez and how he was betrayed by his friends. They also discover that the suspicious man at the meet is another man supposed to be serving a life sentence in another high-security prison in Texas. Stormcrow manages to follow tracks away from the crime scene to a manhole cover and into the sewers. Moth, Esper and Stormcrow follow enter the sewers while Night Claw stays on the surface. They follow the trail for a while, but it goes cold. After several hours in the sewers they are less than clean and decide to surface and check into a nearby hotel to clean up.
Hermes Returns
While the rest of the team are cleaning up, Night Claw suddenly gets a mark on a persona running silent. He finds a decker with a persona like the greek god Hermes and attacks him. Hermes, however, hits Night Claw with a Tantrum-laced dataspike, leaving him puking on the floor while Hermes makes his escape. Once Night Claw is capable of moving again, he swears vengeance on this decker. The team concludes that between the guy in person at the meet and this, they must be quite compromised. They mostly turn off DNI, and Moth stops using the SIN she used at the meet for the remainder of the run.
The Garrison
The team decide to run down a lead they got from the J at the meet - The Garrison, a pub that caters to military and ex-military types in southern Tacoma. They arrive in the middle of a wake for Grant Rowland. They manage to blend in and make inquiries about Rowland and his past, learning that he was well liked at the bar, and that two patrons were former squadmates, one of whom, Rick Nicodemo is at the wake. As they decide to find Rick and question him, he heads outside to smoke, and shots ring out in The Garrison as Rick is shot and killed by sniper fire. The team and all the military patrons inside rush out, and particularly sharp-eyed members of the team manage to spot the killer on a rooftop a good kilometer away. Moth organizes the patrons into pursuit while Stormcrow turns into a bird to chase after the killer and Esper levitates upwards to try to reestablish line of sight.
The assassin tries to make his escape with a wingsuit, but Stormcrow uses an alchemical Destroy [Pants] prep to tear holes in it and cause the killer to crash. Esper promptly turns him to stone with Petrify. They decide to take him to a Laesa syndicate hideout in Puyallup that Moth gives them access to for questioning.
Through a combination of Esper's interrogation technique, Night Claw's matrix search finally concluding, and talking with the surviving squadmate, one Aviram "Ravi" Cohen, the team manage to piece the following together:
The Conclusion
Hector Sanchez has been implanted with some sort of prototype headware that replaces his memories with those of Solomon Hadley, the fourth member of Rowland's squad who was left behind on an op in Bogota during the Amazonian Wars. The squad thought it was the right call at the time but Rowland beat himself up over it, and Hadley never forgave them once he got released from the POW camp in which he spent the rest of the Amazonian war. For some reason "Hadley" decided to act on his vengeance, stealing the necessary equipment to carry out the murder in an act that Hector Sanchez might have chosen. Through Psychometry they also learn that this piece of ware was installed in Hector Sanchez head in a lab that is high tech enough that it probably has the capability to install Deltaware.
As they're taking Hadley/Sanchez to a contact of theirs to examine this ware closer, another sniper kills him. After the shooting in Tacoma, the team hunting the runners picked up their trail and followed them to Puyallup. As Sanchez dies, Night Claw notices that the headware briefly goes wireless on and transmits a very large amount of data to a host that disappears once the transmission is completed. He manages to intercept the data and with the help of Esper's knowledge of memories they manage to build it into a readable format. While the data was fragmented, the team have enough to understand that the data transmitted were the memories that Sanchez had experienced since washing up in Tacoma, five days ago.
They inform the Johnson of all this, who pays them and gives them the contact information of an old colleague of hers.
Rewards
8k nuyen, 6 karma, Cia Bill at Loyalty 1, 2 CDP