The file on the diplomat's murder was a nightmare of optics. A man, a high-ranking official, dead at a glittering state banquet. The police were a predictable disaster, focused on the chaos. My job was to find the one, clean fact that unlocked the system.
I didn't bother with the photos of the victim or the room layout. My analyst instincts went immediately to the single oddity the police kept repeating: Only one glass was poisoned, and CCTV shows no one near it.
The police assumed a ghost or a genius assassin who bypassed security. I assumed high-end catering and a very organized killer.
"Don't give me the victim's biography yet," I told my team, stretching out in my chair and propping my feet on the desk, feeling the satisfying clack of the antique clock parts I still hadn't put away from Case 7. "Give me the event manifest."
I needed to know the boring stuff: Who was the victim? Mr. Aris, a diplomat overseeing a critical global trade agreement. What was the poison? A rare, sophisticated plant derivative—lethal in micro-doses, slow-acting, easily dissolved.
But the most crucial data point was the glass itself.
I demanded the inventory list for the dinner service. "Every glass is identical," the report stated. "Stored in racks, served by rotation. High security."
"Exactly," I murmured, ignoring the police chief's frantic call flashing on my burner phone. "The killer didn't need to know where Mr. Aris was sitting. They needed to know which glass he was guaranteed to receive."
I instructed my team to forget the CCTV footage of the room. "Pull the footage and logs from the prep kitchen and the dishware storage area. We need the full rotation schedule of the glassware. And I want the complete staff roster—not just the servers, but the back-of-house, the dishwashers, the inventory clerk. Anyone who touched those glasses before they were filled."
I was searching for the procedural weak point. The moment of identity. The moment one specific, identical wine glass acquired its unique, lethal trait. The moment the perfect, undetectable crime was set in motion.
My initial deduction crystallized: This murder was about procedural control. The killer was using the sheer organization of the banquet against the victim. A political target, a rare poison, and a choreographed delivery. The motive, I suspected, would be a logical conclusion of the victim's position: eliminating a political obstacle.
I let my mind drift, ignoring the insistent buzzing of the police chief's calls. The killer hadn't needed to defy physics; they had needed to exploit logistics. The solution wasn't about the where, but the identity of the glass.
My team delivered the reports. The glassware inventory confirmed that every glass was functionally identical. But the sommelier's service rotation log and the kitchen's dishware tracking system were the true gold mine.
"Focus on the washing cycle," I instructed, tapping a long acrylic nail against the screen showing the dishwasher schematic. "Glasses are loaded onto racks. They come out sterile and identical. But which glass isn't sterile? Which glass acquired a unique trait?"
I was looking for the procedural anomaly. My team tracked the path of the racks. Before the banquet, a batch of glasses had been rejected by the head server—not for being dirty, but for having a tiny, almost imperceptible scratch near the rim, a flaw that would be flagged for replacement, not re-washing.
The scratches were so small they would be invisible under ambient light, but the sommelier knew to check for them on the fine crystal. This scratch was the identifier.
The killer hadn't poisoned a random glass. They had poisoned a glass that had been deliberately marked with a microscopic diamond scribe during the initial setup phase days earlier, before the glass was even cleaned. They had introduced the rare plant poison to that specific, uniquely flawed glass in the prep kitchen, relying on the sommelier's professional compulsion to reject any flawed glass and place it aside for the highest-ranking official—Mr. Aris.
"The head sommelier served Mr. Aris personally," I summarized, propping my feet back up. "He didn't know he was delivering poison. He was simply performing a courtesy: 'I noticed this fine glass had a tiny imperfection, sir. I took the liberty of replacing it with this other one right before serving.'"
The killer knew the sommelier's routine and exploited his professional meticulousness. They didn't need CCTV to prove who touched the glass; they needed the sommelier's testimony confirming which glass was set aside for its uniqueness.
I had my killer: someone with intimate knowledge of the banquet procedures and the victim's political leverage. The motive—eliminating a political obstacle—was now a logical certainty built on the simple fact of a tiny scratch.
As I finished dictating the full analytical breakdown, the door to my annex office opened without a knock. Detective Keir stood there, looking tired and utterly inappropriate in my sterile workspace. He had clearly ignored the ban on contacting me.
"The Chief is going insane over the diplomat case," he stated, his eyes locked on mine. "They just pulled my unit in. You've already got the answers, haven't you, Analyst?"
The professional collision had arrived.