Cleanup
Michael
The first thing I need to know is who's gonna actually be doing the staging of the Bernadette/Beale Boys murder-suicide thing and if we're still planning to do it in a rundown apartment somewhere.
(Likewise, if there's anything Archie and/or Charley want to do after identifying one of the six remaining cryonauts who didn't make it out of the Agrigenics basement, this is the place to do it.)
Leonard
Jocasta will probably do the dirty work. She'll want to put heads together with Marshall and likely Archie, though, to make sure it's staged with maximum esmological impact.
Brant
Marshall wants to foster a better working relationship with Jocasta and will happily lend his psychological perspective to the problem. He always did like staging a death.
Michael
I had mentioned this elsewhere, but did you have any interest in taking a point in Forensics for Marshall, backfill that into his medical background, and say he'd been using it to stage his various deaths in Vietnam and at home?
Brant
Oh, sure. I feel like maybe I should also get to +0 in whatever the skill would be for like, art appreciation? Knowing about art? Something that an art critic would have?
Surely there's a skill for that in GURPS.
Michael
Connoisseur:
So reminder on Archie's meme below. My feeling is if we're gonna do a scene where Marshall and Jo pose the bodies of Bernadette, Stephen, the burned remains of the other three Beale Boys, and place them in a ritualistic context, Jocasta would aid Marshall's crime scene construction with Occultism-18. We could also throw some Psychology in there at a certain point, but I'd like to see how the banter between Marshall and Jo goes. We can say this happens sometime the week of September 2nd.
1. SHORT TERM / LOCAL MEME: The target here is the local community, press, and law enforcement. Because of the cult angle, Kinsolving makes a good vector for deployment. As discussed, we use the bodies to make it all look like a weird cultish murder-suicide. Archie leaves the details of that to the wetwork team, but I like the idea of putting the bodies in the creepy Downer Ranch barn (as opposed to the Beale Farms barn), as the bad vibes there should only make resulting memes stronger.
We should also tie Butler directly to Bernadette's cult, make it look like he was secretly all mixed up in that: he's been having sex with Bernadette and doing drugs with the hippies, all while bilking Agrigenics' donors and clients in order to bankroll them.
But we don't want to imbue the cult stuff with any unnecessary grandeur. So in the end this part of the story is just sad and sordid: it wasn't really a ritual sacrifice, or not entirely. Ultimately Butler killed Bernadette and her other lovers because he couldn't handle sharing her. Memetic lesson: it just goes to show what you get when you have multiple sex partners or let a woman be in charge of a cult.
Brant
"OK," Marshall says to Jocasta. He's seated cross-legged in the conversation pit of the URIEL offices, dressed in his usual high style. "Remind me how many bodies we are dealing with, and what state each is in? I believe we still have two in the ground?"
Leonard
Jocasta narrows her eyes and opens up a sketchbook — not her usual one, but a new one with a blood-red cover and lots of her small, neat handwriting on the first couple of pages, followed by some material from old tomes on demonology and cult ritual histories of various primitive cultures. "Three of the Beale boys are already neutralized. They're in oil drums out at the barn, in pieces. Probably a little decay but we can arrange them however we want. Then there's Bernadette, and I've got the last of her boys in a cell -- he's a fresh canvas. We can add them to the mix as we see fit."
She unfolds the sketchbook and smiles curiously. Her eyes are pinpricks; she's eager for the collaboration with Marshall, but she's clearly not slept in days.
>> SUCCESS by 11
The sketchbook's middle pages are filled with images of ritual mutilation: Aztec sacrifices, drawing and quartering, lingchi, sagittal sawing of Christian martyrs, Persian shekkeh executions, and so forth. "Lots of ways we could go with them, Doc, depending on what message you and Archie want to send." She looks down at another sketch she made based on police surgeon's drawings of Catherine Eddowes. "Probably easiest to just go with a Satanic angle, but people might not even notice that these days." (edited)
Brant
Marshall nods. "A lot of pieces on the board, then. A lot of work to do. But also a lot to work with.
One: four — no, sorry, five — bodies. Four male — two dismembered — and one female. All white collar professionals.
Two: a sexual angle. Which actually happened! So we needn't manufacture anything there.
Three: Agrigenics.
Four: Butler. Now missing. Presumably any beat cop with access to a telephone will figure out right quick that there is no 'New Delhi' office, and that Butler is on the lamb.
Five: the old woman in Dixon who called the police, and who spotted 'a man' crawling on the roof.
Six: the lab equipment at Bernadette's place. Whatever happened with that? Is it still there?
Seven: an occult angle, if we are going to use Archie's man at the Examiner to get the story out there."
He pauses to think, and to let Jocasta get all that down in her notebook.
"The first principle of constructing any sort of cover story is to use as much of the truth as you can. So what is the truth here? Well, one truth is that Butler was using Fry and her boy toys. We can rule out a romantic angle between Butler and Fry; Butler was a bachelor, and we can imply he was a homosexual. What else? Butler was conducting clandestine, unethical experimental work at Agrigenics. OK — was he using Fry to that end? To manufacture narcotics? Make a little money on the side?"
Marshall snaps his fingers. "Ah, yes. Here we go. Butler and Fry were loosely in cahoots. Butler was funneling resources from the company to Fry and her team to grow or manufacture something. Something illicit and dangerous. Drugs, or drug-laced foodstuff. Whatever. But Fry could not do it alone, so she recruited the boys to work as her assistants and plied them with sex and dope and stories about utopia. They did not know it was all just for money: they were true believers.
Unfortunately for Fry, one of them — one of the boys, whoever we kept alive longest — caught wise. Betrayed, unstable from all the drugs and late nights, he snapped. Killed his colleagues and disposed of their bodies in barrels. Then he abducted Fry and murdered her elsewhere. Not at Downer Ranch. Archie suggested that site for the staging but ... I don't want to draw the wrong kind of attention there. It is ontologically unstable and who knows what a few dead bodies will do to the landscape. But somewhere. Raped her, killed her, then committed suicide.
We will need a note or a letter. Something to tie all this up. I'm reminded of a killing we briefly looked into back in '70 ... or '71, maybe, down in Santa Cruz. Maybe you remember it? John Frazier, I think his name was? He left a letter at the killing site which tripped a few alarm bells here. Didn't turn into anything on our end. Just a weird coincidence. But I clocked it up here," he taps his forehead, "because I thought it might be useful some day."
Michael
(Brant, if you want to give me a Psychology-20 roll (your usual 18 +2 for this amazing monologue), I'll add the result of that along with Jo's successful Occultism to aid the final Forensics roll.)
Brant
>> SUCCESS by 7
(Also don't mean to rob Jocasta of any input here — there plenty of detail for her to fill in, if Leonard wants.)
Leonard
Jocasta, eager as always, is dutifully jotting everything down. "All the stuff I grabbed from Bernadette's house is in storage here. Lots in there we can leak to the press to bolster whatever story we go with. The bigger lab equipment is probably still locked away at the farm or was impounded by the PD — that's if we're lucky and OZY hasn't sent someone to collect it," she says."
She thinks for a moment, chewing on her pencil, a bad habit from school. "I wonder if...I mean, I think the basic story that Beale was a cult trying to contaminate the food supply for whatever reason, that Chun was the one who turned coat on them, is good. It shouldn't be a hard sell, either, because they're all young and on the counterculture edge, and everyone's scared of hippies gone sour now after Manson. I've got a stack of material we could use to craft a letter just based on those underground occult mags I was studying earlier this year.
"But I wonder if we should sort of soft-pedal...not the level of Butler's involvement, but maybe the, the nature of it. Or maybe hold it back for a while. Not that I don't want that son of a bitch; just the opposite. I want him bad. But if we leave him a little bit of breathing room, maybe that sends the message to OZYMANDIAS — and to Reinhardt — that we're off his trail, or couldn't quite connect the dots, or...or something. Relax their guard. I don't know, honestly. Spitballing. I just wish we had something to leverage against them," she sighs.
"Anyway. Whatever I can do." She sets down her pencil and flips back to something in her notes. "Frazier? Was he the earthquake guy, or someone else? Bad vibes in Santa Cruz lately."
Brant
Marshall nods. "Our mutual friend knows we were sniffing around. He would never have extracted Butler so hastily otherwise. Look at all the loose ends he left dangling — the New Delhi meme itself was an ejection seat. Quick. Sloppy.
We will paint Butler's involvement as purely mundane — embezzlement, perhaps, to fund this little side gig? — and put the media emphasis on Fry and her cohorts. Gin up the occult angle. The cult-like activities, the group sex, the drugs, all that. Lurid, you know. SANDMAN 101. Our mutual friend might then think he extracted Butler before we could connect all the dots; that we think we nabbed the primary culprit — Archie can emphasize Fry and de-emphasize Butler in our report to the Peak — and then just did what we do: clean up the History B shit with SOP memetics. I think that is our smartest play. Now we just need a location for the set-up."
Marshall looks at Jocasta, the first time in this conversation. He tilts his head. "Are you alright, Jocasta? You seem a little piqued."
(Another angle Archie can use with Kinsolving in disseminating this meme is the "disintegration of the atomic family" thing; look at these hippies, four men sleeping with one woman, this is the future the women's libbers want, etc.)
Leonard
"I'm fine, Marshall. Really. Just...frustrated we got there a little too late to get Butler. I haven't been sleeping that well, but what else is new?" she asks with a smile that seems a little practiced. "Lots of work to do." Marshall, no newcomer to the truism that you can't bullshit a bullshitter, can see that she's telling a kind of truth, but she's under far more strain than she's letting on.
"Anyway, you're right that we shouldn't stage the bodies anywhere at Beale Farms. Introducing more bad blood to that soil is just asking for trouble. I'd say we either pick some neutral ground -- a natural area, a park, somewhere outdoors that still gets an occasional look by the authorities -- or one of the Beale Boys' apartments or homes. Someplace we can plausibly connect them."
Almost too eagerly, in her old teacher's pet mode, she adds: "Hey, let me know next time you're back at the mission. I learned a new trick I want to show you."
Brant
Marshall looks her up and down, quickly. "Hm. Not the whole truth. But I won't pry. I recognize that look. Be careful. Don't become too focused on what you think is the path before you. The jungle is dark, but full of diamonds."
Looking away, Marshall smooths his beard. "Yes, some place natural but not too off the beaten path. Ostensibly our culprit managed this on his own, so it can't be too elaborate or too far. Why don't you try to scout out a secluded area near-ish their residence? He killed the men while they slept and took Fry at gunpoint, made her help him load up their bodies into a vehicle — we can use Fry's car for that — and drove inland until he was good and remote. Then it's just a matter of staging ... well, I can help with that, if you won't mind having me along."
Leonard
"Of course not. I'll even let you drive my car," she says with a more genuine smile before heading off to the maps cabinet to find some likely spots to reconnoiter. Marshall notices before she closes her sketchbook that she quickly jots down "DARK BUT FULL OF DIAMONDS" in the margins of a crowded page.
(Quick questions for Brant: Should Jocasta quickly dispose of poor ol' Stephen, presumably in a way that can be plausibly presented as a suicide by gun? And what are we gonna do with Bernadette, who I think is still alive unless I missed something -- medically induce her death, or give her the bullet too so everything looks consistent?)
Brant
(Bullet for both. Make Stephen’s look like suicide. We can knock them out with drugs beforehand and then do it at the site for maximum forensic authenticity.)
Michael
Jocasta begins scribbling some ideas in her notebook on possible locations to stage the bodies. Leonard, you want to give me an Area Knowledge (Bay Area)-18 roll (giving you a +1 for those ideas you sent in DMs which you should absolutely put out here as in-universe ideas in Jo's notebook)?
Leonard
>> SUCCESS by 11
After a few hours in the map cabinet, and using her own knowledge of trips back and forth to Sacramento as a kid when her dad was doing a lot of government contracts, Jocasta narrows it down to a few places that fit Marshall's criteria: remote but not too far away from town, wild but not completely undeveloped, and close enough to a road that the bodies could be dumped there without leaving a lot of evidence and wouldn't be too hard for law enforcement to stumble across.
She comes back with a short list:
- the undeveloped federal woodlands a bit northeast of Dixon, mostly tall grass and scrubland;
- a patch of brackish, marshy standing water from river run-off a bit southeast of Dixon;
- and some farmland southwest, closer to Vacaville, used for corn, beans, and squash, but much of which is fallow.
"Any thoughts, Doctor? Feel like a ride out to the sticks?"
Brant
"The farmland. We want to avoid federal land lest we get the FBI involved; those dorks can be frustratingly thorough. The farmland probably falls into un-incorporated county territory so it'll be the sheriff's department that is stuck with it — which is good, pitting the sheriff's department against the Dixon PD. Nice work, Menos. I'm ready whenever you are."
Michael
Good stuff indeed. Brant, it's time for that Forensics roll, at a Forensics-20, 16 plus 1 each for the Occultism, Psychology, and Area Knowledge rolls and 1 for all the superb RP in this scene.
Brant
>> SUCCESS by 12
Michael
Success by 12, that's a masterfully-faked ritual murder-suicide scene.