The first thing they tell you at the Montpellier P.I. Academy is to never start or finish a case at 3 AM. This partially translated to the school’s desire for curfew at this time, although most believed it had some practical value on top of that. The rule was likely intended for my companions of a more organic composure, but most mechanics journals were pretty strict about the effects on robots who refused to shut down for a recharge. Therefore, the warning was taken to apply to anyone, regardless of their interior material. Anyway, I was studying for my latest exam at exactly 2:49:23 AM when a knock just too loud to suit the time resounded in my dorm.
“Get up! Quickly!” a voice more absolutely unsuitable for the time shouted. At least I wasn’t the only person awake. I flung the door open fast enough to give my coat a dramatic rustle and blind the two of my four roommates who always sleep facing the door. Hey, anything to help get ‘em up. The man facing me was Brawn, the janitor who had earned the nickname exclusively by being at a P.I. academy and not having been a student there. “Hey, Ace.” His tone was grim, but it lacked the resentfulness of the two roommates I mentioned earlier who followed with the exact same line. “Well, never mind,” he continued. “Get the others up. We got a problem on our hands.”
“Yeah, me too,” yawned Casey from his pillow, “it’s called an exam tomorrow.” I wanted to correct him that, being 2:49:32 AM, it was already the morning of the exam, but Brawn was somehow faster.
“Y’know it ain’t that,” he grunted. “Your whole class period’s up. There’s been a break-in.”
* * * * *
Professor Curtis, standing in front of the 16 students outside, sounded like a smart cartoon villain as usual. “As you have doubtless heard, someone has broken into our academy,” he started. “Only one, seemingly mundane object is missing. We don’t know who did it, nor quite how, nor why, but we know our culprit has made a terrible mistake: they have tried to invade the grounds of an academy dedicated to training investigators. At Montpellier, we are dedicated to raising only the best and most capable.” At this point one of the students swore loudly to provoke a reaction from Curtis, but none came. “Therefore,” he continued, “I have suggested we try our brightest class against this culprit. My suggestion has been approved. Follow me.”
For the sake of brevity I will spare you the professor’s overview, but there were three main places of interest: first, part of the school gates had a big hole smack in the middle of the thing, and what looked like rollerblade tracks in the short stretch of mud that disappeared onto the academy walkway. The second point was the Leonard Building of Admissions and Internal Affairs, where the robbery occurred: there was no damage whatsoever to the building, and the two distinctly nonsapient guard bots’ approval history didn’t have any unusual history on it. The professor admitted it would’ve been smart to put cameras on the things (or really anything beyond a binary ID approval system and a 5-foot detection radius), but it was too late to change it by this point. Thirdly, inside the building, the professor revealed to us what was stolen: apparently, all this was because of a 34-year-old, one-of-a-kind plastic car in the administrator’s desk. Said administrator said he’d heard a noise from his desk after falling asleep in an office with a more comfortable chair, but he didn’t see anything and apparently retired to his apartment for the night. With that and the usual scene-of-the-crime warnings, the Professor let us go wild.
I left the room, my mind ablaze. One of the biggest questions of the scene wasn’t why the culprit would steal one plastic car, but how said culprit knew the admin had the car in the first place. I checked all the windows to confirm they were all locked, then boiled down that the guards had one reason to be fooled: the theft came from an ID. That didn’t explain the hole in the wall, of course. I decided to move to the nearest Internet-connected computer and see what I could pull up.
Looking for a 1976 one-of-a-kind car gave some interesting results, among them a five-year-old article entailing the theft of an entire set of the cars from an established collector. A report one year after that added that all but one of the cars had been ransomed back, with the criminal still uncaught. This carried certain implications about our administrator, but it didn’t explain anything about the Montpellier culprit. Publicly revealing that information, on the other hand…
I dashed back outside, looking at the roller blade tracks. It would’ve been easy to know whether the criminal was getting in or out of the building--back-heavy prints forward, front-heavy prints backward--but using one track of rollerblades makes it a tougher subject. I charged for the Leonard Building, past whatever students were still wondering why someone would want a car, and headed for the Office of Admission, an answer already forming in my processor.
“Well, then, I believe I have it,” I promptly announced to Curtis and whatever students were in the room.
“Oh? Do enlighten us,” he inquired, his expression all the invitation I needed.
“Well, it’s quite simple: five years ago, a rare collection of cars was stolen, with all but one ransomed off. Please stop gasping, Sam, that isn’t the mystery we’re looking at right now. Anyway, with our administrator a car thief of the least significant definition possible, one would think the thief wanted something from him. Something like, say, admission to a top academy.”
“But that doesn’t explain how he outwitted the guards,” one of the students interjected.
“Oh, that’s the thing,” I added, hoping someone would say something like that, “you don’t need to worry about guard bots if you still have a valid student license.” I pulled up a laptop from the school admissions office. “Yes, I did hack off the protection cable to bring this thing here, but that isn’t the point. Meet Ralph Reddin, a student recently expelled for some high-level cheating. Montpellier makes the ID cards invalid, but the expulsion happened just a few days ago, so someone hasn’t cleared it from the system yet.”
“And the mud tracks?” Professor Curtis inquired.
“Oh, total red herring. Like a lot of things.” Curtis gave me an odd look, but I kept going. “The tracks were there to cover up that Ralph could just get in and out through the front door with his physical ID, but since he wouldn’t have wanted us to know that, he instead would have gone backwards as a way out of the building, using the roller blades to cover up which direction he would have been going.”
“‘Would have been?’” Professor Curtis asked.
“Would have been,” I repeated, “…If he visited the school in the first place.”
Nearly all the students looked unimpressed, like I’d just contradicted myself, so I opted to clarify.
“Well, nothing about the case makes sense. First off, how would Ralph know about our administrator’s presumed car thievery? It’s not like he was the best student the academy’s ever had, since if he were, he wouldn’t have cheated. Adding onto this, coincidence may not kill a case, but it does add some questions to it. Why did the admin happen to be asleep a room away from his desk the night the culprit entered? For that matter, why did you set your ‘brightest class period’ onto the case instead of the actual detectives?”
Professor Curtis was starting to look concerned, but if it’s possible to cut off a facial expression, I did it.
“Finally,” I interjected, “So much attention was paid to making the mud tracks a red herring that there weren’t any footprints from where he would’ve made the hole. So, was Ralph clinging onto the fence with muddy roller blades while clipping a hole in it? I think there’s a much simpler explanation. With the information given by this process, we can gather that the perpetrator must have been…” I turned and pointed at Professor Curtis. “YOU!”
The students’ expressions stopped dead. The professor raised an eyebrow. “You’re a bright detective, Ace, but I think that’s somewhat…”
“Oh, what?” I demanded, then realized what he thought I meant. “What? No! I’m not saying you stole a car. I’m saying that there was no car in his desk and you and the other employees have set this whole case up as a giant applied test.”
Professor Curtis raised both eyebrows. “Goodness, Ace! Going that far?”
“You know me,” I replied, not knowing if he meant me or the staff but opting for my preferred option. “Wasn’t that hard, though. If you ask me, it could’ve taken another few drafts. You can all make quite the delivery, but you can’t write for the life of you.”
The professor then asked me to follow him outside the room. I didn’t think I’d annoyed him enough that I’d join Ralph’s fate, but what happened next was something entirely different.
“Ace, I think we could use some input on you for our next test. We don’t do this sort of thing all the time, but never has anyone not just single-handedly solved the case, but also so acutely deconstructed it in its entirety. If you know any way of improving for the next time we set something up, please let us know whenever an idea comes to mind.”
“Don’t worry about me,” I said with a grin. “When don’t I say whatever comes to mind?”
* * * * *
Well, the next semester was something of a disappointment, since none of the students could crack the case I came up with and the academy never hired me for anything again. Real life wasn’t gonna go easy on them either, so why the staff went so hard on me for it was anyone’s guess. I haven’t heard if Montpellier is still doing those exercises, but it’s a local rumor now that the case was scarring enough for the class that the staff stopped doing ‘em, and if it’s a local rumor then the jig’s up either way. Still, no one can say I never left an impression on the residents, and I certainly did my part for the academy.
Case closed… perhaps permanently.
