In the very late afternoon, while Alton and her abbreviated posse are out checking the locations the former thrall, Helen Emerald, so helpfully provided, Cook heads upstairs to the forensics laboratory. The room couldn’t be more different from Doomweaver’s tidy and mostly empty morgue with its many candles and ritual incense lingering the the air. Instead, the lab is a vaguely organized space filled with clutter.

Ruler of this space, and the only one with a clue to its organization schema, is Roman Rakek, a sea elf from the most northern tip of the isles. Cook dreads speaking to him, but it must be done. If Hordsson were on duty at this time there would be no problem, but Rakek has a problem.

Septimia Auila waits for him on a tall stool near the door. Her shaven head is bowed as if she carries a great weight, but her hands only clutch a thin stack of papers. Cook can see that these are letters, noting the interchange stamps where they had been handed off to the zombie post in North Watch.

“I hope you didn’t wait for me.” Cook offers a handshake for the somber initiate.

“Not long, detective.” Auila accepts, graciously. Cook notes that her grip is weak, her skin clammy.

Rakek emerges from behind a metal rack stacked high with various evidence. As Hordsson’s comments suggested, they’re mostly books, items stained with blood, and bedsheets. Rakek himself is a tall aquatic elf, with closely cropped green hair and delicate webs between his fingers. His skin is as blue as an expensive cut aquamarine left to gather dust.

“I hope you weren’t waiting a whole tide’s worth on me.” Let the puns begin.

Auila smiles. Maybe the punster isn’t the worst person to encounter when working with a mournful friend of the victim.

“This is Roman Rakek, he’s one of our forensic scientists. I’m told you have something for us?” Cook offers a friendly smile. Combining it with his raspy undead voice is not the best match.

“You wanted to know if I had anything that could help.” Auila offers the letters to Cook, but he gestures toward Rakek instead. “I think this might.”

Rakek takes the letters and gives them a once over briefly.

“Oh halibut are you ever right.” Rakek gets very excited. “These are the pearl to the shell you delivered earlier, Cook. Let me cast the net to show you over here.” Rakek leads Cook, and by way of failing to force her out, Auila too, over to a portion of the lab reserved for stacks of envelopes filled with various papers.

Rakek reached under one such stack and tugs free a folder that Cook recognizes as the one with all the consent and loan forms signed by Marion Durandal.

“By comparing these documents, I can be certain whether or not the same person wrote both. If she did it by her shellfish there should not be many distinct differences between the signatures on the two.” The fish references only get worse when he gets excited.

“What do you sea?” Auila asks, excitedly. It’s worse than Cook feared. They’re contagious. He shuffles his feet and contemplates making a break for the door. Best get out before it’s too late.

Rakek flips open the folder, and selects a document containing whole paragraphs of what’s supposed to be Marion Durandal’s writing. He places it on a tilted desk, with a large magnifying glass on a swivel attached. Cook and Auila peer over his shoulders, but try not to distract. This is the document where Marion Durandal supposedly wrote her statement of vampiric intent.

Next to the first document, with reverent slowness, Rakek places one of the letters Durandal sent from her parents home in the Second Strabthine Empire. On the back it still has their coat of arms pressed into a wax seal. Stamps from the border crossing reveal the date it was sent and give the letter legitimacy.

Cook notes the contents of the letter briefly. Durandal was writing to her friend to complain about the pressure of her family’s expectations, and the stress of studying to be a cleric. The letter contains a confession that could not have been penned convincingly by any other person she may have had contact with at home. If she had used a scribe, she would have never been allowed to leave the cloister.

Marion Durandal was an atheist. She confessed to her cleric initiate friend that she thought that the gods were all just very powerful people, like the Primarch, or Lord Valdyr in the Allied Lycan Tribes. It’s a heretical confession, and not one made lightly. This for sure is not something that she could trust to a scribe.

And next to it lies paperwork that legally must be written in the petitioner’s own hand. Cook doesn’t see any obvious differences between the writing, and his hopes begin to crumble.

Rakek, on the other hand, does.

“Shell,” Rakek draws the word out slowly, “I can say that it was written by the same hand.”

“I’m sensing a but?” Cook looks to the elf expectantly.

“But her mind had someone else’s hooks in it.” Rakek smiles widely.

“How can you tell that?” Auila asks, bewildered.

“Because of these mudpuppies.” Rakek swings the glass over the the heretical letter. “Do you sea the tails on the letters?” He uses a fresh quill to point out miniscule points where the line thins and angles with the direction that Durandal moved her nib. “These tiny marks show how her hand hesitated, paused, floated, and hurried.”

Rakek moves the glass to the petition for vampirism. Where before the writing looked identical, under the magnifying glass they are stark differences. The lines have no variation. Sure, the shapes of the letters are identical. They lean in the correct direction, they have the same ratio of capital to lowercase letter sizes, and they have the same flourishes in the same places. But the characters in the petition have no sign of hesitation, pause, or hurry.

Under the magnifying glass, they can see that each character is identically paced, and there is no variation in the strokes of the pen that wrote them. Cook recognizes the significance. Auila takes some time to see it for herself.

“So you sea,” Rakek blusters excitedly, “While this is Marion Durandal’s handwriting, it’s not written fluidly. We know from her letter that Marion pauses and dives into her writing with variation of speed, and we can sea in this other example that the writing shows no sign of it. The letters show consistent ink flow from the nib, which shows that it was written at a single current.”

“It’s robotic. That makes sense.” Cook claps the sea elf on the shoulder cheerfully. “We’ve got the bastard.”