Sasha escorted Luna and Ezra into the surveillance room. There were two cops sitting at a desk and looking through CCTV footage on a large screen. Across the room from them, there was one of the massive combat androids she had seen outside the building. It was sitting on its rear with its long legs folded in front of it. Luna estimated that it must have been three meters tall, and she wondered how the thing had gotten inside the room.

"This is the android we're pretty sure killed the victim," Sasha explained, and she pointed to its hands."

The android had been painted black and yellow, and where the backs of its hands were yellow, it was easy to see where blood had splattered all over them. It was dry and crusty.

Ezra leaned closer to the android, and he rubbed off a bit of the blood, which he then licked off his finger.

Luna only shook her head at him, and she turned to Sasha.

"Have you checked its memory yet?" she asked.

"We tried," Sasha said, "but somehow the android's hard drive had been completely wiped clean."

"The hard drive?"

"Yes, all of its memories, programs, and the operating system is just gone. There's nothing left to examine on it."

"Damn."

"On the plus side, we do have some interesting footage you need to see."

The three of them stepped behind the cops at the desk, and Sasha told them to look at the evidence they had found so far. They pulled up a clip of two people dashing out the door where Luna and Ezra had entered the building, and they were both carrying backpacks with some metal android parts protruding from the opening. Both of them wore a baseball cap and a mask to hide their face from the camera. One, who wore a surgical mask, was much taller than the other, and the shorter one, who wore an industrial mask, looked down the hallway before they shut the door behind them.

"That would explain where the footprints had come from," Luna said. "It's too bad we can't see their faces."

"After this, the outside cameras caught them hiding behind the trailers around the side of the building, and then they just run across the highway."

"It's possible they had come into the recycling plant to steal some parts and just stumbled across the crime scene."

"It is possible, but we don't have footage of everything they did because the camera systems had been forced to shut down for maintenance while they were here."

"And how long did they stay down?"

"For thirty minutes."

"Hm, that's not a lot of time."

"The systems had been shut down twice, and we don't know if these two were responsible for it both times. What we do know is that the cameras have footage of three prototype combat units patrolling the outside of the plant, and then after the systems reboot the first time, there are only two combat units patrolling the area."

"Did either of the remaining units think it was strange that one of them was missing?"

"One of the employees said that because they're prototypes they will run into unexpected issues, and no, they didn't find it suspicious at all."

Luna turned to the CCTV footage as the two cops continued to go through them and look for clues. It was troubling that the murderer had been able to cover their tracks so well, and wiping the android of everything, including its operating system, was the strangest part of all. That sort of thing takes time, especially on machines equipped with artificial intelligence, and a half hour did not seem like enough time at all.

"I have results for the fingerprints and the facial recognition system," Ezra said, interrupting Luna's thoughts.

"Good," Luna said. "What'd you find?"

"First, the blood types found on both the victim and the android are A-positive."

"Thank—Thank you, Ezra."

"Second, the victim has been matched with a man named Ethan Banks, aged thirty-seven. He was here to help build the combat prototypes, but before he worked with Hoosier Robotics, he owned a smaller robotics company called CyberShell, which went bankrupt just a few years ago."

"A failed entrepreneur, huh?" Luna said. "Losing your job might be upsetting enough to kill someone."

"Lastly, the fingerprint results were rather surprising. They belong to a girl named Aeryn Amah. She was orphaned at the age of two, and she had no family to go to. She went from foster home to foster home, and it seems she was quite troublesome. She got in trouble for assault on an older child, but the charges were dropped when they realized it was in self-defense, despite the other child being far more bruised than she was."

"Ah, so a foster kid who's up to no good. That's not so unusual."

"There's more to the story, Lieutenant. When she turned ten, she went into one particular foster home, the Shuris, and her behavior problems faded. The family even tried to officially adopt her into their family. However, not too long after that, her foster parents were murdered, and she and her foster sister both disappeared. They found the killer, but the girls remain missing."

Luna frowned at that information.

"How long have they been missing?"

"Two years, Lieutenant. Amah would be fourteen now, and Shuri would be sixteen."

"It's possible they both could have been the ones who were here last night," Sasha suggested.

"That's true," Luna said, nodding. "But we'll need to find them first to confirm that. Is that everything you've found, Officer?"

"So far, yeah."

"All right. Then, Ezra and I will take a look around the rest of the building to see if we find anything. Then, we need to get back to the station and compile a list of suspects, as well as look into the whereabouts of some missing children. Please, be sure to contact me if you find anything else."

"Certainly, Lieutenant. Let's go."