Perhaps because he doesn't wear a mask, perhaps because he isn't faking incompetence, or perhaps it's just his charisma at work, but Harley is a bit better liked by the other investigators. Interestingly, there ends up being something of a "Good Cop / Shitty Cop" dynamic developing between the two novas and the investigators (who do not currently have a nova on staff). Occasionally Harley gets a bit of information that he wouldn't have gotten if Zero weren't making him look like such a competent team player...
Harley started with the credit card receipt... he constructed a map tracking expenditures, locations, times and dates.
The last recorded purchase was from a Walmart. This is strange, because he went to a McDonald's near his house every evening after work, but didn't go that evening.
Then he started researching James Dawes... Even if his driving partner had been brainwashed and mentally blocked, his employer should have raised questions when they dispatched two drivers and only one came back citing amnesia.
Actually, he called in and reported he'd have to go home early that day because he wasn't feeling well. His partner has no memory of him being there on the trip, though base paperwork shows that he was in fact there and given a temporary pass. When he didn't show up for a few days, he was fired and replaced (he wasn't exactly skilled labor, and he'd only been with the company a few months anyway).
Once he got the employer and home records, he also looked up to see if the man had left a family behind, and if so, suggesting to the investigators to notify next-of-kin.
He was involved in a nasty divorce 5 years ago, and has a kid that he doesn't see or write to by court order. Though he still has to pay child support, and has done so dutifully. His lawyer was disbarred for incompetence a few years later.
Again comparing notes with the investigators and Zero, Harley started checking into base security and surveillance records and tapes of the area and building, looking for any signs of activity.
There is absolutely no one going in or out of that building, though looking into it, the cameras in the area left a notable gap through which someone could reach the building and get in through a window unnoticed. This isn't entirely remarkable however, as the focus of the base cameras seems to be on the area around the dorms and the various training sites.
He was especially interested in Zero’s findings of Sgt. Avandovskia being inside the building at some point, reviewing records, security and surveillance tapes to determine if her presence coincides with James Dawes occupancy and looking further into what she might have been doing in the area and inside the building. He recommends to the investigators and suggests to Zero that they hold off on the interview until the start of the next week to give him more time to review evidence.
There is no record of her being inside the building, though she did pass it on patrol. Careful scrutiny will note that sometimes her patrols took too long, and that on her way back to her rooms it would sometimes take her an hour or more between leaving work and walking into her rooms, but it was off hours and therefore her own time to waste, right?.
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Just say when on the interview you guys.
He checks base records to see if she was on duty. If so, when and where she was supposed to be stationed? Was she at her designated post? What drew her to the building? Was she on routine patrol? Did she notice something? Did she report anything? Was there any record of anything on the tapes? If so, why wasn’t it reported? If not, how was it missed?
She was a guard that patrolled the base from 9pm to 5am. Her route included the area around the dorms and the gate onto the base. She checked in and out at the guard shack at the gate at the start and end of her shift, and reported back roughly every hour or so.
Finally by the end of the week, he enlists Zero’s aid and if necessary, Impetus’ and Gravitas’ help in analyzing the DNA evidence. Despite Gravitas’ objections that his area of expertise and specialty was physics and not genetics, Harley knew the basics, but wasn’t a doctor, geneticist or scientist himself. He speculated that if the “vic” really was a nova, there should be some genetic markers for M-R node development and nova eruption, just like there were genetic markers for virtually everything else known to man.
Work on the human genome and where the M-R node fits in is still quite cutting edge (and the details of it have not all been released to the public), and questions like this will likely require conversing with the people actually doing the research. If you send them a sample, and note that it is an emergency (and convince Dan Walker to push it through), you might hear back in a week or so.