Cyberpunk: I'm Not a Scavenger - Chapter 75: A Special Lead (Patreon)

The motel where Judy's friends had been murdered was only two blocks from Lizzie's Bar.

The Mox weren't particularly interested in expanding their territory.

Rather than trying to control other parts of Night City, they focused on protecting their own businesses, their members, and the sex workers operating near the bar.

The entire gang numbered barely more than two hundred people, far fewer than its rivals. There was no way it could hold a large area.

That was why, even with the motel so close, the Mox hadn't been able to reach the victims in time.

Apart from a handful of bars and brothels, most of Kabuki still belonged to the Tyger Claws.

No wonder Susanna had said she couldn't help.

When Pantheon arrived at the motel, the room where the women had died had already been rented to someone else.

Fortunately, Pantheon was very persuasive when he had a gun in one hand and money in the other.

The guest gratefully accepted the payment and hurried out.

You couldn't expect much from a roadside motel like this.

Huge patches of wallpaper were peeling away from the walls. The dark bedsheets were marked with mysterious stains, and little insects scurried through the corners and cracks.

"Tch."

The surroundings reminded Pantheon of his days collecting corpses.

Come to think of it, this place was actually pretty decent by those standards.

He pulled on disposable gloves and began searching for clues.

He had to admit, the Tyger Claws bastards knew how to clean up a crime scene.

Not even two days had passed since the murders, but their cleanup, combined with the traces left by unsuspecting guests afterward, had erased almost everything.

This kind of meticulous investigation was asking a lot of an ordinary mercenary.

For a Witcher, however, it was right up his alley.

[Witcher Senses]!

As an unfamiliar power coursed through him, dark veins bulged around his eyes.

His senses of smell and hearing sharpened dramatically, making the world around him seem entirely different.

He could hear water dripping in the next room and the faint scratching of cockroaches crawling behind the wall panels.

Every smell in the room grew stronger. Sour, rotting food, the reek of guests' unwashed feet, and beneath it all, a faint trace of blood.

Following that last scent, Pantheon found a tiny bloodstain on the wall.

His nostrils twitched. There was something unusual in the air near the stain.

A complicated mixture of chemicals, with particularly high concentrations of acetone and ammonia.

Both substances were hazardous to human health. More importantly, both could be used in the production of illegal drugs.

Sure enough, he soon spotted signs of ammonia corrosion in several other overlooked places.

He also noticed dirt caught in the cracks between the floorboards and dried mud splashed along the wall beside the entrance.

None of the room's registered guests seemed likely to have brought that kind of mud inside, so it was probably left by the Tyger Claws.

Still wearing his gloves, Pantheon scraped up a little dirt and held it beneath his nose.

It was nutrient-rich soil, or, more accurately, soil heavily contaminated with pollutants.

Soil itself was hardly common in the city.

The gardens downtown were professionally maintained and wouldn't contain anything like this. Outside the city, the Badlands were mostly sand.

Within Night City, the likeliest place to find soil this contaminated was along a riverbank where factories discharged wastewater.

Chemical residues mixed with river mud.

Pantheon reasoned that the men had probably been involved in manufacturing drugs for the Tyger Claws. They might have been dumping chemical waste in a river or using it to smuggle raw materials.

If that was true, they were likely based in an isolated warehouse or factory beside the water.

He made another couple of circuits around the room but found nothing else.

On his way out, a surveillance camera in the corridor caught his attention.

Cameras in cheap roadside motels were usually broken for most of the year.

They tended to start working again only when city inspectors showed up.

Pantheon stared at the camera, rubbed his chin, and headed downstairs to the front desk.

The owner was a burly, fleshy-faced middle-aged man who claimed to have served in the Marines.

Pantheon had already given the man a lesson in manners. Now the owner wore an awkward smile and kept watching him nervously.

"Boss, I told you. There really isn't anything left in that room."

Pantheon shifted the pistol at his waist into view, then produced a thick stack of eurodollars.

"Those cameras of yours really broken?"

The owner's eyes lit up at the sight of the money.

After a moment's hesitation, he admitted the truth.

The obvious security cameras were indeed broken, but hidden cameras had recorded the Tyger Claws' visit.

"Boss, those Tyger Claws came back a couple of days ago and deleted the recordings. They threatened to tear my head off if I didn't erase them."

Deleted? What, had they just moved the files into the recycle bin?

Pantheon tossed the money at the man's face and ordered him to show him the server.

The owner clutched the cash, took a couple of deep breaths, then led the way with an ingratiating grin.

Calling it a server room was generous. It was little more than a storage closet packed with every kind of junk imaginable.

Pantheon used an external cyberdeck to connect to the local server and confirmed that the relevant recordings had been deleted.

Fortunately, the Tyger Claws hadn't brought a professional netrunner. They'd used only rudimentary overwriting and data-erasure tools.

In less than a minute, Pantheon restored the original video files.

He skipped the irrelevant footage and quickly found three Tyger Claws members in floral shirts, their tattoos prominently displayed.

They carried two bound dolls into the room. Screams continued to come from inside for some time afterward.

About two hours later, the three men wheeled body bags out. One even gave the security camera the middle finger.

Pantheon enlarged the footage from the entrance and obtained the plate number of their gray Archer Hella.

The plates were cloned, but he now had clear images of all three men's faces as well as the vehicle's registration number. Tracking them down shouldn't be difficult.

He broke into the local traffic surveillance network, concentrating on cameras along coastal and riverside roads.

Just as he'd expected, the system soon picked up their trail.

Their last recorded location was a temporary storage depot on Pinewood Street South, at the edge of Kabuki.

The depot's internal cameras operated on an isolated local network, so Pantheon couldn't access the footage from outside.

That didn't matter. He already knew enough.

He disconnected the cable. Outside the storage closet, the motel owner ducked his head and saw him off with a sycophantic smile.

It wasn't particularly late yet. Pantheon figured he could make a quick trip there and back.