As Mato is looking more carefully around Runningbird’s head, he realizes that the man was an elf. It looks like he’d made an effort to cover his ears with longish hair, and crumpled up in the chair as he is his height was not immediately apparent. Mato is far from an expert, but the gore on the wall seems about the right height and area for the exit wound on the back of his head.

Answering a couple of the accumulated questions, Michela tells them “This was Mr. Runningbird’s office. I’d be in here occasionally, but not very often — he’d mostly come out to talk to me. I don’t think he was a magician, I never saw any magic, but he would take an item or a few items in there and stay there for an awfully long time, and he’d say “I’m going to sit with this, feel its vibrations, soak up its history.” I think that was just metaphorical, but he’d always lock his office door for that, so sometimes I wondered …”

AM finds the link to be surprisingly sparse. It seems to have been used for certain essential functions and not much else. There is not so much as a funny cat trid saved to it. She does find a calendar, and it has seen extensive use, but it is full of alarms without context. Sure enough there is one set for 7:45 the previous evening, but no reference to what the alarm is for. She does find a log of contact codes he had called — a quick search through the log confirms almost all were voice only connections, with the others being simple messages. With time they could probably process through the codes to find out who he had been talking to.

Jhonney answers AM’s call promptly, and sounds relieved when he replies “Good, good. The Pawns may want to talk to you, as first to actually find the body, but I’ll handle them in general. You’ve earned your payment, as I said it would be, it was quick money. Don’t think I splash around that much nuyen all the time, but this was a special circumstance.”

He let’s out small sigh, then admits “However I am going to offer you yet more money. I’ll be ruining my own reputation. It was not much of a secret that Jhonney owed me. For someone to murder him, that was … either ignorant, presumptuous, or a deliberate threat to me. I dislike all three — ignorance is acceptable in a customer, but not in assassins. I would very much like for you to track down whoever did this, and to determine what led to it, with more accuracy than KE is apt to bother with. And unless there is compelling reasons to the contrary, I’d like you to terminate the ignorance, presumption, or threat. Consult with your team, and call me back with your answer in ten minutes. I’ve a call to make to Detective Nguyen, musn’t wait on calling in a dead body and all.”