“This is real police work, Stanley,” Officer Hamilton said over the communications channel, “like they did in the old days. I need more men. I need a crime lab down here. I need—”

“Look, Hamilton,” the lieutenant said, trying to calm down his frantic homicide detective, “we’ll get everything we can for you. The budget for this kind of thing is slim. We can’t just conjure the shit out of thin air.”

“I have to sets of goddamn footprints in this alley that don’t belong to our victims here. One set, given the size and pattern is a woman. The other set is a huge man, given the size of the boots. None of our security feeds in the area around here have anything close to a subject of this size. I need men to canvass the area and a crime lab to make some casts of these footprints.”

“Are you insane? This isn’t an Arthur Conan Doyle story! You’re not going to catch the perpetrator with footprints. Check the victims’ decks, maybe they got a look—”

“Cerebral trauma, smashed decks. It has to be the footprints.”