Talia's expression was uncharacteristically dour. She hadn't known Benji, not well at least. She had talked with him briefly, passed him in the halls and at the water cooler, but never really known the man. He was well above her pay grade, as were the rest of the Family proper. That did not mean that she was not sad for his passing. Her heart was still heavy with the news of his death, and so her usual precocious mirth was masked with stone-walled determination. 

She hated to admit it, but her usual sunny disposition was marred also by the fact that his death had brought a great deal of very likely incredibly dangerous work to her doorstep, time-senstive and almost certain to tread on the toes of not only the Church, but the resistance and very likely other Novaks. She was the premier marksman in the Novak's employ, and was apparently thought resourceful and trustworthy enough to be worthy of being given the green light to surreptitiously investigate Benji's murder.

It was because of this assignment that she found herself atop a dingy apartment building looking for any evidence of the murder, dragging pieces of indicator paper along every serviceable perch looking for powder burns, her eyes scanning for anything out of place. She had no real solid idea where the shot came from. The faintness of the sound, coupled with the size and shape of the entry wound, suggested a long distance, an unrealistic distance with any civilian-accessible weapon. The rifles Talia could reasonably get her hands, even with her connections, would be reliably accurate out to seven, maybe seven and a half hundred meters. From the reports she had managed to acquire, the shot most likely came from further than a kilometer, a ridiculous shot by any metric. This fortunately narrowed down the list of suspects, but it did not help as much as she would like. Her chief suspect would need unimpeachable evidence to accuse, and so she found herself trying to find the exact place the shot came from.

She had begun talking to locals, trying to discern from whereabouts the shot came, and she had not managed to narrow it down to any considerable degree. Throwing her inconclusive test paper to the floor, she fumed as she walked down the fourteen stories of steep steps, adjusting her coat and nervously keeping one hand on her revolver as she made her way out onto the street and towards the next potential firing location.