[i]In the greater cosmos, the people are protected by two sides in the interstellar justice system; the Lanterns who investigate crimes and the local authorities who prosecute the offenders. The call came in at nine seventeen, Oa Standard Time. Hikers in a park had uncovered a body on a planet inside Sector 2814. That makes it my problem. My name is Kai-ro. I carry a ring.[/i]
[center][h1][color=lime]G R E E N   L A N T E R N[/color][/h1][b]"MARY JANE'S LAST DANCE" || PART IV || [url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xz4-aEGvqQM]POST THEME[/url] ([@Lord Wraith] remix)[/b][/center][hr][hr]
The heat greeted Kai-ro the second that he'd stepped out of the Sentinel, already feeling himself beginning to sweat as his body reacted to being far and away from the regulated environment of the space patrol cruiser.  Raising his right hand, a green energy field enveloped the small boy's form.

He took flight. It was still raining ash, black tendrils continuing to rise from smoldering bits of wrecked buildings around where firefighters and engineers continued to labor at extinguishing the fire and repairing services to the surrounding parts that were still habitable.

Following the coordinates that had been provided him, the Tibetan youth landed in a wooded area on the far side of the planet from the city where the freighter had gone down. The park area was decently marked, with trails splitting off in three directions.  The area wasn't too well kept, but there wasn't a lot of overgrowth either.  Looking around, the boy could see a handful of hikers.  And it was afternoon on a Wednesday.  Safe to assume this was a fairly well trafficked area.  A rather public place for a random body to simply appear.

Their Jane Doe was lying under a white tarp, buried in a shallow grave at the foot of a slight, rolling hill that was blanketed in leaves.  Unusually heavy rainfall for this area had washed out the top soil and exposed the remains.  A family of campers had literally stumbled across the corpse playing frisbee.  They'd called the local cops, who'd called the Green Lanterns when their field analysis revealed the body wasn't native to this planet.

Jane Doe had definitely seen better days.  Heat, parasites, predation, and a number of other factors contributing to a rather harshly decomposed body. The visual alone was [i]disquieting[/i]. The smell was outright [i]horrific[/i]. Even with the ring reinforcing the training that he had received, Kai-ro had to pause in order to process and center his thoughts several times as he examined the area around the body.

Waves of green light bathed over the corpse. A three-dimensional graphic projected as the boy used the ring to conduct a cursory analysis of the body.

The knife blade had broken off between the third and fourth rib took the mystery out of murder.  She'd been stabbed.  Five, maybe seven times, judging by nicks in the bone.

Excavating the body carefully, the boy worked methodically.  There was evidence of clothing that had been produced using a synthetic polymer, the recycling technology producing a stable - if temporary - fiber that hadn't held up well so that there were only tatters of disintegrating fabric to try and guess at what Jane Doe had been wearing.  

The ring of silicone around her wrist was a different story.

A wristband for entrance into a club. 

The green constructs evaporated as the emerald light seemed to retract back into the ring on the child's hand. Crouching down, the boy carefully brushed a bit of soil away from where the faint outline of a logo was still distinguishable on the silicone band.

[center][img]http://baku-panda.org/bounce/boo/sj_green_divide.png[/img][/center]
"Why is it every time a Lantern needs something from me, it involves something a year dead and decaying?"

Hildabrant von Buron was, among many other things, an autopsy technician and a qualified coroner.  She was also something of a legend in the medical community.  During the Bolovaxian crisis, the fiery red head had been an enlisted medic who had been among the first responders to the Bolovax Vik massacre.  Images of her running the battlefield and dragging injured back with her had made her something of a poster girl of the war and earned her the name 'Hot Ice Hilda,' a moniker that had stuck with her through the decades even though few living today knew of the iconic image of a red headed medic sprinting under fire with a Bolovaxian twice her size over her shoulders.  

Today, Hilda's red hair had hints of steel gray at the temples.  

"Because the guy that was shot on the street this morning bores you," Ch'p answered flatly, giving a faint nod to another body that lay under a white sheet on the morgue rack behind the woman.

Hilda merely scoffed in reply, the woman working meticulously over the decomposed remains of Jane Doe.  "This was a farm girl," the coroner noted aloud.

Jane Doe was a Graxian. Or, part Graxian anyway. It made Graxos V the next logical step in the investigation, though Kai-ro noted the description of Jane Doe's probable origin. They could isolate their inquiry to the rural areas of Graxos.

"[i]Ah,[/i]" Hilda murmured, pausing to look at a reading on the board before she raised her head up.  "From what's left, I'd estimate cause of death to be internal hemorrhaging, from multiple stab wounds to the chest and neck."

[color=lime]"How long has she been dead?"[/color]

"Ballpark estimate? Thirteen months," Hilda replied, picking up a datapad and making a few annotations.  When she'd finished, the woman held the electronic clipboard out for Kai-ro to take.  "Seventeeth rotation of the solar equinox is going on the certificate.  Give or take a day...  two days in either direction."

Nodding, the boy took the medical examiners report.  "Anything on the weapon?" the H'lven asked, landing on top of Kai-ro's shoulder.

"Surprisingly, yes," Hilda answered, turning behind her to pick up the tray containing the sliver of metal.

"I've had to remove these from bodies before.  It's an Graxian shiv," the red headed medic reported, setting the tray aside and then reaching over to call up a display of a knife on the monitor at her work station.  Gesturing to the image, the woman added, "People use them for hunting and fishing.  They're relatively cheap and made for mass production, so the blade isn't of the best quality.  Tends to break off when it strikes bone.  Makes for a nasty fishing accident." 

[color=lime]"That sounds like a dead end,"[/color] Kai-ro noted aloud. He didn't need to calculate the probability of trying to track the purchase of such a common place weapon, though the overlay supplied by the ring was already doing that calculation for him.

The answer was, the changes were very, very low.

"What about the clothing?" Ch'p asked, ignoring Kai-ro as the H'lven read the coroner's report from over the boy's shoulder.

"That was very badly decomposed, but I was able to recover a couple of fiber strands," Hilda noted. "The fiber is composed of a synthetic polymer of unstable atoms," the woman noted, highlighting a molecular structure on a monitor overhead. "I've never seen a matrix like it."

Kai-ro looked up, and was surprised to recognize the image on the screen. [color=lime]"We have,"[/color] the boy remarked, exchanging a look with Ch'p.