Dead Women Don't Wear Plaid

You find yourself in the neighborhood where you first saw the jewel thief. On a whim you drift to the other side of the street and poke your head into the alley where you heard the shouting, and immediately you get a feeling that something isn't right. With a weighty sense of foreboding, you creep further down the alley. A horrific sight awaits you: the body of a young woman lies partially buried in a heap of trash bags. You grit your teeth and come close enough to verify that she's not still alive, and then go call the police.

The investigator assigned to the case, a woman named Christine Lind, takes your statement, and then, because she's friends with Rand and knows he trusts you, shares with you what she's been able to figure out. She says, "The cause of death was a blow to the head--the murder weapon was a rock or a brick or something like that. Blunt and heavy. The weird thing is the woman's clothes, or lack of them. She's only wearing a bra and underwear, with no sign of any other garments. But other than the blow to the head and a bruise on her wrist, she doesn't have any other injuries. She doesn't have any identification or a purse, but if it was a simple burglary it wouldn't make sense to take her clothes. Especially after the way she was killed, the shirt couldn't have been worth anything. That makes me think there must have been something incriminating about her outfit.

"Another possible clue is a tattoo on her hip. It's a teardrop, and looks a lot like the logo the Zion's Tears cultists use. I found some thread samples on her body, too. They're being sent to the lab for analysis, but they're coarse and brown, a lot like the normal Zion's Tears robes, so it wouldn't surprise me at all if that's a match."

You mull over those details for a minute. "So someone killed a Zion's Tears follower, and then wanted to cover up that she was part of the group? Why would someone do that?"

Lind shrugs. "I dunno. To avoid having attention drawn to the cult? But that would only make sense if someone connected to the cult killed her in the first place."

You nod. "Yeah, I guess that makes sense. Maybe I'd better learn a bit more about these people."

Location(s)

• The streets of downtown Twilight
  

Notes

• One-time adventure
• Part of the Don't Cry for Me, Zion-tina quest.

References

• Adventure title is a play on the movie Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid