Art of Murder: Cards of Destiny

Head over there to find it’s locked up tight. To get inside. you’ll need a key to unlock the steel shutter, a crank to raise it and a ladder, a supply of oil and an oil can to lubricate the shutter mechanism. (The right binoculars won’t work without the correct tokens — which you won’t find until near the end of this segment — but try them out anyway, as this will help get you through an upcoming conversation.)

The ladder: You’ll see a blue dumpster to the the left of the shooting gallery and what looks like an old bed-frame (“metal railing”) beside it. Take it, place it against the wall to the right of the crank and key hole and left-click on it to change its orientation. It now functions as a ladder and you can climb it and peer inside the shutter mechanism. (A right-click on the gears within reveals it “may be seized up.”)

The crank:  Back out to the midway view and check out the concession stand to the left of the shooting gallery. The crank’s still in place to the left of the door. Take it and insert it in the hole beside the shutter. (If you try to turn it, you’ll learn “something’s jammed.”)

The key: Enter the security shack on the right side of the midway — first removing (and automatically keeping) the block in front of the door.

Three locations of interest here: the padlocked fridge at the back, the key cabinet on the right wall and the desk to the left.

For now, two things: Look at the padlock in closeup — this sets up a critical line from Nicole later in the segment — and open the desk’s top left drawer. Within, the shooting-gallery shutter key, a handful of tokens like the one Nicole received in the parcel (right-click on it in inventory and Nicole trumpets her vindication), an energy-saving light bulb and a round metal box of airgun ammo. Take ‘em all. The tokens and ammo are for the shooting gallery. (We’ll get to the bulb a bit later. See “Oil can” below.) Insert the key in the keyhole to the right of the shutter and turn it.

Oil: You’ll find a large can of oil on the right at the end of the alley that leads right from the security shack.

Oil can: This one takes a bit more work.

In a hint-in-reverse, you’re actually steered away from the park’s key location — the Evil House ride at the far end of the midway — by the uniformed police officer out front. Talk to him and he’ll tell you SWAT personnel have already been through the haunted-house ride, chuckling as they emerged.

On one hand, you can read this as “This has been covered.” But you’re supposed to read it as “This has been covered by folks who didn’t take it seriously.”

So take it seriously. The ride itself is shut down — how did SWAT get inside? — and if you enter the control room to the right, you’ll find the control console locked. Two keys are hanging from a nail left of the window above the console. Alas, they don’t fit the keyhole at the right side of the console.

But they do fit the door to the workroom to the left of the ride’s entryway. Inside, you’ll see the corner of a workbench to the right. You can’t interact with it just yet. It’s too dark. There’s no bulb in the socket overhead. So plug in the bulb from the security shack, pull the cord to turn it on and then grab the oil can from the left side of the worktable below. (Also the string on the hook on the back wall and the wheel at the back center. And note the presence of the handle-less vice at the front left.) Use the big oil can on this small one to fill it and use the filled can on the grease hole at the top right corner of the shooting gallery’s shutter.

Now you’re all set to open up the shooting gallery. Just turn the crank to raise the shutter, approach the counter, place a token from the security-shack drawer in the slot and press the red button to start. A row of ducks trundles into view from the left and then stops.

The game’s pretty much a formality — much like Nicole’s target practice back to the field office. Pick up the rifle and use it to bring down all the sitting ducks and moving rabbits and you’ll win a witch doll. (If you’re distracted and the game ends without you completing the task, just push the button again.)  Take the witch and spin it around in inventory to find a key tagged “9” embedded in its back.

Now, something rather subtle has happened here. When you pick up the air rifle, a new item appears on the counter: a bit of yellow plastic. Take it. You won’t be able to get into the Evil House ride without it.

And what does our new key fit?

In fact, it doesn’t fit any lock. It’s the missing component of a puzzle back in the security shack.

Remember the key cabinet on the shack’s right wall? It is padlocked, but to no good effect. The upper right hinge can be dismantled. Just zoom in on it, pull out the nail that serves as the spindle, back out of the closeup and left-click near that hinge to open the cabinet.  You now have access to 22 additional keys. Which one(s) do you take?

All of them — each only briefly.

The first time you take a key, Nicole notes that some of the tags display arrows — the second, that the keys are out of order. And when you use your new #9 key on any hook, she’ll suggest an order: left to right and top to bottom. To do this, you’ll need to pick up all the keys (collectively or individually) and place them in their correct positions — when necessary right-clicking on a key in inventory and rotating the image to display the numbered tag.

This’ll take a while. When the process is complete, Nicole says all the keys are in place and suggests you examine their arrangement.

You’ll notice two things.

1) The #16 key is missing. (Don’t bother looking for it. This is a red herring. It never turns up.)

2) The arrows on the tags for the #2 and #9 keys point to #14.

No, #14 doesn’t open anything either. Rather, the numbers on 2, 9 and 14 together form the combination for the padlock on the refrigerator at the back. Just plug 2-9-1-4 into the combination lock, open the door and take the keys from the front of the top shelf.

The puzzle appears to be over and yet this is where it can get a bit tricky. Though Nicole offers all manner of hints as you assemble the keys, you may notice that she doesn’t actually disclose anything about what the arrangement means …

… unless you have examined in closeup the combination lock on the fridge at the rear and then open the key cabinet after completing the puzzle. Nicole then says, “The keys give the number 2914.”

(This comment isn’t required to unlock the fridge, but it is important — helping set up as it does a key line in a later conversation with security guard Archie Benson.)

Make your way back to the Evil House ride. You’ll find Parry here and have another automatic chat. It goes about as well as the earlier one — Nicole doesn’t explain herself well and Parry seems closed off to the possibilities– and ends with Parry and the SWAT team abandoning the scene on the boss’s say-so.

So you’re on your own. Enter the control room, insert the key from the fridge in the control console and turn it to enable the console.

Now to turn on the power. Simply press the S-2 and S-3 buttons. (The order doesn’t matter.) All five lights come on, but the “ghost train” doesn’t move. Nicole suggests an inspection.

It turns out the front car is missing a wheel and a pin to hold the wheel in place. You can supply the wheel right now — it’s the one you found on the workbench — but the nail from the hinge in the security shack proves too short to serve as a retaining pin. (It’ll find a use a little later.)

There is another nail — the one beside the window above the console, from which you earlier retrieved the key to the storage room — but it’s not coming out on its own. You need some kind of tool for this purpose.

A hammer? There is indeed a hammer on the workroom floor — visible through the door — and a second on the workbench, but neither has the traditional claw used for removing nails. (However, take the hammer on the floor anyway, as you’ll soon need it for another purpose.)

You’ll have to improvise the claw — say, with that loose bar on the gate at the ride’s exit. One end has an ornamental flourish that might catch the nail head. Sure enough, it does and the nail is yours.

And yet you may wonder if you have the right one. Try to use the nail on the axle and Nicole comes back with the usual “Not gonna happen” (or some variant).

The issue is that you have a badly bent nail where you need a straight one. Perhaps the vice on the storage room workbench could straighten it out for you … but first you’ll have to straighten out the vice. It’s missing a handle and you can’t put the nail in place until you close the vice’s jaws.

The only suitable item is the metal bar (“prop”) on the windowsill above the ride’s control console. Insert this in the hole on the vice screw and then left-click on the handle to close the vice. Insert the bent nail into the small gap between the jaws and left-click on the handle again and you’ve got a long straight nail. Left-click on the vice handle a third time to loosen its grip and you can retrieve the nail and use it on the ghost train axle. Nicole now instructs you to bend the nail so it will remain in place — easily done with a tap from the hammer from the workroom floor.

If you like, you can beat a path back to the console and try to start the “ghost train” again. Off it goes without Nicole on board. (You can monitor its progress from the console lights.)

But this isn’t required. You can anticipate this problem and set about preventing the train from taking off until Nicole’s ready to board.

In the closeup view of the full car (i.e. not of the axle), look at the “Car underbody” just left of the wheel you replaced to get an idea. You’ll see a set of small metal wheels and a contact strip that transfer power from the track to the train’s engine. You’re not told as much, but if you could slip something non-conductive between the rail and the wheels and pull it out once Nicole’s in the train, you’d be all set.

You may even have that item already. Remember the piece of plastic from the shooting gallery? This’ll do admirably, but you still need some way to pull it out remotely once Nicole’s in the train.

And that is a bit ticklish. The string from the workbench must connect to the tile somehow, but the tile is not string-ready. It needs a hole and attempts to poke a hole with the remaining nail just produce Nicole’s standard no-dice answers. You’ll have to first secure the plastic in the workshop vice, then use the nail on the plastic and then, with the tile back in inventory, the string on the hole. Now simply place the plastic + string under the metal wheels and Nicole automatically slings the string over the front of the car.

Retreat to the control room and turn on the power, then return to the train and pull the string. Cut-scene — ending with Nicole retrieving a Queen of Hearts from the horn of a menacing animatronic devil. Once the ride ends, she’ll call Parry again to report her success, but his position is unchanged and Nicole winds up calling him an “asshole”.

Retreat back up the midway. Long pause.

Here you’ll meet Archie Benson, the security guard for the demolition company. He doesn’t seem to know much (or just doesn’t admit to knowing much). But your chat with him establishes two things: He’ll visit the FBI’s offices in NY the next day for an interview and he’ll swap you some tokens (different from the ones you used at the shooting gallery) for the combination to the security-shack fridge.

Suppose you don’t get a chance to propose that exchange? Then you’ve skipped something. Either you failed to elicit the “2914” line from Nicole (by examining the fridge padlock and opening the key cabinet after solving the key puzzle) or you haven’t examined the right of the two binocular kiosks outside the security shed (and thus established that you don’t have the right tokens). If necessary, play catch-up and do that now.

Just use one of the tokens on the right-hand binoculars outside the security shack, throw the little lever and use the eyepieces. You’ll discover the binocs are equipped with night vision and that the blurry view is pre-sighted on a barrel bearing the letter “Q” and a heart sign — just like your new playing card.

What’s behind the wall? To find out, you’ll have to knock down the barrels. Use the block you found at the security shack door on the empty patch of ground at the base of the barrel wall.  This serves as a fulcrum, but where’s your lever? It’s the only take-able item we haven’t collected: the shovel (“spade”) just right of the door to the haunted-house ride control room. Use it on the barrels. Cut scene as the barrels tumble. Retreat to the binoculars and look through them again. Off in the distance, you’ll see an old building.

“A factory?” asks Nicole. “A power plant?”

I’m unsure why Nicole needs a firm answer to proceed — what difference does it make? — but she does. By now, Benson has crept off to the security shack to trade his newly-acquired combination for a cold one. Talk to him about “Power plant” and he’ll identify the location. Nicole automatically makes her way out to the car and shows up outside the plant.

Odds & ends: The “Luna Park” name has been used by many amusement parks — the first opening in Brooklyn’s Coney Island section in 1903.

– Nicole has a little help here. I’ve already mentioned the officer outside the Evil House ride. Initially, you’ll find three others sited in and around the park:

1) the SWAT commander and Parry in the parking lot. Nicole can talk to them jointly. Parry is as skeptical as before. T he commander reveals that nothing suspicious has turned up so far and that you can call on his men for backup. (Indeed you can: Two of them can supply hints.)

Parry vanishes when Nicole enters the park — reappearing in the side street with the barrel wall once she moves in for a closeup view for the shooting-gallery keyhole. He’ll move to the front of the Evil House ride when Nicole collects the ride key. (The commander may remain on station up to the Evil House segment. Or he may vanish.)

2) a SWAT team member at the near end of the midway offers a hint if Nicole asks him about “Crank” after inserting crank and key and trying the crank. He’ll remove to the front of the rifle range, try to help (without success) and then suggest “the cogs need to be oiled.”

- In the key-cabinet  puzzle, since the numbers are supposed to be in a sequence, shouldn’t the arrow on the #2 key be pointing at the #9 key rather than the #6?

– Nicole says she’ll call the boss to protest SWAT’s withdrawal. She can’t. The cell phone is just an ornament  and you will find every line busy except for Parry’s. (Nicole’s evidently too pissed off to talk to him again.)

Power Plant

Walk into the building to trigger a short cut scene. Nicole sees a huge gear being lowered above a upright generator. (This lowering occurs in increments at predetermined points as you progress through this segment, but it’s meaningless. It never descends all the way.)

Nicole wants  to know what’s on the platform up top. Oblige her. Climb the stairs in the near left corner, then head all the way  right and climb the ladder. You’ll find Nicole atop a second generator adjacent to the first. Beneath the dangling gear, she can now see a tied-up woman. A quick, comparatively civil call to Parry and the FBI is headed to the scene.

Note that Nicole told Parry the place is “mined.” First we’ve heard about it, but she’s right. If Nicole messes with the device that directs laser beams around the structure or the bomb at the top of the building without knowing what she’s doing, she’ll set off a huge conflagration (which is worth seeing once) and Nicole will die.

Now that you’ve found the prospective victim, you have access to the next level of the walkway. Descend the ladder back to the walkway and head left. The door at the left end of this level is locked (“blocked”), but Nicole can now open the window at the far left (previously inaccessible).

You’ll find her out on a ledge — a la the Montmartre sequence in Hunt for the Puppeteer. Click on the pipe around two corners to the left, the fire-escape platform to the left, the ladder and finally the window around the corner to the right. Back inside the structure, head  right and, when the scene pulls back to the full view, down and to the right. At the near end of the walkway, you’ll be able to inspect in closeup a ladder leading up to the top level and the laser junction box below and take a schematic. (The last is that bit of paper below and slightly right of the box.)

The ladder is currently impassable. A laser beam from the green box below passes through a hole in the hatch at the top. Open the hatch and you’d break the beam and …

Boosh.

So what’s to be done? Examination of the laser box (three positions for its dial) and the schematic (an alternate configuration of the lasers) should suggest to you that the beam could be redirected. But if you change the settings right now, it’s all going to blow up in your face. Why?

The laser currently completes a circuit. Break the circuit at any point and the building gets very hot very quickly. But if you could somehow complete a circuit in a different configuration — one that doesn’t involve the laser passing through the hatch — the trigger for the explosives wouldn’t identify an interruption, the ladder would be laser-free and Nicole would be able to open the hatch and climb to the building’s top level.

Sure enough, there are two laser boxes on the left side of the structure that aren’t currently being used at all — the lower of the two directly in-line with this box on the right.

The problem: The domed cover atop of the generator Nicole visited on the previous level blocks the prospective path. The cover does have two holes through which the beam might pass, but they’re currently out of alignment. So you have a new challenge: Find a way to turn the cover so its holes would line up with a redirected laser beam.

Head back downstairs. (No, you don’t have to edge along the ledges again. When you reach the second level, Nicole opens the formerly locked/blocked door.)

You’ll need two tools: a wrench to unscrew the bolts that hold the cover in place and a lever that will give you some torque.

– The lever can only be the pipe sticking out of the windshield of the Volkswagen bus outside the plant.

– The wrench is in the station itself — in the top left drawer of the workbench at the far end of the entry level.

You’ll need the screwdriver and flat file here soon enough, so take them as well, along with the round and triangle files and the key in the top right drawer. And heck, since you’re down here, take the fire extinguisher at the base of the turbine as well. These will all find uses in the final sequence.

OK, back to the top of the turbine. Use the wrench to remove the three bolts, insert the pipe from the VW in the hole on the right side of the cover and activate the pipe to give it a good push. The cover rotates and when you pull back to the full view, you’ll see the gaps in the cover are now in line with the laser boxes to left and right. You’re ready to re-jigger the lasers.

Take the wire cutters to the right of the cover — no, you don’t have a use for them yet, but they’re about to become less readily accessible — and head back to the laser box. Zoom in on it and your game will be saved automatically. Turn the dial to the top setting and the laser beam is reconfigured. The hatch is clear. Open it, climb the ladder and move left to the crane.

There’s a bomb here and you’re now equipped to disarm it.

First step? You’d think it would be deactivating the senor at  the top center, but it’s the four screws in the corners of the top plate. They’re non-standard and the flat head screwdriver in your inventory is sadly standard. Can you modify it?

You can. That’s what the three files from the workbench are about. Right-click on the screwdriver in inventory to call up its image and then use each of the files on it. Any order’s OK. Now the screwdriver’s non-standard as well.

But don’t use it yet. You can’t actually  touch the bomb until you’ve deactivated the motion sensor at the top. Use the fire extinguisher on it. As long as the sensor appears frosted, you can work freely with the bomb. Each squirt should buy you enough time to remove two or three screws.

And now you have another problem. Even though the screws have been removed, you may find you can’t remove the cover.
If so, freeze the sensor again and use the screwdriver to pry up the left or right edge.

Now to deal with the bomb itself. You can do the next two steps in either order.

– Nicole here instructs you to cut the wire from the laser controller (upper left) to the battery (upper right). This is not super-helpful. I’m reminded of a line from the intro to the Family Guy episode “Brian Does Hollywood”: “What do you mean, ‘Cut the blue wire.’ They’re all blue wires!’ ”

They’re pretty much all blue wires here, too, but there are just two that fit Nicole’s description. You want the lower one and the game’s oddly particular about where you cut it. You want to cut the first wire that passes above the blinking LED (i.e. NOT the wires coming out of the LED).

This shuts down the lasers.

Goof?: But shouldn’t you have to unscrew the bomb’s inner plastic cover first? Apparently not!

2) Use the key handle to remove the “space sleeves” at the four corners of the case and then left-click on the inner cover to remove it.

Finally, jam the screwdriver into the clock mechanism.

Nicole then uses the dangling gear to reach the would-be victim’s location — not the best idea, given how tenuous the support threads appear — and, sighting a man through a doorway, heads off in pursuit. Alas, she falls through a boarded-over section of walkway and by the time she recovers, he’s gone.

October 21

FBI Field Office

Nicole’s back in the office watching through a one-way mirror as Parry questions parolee Benson (who has reported as ordered). You’ll talk to the boss automatically. Nicole offers that Benson seems “a sidekick at most.” She’ll leave the room room at the same time Parry quits his interview.

Goof?: Outside the interview room, Nicole thinks to herself: “Dick blamed me for the unsuccessful action [at the power plant]. Is -he- the [Card Man’s] accomplice?”

Whoa there. Quite a logical leap. Perhaps it is just a script  mistake and the “he” is Archie. But it’s an awkward reminder of a lingering loose end: Judging from the FBI archive footage in the film at the theater, the killer does seem to have an “in” with law enforcement.

Talking to Benson is the next step, but you’ll want to go in with some ammo. Otherwise, the interview will come to nothing. You can talk to Parry here for a prompt, but it’s not required. Send Nicole upstairs to her office and left-click on the stack of files on the corner of her desk. (The files remain in place. Nicole has extracted the five victims’ photos.)

Enter the interview room and, in conversation, run the pics by Benson. He denies knowing any of the first four, but the fifth seems to connect and at length he’ll admit to knowing one (presumably that fifth one: Jane Harrington) and then to knowing “her and a few other guys” — all jurors in one of his trials.

When Nicole leaves, she’ll automatically have a chat with Parry. The upshot: Benson’s had two jury trials — one resulting in an acquittal on a murder charge and the other a conviction for rape. (In Nicole’s first interview with Benson, she says “attempted rape.”)  Parry says only the latter verdict makes sense as a motive.

Send Nicole upstairs to collect the suspect’s file from Ruth. (This is a red herring. You never get to examine its contents.)  You’ll run into the secretary at the head of the stairs and she’ll turn over the file and nudge you toward the boss. Nicole automatically removes to the boss’s office.

A number of seeming issues are raised in this exchange, but most of them are just musings or red herrings and are never explored. (he upshot is that Benson has an alibi and is to be released to his lawyer. )

The key bits of inf

– Benson was charged with murder in  the 1998 killing of lover Carol Austen — a new-age type whose talents included card reading. Her cards vanished when she was killed only to turn up later at Benson’s home and was then somehow pulled from the evidence list in his trial by mistake. No wonder he was acquitted.

Though it’s never stated explicitly, this presumably is the deck from which the Card Man’s Jack and Queen of Hearts were drawn. But how did he get hold of it? Along with its disappearance from the evidence list,  this seems to suggest a link between the killer and law enforcement.

– The Card Man’s victims are jurors from Benson’s murder trial. Hence, everyone involved with this case needs to be accounted for. Bizarrely, this task is handed off to Ruth and Nicole later gets some info for her on this angle. (Bad info, as it happens. Do FBI secretaries often aid in investigations?)

- And, finally, that Nicole’s the next move is to talk to Wang.

Do so now. Talk to him about “Work” and “Traces” to turn up a tidbit: He may have a partial print on the chip from the car. But that’s as far as it goes for now.

Once you wrap up this chat, Parry enters. Someone claiming responsibility for the last two killings has called looking for Nicole and will call back. Nicole automatically moves to the monitoring  room downstairs to take the call.

On the surface, you don’t get much of substance out of the call. The killer doesn’t like his code name “The Card Man “ (“You’ve understood so little”) and has you call him “Paul.” He suggests he knew the victims Harrington and Carter — at least to the extent required to lure them to their deaths. And he seems to enjoy preying on his victims’ dark sides and ambitions. (“It was always about something ugly and illicit.”) He rings off when Nicole pushes him to reveal his next victim.

Wang can’t trace the call — it was coming from out of state — but promises to work on it today and suggests Nicole do so herself.

And if that’s not enough, when Nicole automatically leaves the room, you’ll learn from the boss that another parcel  has arrived. This detonates harmlessly on its own before you can inspect it. Nicole automatically moves to the sapper room. The sapper says he will analyze the remains — no, he never does (like so many things in Cards of Destiny) — and turns over the wrapping. And, now, finally, you get back control for a while.

Bring the wrapper to Wang — he’s still upstairs in his lab — and talk to him about “Piece of paper.” While he’s examining it under the microscope, Nicole can question him about the recording of the phone call. You’ll learn he’s deleted the speaker’s voice — meaning you’ll be left with a tape of ambient noise, — and that Nicole should be able to handle the rest of the process on her own.

Finally, ask about “Traces” a second time to learn Wang has found some organic matter on the wrapper. “Probably seeds.”

You now seem to have a huge stack of potential tasks on your plate, but, as mentioned, a lot of them are just varieties of herring. They boil down to three: the seeds, the wrapping paper and the voice analysis. You can perform these in any order but you’ll have to finish all three to make progress in the game

Seeds:  You need to reassemble a seed from the five pieces found on the package wrapper.

From the left side of the lab counter, take the tweezers beside the lamp. Right-click on the bag of seed fragments to summon a closeup and use the tweezers on the bag. Now zoom in on the microscope and take a slide from the blue container to the right. Use the tweezers on the slide to place the seed fragments there. Open the little drawer (“stage”) in the front of the microscope. Place the slide inside, close the drawer again, turn on the light (via the switch at the bottom)  and look through the eyepiece at the top. You’ll have to diddle with the manual-focus knob to the right a bit and bring the picture into focus. (Eight ticks down from the top should do.)

You’ll now see five seed fragments in the view field. They all belong to a single seed and the idea here is to put them together with the tweezers. And it’s a bit tricky, being that you can not only drag them and rotate them (with a right-click), as in standard computer jigsaw puzzles, but flip them as well (with a double-click).

You can assemble this seed any old way. The example below sets up the partial seed in the same orientation in which you’ll see in the Bureau database

1) Drag the large piece with the two long “legs” to the middle of the view field. (This is just for convenience.)

2) Double-click on the large piece with the curved bottom at the bottom of the display to flip it over and then right-click on it three times to rotate it so the curved side is to the left. Now drag it up to connect with the top of the dark-brown portion of piece in #1.

3) Right-click twice on the triangular piece at the upper right and then drag it over to connect with the rough right edge of the #2 piece.

4) Double-click on the small piece at the right to flip it over and drag it over to connect with the bottom of piece #3.

5) The final piece at the upper left doesn’t connect to the rest of the seed in an obvious way — but it does connect. Right-click three times on it to rotate it to an inverted “T” position. Then drag it down to connect with the bottom of piece #4.

You’ve assembled an incomplete seed — but enough is in place to compare it to the Bureau’s database. Quit the microscope and press the red button at the top to send a picture to the computer  for comparison. Log in to the database and run an  analysis of the seed just as you did earlier with the Jack of Hearts, token and turnpike ticket. No need to select regions this time around. The database will cough up six possible matches. The closest visual match is the right one in the top row, so compare them by dragging our reassembled seed atop this one and left-click.

They match: It’s Eleocharis rufilata. Run a search and you’ll come up with the map of the Louisiana area with the three southern parishes where it appears highlighted with red stripes: Terrebonne, Jefferson and Plaquemines. Click the print icon at the upper right and collect the map from the printer at the left side of the lab. (It looks like another microscope in the full-room view but the closeup incorporates an area off-screen to the left.)

Whichever task you perform, it won’t amount to much by itself. You still need to zero in on your target. (Parry will tell you as much if you bring the map to him now.)

Wrapping paper: Is there something special about it? Seems to be. In closeup, there’s appears to be a watermark of a steamship on one side. You’ll want  to analyze it.

From the left side of the counter, take a fresh pair of rubber gloves. Right-click on the bag that contains the wrapper and then use the gloves on it (or just use the gloves on it twice) to extract the paper.

Scan the document — only the side with the watermark is required — and then run a search. The result: a map with three highlighted parishes where the Louisiana Navigation Company once kept offices. (Two of them are in the same Louisiana communities where the seeds appear: Gretna in Jefferson Parish and Detalion in Terrebonne.) Hit the print icon again and collect the wrapper from the scanner (closing it afterward) and the map from the printer.

Phone call analysis: Drop downstairs to the monitoring room and zoom in twice on the PC at the left. Nicole gives you a pretty emphatic hint here: She says she heard a radio in the background while talking to the killer.

Start by playing this recording of background noise through once so you have a better idea what you’re doing. You’ll hear what might be an airplane or lawnmower, a motorcycle and a range of construction sounds. And at three points — around the 53-second, 1:22 and 1:43 marks — a bit of music.

To focus on the music, you’ll need to strip away the other sounds. This is done by first analyzing the recording to break it down into seven zones in which distinctive noises appear (use the ”Analyze” button) and then removing the extraneous sounds one by one by highlighting the respective zones and hitting “filter.” (You’ll also have to reanalyze the recording after the first two filters are applied to bring up the zones diagram again.)

Once you’ve knocked out zones one, two and three, Nicole says “It couldn’t be better” and suggest you play the recording  through again. Do so. This time, Nicole recognizes a Lafayette radio station. (Nice song, too — sort of rockabilly-meets-country.)

Once you’ve completed all three steps, go see Parry in your office. Now he actually says something useful: A radio station’s useful range is about 60 miles and a circle with a 60-mile radius drawn around Lafayette might help you zero in on the Card Man’s location.

You’ll need something to draw with, so take the marker off Nicole’s desk. It’s right in front of the telephone. (You’d think she’d also need a way to measure distance, too, but Nicole apparently can do this in her head.) Turn on the light in the lower left corner of the big US map above Nicole’s desk, then zoom in on Louisiana, place the two printouts atop the state to give you a frame of reference, use the marker on the top printout and you’re done. The circle includes a sliver of Terrebonne Parish and the sliver includes the community of Detalion. Talk to Parry again and you’re all set.

Odds & ends: Wikipedia reports the typical range of FM signals — commonly used for broadcasting music — is 50 to 100 miles but potentially much farther with high wattage or the proper atmospheric conditions. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio)

The name “Detalion” is an in-joke. Detalion was a Polish developer co-founded by Lukasz Pisarek — one of the two designers who worked on Cards of Destiny.
October 22

Delation, LA

Talk to the sheriff. (You can’t leave his office until you do.) His only meaningful remark: There’ve been no visitors since Katrina. (He’s either lying or mistaken, but you’re not equipped to contradict him.)

Then step outside and talk to Parry. (You can’t explore the town until you do.) Your partner takes off to retrieve your left-behind laptops and Nicole’s free to head downscreen to the docks.

You’re in the right place: The former steamship company building to the right was the backdrop for the killer’s call to Nicole. Is he still around? Unclear just now. But both Aaron, the old gent sitting outside the bar to the left, and Momma Morton, the lady out on the docks, will allude to a stranger. Momma reports that she just transported a man to a hunting cabin out in the swamps in her airboat.

Talking to Aaron and then Momma gives you something to discuss with the sheriff: Can he give you a lift out to the steamship or the hunting cabin? No, and, more to the point, no. A deputy has the boat and the sheriff is unwilling to take the car without an extra body (Parry) on-hand to push it out of the mud. And besides, he’s up to his ankles in paperwork.

The sheriff leaves the office at this point. You can loot the place — there are four take-able items here — but you don’t yet have a motive for looting it, so let’s hold off for the time being.

This exchange allows you to approach Mama about renting the boat (and collect one more “no”). When Nicole leaves the dock, she’ll get a call from Parry about a missing file. He’s headed back to a bar where they stopped en route to retrieve it while Nicole figures out how to reach the steamer.

And that call, in turn, loosens Aaron’s tongue. Ask him about “Boat,” “Deal” and “Mojo.” If  Nicole recovers his magic charm from the sheriff, he’ll set you up to borrow Momma’s airboat.

Return to the sheriff’s office and check out the cabinet on the left. There’s the Mojo bag behind the glass. The door is locked, but you can remove by hand the right-hand nail that holds the glass in place and, with the scissors from the desk, the glass itself. Left-click on the bag once to take a spiral copper tube and a second time to reclaim Aaron’s Mojo. Now you just have to replace the glass — a simple left-click on the glass to the left of the cabinet in the room view — and you can leave.

See Aaron again. Your immediate reward for return of the Mojo is not airboat, but chicken. Yes, an uncooked chicken — still in its supermarket tray and plastic wrap. Aaron has detailed instructions for feeding it to the spirits, but it’s just fancy talk — the chicken will wind up in a gator’s tummy — so don’t sweat the details.

Once this topic runs its course, Aaron begins to seem a little worse for wear and Momma turns up to look after her brother. Talk to her about “Aaron” and then “Boat” to learn she’s had a change of heart. She’ll lend it to you if you’ll just give the fellow she transported to the cabin a ride back to Delation. (She’ll also provide staggeringly detailed directions that suggest an upcoming action sequence. Don’t bother noting them down. Like a lot of stuff in Cards of Destiny, it’s one big red herring.)

Now for the boat. Return to the dock and board. Nicole observes that the boat appears in good shape but wants to check the rudders. Momma reported earlier that they were sluggish.

Operate the lever to the right of the pilot’s seat and you’ll discover the rudders are not working at all. You can see the rudders themselves through the fan. But how do you get to the mechanism?

It’s behind the metal plate at the front of the seat. Open ‘er up and discover (with a right-click on the hose) that there’s a leak in the hydraulics.

You can left-click on the hose to disconnect its right end, but you’re not yet equipped to make repairs and such supplies as you’ll find aboard the boat aren’t immediately useful. You’ll find a toolbox if you click on the deck just in front of the pilot’s seat. It contains a funnel and brake fluid — but the funnel’s too big for the hose and no hose-patching supplies are included.)

Maybe tape? You have seen tape. When you claimed the scissors from the sheriff’s desk, you probably noticed a roll in the lower left corner. (And while you’re back here, you might as well take the postcard to the right and the map on the wall as well. They’ll soon find uses.)

The repairs aren’t quite as simple as use-tape-on-hole. You’ll have to use the scissors on the tape in inventory to cut off a piece and then use the piece of tape on the hose.

Then left-click on the postcard in inventory to turn it into a funnel. (If you can’t do this, you haven’t yet first tried to use the metal funnel from the toolbox on the tube.) Use the paper funnel on the loose end of the tube and the brake oil can on the funnel and despite obvious issues of gravity, Nicole announces that there’s now enough brake fluid in the steering system. Left-click on the funnel to remove it, on the hose to reattach it and on the rudder lever in the seat view to test your repairs. The boat should take off.

Or not. If Nicole says she doesn’t remember much of Momma’s elaborate directions, you haven’t collected the map from the rear wall of the sheriff’s office. Map in hand, re-board the airboat, use the rudder lever again and you’re off. For all those elaborate directions, it’s just a cut-scene.

The Cabin

You’ll find Nicole on the dock. Move her toward the stairs up to the cabin — the drawbridge to the right is inaccessible for now — and she’ll note the light in the window and urge caution.

As if you had a choice. When you move Nicole up the stairs, you’ll trigger a cut-scene — our girl slowly opening the door and knocking the occupant flat on his back. When the action picks up again, you’ll find a him handcuffed to a pillar on the porch. (No word on what was in the drawer.)