Art of Murder: FBI Confidential Walkthrough by Peter Olafson

Beaten by the first thug
and threatened by Huaquero, Nicole appears doomed. But she successfully
distracts Huaquero with an unlikely claim that she knows how to hide
bloodstains on the roof stairs. (Presumably she means in the tenement
across the way. But why would there be bloodstains up there? Agent
James was killed in the bathroom.) She suddenly finds herself alone
in the wardrobe room (though not out of earshot) and has a chance
to escape.

This is a non-random stand-alone
puzzle — the idea here to bounce the chair on “safe”
squares of flooring to reach a table in the room’s upper left
corner. It’s easy provided you avoid:

– the damaged patches of
floor. Most of these make the chair topple over. (Exception: the two
squares with unique damage along the left wall.) The thug then appears
and Nicole starts over again at square one. The third time he catches
her, he’ll kill her. Note that these squares are on three of
the four sides of Nicole’s starting position — and that the
damage to the square directly in front of her is obscured by Nicole’s
feet.

– squares that creak and
then elicit an audible threat from the thug. Tricky, since you can’t
identify these on sight, but only through experience. Again, three
of these and Nicole’s toast.

And you’ll want to
move quickly from one square to the next, with only the short pauses
in between. There is always a chance the first thug will wander back
into the room and find Nicole out of position. No second or third
chances here. He’ll just shoot her.

The safest route: two squares
back, one left, one back, two left, one forward and one left. This
should put you over on the left side of the room. Now go forward four
squares, right four, forward two, left two, forward two, left one
and forward two.

(An alternate route: one
square back and two right. The first of these rightward moves elicits
a threat from the thug. Then move two forward, one left, one forward
and one left. Here you’ll pick up the safe route above. This
continues forward two squares, left two, forward two, left one and
forward two.)

Nicole then uses a non-inventory
makeup item on the table to cut her bonds, grabs up all her stuff
and, despite threatening shadows in the next room and the alleged
squeakiness of the floor, can move directly to the wardrobe with the
false back. This time, she locks behind her the door between the wardrobe
and the secret room.

The ritual dagger’s
in the dresser right where you left it. The first time, you could
simply try to grab it. This time Nicole’s all fussy about the
forensics (unless you’ve done them already). She wants to establish
first that it’s the murder weapon. If you haven’t already
done so, squirt some luminol on the knife and then use the lamp on
it to make any blood traces appear. Yeah, that’s blood all right.
Use the plastic bags or gloves on the dagger to secure the evidence.
(Oddly enough, despite having made much of the gloves back at the
office, you don’t have to use them here.)

Now you just have to make
your escape. Back out of the dresser close-up and have a look around.
You’ll notice two hotspots: The corner of the rug closest to
the entrance to the wardrobe conceals a trapdoor and the second picture
from the left on the rear wall is the only one with a name: “The
Cold of Morning.”

The trapdoor is bolted
but once you’ve tried the door, the lever hidden behind the
picture is freed up. Throw it. The trapdoor unbolted, Nicole’s
free to descend into a small shop. A thug starts to follow her, but
seems to think twice. (He has a better idea.)

It’ll take a little
work to get out. The exit is key-locked and the metal blind that covers
the door won’t stay in a raised position.

The keys are in plain sight.
See that green-ish pigeonhole four nooks up the left wall from the
base of the ladder? Zoom in on it. It’s a key box — evidently
unlocked itself but with no handle on the door to provide easy access.
You’ll need something to pry it open. (The “pry”
part is presumed. When you use a coin on the door, it suddenly develops
a coin slot!) Evidently this is the key the thugs were seeking.

Back out of the key-box
view and check out the candy container — that flat-ish gray can in
the lower right-hand corner of the screen. A left-click on it in inventory
removes the top to reveal money and a second removes a quarter. Use
the quarter on the key box door and it opens. Grab any of the keys
to collect all eight. They jangle into your inventory in random order.
It’s easy to pick out the small gray-ish key that unlocks the
door.

Halfway there. Now to have
a look at the mechanism that operates the metal blind. Use the same
quarter to remove all four screws holding in place the steel plate
above the crank. It falls away to reveal a mechanism with the stub
of a busted ratchet in the lower left corner.

You have a whole collection
of would-be makeshift ratchets, but only one key is of the proper
size and configuration to serve in this capacity. This one’s
harder to pick out (though trial-and-error will do) but it’s
one of two large golden keys with an oval bow (handle) — the one
with the smaller hole in the middle.

Use it where the ratchet
used to be. Now you can raise the blind to find one of the thugs waiting.
(I’m guessing he got out of the building the way you got in.)

Happily for Nicole, the
blind drops on his head automatically and Nicole can collect his gun.
Exit to the right for a series of cut scenes: Nicole, in-game, racing
to the tenement where James was shot, a first glimpse of Nick, the
surviving Huaquero handcuffed and beaten bloody in the bathroom where
James died (presumably Nick found him checking the roof stairs for
blood) and finally being questioned by Chaser.

Interesting. Huaquero denies
responsibility for Rudolph’s murder. But why does he call Leon
Chaser “Ray” as though he knows him? And why does Chaser
then cover the microphone?

What the hell’s going
on?

Odds & ends:
You can examine the building entrance, the purse on the sofa and the
chair to which Nicole is tied. Also, in the shop, check out the ledge
to the right of the top of the ladder. Those look like pieces from
the museum. Is this where the drugs were hidden in artifacts?

Day
3

The
Office (V)

You’ll
start out with an automatic chat with Ruth and then move directly
to Chaser’s office. Talk to him. He commends Nicole for her
good work, focuses on the need to make a solid case against Huaquero
and vents about Nick’s lack of accountability.

Take your next direction
from this chat. Nicole indicated she’d do a workup on the blood
traces on the ritual dagger from the thugs’ hideout. Head back
to the lab where you picked up the swabs.

Left-click on the swabs
to separate one out and use it on the dagger to collect a blood sample.
Then head over to the far side of the lab. You want the “sample
testing equipment” with the blue screen in front.

Take a test vial from one
of the two racks to the left of the machine, place the bloody swab
in the vial, put the vial into the machine and finally click the button
on the screen to send the test results to your PC. Before you return
to your desk, grab the “blood test results” document from
the trolley beside the lab door. This will gives you a context for
the new findings.

And, sure enough, when
you use the document to the test result on your computer screen, you’ll
learn the blood of murder victim Henry Fairbanks is all over the knife.
Huaquero has a problem.

That wraps up your immediate
task. This would be a good time to consult Chaser. You’ll find
him just outside his office.

Turns out Huaquero has
a bigger problem than you thought — Chaser says he has died tying
to escape custody — and that your own problems may not be over after
all. Your boss doesn’t think the murders are at an end. Given
that Huaquero is your only meaningful suspect, that’s an odd
thing to say. What does Chaser know that you don’t?

He doesn’t give you
a new direction of inquiry before leaving the building. But think
back. The fingerprint folks should have returned the statue head to
Evidence Deposit by now and you can finally match up head and torso.
When you combine them in your inventory, you’ll discover a hidden
pocket has opened in the head to reveal a bag of white powder. Marching
powder? Maybe. Nicole suggests another visit to the lab. (While you’re
down in Evidence Deposit, you can also take the smaller of the two
loose keys from the box of James’s belongings. Better now than
later.)

Use another swab to take
a sample from the bag, grab another test vial, pop the swab inside
and then the vial into the cup-holder in front of the analyzer (to
the right of the sample tester). Not cocaine after all. It’s
heroin, and Nicole’s looking at William Warren funny all over
again. (Then again, it’s worth noting that the head wasn’t
found at the museum.)

So do we rattle his cage
some more? Not yet. If you try to leave, Nicole says there’s
unfinished business and “try to get something more from this
photo.”

What photo? That’s
the one of Huaquero from James’s PDA. Get back to your PC and
tap the keyboard once to call up the fuzzy shot again and two more
times to add filters. Suddenly the dark room in the background looks
a whole lot like the museum’s storage room. Time for another
visit.

Odds & ends:
After Chaser checks out, Nicole can have a chat with Ruth and, uncharacteristically,
visit Chaser’s empty office — to no point in either case.

Museum
of Pre-Columbian Art (IV)

You’ll
arrive at the museum minus the dagger. (It’ll turn up again
in the wrong hands on Day 10..) Warren’s not here and the porter’s
adamant about not letting you in storage without a warrant, so you’re
confined to the museum’s public areas to cobble together the
inevitable distraction.

This is one of the game’s
more difficult puzzles. Nicole doesn’t enlighten us about what
she has in mind and the focus of her attention is a little hard to
spot — set as it is against a wash of foliage.

But look at it this way:
You set off one alarm on your previous visit. Is there another? Sort
of. There’s a sensor. Head into the exhibit hall and then right
into the Orangery. In the upper left corner, you’ll see a temperature
sensor — currently green. Can you heat it up?

You’d need something
to focus light there, and you’ll find the perfect item in the
Archive on the far side of the exhibit hall: the magnifying glass
on the nearer of the two tables. In the Orangery, place this just
to the left of the base of the large statue at the right side of the
screen.

So where’s the light
for the magnifying glass to focus? That’s a little trickier:
You’ll need to create a reflective surface to channel light
through the glass. Again, the Archive is your friend. Beneath the
lefthand map on the far wall, you’ll find a roll of aluminum
foil.

By itself, foil isn’t
very substantial. To reflect light effectively, it’ll have to
be wrapped around a solid object with a flat surface (i.e. not the
remaining small vases nearby).

There’s one such
object back in the exhibit hall: the bowl on the wall in the hall’s
upper right-hand corner. Use it on the base of the big statue on the
right side of the Orangery and then use the foil on the bowl.

Bingo. A narrow beam of
light sets off the sensor. It turns red. An audible alarm sounds.
The porter responds. Nicole, meeting him when she exits back to the
exhibit hall, makes a thin excuse and can hustle down to storage while
he checks out the sensor.

No, you don’t have
to do the light-switch puzzle again! Jog down to the far end and Nicole
quickly puts it all together. The museum appears to be involved in
a drug-smuggling operation.

What’s missing is
some tangible evidence. Zoom in on the poster and Nicole observes
that James was also interested in the small cabinet beneath. It’s
locked. We’ve already claimed the key from agent James’s
belongings. Zoom in on the cabinet and unlock it. Inside, you’ll
find a scale. Use a swab on it to secure a sample of “white
pollen.” (Nicole jumps the gun and calls it heroin if you look
at the untested sample in inventory — and not for the first time.)
When you pull back from the close-up, you’ll get a text from
Nick that another murder victim has been found by subway workers.
You don’t even have time to question the porter!

Odds & ends: Did you
notice that the crates Warren mentioned being shipped off to Bogota,
Columbia are no longer here?

Subway
Station (I)

Weird coincidence.
The drunk from the tenement, Joel Tatum, said something about Nicole
and Nick meeting up with him at this same 181st St station. A killer
in disguise? No. Nicole figures him for a victim. And she is right.
Downstairs, on the subway platform, Tatum’s body has been bagged.

Zoom in on the station
entrance and grab the soda bottle to the right of the doors. Downstairs,
zoom in on the benches to the right of the body to find a lighter.
Then check out the near end of the platform and take the blue gas
can from the scaffold and the newspaper from the ground to the right..
Finally, inspect the metal grid covering the ventilation tunnel in
the far wall. There’s a bottle in there. Use the soda bottle
on the screws to loosen them, then remove them manually and finally
pull off the metal grid.

You can’t just take
the champagne bottle. The tunnel is filled with creepy-crawlies and
Nicole suddenly decides that she’s a girl. But you have the
makings of a bonfire in inventory. Use the gas can on the empty lighter
to refill it, left-click on the newspapers to fold them and use the
paper on the champagne bottle. Set fire to the papers with the lighter.
The critters make themselves scarce. The bottle seems to contain a
message in the form of a rolled-up diploma.

Nothing you can find down
here will help you extract it. But topside, pull back to the full
view and approach the tenement entrance between the two cars. Hanging
down to the right of the door, you’ll find a handle for one
of those old-fashioned manual doorbells. It’s loose and it fits
right into the bottle. The message in the bottle is a diploma: Joel
Tatum graduated NYU with a degree in fine arts! It doesn’t seem
to mean much just now, but wait a bit. Click on your car and the scene
fades to black.

Odds & ends:
You can talk to the officer on the scene (the same fellow as in Staten
Island) and examine him, Tatum’s body, the wall around the grid
(Nicole wonders what’s on the other side) and the pliers on
the scaffold. (The pliers can’t be claimed until the game’s
final sequence.)

Day
4

The
Office (VI)

Notice that
the red car is missing from its usual spot out front?

You’re playing catchup
from the previous day. Run up to the lab, pick up another vial, pop
the “pollen” sample from the museum’s storage area
into the vial and the vial into the analyzer to confirm it’s
heroin and thus draw a direct line between drugs and the museum.

Nicole wants to launch
a search of the facility, but Ruth indicates Chaser’s not around.
She’ll provide a few answers to Nicole’s casual questions
about her boss. You’ll learn that Chaser lost his wife shortly
before Ruth started work a few months ago and that he hasn’t
been the same since.

Ruth also suggests a possible
link between Joel Tatum and the other victims: They all went to school
at NYU . If they’re roughly the same age, perhaps they were
there at the same time. Nicole’s off to the university’s
library to do some research into the potential implications.

Library
(I)

Go all the
way down the hall until the view flips around and then enter the reading
room. You can’t scan the books until Nicole takes some direction
from the librarian behind the desk to the left. At length, she’ll
direct you to the shelves to the left of the entrance. The 1986 yearbook
you want is in the third column from the left in the third row from
the bottom. Bring this back to the librarian to learn all the victims
are mentioned on the same page of this book … which is missing.

The librarian eventually
directs Nicole to the microfilm room. It’s just to the right
when she exits back to the main hall. Click on the cabinets against
the rear wall and Nicole, frustrated, offers that “there’s
more celluloid here than in George Lucas’s garage” —
so much that you can’t even zoom in to inspect individual drawers.

That’s your cue to
see the librarian again. She now provides a catalog number: 01-044-86.
Back to the microfilm room. Now you can zoom in on the cabinet at
the rear … and discover that the nice lady’s numbers don’t
exactly match up with what’s on the drawers. (It’s five
years since she retired and her niece took over the job and evidently
the filing system has changed in the interim.)

You can go back to the
reading room yet again and the librarian will try to explain the changes
… without quite putting a finger on the volume you need. But the
numbers on the top drawers in the lefthand column incorporate the
one the librarian gave you, so just go through the whole 1986 range
until you find the one you need (the one ending in 19867). The box
you need is lying on its side at front and center.

The gear in the microfilm
room is non-functional. The microfilm reader’s in the reading
room on the table just right of the door. Zoom in on the reader, remove
the left-hand reel, use the microfilm on the reel to transfer the
film there and turn on the gizmo using the switch at the lower left.

Ack. You can’t make
out a thing! Click on the screen to learn the lens is missing. This
is the worst library in the world! Back to the librarian discover
she’s lost her glasses and is using the reader lens instead.
She won’t just give it up, but is willing to swing a trade.
So off you go to find the missing glasses.

The glasses are almost
transparent and thus a little hard to spot. They’re beside the
two brown books on the table in the reading room’s lower right
corner. Just drop ‘em on the librarian, claim the lens from
the counter and use it on the bright gray space between the microfilm
reader’s two reels and all’s well.

Click on the screen to
learn that all the murders victims were not simply students but members
of an Amazon expedition led by NYU professor Samuel Dickinson (with
William Warren assisting) to find a legendary Incan treasure. The
second page reveals the party came to no good. One student was killed
by natives and the professor and his daughter simply vanished. The
only survivors were Warren and Branford.

Nicole copies out a list
of the participants. Make sure you hear everything she has to say,
for she puts together a fair number of hypotheses here. She figures
Warren and Branford either as potential victims or co-conspirators,
but also raises useful questions. Where does Huaquero fit into this
mix, and are there other potential killers who aren’t on this
list? Why didn’t Warren and Branford mention knowing the victims?
(Actually, Branford did mention knowing them and, while not explicitly
stated, it seemed to be understood with Warren as well.) And she intuits
that the drug business is probably just a sidelight. The expedition
is the core.

Note that Nicole’s
inner monologue keeps going after it appears to be complete. Make
sure you follow it all the way to the end.

A final kind word to the
librarian and a quick call to arrange a ride home for her in a police
car and you can head for the museum.

Odds & ends:
You can examine the librarian and open all he microfilm drawers …
and not a whole lot else. The game designers could have had some fun
in the microfilm room, but with 40 drawers and dozens of microfilm
reels, there’s only one box that’s take-able.

Museum
of Pre-Columbian Art (V)

You’ll
find Warren in the Archive. Use the list from the library on him to
get him talking. The one useful nugget you’ll extract is that
Warren and Branford weren’t the only survivors of the Amazon
expedition. Another was the Peruvian archaeologist Juan Alvarado.
And there was the late Huaquero — a local grave robber who offered
his services when the party was trying to get home — and broke with
the party “with great ill will” over payment for his services.

Keep going until Warren
says he has to make a phone call. Leave the building. Outside, you’ll
find Branford. He reveals that Alvarado was in New York at the time
of the murder and even supplied a picture of his house in Cusco, Peru.
Alas, Branford lost it at the museum earlier in the day. (You’ll
hunt it up, but not just yet.)

Click on the museum door
and Nicole makes a quick call to Ruth to track down Alvarado’s
flight. You can then venture back inside to reinterview Warren. He
now expands upon Huaquero’s involvement with the expedition
(helping in the party’s exit from Peru and the smuggling of
“objects of little significance”) and his subsequent reappearance
in New York. Though disconcertingly vague on key points, he denies
involvement in the drug smuggling.

And he’ll drop in
an odd nugget: He’s already reported all this to the your boss
at the FBI.

Y’know, Chaser’s
name is coming up all too often in less-than-savory connections.

Finally, enter the Orangery
to find the picture of Alvarado’s house. It’s next to
the sack of potting soil. When you leave the room, you’ll get
a call from Ruth confirming Alvarado’s already left for Peru.
Nicole then has Ruth book passage for herself and Nick and leaves
a message for Nick that they’re following the killer to Peru.

Leave the museum and return
to the FBI offices.

Odds & ends:
A glitch. If you reenter the museum at the very end of the this sequence,
you’ll find the porter has returned to his station in the lobby
… and is still talking about the temperature sensor in the Orangery!

The
Office (VI)

Enter Chaser’s
office and talk to him to learn he won’t authorize Nicole’s
Peru plans. He sounds a little too set against it. As the facts grow
more pointed in indicating a direction, he says the case is more and
more “iffy.” He asks to see the picture of Alvarado’s
house — the first time Chaser’s asked to look at any of the
evidence. Oddly, he focuses on the psychological portrait he’d
asked Nicole to compile. (This seems far less relevant since your
visit to the NYU library. Clearly the killer is working from a fixed
list and not just selecting his victims as he goes.) Those of you
already looking at Chaser funny will find it interesting that Nicole’s
profile characterizes the killer as someone in a trusted position
who could use this to get close to his targets.

“Policeman, priest,
the usual candidates,” says Nicole. “Even someone like
yourself, Chief, or Branford.”

And as to his failure to
report the call he took from Warren to Nicole, Chaser palms it off
a convenient target: an uncommunicative Nick.

Nicole here suggests that
the smuggled objects weren’t as minor as Warren claimed (which
will prove on the mark), a motive (revenge) and an explanation for
the 20-year delay between expedition and comeuppance: a prison sentence.
This improvisation seems to send her off the rails: She starts talking
about her dreams, which gives Chaser a good excuse to send her packing.

Yes, you did make an ass
of herself in there.

Leave, talk to Ruth (if
you haven’t talked to her already) and take the stairs. In reception,
Nicole reflects on her options, but she’ll act on only one.
When she leaves the building, she gets on the plane.

Odds & ends:
You can also talk to Ruth before entering Chaser’s office and
get a slightly-expanded version of the same speech she issues afterward.

Day
5

Cusco,
Peru

You’ll
find yourself in the central courtyard of your hotel with a new item
(an ATM card) and the picture of Alvarado’s house. Talk to proprietor
Diego. He’ll offer some help ridding yourself of this high-altitude
headache (in the form of coca leaves) and suggest a guide. Nicole
here mentions Alvarado. Diego is not crazy about the idea. The archaeologist
apparently has turned into a weird recluse.

When you’re done
chatting, take the camera from the hutch and the coca leaves and buckthorn
from the table to the right of the hutch and exit via the door to
the left of Diego. Head right to enter a plaza.

The building on the far
side looks like the house in the picture! Zoom in on the entrance
and then knock on the door. Nothing.

Maybe Diego can help? Return
to the hotel and he agrees to broker a meeting with Alvarado. You
just have to do him a favor: A hotel guest rented a car from a local
man named Jose, but vanished without returning it. Jose in turn stole
a Jeep from Diego as compensation. Diego now proposes you “rent
my stolen Jeep from him. The rest I will take care of myself.”

On leaving the hotel, Nicole
mentions money — a clue that you can now use your ATM card. You’ll
save yourself a trip if you take care of this now. Zoom in on the
cash machine to the left of the hotel entrance, insert your card in
the slot at the upper right, hit “enter” on the keypad
below to get the cash and card and climb the hill downscreen to reach
Jose’s scrapyard.

Jose’s on the bench
in front of the building. Talk to him. Nicole asks to rent a Jeep
only to learn they’re out being serviced. And that’s about
all you can do for now. When you click on an exit from this screen,
Nicole says she sees no sign of Diego’s Jeep.

Back to Diego. He says
the Jeep’s hidden in Jose’s garage. So it’s back
to Jose with a request to peek at the 4 x 4. He seems uncertain and
says his sister keeps her photographic equipment in there. Nicole
adapts quickly to this new info: She suddenly decides she’d
like a picture with Jose. Talk to him until he says it’s okay
to retrieve a tripod from the garage.

Now you can open the garage
door to the left. There’s the old Jeep and the tripod. Take
the tripod and the bearing you’ll find on the ground to the
left of the doors and use the camera on the tripod in inventory to
combine them. When you back out of the garage scene, you’ll
see Jose has removed to the hood of the red Chevy out on the street.

Use the camera + tripod
on the two loose bricks at the right side of the scrapyard entrance.
The picture snapped, you can reclaim the camera and talk to Jose again
to negotiate the Jeep rental for $100. He wants Nicole to place the
money in his pocket herself. Yeah, right! Nicole says she’ll
“leave it under this thing here.”

”OK, says Jose,
“if you prefer cold metal.”

This may well be confusing.
Nicole’s over at the ’62 Impala outside the scrapyard
and both Nicole’s and Jose’s remarks seem to suggest she’s
supposed to leave the cash on or around the car.

But there’s no place
there to leave the money. Nicole is actually proposing to leave the
cash under the metal bearing in your inventory, but she’ll say
exactly the same thing even if you haven’t found the bearing
yet.

In any case, combine the
bearing and cash in inventory and then use the combo on the bench
where Jose was sitting earlier.

The car arranged, Nicole
can hoof it back to the hotel to see where things stand with Alvarado.
Talk to Diego to learn the meeting’s arranged for 8 tonight
with the photo of the house to serve as your admission ticket. (He
also advises you not to bring your camera, and this vanishes temporarily
from your inventory.)

You can leave right now.
(When you leave the hotel, it’s instantly evening.) You can’t
knock this time, so slip the photo through the mail slot in the right-hand
door. Things don’t go that well. Alvarado’s suspicious
of Nicole and can’t make out her ID well enough through whatever
crack he’s using to watch her. Nicole’s unwilling to surrender
the ID to a bolted door. But just keep on talking to the door and,
at length, Nicole suggest holding her identification up to the the
small window high on the wall to the left of the door.

Alas, the Incan sitting
on the bench to the left of the door is in the way. He’s not
much of a talker, this fellow. Nicole guesses coca leaves might help.
You can offer him some, but that just gets you another hint from Nicole:
Spice things up.

Is buckthorn a spice? (Not
really. It was once used as a purgative, as you’ll learn if
you right-click on it in inventory.) This gentleman won’t touch
the stuff by itself, but mixed with coca leaves, it inspires him to
move along. (In a cut-scene, he holds his stomach as though it hurts.)
Nicole then automatically mounts the bench and holds up her ID to
the window. A shutter opens briefly, a face appears and you’ve
only to talk to the door again to be granted admittance.

Right away, Nicole fears
a trap.But that’s a red herring just to put you on your guard.
Simply enter “Juan’s room” (the right-hand of the
two doors) and talk to Alvarado. He confirms he’s afraid of
the killer — but doesn’t know his identity. And he’ll
supply a complete and apparently forthright account of the expedition
to Akakor.

They found the city and
its vast treasure only to be told by Dickinson that they couldn’t
take it with them. “That was a bucket of cold water on our hot
heads.” Warren then led a mutiny — abandoning the professor,
his daughter and her boyfriend Raches and taking the treasure, weapons
and most of the provisions. When the mutineers returned — and it’s
not clear why they returned, as they were headed out of the jungle
— they found Raches with his heart torn out (identifying him by his
distinctive watch), the camp destroyed and Dickinson and his daughter
missing.

Huaquero helped them smuggle
the treasure home. But once it was back in the US, Warren blew him
off entirely. Warren then used part of the treasure as the centerpiece
of the museum and apparently hid part in a tenement owned by his grandparents.
But he also used some portion to finance livings for the surviving
members of the expedition. (So, with such a living, how did Joel Tatum
wind up a skid-row bum?)

The jungle has been reshaped
by rains since those days and, until recently, Alvarado had given
up on the idea of returning to Akakor.

This part of the tale is
awkwardly told. Alvarado here asks Nicole if she’s seen an Incan
out front. (Disingenuously, Nicole says “he might have been
gone by the time I arrived.”) He says the man “bought
some junk at the market from another Indian. Some of it once belonged
to me, and I know I’d locked it in a safe many years ago.”

And that’s all he
says on the subject.

There’s a lot here
that’s unspoken. I’ll try to piece it together: From this,
we can intuit that Alvarado apparently believed this “junk”
— including four precious stones that unlock Akakor’s vaults
— had been stolen from him and thus had little compunction about
stealing it back. In the process, he seems to have ticked off the
Incan, who laid siege to Alvarado’s house. That’s why
he was so suspicious of Nicole, and that’s why there’s
an unidentified “he” in a later conversation you’ll
overhear between Diego and a policeman.

Alvarado takes up his tale
again: He used Google Earth to map a route to the city and visited
New York to reassemble the team to return to the jungle and determine
what became of Dickinson. The murders killed that plan. Now it’s
alive again, as Nicole volunteers to accompany him. They agree to
meet the next morning. Leave the house. When you exit the close-up
view of the front door, the scene fades to black.

Odds & ends:
At the scrapyard, you can examine Jose, the bicycle to the left, the
wrecked blue car at the left side of the lot and the pile of tires
nearby and try to open the garage doors before their time. (“Open
Sesame!” says Nicole.) At Alvarado’s house, you can examine
the Incan, the house, the archaeologist and knife above the fireplace.

Day 6

Cusco,
Peru

It fades back
in the next morning to a zoomed-out view of Alvarado’s house.
You can’t reenter the house just yet, so jet back to your hotel
to find it closed and Diego on the street. He’s still desperate
for you to eat and gives Nicole a sandwich.

Head back to the plaza.
You’ll arrive outside the archaelogist’s house to find
the Incan from the bench nowhere in sight, the doors open and the
archaeologist dead in his room.

Your mind will jump to
exit strategies — for some reason, Nicole can’t return the
way she entered — but remember what Alvarado said about the four
precious stones and map. They’re hidden in the house.

No sign of the password-protected
strongbox Alvarado mentioned. That must be an artifact from an earlier
stage of the design. Just take the knife from its position above the
center of the fireplace and use in on the slit in the emblem immediately
to the right. This opens a compartment behind the knife’s original
position that contains four crystals and the map to Akakor. (Hey,
if it’s a printout of a Google Earth map, why does it look so
ratty?)

This event summons la policia
and the Incan you poisoned with buckthorn the previous night. They’ll
start hammering on the front door. Nicole overstates things a bit
— “they want to kill me” — but the message is clear:
Time to clear out. Leave the room and use the door to the courtyard
to the left. Knock down the board leaning against the left wall to
create a bridge over to the tiled roof.

You’re expected to
scale the chimney wall, but when you click on the chimney at the top,
our girl says “I should do one more thing.”

Actually, six more things.
You’re going to stack those vases (here called “amphora”)
on the platform across the way according to size.

The first step: Clear a
path to the biggest vase. Just move the second amphora from the left
in the middle row to a position just inside the door back into the
house. (You do this by picking it up, highlighting it in inventory
and then left-clicking on the relevant spot to put it down again.)
This’ll keep it out of your way as you go about your business.

Now you can grab the biggest
of the amphora — the second from the left in the bottom row — and
use it at the base of the chimney wall. That’s the base of your
tower. Now grab its neighbor (the second amphora from the right in
the bottom row) and place it atop the first one. Then the rightmost
amphora in the bottom row and then the leftmost amphora in the top
row. (These two present the only challenge here, as they appear to
be roughly the same size.) Then the leftmost amphora in the bottom
row.

Then click on the top of
the chimney to set off a cut-scene and suddenly you’re at the
rear of Jose’s scrapyard. The Jeep’s out of the garage
and ready to go but for the fuel. Jose’s got 20 liters. You
don’t have $20.

The first option (the ATM)
isn’t really an option at all. It’s just a way to dump
your card. It’s expired and the machine back at the hotel won’t
give it back. But you have to lose it to fasten onto the second choice.
Return to Jose and you’ll quickly work out that a trade-in of
your camera would do as well.

The camera’s now
hard to reach. You’ll recall you left it back at the hotel the
night you met with Alvarado. It’s back on the hutch in the courtyard
and Diego is currently being questioned by police at that location.
It’s a strange exchange:

“No,” says
Diego. “I can’t believe she could do something like that!”

“Everything’s
clear now, Don,” says the officer.

“I hope so,”
says Don. “I know what he’s like.”

“You’ll see,”
says the officer. “He stays at the police station, he’ll
confess soon enough.”

Nicole then leaves automatically.
But who’s this unspecified suspect — this “he”
who is already known to Don Diego? Presumably the Incan who was laying
siege to Alvarado’s house. But is he the actual killer?

You have to work up yet
another distraction here. Use the kitchen entrance in the screen’s
far left corner. Here, you’ll literally cook up a treat to entice
the proprietor and policeman out of position.

Take the matches at the
left end of the table in the right near corner, the strawberries and
honey from the cabinet at the left and the small jug from the stove.
Use the small jug on the large round one on the floor to the left
of the stove to fill it with dough. Put it back on the stove and add
the honey and strawberries. Light the fire beneath and you’ll
quickly find this confection steaming away. Ah, the Peruvian delicacy
of, uh, dough, honey and strawberries!