Art of Murder: FBI Confidential Walkthrough by Peter Olafson

But Diego and the policeman
remain in place. You have to bring the good smell to them. Simply
turn on the fan in the window to the left. (The switch is just below
the window.) The steam from the pot turns left, the occupants of the
courtyard move zombie-like toward the entrancing fragrance — Nicole
captions this migration with the strange line “an old man who
feels thirsty” — and our girl finds herself outside the courtyard
door. Step inside, grab the camera off the hutch where you found it
in the first place and step outside again.

Make for the scrapyard,
drop the camera on Jose and he’ll give you the same gas can
you found back at 181st St.! Use the can on the Jeep’s fuel
tank — a little hard to spot; it’s just above the top of the
rear left wheel — and suddenly Nicole’s driving along a dry
wash in the Andes. Alas, the Jeep takes a bad bounce and crashes.
(Nicole’s OK, but Don Diego’s just been burned again!)
Happily, she’s almost at her destination.

Odds & ends:
You can examine Alvarado’s body and try to use the left exit
from the hotel’s kitchen.

Day
8

Somewhere
in the Andes

Despite Nicole’s
misgivings, cross the creaky rope bridge. On the far side, you’ll
find a piece of metal variously referred to as a “tube,”
a piece of a Jeep frame and a crowbar. Grab it.

Use the knife from Alvarado’s
place on the liana vines that block the upper portion of gray rock
wall to the right and they’ll fall away.

However, you can’t
get into the tunnel beyond just yet, so hoof it back across the bridge
— a quarter of the way back, Nicole notes that it is swaying ominously
— to find an ancient wrecked Jeep to the left of the spot where you
started out. (Yes, this can also be investigated before your initial
crossing, but you can’t take everything you’ll need to
take until you have the crowbar.)

Pull out the passenger’s
seat and use your crowbar to force open the locked crate in back.
Inside, a jack and a pulley. Take both.

Once more onto the bridge.
Oops. There it goes. Nicole survives by clinging to a rope — which
seems to still be there after she’s hauled herself to safety.
(It’s hard to take, but it’s between the cliff’s
edge and the right support pillar.) Note also that one rope linking
the two sides of the chasm has survived the debacle: the overhead
one anchored at the center of the support arch.

Hey, I have this crazy
idea! Use the rope that saved Nicole on the seat from the Jeep! Then
use the pulley on the ropey chair! Then use the pulleyed, ropey chair
on the surviving bridge rope and climb in! Nicole whizs across the
gap. Thank goodness it’s all downhill. (If Nicole won’t
climb aboard, you’ve left the jack behind in the Jeep.)

The jack’s just the
ticket to pry open the stone door to the tunnel. Step through the
gap and you’re in Akakor.

The first thing you’ll
want to do is look over your shoulder. No, not in that sense. It’s
a kind of creepy place, but I’m talking about checking out the
symbol above the tunnel exit. The lower half is aquamarine and a raised
aquamarine circle can be seen in the sunken upper-left portion.

A clue? Yes — a simple
one for a simple but potentially confusing puzzle.

Head downscreen from the
tunnel exit and enter the small pyramid on your right. You’ll
find the passage blocked by a door and a panel in a recess in the
left wall.

This is where the crystals
from Alvarado’s house come into play. You’ll have to place
three of them in this 4 x 4 panel and then the fourth in a newly-revealed
indentation in the door.

Half the info you need
do this correctly is in the panel itself. The aquamarine triangle
in the first column, the yellow circle in the second and red square
in the third link the corresponding crystals in your inventory to
colors. Now you just have to link those colors to three symbols you’ll
find in Akakor: the aquamarine one above the tunnel exit and the two
others — yellow and red, respectively — atop the entrances to pyramids
up and down screen from the one with the panel.

You should be able to place
one stone correctly now just by recalling the symbol over the tunnel
exit.

That same symbol appears
over the second column from the left in the panel. The symbols in
the panel are colorless, but you’ll recall the original was
aquamarine … and the only thing colored aquamarine in the panel
is the triangular shape in the the left-hand column. Hence, you’ll
use the tetrahedral crystal in the triangular indentation (the top
spot) beneath the symbol from the tunnel exit.

Leave the panel and pyramid
and head up the screen. A yellow symbol appears over the entrance
to the pyramid on the far side of this screen. (This one has a tomb
in its recesses, and you’ll want to explore it as well.)

This symbol also appears
atop the second column from the right in the panel in the recess.
The only use of yellow in the panel is the half-shaded circle mentioned
above, and the same rules apply here. Hence, you’ll use the
spherical crystal in the corresponding indentation below the symbol
from the tomb entrance.

Remember that Nicole entered
the pyramids screen from the lower left corner. If you walk straight
down to the near edge of this screen, you’ll come upon an unexplored
path. The symbol above the entrance to the tumble-down pyramid at
its end is red and corresponds to the one above the left-hand column
in the panel in the recess. The only red in the panel appears in the
shaded square in the second column from the right. Hence, you’ll
use the cubic crystal in the square indentation in the left-hand column.
(While you’re here, note also the water that has accumulated
in the leaf at the lower right.)

Once you’ve successfully
placed those three crystals, you’ll notice something’s
happened: A section of the door’s surface has slid away to expose
the final bit of the locking mechanism. It’s beyond intuitive.
You only have one crystal left (the dodecahedral one) and it fits
only in the left of the four indentations here. Just drop it in the
left one and the door slides back far enough to admit you to the vault.

No treasure. But you can
do a fair amount with just the junk you’ll find lying around
here. Start with the old sword on the ground to your right.

Did you explore the tomb
pyramid with the yellow symbol? There wasn’t much to see, but
someone is buried down there — if you investigated, Nicole said the
place smelled like “a mummy’s underpants” — and,
given the heavy stone lid on the sarcophagus, it was clear you’d
need some leverage.

The sword provides this
leverage. Advance on the tomb to learn this is supposed to be the
grave of expedition member Raches. Use the sword on the upper left
corner of the sarcophagus to put it in place and then activate the
sword. The blade will break, but the lid nevertheless slides away
to reveal remains. Take the wristwatch from the skeleton’s right
wrist (an odd place for a watch) and the jawbone as well as the cap
or lid to the left of the tomb. (You can right-click on the jawbone
in inventory to get your first hint that this doesn’t belong
to Raches.)

Return to the vault and
the take the “old passage” on the left. You’ll emerge
onto a stony plain to find an intact single-engine aircraft! (Presumably
this dates from a different expedition If the party had an airplane,
why all the whining and moaning about escaping Akakor?)

Have a close look at the
plane. Open the hood in front and take the air filter from the upper
part of the enclosure. Left-click on it in inventory to clean it and
then replace it in the engine.

That’s one of two
small repair jobs required here, (Yes, this will eventually be your
way out.) And be sure to grab the glass jar in the lower left corner
of the screen. It’s about to come in handy.

Retrace your steps to the
vault. There’s a cloud of flies over by the right wall. Use
the sandwich Diego gave you on the cloud. Several hungry flies will
attach themselves to the sandwich and the sandwich transforms into
“fly-covered sandwich” in your inventory. Gross. Now use
the jar on the sandwich to trap the flies. (The cap from the tomb
is applied automatically to trap them.)

You can put this to use
right away. To the left of the “old passage,” you’ll
see a broad crack at the base of the wall. You can zoom in on this.
There’s a funnel in there and it seems to contain something.
Also a large-ish spider, which emerges from the crack periodically
and intimidates Nicole enough to prevent her from just taking the
funnel.

Use your fly jar on the
spider to trap it as well, take the funnel and left-click on it in
inventory to liberate what appears to be an injured Professor Dickinson’s
last words. This crude document identifies as Dickinson’s the
skeletal remains we found in the tomb earlier. Turns out he’d
borrowed Raches’s watch.

So what became of Raches?

Naturally, the captured
spider has a use as well. I mentioned another repair job back at the
plane. Open the metal cover just above the left wing to expose the
battery …. and a large-ish brown snake that has taken up residence
atop it. It moves threateningly, but won’t actually bite Nicole
if she makes a move on the battery. But it also won’t surrender
its position.

Apparently this snake has
spider issues. Use the spider jar on the snake and the snake moves
along. Nicole then presumably releases the spider for you’ll
find an empty jar in your inventory. Which is convenient, because
a peek at the battery determines it needs water. You’ve seen
water gathered on a leaf in the pyramid with the red symbol and you’ll
need a way to transport it.

Make your way back to the
exterior view of the two small pyramids and head downscreen. Use the
jar on the little cache of water in the leaf and you’re practically
done. Use the water on the top of the plane’s battery, give
the propeller a twirl and watch Nicole fly first to Manaus (the capital
of the Brazilian state of Amazonas) and then to New York aboard a
commercial flight. When the action resumes, you’ll find your
outside her offices with the jawbone, watch and Dickinson’s
dying declaration.

Odds & ends:
That’s a condor circling in the background at the bridge scene.
You can’t examine it, but, like the raven at the tenement, you
can identify it by placing the cursor over it. Did you catch the faint
scream at the end of Nicole’s ride across the chasm? You can
try to use the crowbar to pry open the tunnel entrance and get a unique
response. You can examine the fallen statues beside the path after
you exit the tunnel and the airplane.

Finally, a nice touch:
If you right-click on the “frescoes” to the right of the
entrance to the “old passage,” you’ll replay an
audio conversation between Dickinson and Warren that may have inaugurated
the mutinous episode.

Day
10

The
Office (VII)

Remember:
Nicole disobeyed orders and went off on her own. Check in with Chaser
to learn she’s off the case and suspended from duty and that
he wants your final report by day’s end. Nicole says that’ll
mean another visit to the NYU library. The encounter ends with Chaser’s
assertion that Nick may be a suspect. (This is based on what, exactly?
You’ve just learned Nick missed his flight to Peru.)

You can’t leave the
building without first having a quick chat with Ruth. (It doesn’t
really clarify anything.)

Library
(II)

Check in with
the librarian to learn the person who tore out the yearbook page referring
to the expedition members must have been someone from “your
side” — someone in law enforcement. She doesn’t offer
a basis for this interesting theory and, though she says she’ll
try, doesn’t cough up a name. (No, you’re not missing
something. This is nothing more than a hint.)

She’ll also report
that Dickinson’s widow gave his papers to his assistant. You
probably know this already. Dickinson’s papers have been sitting
in the museum’s Archive since Day One and you’ve been
been to identify their presence there. Today, you’ll be able
to actually look at them.

But not just yet. Leave
the building to receive a text from Nick. He writes that the expedition
members have been “checked out” — not sure what this
means — but that he hasn’t learned anything solid about Raches.
He’ll now dispatch Nicole to look for a photo of that elusive
gentleman in the home of Staten Island stockbroker Rudolph.

Staten
Island

The photos
in question are in the niche to the left of the entrance where you
found the umbrella on the earlier visit. Zoom in on the upper wall
to find six photos arranged in a rough oval. Remove the photo of a
graduate and his parents from the frame at the bottom of the circle
to discover a photo of Raches hidden behind it.

You can right-click on
the photo in inventory to read the inscription — but if you left-click
instead you’ll get more commentary from Nicole — including
the assertion that the handwriting on the back looks familiar.

Odds & ends:
Why are insects still fluttering around the unlit streetlight out
front? It’s daytime!

Museum
of Pre-Columbian Art (VI)

Now to follow
up on the lead from the librarian about Dickinson’s papers.

Talk to the snotty porter
on your way in to learn Nicole is headed for the Archive again. Initially,
this may seem like the microfilm room at the library all over again
— the shelves are packed with material — but it’s really pretty
simple: You want the large wooden box of Dickinson’s papers
on the lowest of the right-hand shelves.

Within, you’ll find
… dental records? Not the sort of thing one typically finds in donated
personal papers! But take the large photo of teeth at front and center.

No lab needed. While Nicole
seems a bit shaky on the forensics — she doesn’t know right
from left here — simply use the records on the jawbone in inventory
to establish that the jawbone belongs to Dickinson.

In other words, Raches
is unaccounted for and must be considered a suspect. Warren concurs.
Talk to him outside the building. (You also get a glimpse of his gray
car, which quietly removes him as a suspect.) As usual, he doesn’t
say much of consequence — the only surprise is that he knows Nicole
was in Peru — and then has to make one of his many important phone
calls.

Tenement/Subway
(II)

You can’t
do anything but follow Warren (though you don’t know you’re
doing so until after your arrival) to the tenement at 181st St.

Apparently this is the
building Alvarado mentioned as a potential hiding place for Warren’s
treasure. But you’re barely out of the car when Chaser calls
and summons you back to the office. (Note that he seems to pay special
attention to your location.)

The
Office (VIII)

Nicole returns
automatically to a close-up view of her desk. You’ll find the
formal suspension letter she requested in its lower left corner. Inspect
it. Nicole says the signature looks a whole lot like the one on Raches’
photo from the stockbroker’s house. Use the photo on the letter
to make a side-by-side comparison. Yes, they’re very similar.
(They’re also very printed, rather than in cursive, and thus
not proper handwriting samples.)

And, yes, we get it. Leon
Chaser = Noel Raches. How could we not get it? Why didn’t he
just change his name entirely rather than turning it into a Jumble
word puzzle?

Talk to Ruth. At the end,
she’ll vanish for the night and Nicole can explore Chaser’s
office. In the lower left portion of the desk, you’ll find a
safe with a six-letter combination. Using the dial below to select
the letters and the slider above to adjust them, simply adjust “Chaser”
until it reads “Raches” and open the safe to elicit another
one of those strange lines (“I’m acting in a high necessity
state!”) and find a flood of evidence: Chaser’s ticket
to Cusco, the missing page from the ’86 NYU yearbook, newspaper
clippings from the time of the expedition and pictures of Alice Dickinson
, Raches and a car accident.

The only item you have
to look at is the ticket to make Nicole think out loud. Leave the
office. Downstairs, Nicole calls Nick with her findings and alerts
him that she’s headed for 181st St. subway to intercept Warren.
(In fact, she’s headed for the tenement nearby and winds up
in an otherwise inaccessible section of the 181st St. station.)

Tenement/Subway
(III)

Note Chaser’s
red car at the right and Warren’s gray one in the background.

Drop down to the subway
platform and collect the pliers from the scaffold at the near end.
They’ve been waiting there for you since the discovery of Joel
Tatum’s body, and you can finally take them.

Return to the surface and
enter the tenement where you destroyed the doorbell earlier in the
game. On the ground floor, click on the gate to the left of the elevator
and it becomes apparent that Nicole’s headed for the cellar.
She can’t get there on foot, however — the gate is closed (apparently
meaning locked) — and Nicole suggests the elevator.

Unfortunately, it’s
not working. You have to repair it. The pliers will help. So will
the schematics and the bit of take-able uninsulated wire that flank
the elevator door one flight up. With wire and pliers, climb the stairs
to the top, where you’ll find the elevator apparatus, and open
the electrical panel on the left. Your game will be saved automatically
— more on this in a moment — and you can get down to work.

It looks complicated. But
the actual modifications are simple. The schematics indicate you just
need to bypass switch box 20/07WB. Just use the pliers on the wire
and then use the pliers + wire on the switch box at the lower left.
The bypass complete, you’ll exit the panel to find the elevator
in motion. Return to the ground floor and enter the elevator to descend
automatically to the cellar.

However, do not use the
uninsulated wire on any of the switch boxes without the pliers. Nicole
will fry and the game’s over. (The description of the pliers
expressly mentions that they’re for use with live wires.)

Grab the skewer from the
box across from the elevator — it looks like a rapier — and head
left to the boiler room. Use the pliers to remove the valve handle
from the boiler and the skewer to puncture the blue barrel of water.
The water leaks out and Nicole automatically moves the barrel over
to a position beneath the truncated ladder in the corner. When the
cut-scene ends, click on the tunnel to the abandoned platform above
the ladder and you’ll find yourself in a heretofore-unseen section
of the 181st St. station. Enter the near end of the subway car here.

The controls are damaged,
but repairable. The valve handle from the boiler fits perfectly over
the stub of the broken brake control. Turn it to release the brakes.
Nicole starts destroying the Grateful Dead’s “Casey Jones”
and drives the train automatically to another abandoned station.

Everything’s on automatic
from here on. Chaser/Raches has Warren tied up down here. (How did
they get here?) The director tells Raches to take his gold. Raches
doesn’t seem interested. He seem interested only in revenge
for Alice Dickinson’s grisly death at the hands of the natives.
He reveals that Huaquero inspired him to start killing expedition
members. “When I saw Fairbanks’s body, I thought, ‘Why
not me? Why didn’t I kill him?’ ” Warren here protests
that he didn’t intend for Alice to die and Raches in his turn
implies that Warren plainly didn’t care: He and his fellow students
abandoned them.

He’s about to do
in Warren with the ritual dagger — last seen on Day 3 when we found
Fairbanks’s blood on the blade — when Nicole announces her
presence with authority. Chaser insists -he- is the FBI — a seeming
signal he has slipped over into madness — and steps back into the
the blackness. Warren asks Nicole to release him, but as Nicole scans
the darkness for Raches, gunfire erupts. It looks as though Raches
circled around shot Warren and that Nick, turning up just when the
curtain was about to ring down, shot Raches. Appearing here only in
partial silhouette, Nick suggests this may be the best solution to
the case. But why didn’t Raches kill Branford as well?

You can probably answer
that yourself. All along, Branford has always tried to make himself
agreeable to all parties. Note his attentions to both Nicole and Warren
in the present day and his divided loyalties (reported on by Alvarado)
during the expedition — first staying with the professor, his daughter
and Raches and then running after the mutineers. He’s politically
astute enough to play both sides against the middle and, ultimately,
it seems to have kept him alive.

A bigger question: What’s
Branford doing here? In the final end cut-scene, as the camera pivots,
you’ll see the collector smoking serenely near the tenement
entrance. No chance to find out what this might or might not mean
— will he wind up with the treasure? — as the credits begin to roll.

Odds & ends:
You can examine all six of the switch boxes at the center of the elevator
panel and get six identical responses. Nicole actually gives two different
right-click descriptions for the subway car. In one, she says it dates
from 1917, but I suspect this one’s from a later era. It resembles
an early “R” series car from 1930 or later. Nicole can
try to exit this part of the station via the near side of the screen
and get a unique line.

The picture of the car
accident in Chaser’s safe is never properly explained. At a
guess, it took the life of Chaser’s wife — whose death Ruth
mentioned earlier — but why is it hidden with other evidence concealing
Chaser’s true identity? Did the wife learn that Chaser was Raches
and hence set herself up to become his first victim?

We never do find see the
hiding place for Warren’s treasure or get a fuller examination
of Raches’s killing spree. We have his word that he took over
from Huaquero after Fairbanks’s murder. It’s implied in
the intro that he killed agent James — presumably to conceal his
link to Huaquero (though taking out Huaquero himself would have been
more efficient).

But what about Huaquero?
Chaser provides no details at all about his alleged escape attempt.
Is it possible he simply shot him and then made it look as though
he was trying to get away?