Art of Murder: FBI Confidential Walkthrough by Peter Olafson

General
Hints

Many conversations are
broken up into chunks and require several clicks to complete. Some
may appear to end before they’ve actually ended. Keep your interviewees
talking until they begin to repeat themselves.

You can interact with certain
locations only in the close-up view.

Sometimes trivia matters.
Occasionally you’ll have to complete some insignificant operation
in order to complete your business in a given location. (Non-essential
actions that yield unique responses are mentioned in the “odds
& ends” sections.)

There’s a lot of
running around in this game, so make sure Nicole’s always running!
Double-click on your destinations. However, if a character to whom
to you need to speak or mechanism with which you must interact to
is at a significant distance from Nicole’s location — Jose
in Cusco, for instance — don’t click on the character or mechanism
directly. (This forces Nicole to walk.) First run to a nearby location.

There are some holes in
the story. I’ve tried to fill them either logically or with
informed conjecture.

You can figure out the
killer at a very early stage of the game if you’re watching
carefully. (You can’t act on this suspicion, however.)

Contact:
Comments or questions? Write to me at .

Copyright:
This document is copyright 2010 by Peter Olafson. You may not post
it, distribute it, edit it, excerpt it (except for "fair use"
purposes in news coverage), sell it or publish it in any fashion without
my prior written consent.

Introduction

Agent Nicole Bonnet’s
first field assignment is playing fetch. Fellow agent James Scott,
on a stakeout in a New York City tenement, asks her to get coffee
from the bar around the corner. She’s returned to the foot of
the tenement stairs when she hears gunfire above. James lives just
long enough to croak out, “Take the message to Nick.”
Nicole races after the killer, but she’s too late. She reaches
the roof to see a red car skidding around a corner. Don’t forget
that.

Day
1

The
Office (I)

You’ll start in the
bureau chief’s office. Talk to Chaser. He’ll partner you
up with Nick Romsky — evidently in need of a den mother to handle
his paperwork — and ask you to finish your report on James’s
shooting.

Leave the office. Outside,
you’ll have an automatic chat with perky office manager Ruth.
She suggests you request reassignment. (Nicole declines. She means
to go after James’s killer, but will be reassigned in short
order in any case.)

The unfinished report is
on the PC on the Nicole’s desk just across from the printer
on Ruth’s. But you can’t call it up right now. Zoom in
on the desk and tap the in-game keyboard once to learn Nicole first
needs information from Nick.

From Nicole’s conversation
with Ruth, you already know Nick’s not around. In fact, he won’t
show up in person until well into the game and only fleetingly then.

But you can call him. Tap
the keyboard again for Nicole to suggest this and a third time to
learn a list of agents’ cell numbers has been tacked on the
wall somewhere in the office.

You can find that list
independently (i.e. without the keyboard tapping). It’s on the
bulletin board at the far end of the room. Zoom in on the board and
Nicole automatically spots Nick’s number. Afterward you’ll
find numbers for Nick, Ruth and Chaser by clicking the bottom icon
on your PDA’s desktop.

Just click on Nick’s
to place the call. (Don’t bother trying your desk phone. This
is a new office — as you’ll see more clearly in a moment —
and the phones haven’t been connected.)

No answer. Nicole now wonders
if something’s happened to Nick. No. You just have an old phone
number. Go see Ruth for the current one. (Again, all good things seem
to flow from touching your keyboard. A fourth tap will now yield a
suggestion that you speak to the office manager.)

Back at your desk, you’ll
find Nick’s correct number on the screen. Tap the keyboard to
import it to the PDA and use the PDA to place the call. It’ll
go to voicemail but Nicole gets a text message right back indicating
Nick will explain James’s odd message later. (He doesn’t,
but you’ll eventually sort it out for yourself: James left a
message for Nick in a prearranged spot.)

Exit the PDA and tap Nicole’s
keyboard again to complete the report and then the open document on
the monitor to send it to the printer.

Uh-oh. The printer’s
throwing up an exclamation point on Nicole’s screen.. Zoom in
on the printer itself and open the feeder drawer. Empty. It needs
paper.

You’d expect to find
paper in the storage room at the far end of the office. Too easy!
Instead, use the side door to exit to the Mezzanine. (This gives you
a sense that this new office is still a work-in-progress.) In the
near left corner of the screen, you’ll see printer paper atop
a cardboard box.

Grab it, jet back to the
printer, open the drawer, place the paper there, close it and claim
your printed report from the top of the printer. (If you examine the
report, Nicole calls it “a bald description of human tragedy.”)
Again, you don’t have to wait until you need the paper to take
it. You can grab it as soon as you’re out of Chaser’s
office — irrespective of whether you’ve previously checked
the paper drawer.)

In Chaser’s office,
drop the report on his lap and then talk to him until he tells you
he’s busy. In a conversation interlaced with gory cut-scenes,
you learn you’re not on the James case but assisting Nick in
the search for a serial killer who to date has killed three well-to-do
white male professionals: Henry Fairbanks, Mark Chestum and Andrew
Haig. Chestum and Haig had their hearts removed and all three had
16th century Spanish coins placed in or about their bodies — a fairly
transparent accusation of greed.

You’ll come out of
this chat with a picture of a shovel-like ritual dagger and instructions
to consult a file on the office network. (Don’t bother looking
on your PC. You can’t access any such file.)

Outside, you’ll endure
another automatic chat with Ruth. An important one: On learning Nicole
is headed to the museum, she’ll tell you that Nick suspected
the porter there of selling “marching powder” (slang for
cocaine) on the side. That’ll give you some leverage when you
speak to him.

Out in the Mezzanine, descend
the stairs and exit via the door to the right of reception. Your car
is the black one on the right side of the building … and I’ll
note without comment the presence of a red car out front not dissimilar
to the one you saw speeding from the scene of James’s shooting.
Just a coincidence?

In your car, just click
on the picture of the Museum of Pre-Columbian Art atop the NYC map
and you’ll find yourself outside that handsome structure.

Odds & ends:
In Chaser’s office, you can examine the two diplomas and map
on the left wall and Chaser himself. Outside the office, you can examine
Ruth, the piles of papers at the corner of her desk, the shelves to
the left and the door to Chaser’s office. In the full view of
the office, you can examine the three other desks — James’s,
Nick and one kept open for a newcomer — and the larger of the file
cabinets on the left side of the room (which elicits a reference to
J. Edgar Hoover’s purported cross-dressing).

In the close-up view of
Nicole’s desk, you can examine the telephone, coffee cup, picture
and wanted posters. In the one of the bulletin board, you can examine
three wanted posters, two police reports and a post-mortem photo of
a gangster. (This is as close as AoM comes to an Easter Egg. Presumably
these are members of the development team at City Interactive?)

IThe two post-it notes
can’t be examined, but can be read directly off the board. Presumably
the other number on the note with Nick’s old number is Nicole’s
or James’s. The other note is mildly intriguing. It’s
a to-do note for James: “302 Fylop [or so it appears] (don’t
leave on your desk).” Was this the location James had under
surveillance or his own stakeout location?

If the latter, that would
be dangerous information in the wrong hands.

Try the number you found
for Nick on the bulletin board a second time after Ruth describes
the fate of Nick’s phone to get a unique line from Nicole.

Museum
of Pre-Columbian Art (I)

Use the front door and
talk to the uniformed porter (who’s all ready to deny the “marching
powder” charge) to the left to locate director William Warren.
Walk through the entrance straight ahead and you’ll run into
this well-dressed and rather odd man. A conversation follows automatically
in which you’ll establish that an exhibit of Aztec knives can
be found in the main hall.

This may prove a bit confusing,
Warren is talking about -this- hall — it’s the only accessible
exhibition hall in the place — but the only knives you’ll find
here are the Incan ones in the display case to the left of the crouching
dog. Surely Warren knows the difference! In any case, you’ll
have to inspect these knives close up to satisfy yourself they don’t
include anything like the murder weapon before you can leave the hall
again.

You’ll need one item
here to complete the museum segment, and though you don’t yet
know you need it, you may as well grab it now rather than hunting
it up in a pinch later. Walk to the upper right corner of the hall,
where Nicole makes a crack about a “scary-looking mummy.”
You’ll see a fire extinguisher beside the display to the right.
Take it. (Nicole refers to the extinguisher as “this pot”
— evidently a translation issue.)

Return to the porter and
talk to him to learn not all of the museum’s collection is actually
on display — it lends items to other museums — and add Warren’s
cell number to your PDA. Now you can ask permission to check out the
off-limits storage area . (Why does the porter read the number off
in that super-weird voice, though?)

Busy signal. Talk to the
porter again to issue an implied threat about the marching powder
and he permits Nicole into the storage area. Descend the stairs and
discover you’re in the dark.

The only lighted area is
the pillar with a panel of five light switches — the first of the
game’s stand-alone puzzles. Nicole says she’ll ask the
porter to turn on the lights. He won’t do it, but Nicole can
pick up a small clue about the simplicity of the process: “One
up, one down or something like that …” (Don’t take this
literally. It’s more along the lines of something “something
like that …”)

Unfortunately, I can’t
tell you how to pull this off, as the lights connected to each switch
vary from game to game. But it’s easy and easier than it first
seems once you realize the five lights don’t all have to be
on at once and that your business here can be broken down into sub-tasks:
illuminate (and thus make take-able) two items you’ll need once
you reach “The furthest part of Storage” and then light
a path up the right side of the screen. In each case, the required
light can be illuminated with the throw of a single switch.

AThe first item is the
“flight case” on the right side of the middle shelf in
the near left corner. To take this, the light must be on in this same
corner. Left-click on the case once in inventory to open it and again
to extract the contents: an X-ray scanner.

The second is the inflatable
dingy (yes, as in “little boat”) on the floor to the right
of a second set of shelves farther up the left side of the screen.
This is slightly trickier. In addition to the item itself being visible,
there must be a lighted path to it. (Nicole won’t cross any
dark areas en route.) Hence, for Nicole to claim the dingy, Nicole
must first light either: a) both lights on the left side of the screen
or b) the lower two lights on the right side of the screen and the
upper light on the left.

Now you just have to light
the way to the far end of the storage room. That means turning on
either: a) the three lights on the right side of the screen or b)
the two lights on the left side of the screen and the upper two lights
on the right.

Once they’re on,
you’ll see crates at the far end of the room. Head that way.
The view reverses — now you’re looking back toward the stairs
— and your attention will quickly focus on the sealed rectangular
crate lying on its side near the upper wall (to the left of an upright
crate with the “Load this end up” legend). It’s
too heavy to move and apparently “very suspicious.” Opening
it is not an option.

Actually, this is sort
of a red herring, and you don’t have to inspect its contents
at all. You just have to move it out of the way to get at the larger
crate immediately behind it. Hence, the important location here is
the gap between the two crates. Use the dingy on the gap and then
use the fire extinguisher on the dingy to inflate it. The smaller
crate pivots away, and you can inspect the big crate.

Left-click on the “flight
case” once to open it and again to retrieve the X-ray scanner
it contains. Use it on the revealed crate to establish it contained
four pairs of knives — including one set that matches your murder
weapon — and that one of that particular set is missing! You’ve
found the source o the murder weapon!

And that’s it. Oddly,
you still have to do a little clean-up work, returning the scanner
to the flight case and the case to the shelf where you found it. And
you need to check in with the porter again to ask for the paperwork
on the shipment (which is handed over invisibly).

Leave the museum and enter
your car for a text message from Nick on a fourth murder — John Rudolph,
a stockbroker who lives on Staten Island — and a new picture atop
your NYC map. (The house is more Victorian than “villa.”)

Odds & ends:
In the lobby, you can examine the porter, the gift-shop display case
behind him, the glassed-in display case beside the column, the two
statues flanking the door to the exhibit and the exit to the street.
(You can also use each of the items you find on the porter and elicit
unique responses for each.) In the exhibit hall, you can identify
the ceramics display in the hall’s upper right corner and examine
the bowl on the wall to the right. (This establishes it’s probably
a replica, which may be why Nicole feels free to make use of it later
in the story.) In the Orangery, you can examine the large statue in
the near right corner and the smaller one in the middle distance and
the potting soil in the foreground. (You can also take one of the
small pots in the foreground, but can’t carry it out of the
room until later in the game.) Ditto for the Archive, where you can
examine the magnifying glass and, in a close-up of the shelves, identify
the box of Professor Dickinson’s papers. (You’ll also
elicit a couple lines here that seem to jump out ahead of the story
— notably when you first enter the room and move in for a close-up
of the shelves.) At the near end of storage, once you’ve taken
the x-ray scanner, you can examine the empty space occupied by the
case. At the far end, you can examine the poster on the central pillar,
the table nearby, the broken vase in the right near corner and, using
the x-ray scanner, the contents of the smaller of the two accessible
crates. (It contains two pots and a mask.)

Staten
Island (I)

Have a quick chat with
the officer at the gate for a briefing on the NYPD’s findings.
But not too quick, as Macgregor offers a vague clue: This victim’s
heart was found in a corner pocket of the pool table.

Enter the house and have
a peek at the low table near the door. Signs of struggle? The whiskey
bottle and one of the two glasses on the table here have been upset.
And one of the two armchairs is slightly out of skew. Move the right-hand
one back into position with a left-click and then back out of the
close-up to discover you’ve uncovered a business card for an
Allan Branford.

Looking at the card in
inventory adds the collector’s phone number to your PDA and
Nicole says she’ll call him the next day. But she’s already
decided he’s not a suspect. Why? It’s declared but never
made clear.

To the left (the exit arrow’s
above the sofa), you’ll find a niche with an umbrella in a hat
stand. (You’ll return here late in the game to inspect the photos
on the upper wall.) Left-click on the umbrella in inventory to strip
it down to a single wire. Pretty clearly a tool for some undone task!

Return to the lounge and
then move right (the exit arrow’s under the stairs) to the pool
room.and random stand-alone puzzle #2. Zoom in on the blood-drenched
pool table for one of Nicole’s sillier lines and access to the
blue #2 ball in the slot below the table’s right end.

Remember Macgregor’s
reference to the heart in the corner pocket? It’s not immediately
apparent from the scene, but something’s been concealed in the
pool table. You just have to locate it by dropping the #2 ball in
the six pockets until it fails to reappear. “Something … blocking
… the ball,” says Nicole.

Just use the wire remaining
from the umbrella on the pocket where you encountered the blockage
to free both ball and blockage: the head of a pre-Columbian figurine.
Take the head and scoot. Nicole says she’ll leave the head in
Evidence Deposit the next day and automatically exchanges a few words
with the officer out front. Click on her car and the scene fades to
black.

Odds & ends:
You can examine the officer, the pictures high on the lounge wall
and the one to the left of the front door, the grandfather clock to
the right of the door and the bottle, decanter and glasses on the
table. (It looks as though the newspaper on the table was supposed
to be take-able, but Nicole refuses to pick it up bare-handed. Shame
she’s not so circumspect with the statue head!) In the pool
room, you can examine the cabinet against the rear wall, a large bloodstain
on the rug on the near side of the pool table and any of the six pockets
on the table itself.

Chatting with Officer Macgregor
after he stands aside from the front walk or says good night yields
one additional unimportant line. And a second close-up look at the
table near the door elicits Nicole’s theory of the crime.

Day
2

The
Office (II)

We see Nicole
waking from a dream of a shadowy killer and find her outside the office.The
first step: Wrap up unfinished business.

Inside, Nicole suggests
dropping off the head with Evidence Deposit. That’s the room
to the left of reception downstairs. Sadly, the door requires a keycard
and our girl doesn’t have one.

So whaddaya think? Ruth?
Yeah, Ruth. Simply take the keycard from her desk. It’s just
to the right of the coffee pot, which is to the right of Ruth’s
telephone.

While you’re up here,
visit Chaser to update him on your progress. In return, he’ll
give you your agenda for the day: You’re going back to the museum
and have a look into director Warren’s whereabouts the previous
night.

Back in the office, Nicole
notices that Nick’s muddy footprints lead to her desk. Anything
new there? Yup. On the right, just above the “wanted”
posters, is a little paper boat. Grab it and left-click on the map
in inventory to flatten it out. You’ll find a map with a note
to meet Nick at 4:30 at the tenement where James died.

Now drop off the statue
head. Back downstairs, use the keycard on the Evidence Deposit door
and then use the head on one of the two empty sections of shelf. (Note
that there’s a box of James’ belongings and another of
“tailor’s supplies” on the middle set of shelves.
You can’t do anything with them just yet, but these will be
important later in the day.)

Finally, you need to set
up meetings with Branford and Warren. (You can do this only after
you’ve spoken to Chaser.) Call Branford first. You won’t
get through. Then try Warren. It turns out he knows Branford — and
that’s kind of strange, isn’t it? — and indicates he’ll
meet with you at the museum as well. Get over there!

Odds & ends:
You can have a chat with Ruth about the missing Nick. And if you show
her the statue head, she’ll suggest you drop it off in Evidence
Deposit.

Museum
of Pre-Columbian Art (II)

No need to
check in with the porter this time. Just head straight into the exhibit
hall to find Warren leering at you again. It’s a long conversation
but, once past the sparring over Nicole’s unauthorized search,
an important one. It turns out Warren knows the late Rudolph as well
— and that he has an alibi for the previous night. He says he was
at the Philharmonic with Branford.

Use the right-hand exit
to reach the Orangery. You’ll find Branford at the far end of
this greenhouse. Despite Nicole’s attempt to fake him out, he
backs up Warren’s alibi, reveals that he, too, knew all the
dead men and says he last saw the late Mr. Rudolph six months ago
at a charity concert. (Nicole’s already determined psychically
that Branford isn’t a suspect and she doesn’t ask him
about the presence of his business card under the chair adjacent to
the one where Rudolph was apparently knocked cold.)

But, really, could Branford
be our killer? We don’t have any other evidence that points
to him. And he’d have to be really sloppy to leave so transparent
a piece of evidence behind. Then again, maybe Branford didn’t
leave the card there. If I was the killer and wanted to redirect the
attention of authorities, a judiciously-placed business card from
a close acquaintance of the director of the museum that was the source
of the murder weapon would just the ticket.

You’ll never confirm
that this is the case. (AoM leaves a lot of unanswered questions in
its wake.) And, in truth, Branford here feels much more like a frightened
would-be victim.

You’ll get one bit
of vague info out of him. Agitated after learning of Rudolph’s
death, he points a finger at a suspect: Huaquero. But when Nicole
questions him further, he says only that the Spanish word means “grave
robber.”

Nicole lets this slide,
and you won’t sort it out for a little while yet.

It may seem you’ve
addressed everything on your agenda. But something’s missing.
Have you made a full survey of the museum? Get back to the exhibit
hall and zoom in on the left of the two glassed-in exhibits just to
left of Warren.

One of the two gold figurines
here is missing a head. If you inspect this after your chat with Branford,
Nicole makes explicit the connection to the statue head from Ruldolph’s
pool table and can ask the returned Warren for a loan of the body.
Warren asserts that the museum has rules about such things and asks
for a formal request. So it’s back to the office once again
for some busywork.

The
Office (III)

You’ll
need to touch base with Ruth first to find the right form in the supply
closet, so check in with her (automatic when you reach her desk),
jog down to the storage room and grab a form from the stack that’s
straight across from you as you enter. (It’s on the right on
the second shelf from the bottom.)

Drop it on Ruth, then visit
with Chaser for him to sign off and, upon exit, Ruth tells you it’s
ready. You’ll find the completed form just east of Ruth’s
coffee pot, where you earlier found Nicole’s keycard for Evidence
Deposit. Nicole then tells her she’s headed back to the museum.

Museum
of Pre-Columbian Art (III)

Warren’s
where you left him. Just drop the form on him and he’s cool
with Nicole claiming the head-less statue. He’ll tell you to
talk to the porter and the porter grumpily tells you he’ll unlock
the case. Return to the exhibit hall, open the case and take the statue.

Uh-oh. You’ll notice
some action with the alarm light at the lower left. Previously it
was green. Now it’s flickering red. The system still registers
the statue as missing.

You can return to the lobby
and talk to the porter to confirm this and learn he won’t let
you leave the museum until this situation is rectified. But that’s
not necessary to the ensuing puzzle. A touch of “Raiders of
the Lost Ark” here. You have to replace the missing statue with
something of equal weight.

You don’t have far
to go. At the far end of the the Orangery is a trio of vases (on the
right) and a sack of potting soil (on the left).

Here I part company with
most of the AoM walkthroughs. Most of them report that this puzzle
is random. My testing (four run-throughs) suggests it’s only
semi-random. That is, you should always take the smallest vase —
the one in the middle — but the amount of potting soil you’ll
add to it will vary from game to game. Sometimes one handful. Sometimes
two (the maximum). Sometimes none.

The least labor-intensive
solution: Take a handful of potting soil along with the vase. Don’t
put it in the vase yet. (If you already have, simply use the vase
on the potting-soil bag to empty it.) If you place the vase in the
display case and the alarm light doesn’t go green, take it back
again, add the potting soil in inventory and replace the vase in the
case. If it still doesn’t go green, return to the Orangery,
grab another handful of soil, put it in the vase and replace the vase
in the display case. (You can only hold one handful at a time.)

Once the alarm light goes
green again, you’re free to go.

Abandoned
Building

lHeld up by
the alarm puzzle, Nicole is late and has missed Nick. So what can
be extracted here without the presence of Nicole’s colleague?
Not much without some gear. Climb the stairs until your climb is called
on account of darkness above, head left (the apartment to the right
is inaccessible for now), enter the kitchen on the right at the end
of the hall and grab the booze from the open fridge. (Note the fallen-down
flap of calendar on the table beside the door. This’ll become
important in a bit.)

In the apartment across
the hall, enter the bathroom and grab the plug from the floor between
the grimy toilet and the grimy sink. Then back out of the scene and
head left into the bedroom. This is apparently where Nick was waiting.
Take the wire hairbrush (between the cup and the can on the table
in the foreground) and left-click on it in inventory to remove the
bristles. Leave the apartment and Nicole mentions she hasn’t
checked the place at the far end of the hall.

You can do so now. Apt.
No. 9 is on the right. Enter the second room to surprise (and be surprised
by) a drunk named Joel Tatum — an unlikely repository for a message
from Nick.

You just need to get him
something to drink to shake it loose. Unfortunately, the booze from
the fridge at the other end of the hall isn’t Joel’s particular
brand of poison, so you’re stuck with the time-honored adventure-game
business of making one liquid appear to be another.

There’s an empty
bottle of booze under the round table near Joel. Take it, get back
to the kitchen where you found the original bottle and zoom in on
the sink to the right of the fridge. Use the plug from the bathroom
in the drain, place the empty bottle in the sink and turn on the water.
The sink fills with something halfway between water and oil, the label
on the bottle quickly floats loose and you’ve only to slap it
on the bottle from the fridge to make it palatable to Joel.

In exchange, he turns over
an Origami bird . Flatten it out in inventory with a left-click to
read “James – mobile.” This’ll soon become self-explanatory.

When you try to send Nicole
out the door, she coaxes Joel to leave instead. On the empty sofa,
you’ll now find a blown fuse.

Perhaps you noticed the
fuse box just outside the apartment. Use the loose bristles on the
fuse and it’s as good as new. (Apparently, it was just as grimy
as everything else in here.) Now you can use it in the close-up of
the fuse box. The only working slot is the second from the right in
the bottom row.

This seems futile at first.
The fuse just blows again. (Remove it, use the bristles to doll it
up again and it’s ready for its next fuse box close-up.).

But think: Could said blowing
have had useful consequences somewhere else on the floor? Yup. Remember
that flap of calendar back in the kitchen where you found the booze?
It turns out this covered an exposed electric cord and the short from
the blown fuse has now burned away the calendar. Now you can return
to the kitchen and pull the exposed cord out of its plug. Who knew
that flattened Origami paper had the properties of a pair of insulated
rubber gloves?

You’ve just eliminated
the only drain on the fuse box. It stands to reason it should now
be able to power something else. Scoot back down the hall and plug
in the fuse. It doesn’t blow! And when you return to the stairs,
you’ll see light from above. Now you can climb to the next landing.

Here you’ll find
a “look more closely” zoom-in spot beside the radiator.
And here, through a gap in the floor, you’ll see a cell phone
— as per Nick’s note. Use the hairbrush handle on the gap to
prop up the board above and then grab the phone and get back to your
office.

Odds & ends:
Notice the raven on the ledge above the entrance? You can examine
the graffiti to the right of the entrance and get a description you’ll
also find in Akakor deep in the game. In the kitchen sink, note the
dripping faucet and the appearance of the odd cockroach.

The
Office (IV)

Upon entry,
Nicole reminds her listeners to drop off the statue body in Evidence
Deposit. When she does, she’ll notice the head is missing. That’s
bound to make you uneasy, and we’ll follow up in a moment.

But something’s changed
here. To date, Evidence Deposit was a place only to drop things off.
Now it’s become your own personal Lost & Found and you can
claim two items from evidence boxes: agent James’s ID card (from
the box of his belongings) and the scissors (from the box of “tailor’s
supplies”).

OK — the missing statue
head. See Ruth. Turns out it was taken off to be checked for prints
and should be back on Day 3. Regrettably, the only prints were Nicole’s
own. She handled it without gloves. (Of course, since Nicole hasn’t
been permitted to take latex gloves until this point in the game,
it’s not really Nicole’s fault.)

In any case, you can go
get gloves now. They’re on the left side of the right middle
shelf of the supply closet. And in fact you can take them without
first going through the Evidence Deposit/Ruth sequence, which is really
just an elaborate prompt rather than an authentic reproach.

The funny thing is, you
never have to use them.

While you’re up there,
you can take all the other gear you have been denied to date: a cell
phone battery from the box on the second shelf from the top on the
closet’s left side; a bottle of luminol from the middle shelf
to the right; a plastic bag from the middle shelf to the left; and
a lamp (which works with the luminol) from the same shelf as the plastic
bag.

And that brings us to your
new, broken toy: James’s cell. Right-clicks on it in inventory
will establish that, though the battery was destroyed in the shooting,
the data stored in the phone might still be recoverable. It needs
a new battery and you just grabbed one from the supply closet.

But try to use the new
battery on the cell in inventory and Nicole talks to you like you’re
an idiot. This combined item needs to be handled differently than
earlier ones: Zoom in on your desk and place the cell and battery
on the lower-left corner.

Now you’ll need wires
to connect them.

Did you notice the rafters
near the top of the stairs? As mentioned, the rehabbed building is
a work-in-progress and there’s a ladder here and some tangled
cables hanging down. Push the ladder to the right and you can reach
them. Use the scissors to snip away the blue and red wires closest
to the top of the ladder, descend again, push the ladder back to the
left (so you can pass) and, at your desk, use the wires on the battery.
The phone comes to life. It’s asking for a PIN code.

Where could it aside from
James’s ID card? Alas, it’s visibly tarnished and unreadable
in this form. You need to clean it up. To do that, we’ll visit
a new room: the laboratory.

Use the rightmost door
upstairs. On the rolling cart just left of the door is a bunch of
swabs. Take them, left-click on them in inventory to select one and
use it on the blackened ID card. Then simply right-click on the card
in inventory to collect the PIN number: 8673. Plug this in via the
phone, push the large central button and you have access to James’s
files. Click on the phone’s screen to download them to Nicole’s
desktop PC.

The phone gives up the
ghost in the process, but you’ll wind up with one fuzzy photo
on your screen. Click on the photo to clear it up and prompt Nicole
to sum up the new data: This is a thug named Huaquero. James (who
had a last name: Scott) had just started watching him when he was
killed. That’s just become your job. Descend to your car and
head for “thugs’s hideout.”

Thug’s
Hideout

The building’s
formal entrance (and your eventual exit) are both down and to the
left in the “building facade.” Naturally, this route is
unavailable to you. Instead, enter the intervening alley and move
toward the pick-up truck. You’ll need this vehicle to scale
the building … but not from this position.

You’ll see a crowbar
under the truck’s left rear wheel. Oddly enough, this appears
to be bracing the truck in position. (You can’t move the truck
with the bar in place.)

Take the crowbar, hop into
the cab and release the parking break. The pick up rolls a bit down
the alley before coming to a halt. Get out again and use the crowbar
on the fire-escape ladder above the truck. Nicole automatically climbs
on the hood, pulls the ladder down onto the truck’s bed and
climbs to the first landing.

Now you want to manipulate
the bad guys into giving you access. Zoom in on the air conditioner
here and use crowbar on the fan blades. The game cuts briefly to a
hefty-looking fellow opening the window just to the left. (How is
it he doesn’t see Nicole lurking on the fire escape?) Click
on the open window to listen to the thugs’ chatter. They’re
looking for a missing key, are aware of your presence outside, are
working with items (“old junk”) that has a value that
isn’t intuitive, have a knife stored in a drawer and are about
to make their exit.

Once they fall silent,
a second click on the open window gives you a view of the interior.
Click on it one more time to step inside.

You don’t have freedom
of movement here. One of the two thugs can be seen through the doorway
to the right. Nicole can’t move to any location where he could
see her and must stay in the area with the shadowed floor along the
far side of the room. Within this limit, she must distract the thug
to progress.

It’s slightly tricky:
You’ll need to call up your PDA and use its camera function.
Interestingly, it’s already focused on the bag over on the sofa
beside the door — but to no clear purpose. From the two positions
nearest the window, the bag appears to be just a bag.

But there does seem to
be something printed on a tag at its left end. If you could get closer,
the camera might pick it up.

Move to a position between
the cardboard boxes closest to the door and use your camera there.
You’ll now see three sets of three numbers on the tag. (You’ll
only get a quick glimpse of the numbers in the camera function, so
switch over to the picture function just below it on the PDA’s
desktop to study the shot you just snapped at your leisure.)

It’s another random
puzzle. The numbers on the tag will always be different. But they’ll
always have nine digits and always include a “555” at
the bottom.

This should ring a bell
with you — literally. Have you noticed that all the cell phone numbers
in the game begin with “555” and have nine digits? This
a cell phone number viewed in reverse-image. Read it upside-down so
the 555 part comes first. (For example, “506199555” works
out to “555661905.”)

You’ll have to dial
this manually. A cell rings in the distance, you’ll hear the
thug’s departing footsteps and Nicole can exit the PDA and move
safely into the next room … where there is no sign of a dagger,
key or anything else! This seems to be the extent of the apartment.
What are you missing?

There’s a secret
room, and it’s not artfully hidden. You just have to open the
wardrobe to the right of the door, zoom in on the false back and step
into a dingy little parlor. Your game is then saved automatically
— a sign Nicole is at risk for her life.

Try to take the ritual
dagger from the second drawer of the dresser to the right and instantly
get discovered by the thugs. (Note that Nicole can first do some forensics
work on the dagger at this time — using luminol and then the lamp
to detect blood — or wait until later. If you do it now, you won’t
have to repeat it later.) You’ll hear a faint thump and find
Nicole tied to a chair in the room with the wardrobe.

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!

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?