the mummy case

CH 1 pg 3

Amelia is our main character.  She's a British academic type.  An Egyptologist.  Married to another Egyptologist, Emerson.  They speed their winters in Egypt digging up stiff and their summers in Brittan writing an out it.   They have a son named Ramses who has been living with Emerson's brother's family as his wife is fond of children and Amelia is not.  They are going to excavate some pyramids together as a family for the first time.  There's some foreshadowing that there will be a robbery and murder they have to solve.

CH 2 pg 31

The family and a guy they hired to look after Ramses go to Egypt on a boat.  The guy they hired gets sick.  Somehow this is his fault because he didn't wear his special plaid belt.  Why not?  Cause Ramses has obtained a car and he needed his !an servants belt to make a cookie and leash for his cat.  They get to Egypt and have dinner with a fancy man and there's a guest that's a fancy French man, who's in charge of excavations a nd what not.Emerson gets all uppity when he kissed Amelas han d.  Emerson won't talk about where they're planning on digging.  Ramses behaves himself so good.  The next day Amelia and Ramses go to an antiques dealer looking to buy papyrus.  They end up getting one sheet that Ramses found looking for the cat.  The antiques guy claims that it's cursed.  They get back to Emerson who's in a rage because they won't get the primo pyramid spot they wanted.  The French guy from dinner took that spot for himself and they've got some cra ppy spot very near by with some pyramids so small and warm down by the elements they don't deserve the title.

Ch 3 pg 63

They go to dinner with some people at a fancy restaurant.  There's lots of people they recognize there that are going to be digging in ruins this season.  So many of them have much better spots than them.  They are mocked for their crappy spot.  There's a very good looking guy I'm sure will be important later.  After dinner Amelia says they have to go visit the antique dealer again.  They go there and they find him dead.

Ch 4 of 90

They sleep.in.  They are awoken by th cops with her kid.  The kid was at the dead man's shop.  Amelia goes to the dead man's shop and finds the son of the dead man taking all his stuff.  Amelia demands he put it back as it's part of an active murder investigation.  They are preparing to leave the city to the dog site.  They wakes up tangled in mosquito net.  They have been burgled.  They find a boot print as the only evidence.

Ch 5 pg 118

They take the train down to.the stop nearest.their dig site.  They are met by their foreman and take donkeys to the site.  They find an empty building to set up shop in.  Everyone says this is bad because the place is possessed by demons.  The go to the nearest village to inquire availability of workers.  They meet a Muslim priest that's not inviting.  They meet a Christian missionary that's overly inviting.  Emerson and Amelia are stonch athiests and Emerson says Amelia was far too.polite to the missionary and he will make it as an invitation.  He totally did as je shows up at their camp the next day.  They go visit the French guy in charge's site with real pyramids.  Ramsey's ends up falling down a sand hole and almost gets buried alive.  But Emerson yanks him out.  Then there's this odd thing where French guy shows up with Ramses at their camp cause early in the morning, Ramses had tried to walk to the French guys camp.

CH 6 164

They go to church.  They go.to a dinner party on a German duchesses yacht.  Ramses tries to release her.lion cub into the wild.  The next day they're working their dig and they're just super board with it.  So when they get a message from the German duchess they're k kind of eager to visit her.  But in the most boring of ways where they act like they don't wanna go and each go "I'll take one for.The team and go while you stay to work the dig.". She has been robbed .  A sarcophagus and a couple valuable antique statues wera stolen.  Then as they're leaving they realize that the lion cub is also missing.  Their first thought after that is maybe their son Ramses did this.  Emerson says of course not, but I know who did.

Ch 7 pg 202

Ramses totally stole the lion.  They don't tell the baroness or anything.  They just let him keep it.  There's a fire at the mission and john grabs the preachers sister and brings her all the way to camp.  The preacher shows up and drama ensues.  The baroness's sarcophagus is found in the dessert and brought to camp.  One night the come to find a giant hole in the exterior wall of the room holding the sarcophaguses and the baronesses is missing.  They decide it's time to gibe up in the grave yard they're excavated and work in the pyramids

CH 8 of 251

They somehow decide the sarcophagus that was taken wasn't the one from the German duchess.  Someone breaks into Ramses room.  Ramses was wrapped up in a sheet and the lion was out of it's cage.  The robber got away.  Emerson said its gonna take a few days for gum to survey the pyramids at their site before they're ready to dig for real.  Amelia decides she is going back to Cairo for stuff.  Ramses wants a coptic dictionary.  On her Cairo trip Amelia realizes that the worker named Hamid she suspected as being related to the antique dealers murder was his son.  The least respectable son that is a druggie.  She comes back from Cairo to be told that her suspect is dead.  Obviously murder but the missionary who Hamid was staying with says it was suicide so as to close the book on the matter.  They bury Hamid in the dessert and the missionary makes a point of saying a bunch of offensive things about Muslims.  Somehow they are talking to the head French in charge who says it's OK for them to explore one of his pyramids cause it turns out Ramses has already been doing it.  They talk a lot about who could be the mastermind of the criminal enterprise.  They surmise the German duchess was smuggling out smaller antiques in her otherwise worthless sarcophagus.  There was also a thing where they can see a fire burning from their camp and decide it was a sarcophagus.

CH 9 301

They see the growing problematic relationship between the missionaries and the Muslims.  They try to talk to the Muslim priest to see if he'll exert his influence to get people to stop throwing rocks at the missionary lady that John  (Ramses baby sitter) is so smitten with.  Je says he's got nothing to do with it.  Emerson tries to convince the missionaries they should leave starting with the lady.  Ramses says he's translated the coptoc text and it's something important about Jesus and Amelia is dismissive.  They get a letter from the missionary lady saying to mEET her at midnight.  They go and she runs away and they get jumped.

CH 10 335

Their abductors take them to the big pyramid.  They're thrown in.  Its all wet, there three feet of water and mud that broke their fall and saved their lives.  They have matches and a candle.  The figure out they're down here with tjw royal sarcophagus.  They hear voices and hide.  They hear a other splash.  It's Ramses, the family is back together again.  I.hope the lion cub is OK.

Ch 11 352

Ramses has a rope.  They form a human pyramid to get Ramses out and he ties the rope to something above to get them all.out.  

They walk back to their camp and people are in their building searching through the rooms.  They try to attack them and it goes badly.  The hbic is Father Girgis of the church of Sitt Miriam.  He says not to kill them.  He's an imposter and has the real Father imprisoned.  He says he didn't kill Hamid or his father.  He.leaves and Ramses sneaks in the window and they subdue the henchmen.  They think either brother David or brother Ezekiel is the real killer.

CH 12 383

They go to the village to find john.  He's with the missionaries and he's taken captive by brother Ezekiel.  Turns out he went crazy.  Some of the papyrus that was the building materials for the sarcophagus that the German success bought from the murdered antiques dealer in Cairo was the same that Ramses has been translating and Ezekiel read.  It said that Jesus had a son and so he had to murder the antique dealer and his son Hamid and burn both sarcophagus to destroy the evidence.

I'll be gone in the dark part 3

Michelle has left us. In her place is Investigative journalist Billy Jensen and Paul Haynes (AKA THE KID!!!!)

They talk about how Michelle was a good writer. The first true crime thing she ever wrote was a post about EAR-ONS back in 2011.  They talk about how Michelle was constantly interviewing people connected to EAR-ONS crimes.  In this case it's a fellow named Andrew Marquette.  He had this fun deal where he heard the EAR-ONS in his back yard and he had a gun and didn't catch him or call the cops or anything.  When Michelle interviewed him about it years later, the first word that came to mind about the EAR-ONS is "schoolboy" They talk about a list that Michelle has called EAR clues.  

Finding the killer with geo-profiling

They're doing this thing where they take the white pages from Sacramento in the late seventies and compare them to white pages from the eighties in Santa Barbara and the east bay where we know the EAR-ONS was active.  They're using computers to compare all this and narrow down suspects.  THE KID is going through the list and elliminating the many false possitives.  We end up with a HUGE list that THE KID is investigating.  

geo-profiling is real sciencey.  You've got hard data you use to try and pinpoint your suspects.  As opposed to personality profiling and psychological profiling of suspects which this book ascertains is more arty than geo-prfiling.  

That said, they're now talking about Paul trying to geo-profile like it's jazz and improvise. He's taking google maps and putting them in photoshop and just drawing lines.  Fun pictures.

Finding the killer with Familial DNA

Paul Holes is in this one.  Not only is he a good hang, but he's digging up DNA to try and find a Brother, father, uncle, etc. with a matching bit of DNA.  The theory that EAR might have been been well off and his family similarly respectible seems to hold as they don't have any matchesin the criminal databases.  Now Paul is trying to dig into some geneology databases to see if he can find a match.

Paul is obsessed with EAR.  He goes on weekly crime scene rides.  Every few weeeks he submits EAR's dna to a geneological DNA database to see if he can find any matches.  Paul thought he had a match.  Turns out it was some other do gooder that had also uploaded EAR's dna so it was EAR matching with EAR.  On Anscestry.com they kinda found a match.  But that match was very distant.  11 generations distant.  They'd have had to go back 330 years to that common ancestor and then find all of that person's descendents.  That would make for a pretty big suspect pool.  And there would need to be A LOT of luck for even that to work.  

They they get into talking about male last names.  That if you find the common ancestor you might get their last name and from that get useful information.  Like now they seem to think the EAR has a german last name but is of UK decent.  The problem with all this ancestory.com and 23 and me investigation stuff is that it's kinda gotta be done hush hush unofficial like cause both of those companies are very serious about their client's privacy.  

Michelle had TONS of files on the EAR cases.  But it was all just sitting there on paper.  Big game changer was scanning all these documents so they can be digitally cross referenced.

When Michelle wrote that La times article she got a lot of responses and blogged a lot about those responses.  It's all a big jigsaw puzzle.  But it's unbounded.  Imagine trying to do a puzzle without any edge pieces to contain it.  

After her passing Paul, THE KID and Billy Jensen have been working on Michelle's to do lists.  

The main point ofthe book is to put the ideas out there and see if more people can get involved maybe we can find the EAR.

Murder on the orient experss part 2 ch 9 through part 3 ch 9 (The End)

part 2 ch 9 mr hard man

turns out mr hard man is a detective. He was hired by mr. rachet to protect him. fail. he doesn't smoke a pipe and doesn't know anyone that wears a red dressing gown.

part 2 ch 10 the italian

He's a sales guy, very chatty. Seems like a good bloke. Mr what's his face who thought he was the murderer sure called that wrong. he only smokes cigarettes.

part 2 ch 11 ms debenham

This is the lady from the first train that's a governes in baghdad. She's not overly concerned about there having been a murder on the train. She wears a mauve dressing gown. Also at one point her room mate left their room. Poirot thinks it was too early to have been when Rachet was murdered.

part 2 ch 12 The german lady's maid

she wears a dark blue flannel dressing gown. She did see the conductor coming out of one of the middlest compartments. So that's neat. Word has gotten out that rachet was responsible for Daisy Armstrong's murder. Also neat. Neatest thing, they bring in the conductors so she can say which one it was and she says it wasn't any of them.  So we've got some other dude dressed as a conductor.  That's probably the murderer.

part 2 ch 13 summary of evidence

We're not really sure on the time of the murder.  We're not sure if the murderer is male or female.  We think maybe the "man" mr rachet identified as a potential murderer wsa really a woman.  We know there's someone that was dressed as a conductor that wasn't one of the three conductors.  We know there's a lady that was wearing a red kimono.  WE think there might have been one or two murderers.  One thing Poirot is pretty sure of is that you'll find a conductor's uniform in Ms. Hildegard's compartment.  

part 2 ch 14 the weapon

Mrs Hubbard finds the weapon in her sponge bag.  It's all bloody and she faints at the sight of it.  When she wakes up she takes a sip of cognac and mentions that her whole family doesn't drink.  She demands to be moved to another room.  Of course they'll move her to another room.  Poirot say she needs to search her luggage.  They're going to be searching everyone's luggage.  One tidbit I found fun was that she didn't take a train to get to the city where she got on this train.  She arrived via boat.  

part 2 ch15 the luggage

first they search the hard man's luggage.  Nothing interesting there.  Then they search the colonel's room and they find he uses the same kind of pipe cleaners that were found on the floor of the victim's room.  Next is princess dragiormav's, they have to have her german maid fetch the keys to her luggage.  The count and countess have diplomatic passports so they're exempt, but Poirot thinks they'll be reasonable and let them search anyway.  He is right, nothing remarkable there.  Mrs. Hubbard, the dead man and Poirot are searched to no special remarks.  They search debenbam and ohlson's room.  Poirot has ohlson go comfort mrs. hubbard so he can interogate debenbam more.  He specifically points out that on the previous train she was FREAKING OUT at the delay, but on this train she's pretty chill about it.  His idea being that she really wanted to get on THIS train, maybe to do the murder.  He also tells her about the pipe cleaner they found on the floor of the victim and how the colonel is the only person on the train that smokes a pipe.  Next is hildegarde schmidt, they find a brown wagon lit uniform and assure hildegarde that they are certain it's no hers, that the murderer hid it here.  Also, there's a conductor's key with the uniform, so all this back and forth about whether certain doors were locked or not turn out to not have mattered as the murderer can enter any door they want.  They search MacQueen and the Italian and find ntohing useful.  The red kimono is stull unfound.

part 3 ch 1 which of them?

they have a thought atht the hands on the watch were set to 1:15 on purpose to throw off the investigation.  So the thing thye're going to try to do is figure out who has an alabi for exactly 1:15 for some reason.  Also that at 12:30, the conductor came to the victim's room and the response was in french, so we're thinking it couldn't have been rachet cause he just speaks American, maybe that was the murderer so we're looking for someone that speaks French.  They go through all the passengers one by one to check their motive, alibiy, the eveidence agianst them and suspicious circumstances.  

part 3 ch 2 ten questions

Poirot has written down 10 questions stating if we can answer these ten questions we might solve the murder.  Some of them they have ansers to.  Otheres, not so muhc.  The basic fram of it right now is that the pipe cleaner was placed on purpose to cast suspicious on the cononel, that the second murderer set the time on the watch backt o 1:14.  Also, the second murderer might not have known rachet was already dead.  stabbing at him in the darkensks.  Also, everyone signed with thier right hand.  So it's rough figuring out who must have done that left handed stab.  Princess dragomiroff refused to sign, but they're thinking she would nto be strong enough to stab a man to death.

part 3 ch 3 certain suggestive points

Lots of jibber jabber going on in this chapter.  Talking in circles due to the lack of real evidence.  The hankercheif witthe H on it.  Maybe the rusian princesses real name is not Elana, it's Helena as there's a greece stan where the H wouls have been othe passport.  Somebody steals that hankerchief, leaves it in rachet's room as fake evidence not realizing that the name everyone used for her and she told people wasn't an H name.  But who would that have been?  Maybe the countess.  But we don't think the russian princess is strong enough to have done the murder.  So I guess we're gonna explore this next chapter?  I'm getting allt eh characters confused.  

part 3 ch 4 a grease spot on a hungarian passport

The countess is really named Helen.  The count confesses to the whole passport grease spot renaming thing.  Poirot shows them the H hankerchief and Helen swears it's not hers.  Poirot tells Hellen that he thinks she's really Daisy Armstrong's sister and that he also thinks there's someone else that was around during the bad ole days that's here on this train.  Hellen says she had a caretaker/teacher that was a bit of a dragon, which immediately makes me think of the russian princess Dragomiroff.

part 3 ch 5 the christian name of princess dragomiroff

Princess dragomiroff comes in and asks for her hankerchief back.  Her name is Natalia.  In Russian, the N is an H, hence the H on her hankercheif.  Lots of talking about how She and her maid and the count and countess have been lying and all along knew that this was Princess dragomiroff's handkerchief.  But they all swear to have had nothing to do with the murder.  Hard to accept that someone is telling the truth when you know they've been lying to you already.  So Poirot has the idea that he's gonna start confronting other passengers about the lies he knows they've told him.  Gonna start with the colonel.

part 3 ch 6 the colonel, again

Poirot tells the colonel of the pipe cleaner found at the dead man's room.  The colonel says he never spoke to the man, certainly wasn't in his room.  [eric thought] He was hanging out with Rachet's assistant, maybe he took the pipe cleaner and placed it in Rachet's room. [/eric thought]  Poirot asks about the whole "I cant't talk about it until this whole sorted affair is over" conversation between Ms. Debenham and the Colonel that he overheard.  Just like Ms. Debenham, the colonel won't talk about it.  Poirot tells the Colonel that Ms. Debenham was the Armstrong's governess when Daisy was kidnapped.  The colonel doesn't believe it.  Poirot tells someoen to fetch Ms. Debenham.

part 3 ch 7 the identity of Mary Debenham

Turns out she was the Armstrong's governess when daisy was murdered.  The colonel is all up in arms about Poirot harassing Mary.  fun thing, her name when she was working for the Armstrong's was freebody.  She got the name Debenham from an English store named debenham and freebody.  

Part 3 Ch 8 further surprising revelations.

The Italian guy was the Armstrong's chauffeur.  The cops harassed him a bit about the Daisy kidnapping.  Italians control organized crime, so if there's an italian, they probably did a crime.  The Swedish lady was daisy's nurse.  This is ridiculous, the whole train used to work for or was friends with the Armstrong's it seems.  The valet Masterman was Mr. Armstrong's Batman (I'm Batman) in the war and valet after.  Mr Harman comes to exclaim about how everyone on the train seems to be connected to the Armstrongs.  Poirot says he knows who did it.  Time to assemble everyone to tell them who dun it.d

Part 3 Ch 9 Poirot propounded two solutions

Poirot suggests a scenario where the killer jumped on the train at the last stop, had a conductors outfit and key, killed Rachet, dumps the knife and the uniform and jumps off the train.  We have no idea who this person is.

Poirot then outlines what actually happened.  EVERYONE did it.  All these people connected to the Armstrong's on the same train isn't just unlikely, it's impossible.  This whole situation was elaborately staged.  All the supposed evidence was staged to make it confusing and unproveable.  Rachet was drugged and All twelve people stabbed him once.  We don't know when or where each person stabbed Rachet so you can't say who killed him.

So we're just going to tell the authorities the first scenari o.