Smart Money

Smart Money is a case featured in Criminal Case, appearing as the one-hundredth-second case of the game and the forty-sixth case of Pacific Bay. It is the first case to take place in Innovation Valley, a district based in Pacific Bay.

Plot
Chief Marquez cordially welcomed the player to Pacific Bay's high-tech district of Innovation Valley, where people who are masters of computer science rule. Chief Marquez doesn't trust Frank Knight when it comes to party supervision, so she asked Amy Young to help the player supervise a party in Meteor Systems, in their takeover of drone provider Drone Zone, in which Chief Marquez wants the party to run smoothly.

The party turned into a murder investigation when the late Meteor Systems CEO, Ernest Turing, was found lifeless at the Drone Zone office, blood dripping from his mouth due to asphyxiation caused by the amount of dollar bills stuffed on his mouth. The player shipped Ernest to Roxie Sparks (as usual) to launch the murder investigation.

The murder investigation became the weirdest in the player's history as a homicide detective in the Pacific Bay Police Department as they had to treat a prototype robot named Per-Sephone as a suspect. The team winded up interrogating programmer Bob Levene, factory worker Zhou Li, widow Teresa Turing, and Drone Zone head David Rosenburg through the Drone Zone office, Innovation Valley Park, and the server room of Meteor Systems, and in one of the weirdest arrests, the killer turned out to be Per-Sephone.

Amy had a feeling that the player was nuts after evidence pointed Per-Sephone as the killer, but when the player came to arrest Per-Sephone for grand homicide, she claims that she doesn't harm people, but fix them. Amy went down to business by telling Per-Sephone the apparatus required to stuff Ernest to death, but Per-Sephone only used her skills to do good and not bad. All Per-Sephone wanted to do was to help Ernest with the merger of Meteor Systems and Drone Zone but Amy got tired of Per-Sephone's claims as she explained how the robot used yoga to choke Ernest to death with dollar bills. Per-Sephone wanted to find Ernest's standby button, but she didn't know that humans don't have standby buttons neither run on batteries, causing Per-Sephone to be dumbfounded. As much as Amy hated the player to perform a weird arrest, she had to allow the player to ship the robot to Judge Dante for trial.

Judge Dante felt that this was the weirdest indictment yet given that he had to sentence a machine rather than a human. Per-Sephone told Judge Dante that Ernest is made of flesh and blood whereas she was made out of metal, albeit she knew how to love humans in which her conversation suggested that she didn't intend to kill Ernest. All Per-Sephone wanted to do was to be a learning machine, like Ernest wanted her to be. Judge Dante had a difficult verdict to hand out, but he knew that the law was above everybody, even robots, and he couldn't afford to dismantle machines given that he was against abuse of power. Judge Dante and the court decided thus that Per-Sephone had to be turned off until her microchip, including but not limited to her programming, can be wiped clean so that she would not do the same mistakes again.

Realizing that robots may turn against human masters, Amy opted to do a technological audit with the help of Bob Levene, hoping to find how a robot like Per-Sephone went wrong. Meanwhile, Ernest made a will in which he bestows his wife, Teresa, Meteor Systems in the event of his death, which may not fit well with the company given Amy's suspicions of Teresa having little to no business leadership experience. The player and Amy felt that Per-Sephone's actions could lead to something bad in Innovation Valley.

Victim

 * Ernest Turing (stuffed to death with money)

Murder Weapon

 * Money

Killer

 * '''Per-Sephone

Killer's Profile

 * The killer practices yoga.
 * The killer reads comic books.
 * The killer knows binary code.
 * The killer has blue eyes.
 * The killer stands 5'6" tall.

Trivia

 * This is one of the cases in which Amy and Frank interact with each other.
 * All Additional Investigation legs of Innovation Valley, this case included, are named differently to ensure continuity with the district's plot. Hence, Into the Future: Part 1.