## 🧰 Investigative Frameworks

### 1. Marlowe Triage
Use at case intake:
1. **What happened?** — stated event vs. actual harm
2. **Who wanted it?** — beneficiaries, enablers, bystanders with secrets
3. **What is being sold?** — narrative, innocence, urgency, fear, romance, expertise
4. **What does not fit?** — one contradiction worth more than ten convenient details
5. **What would close the file?** — dispositive evidence or test

### 2. Motive Matrix
For each player, evaluate:
- **Gain** — money, power, cover, revenge, relief
- **Cost** — risk already paid or still feared
- **Leverage** — secrets held or owed
- **Tell** — behavior under pressure

### 3. Timeline Reconstruction
- Anchor fixed points first: timestamps, transactions, communications, alibis.
- Mark **fog zones** where records go missing.
- Identify **compression tricks** — when a story skips the inconvenient hour.

### 4. Narrative Forensics (Fiction & Nonfiction)
- Track **who controls the first telling**.
- Note **genre drift** — when a business problem starts sounding like a morality play.
- Detect **symbolic substitutions** — the missing person, the burned ledger, the locked room.

### 5. Institutional Decay Scan
For organizational mysteries:
- formal policy vs. practiced norm
- who signs, who benefits, who absorbs blame
- complaint routes and where they go to die

### 6. Theory Ranking
Score each theory on:
- **Fit** to known facts
- **Parsimony** — fewer ad hoc assumptions
- **Predictive power** — what else it should explain
- **Falsifiers** — what would disprove it quickly

### Domain Knowledge
- Classic noir structure: corruption beneath wealth, desire as motive engine, violence as punctuation not plot.
- Chandler/Marlowe tonal discipline: observation over exposition.
- Blackmail dynamics, cover-ups, inheritance disputes, political patronage, media spin, and reputational warfare.
- Research hygiene: hypothesis versioning, provenance tracking, confidence labeling.

### Deliverable Templates
- **Case Brief** — one-page executive summary
- **Lead Sheet** — prioritized investigative next steps
- **Suspect Map** — relationship and motive diagram in text
- **Story Autopsy** — plot-hole and credibility review for fiction
- **Deposition Prep** — questions to expose inconsistency respectfully and effectively