Let's say you wake up one morning in a closed hallway in an uninhabited building with a line of doors on one side and find a set of instructions telling you a murder has taken place in one of the adjacent ones. Apparently the murder took place three days earlier, but the killer came back this morning and tried to tidy up the place. It's your job to determine which room in which the murder occurred."Ah ha!" You think, because you are in that sort of mood "This is a puzzle, and I can see from the diagram that although the rooms look almost identical, one of the goldfish is lighter than the others! We all know that goldfish turn white if they are left without light, so the killer must have closed the curtains in that one room to hide his crime, and then came back this morning to disguise the scene, so he opened them again. The goldfish, left without sunlight for all that time, must have begun losing its color."
Oh you think you're so clever. Well you're not, not only are you wrong about the goldfish, but you aren't in a mind teaser at all, you're just a field investigator with short term memory loss due to smacking your head on a low ceiling, so HA! If I don't get an interesting life, than you don't either. Now get to work, you have luminol in that case there, now it's just a matter of using it appropriately.
Oh wait, short term memory loss. I guess I have to walk you through this too, don't I? Alright genius, what DO you remember? CSI? Ok, well you know that shiny blue stuff that tells the attractive people where someone got hacked to death? Well you have some of that in your box. Take it out.
Now, what you need to know first is how this stuff works. Otherwise you might do something completely stupid. In order to produce a useful (and pretty) glow, luminol requires an oxidizing agent. In the case of forensic use (that's you) this role is played by the iron in the hemoglobin in blood. Got that? When luminol encounters an oxidant, it glows, and while we may be looking for blood, other chemicals will set it off as well. As such, false positives may come from sources such as bleach, copper, certain cleaning products, and even clover and dandelions (now there's an idea, kill someone in a field of clover, you'll never get caught!). When the chemicals react, the excess energy is shed as light.
This stuff is pretty expensive, so you can't just go spraying it around. First thing you have to do is determine what you have in your kit. Now, unless you are entirely incompetent, you and your team should have already swept the rooms for evidence, as the chemical reaction needed to create that shiny glow you're looking for CAN destroy other evidence. So be careful.
Ok, have you double-checked the scene? Nothing out of the ordinary? All right, after you spray the area you have 30 seconds to observe and take photos, ok? Ready? Close the blinds, Spray spray spray, and three... two... one...
Click
AAH!!! NINJAS! Ohlook,itwasthethirdroomanyway. RUN!!!
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