Watch your step.
Money Mile is the second district investigated in Criminal Case: The Conspiracy.
The heart of Grimsborough's economy and previously known as the Financial Center, Money Mile focuses on the police department dealing with the aftermath of a devastating earthquake that struck the city a few days ago and whose epicenter lied on the district itself, destroying a huge chunk of its infrastructure, unearthing rivers of lava all over the streets, and bringing a rising artist into the spotlight who has decided to take advantage of the wreckage brought by the disaster to amorally advance her career. At the same time, it also focuses on the search of Zoe Kusama, a social worker who went missing a few months ago and whose disappearance has particularly affected Jones the most.
Cases set in Money Mile
- Flatline: A family doctor is found in a destroyed square with his throat slashed.
- Stonewalled: A missing lawyer's dead body is found behind a venture capitalist's penthouse wall.
- Shooting Star: An actor is shot on the red carpet at the premiere of his latest movie.
- The Bloom of Doom: An art gallery owner is impaled through the abdomen with a metallic flower sculpture.
- Hot Mess: A stripper is poisoned and dies in the middle of his act at a strip club.
- The Art of Murder: An artist is slowly cooked alive with lava at her own performance.
Tropes:
- Arc Villain: A Big Bad Ensemble between Meera Kat and Christian Bateman. While neither of them are responsible for either the disaster that has struck Money Mile or Zoe's disappearance, both of them still end up being the two most troublesome people encountered during the district, as Meera has been taking advantage of the destruction, grief, and suffering brought by the earthquake to advance her career by creating art pieces out of them without caring about what the traumatized victims might think, while Bateman is revealed to be a psychopathic time bomb with a strong sense of entitlement to do whatever he pleases just because of his wealth, leading to murdering Meera himself after she refuses his advances on her.
- Big Disaster Plot: The main focus of the district is dealing with the aftermath of the earthquake that struck Grimsborough two days ago and hit Money Mile the hardest out of them all, unearthing a bunch of problems both literally and figuratively.
- A Day in the Limelight: While Jones is no stranger to being in the spotlight due to his status as the Series Mascot, this is arguably the first district where he's the main protagonist of an ongoing storyline, as the search for his missing girlfriend and eventual reunion with her serve as one of the main focuses of Money Mile.
- Innocuously Important Episode: With its seemingly Plot Irrelevant Villains and main conflict sprouting out of a natural disaster, one would be inclined to believe Money Mile is just another Standalone Episode in the same vein as Fairview, and that the real storyline actually commences in the next district with the introduction of Rozetta Pierre and DreamLife. However, Money Mile is much later revealed to contain a bunch of important plot elements, as the earthquake and Zoe's disappearance are proven to be, respectively, a man-made disaster provoked by DreamLife experimenting with the meteorite and using Zoe as a test subject for their Fantastic Drug, and Christian Bateman and Louis Leroux, two seemingly minor characters introduced in the district, are revealed to be part of Ad Astra.
- Recurring Character: The main recurring characters for Money Mile are Christian Bateman, Meera Kat, Ruby Armstrong, Megu Hashira, Louis Leroux, and, in a way, Zoe Kusama.
- Two Lines, No Waiting: The main plot of Money Mile involves both dealing with the aftermath of the earthquake and the problems brought along it as well as the search for Jones' missing girlfriend. The former is mainly explored during the main murder investigations, while the latter tends to take the spotlight during the Additional Investigations.
- Urban Ruins: As a result of Money Mile serving as the epicenter of the earthquake that has struck the city, most of the district has been destroyed and left inhabitable either due to the still-collapsing buildings or the rivers of lava that have literally started flooding the streets, leading to plenty of Scenery Gorn as most of the crime scenes set in the district involve wreckage in some form.
- I Will Find You: One of the main focuses of Money Mile involves the department looking for Zoe Kusama, a social worker and Jones's girlfriend, who was seemingly kidnapped while investigating reports of missing homeless people a few months ago, and clues regarding her whereabouts have now started to appear all over the district. In the end, Zoe is managed to be found... with some consequences.
