Estrella's favourite subordinate will coldly narrate the irrelevant details, small things clearly not related to what happened but that Estrella did technically notice, because Stristyko commands her to do that too.

Stristyko is no longer certain that the +5 bow would have been enough to kill Robaldo. Robaldo is clearly a man with more than one contingency. Stristyko can respect that.

Open questions:
Why did the Mud Buddy have a fez?
Why did the Mud Buddy have boots on? Why did Robaldo have similar boots on?
Why did the Mud Buddy have a jar on a stick? Why was it full of Kerosine?
What's with the glasses? They were probably dark enough to give him a penalty to perception in dark environments, is it really just to stop you from knowing where he's looking?
What's with the brightly coloured robes? Okay maybe that one is just a style thing.
The metal belt and wristbands are weird, probably not what they look like either.
The cane was weird, Estrella thought it was probably a magic staff but Stristyko doubts it.
What's he got going on in all his other spell slots?
And in all of his pockets?

Please tell me Estrella looted what was left off of the dead mud-buddy. "Always Loot" is the third most important concept he's tried to explain to her right after "If in Doubt Run Away" and "Don't Leave Home Without a Mind Blank."

The magic shield and hat were grabbed by the target prior to fleeing.

He couldn't get the boots, which were partially buried under all the mud of the dead mud buddy, and the jar was left behind because it smashed open when it was dropped and hit the ground.

Estrella was in a rush, but obeys orders above all else. She grabbed the boots and one of the ceramic fragments of the jar as a sample.

It's ordinary ceramic.

The boots aren't magic, and are clearly custom. The closest things Stristyko is familiar with are a kind of mundane Fire-Resistant Boot made using brick dust, and an Alchemical Remedy that protects items from oozes, rust monsters, and corrosion, and Wading Boots which go up high and are water-tight.

He's had them custom made, Stristyko assumes, to let his Mud Buddy walk across a very shallow puddle of corrosive liquid without dying in the process, long enough to drop a small ceramic jar full of kerosine.

Why is he expecting that ability to be useful?

You have no idea what level I'm playing at.
Maybe its only job is to be a red-herring.
Maybe I switched the boots out at the last second, and it used to be wearing different ones.
Maybe I switched the jar out at the last second, and it used to have acid in it.
Maybe I really am crazy.
Maybe I just thought it'd be funny to watch.
Maybe it doesn't matter because you've already seen too much and now I'm going to change all my plans.

I'm a man who has been to Disboard, and you're a lich who has not.
What chance could you possibly have?

Stristyko is well aware that he's only seeing one timeline here, one possible response Robaldo would make against one possible threat. He's reasonably confident that these unused pieces represent parts of different defenses, against some other threat.

He's not just going to give up though, now that he knows that.

He'll have to study his adversary all over again, conditioned on the assumption that he now has some considerable evidence for, that Robaldo is a certain kind of clever person who thinks a certain kind of clever way and produces plans based on that, of a kind Stristyko who is an idiot could never easily duplicate himself and must therefore make up for with enormous quantities of time and effort.

It's looking like more wealth than he would've anticipated someone at Robaldo's middling circle and young age having on hand in general, let alone to use on personal self-defense. He's not seeing where he earnt that much.

He's also clearly left quite a few of his spell slots free for combat, who does he think he's fighting exactly? And the ideas here seem pretty original, has he been working a lot on this kind of thing? The university probably knows his official areas of research, even if everyone knows everyone secretly works on other stuff too.

Actually, now that he's got this all written out in front of him...

Stristyko is not inclined to believe an idea, the moment he thinks of it.
Stristyko is an idiot, that's an idiot's idea, it cannot be trusted.

But he's not as uninformed as you might expect for a guy who lives under a mile of solid stone and sees the sky only a handful of times per century.

Just to be sure, he'll want their copies of recent papers, the Andoran ones and the merchant ones and do we have that recent statement from the bank of Abadar and there was an article about a privateer who kept saying he wasn't allowed to say stuff but Andoran has public trials and the slavers they catch aren't as easily kept quiet and...

She'll diligently fetch document after file after diary after broadsheet, in neat piles.

Hopefully Estrella isn't too upset later over all these opportunities to serve Stristyko she's missing out on, because of her huge mess.

He hadn't thought as hard as he should have about followups to the attack failing because he'd mostly expected Robaldo to raise alarms immediately, himself.
Most people raise an alarm, if they narrowly escape immediate death by assassin.
What kind of person doesn't, even if he's done nothing wrong?

Captures of enemy galleys went up a lot about three months ago, faster than should be possible given their fleet.

The Abadarans are trying to buy up diamond dust at higher prices than they were before, they've got a new design for a magic item for making ships move more quickly. They've been warning everyone who'll listen about upticks in piracy off of the same mechanism.

Commander Reginald Cormoth really sounded, in that recent interview, like he wasn't trying to claim any personal credit or glory even by paladin standards for the recent successes that had brought wealth and freed peoples to Andoren shores. He didn't sound like he was giving it to anyone else either. Nobody in particular was winning medals at all, as far as the newspaper reported.

Estrella's had some irregular scouting missions, she'd been in Almas recently to get an idea of the city security before she even tried touching the target. Her last feeding trip wasn't Almas though, he wouldn't want to raise the vampire alarm by an ordinary mistake. She'd gone to Augastana instead, grabbed some bloodbags off the dockyards there far enough away to avoid being correlated but close enough to have useful general knowledge.

Stristyko makes sure to milk their minds for anything he can get, just on principle.
One of them had been loading a lot of barrels of kerosine onto privateer ships.
They'd mentioned that the barrels were reinforced, mostly steel in frame.
He hadn't thought much of it at the time.

It's not for burning down slaver galleys, Andoran tries its best to capture them whole. Maybe it's for warships?

If it was a big enough problem from a small enough target, Cheliax absolutely would kill and damn them for it, whoever they might choose to blame.

You have their release now?
This "magic item" is just some carefully shaped steel and two springs with "Shrink Item" permenancied.

It's still admittedly pretty overcomplicated for it's task too.

What kind of mind makes an expanding shell to hide inside of, and then adds a trapdoor to the ceiling in the hopes of convincing his enemy he didn't just Dimension Door away?

The kind of mind that's spend all its free time thinking about overly complicated mechanisms for overly complicated tasks.

Stristyko is aware how rare smart people are.
He's not one himself, but he's fought them before occassionally.
Andoran has at most a dozen of them, total.

Stristyko isn't convinced yet, he's going to check more of what's been dug up on Robaldo's early adventuring and evangelism stories. Give him a few more hours. It's okay. He's an idiot. Stuff takes him a while to figure out.

...He's not mad about it.
Well, he's upset about how dumb he feels.
He wishes that he hadn't needed to see the guy use the same spells, the same tricks, the same combustable chemical in self-defense as he'd already developed for his real job. A smart guy would've known already.

He doesn't want to do something about it that would benefit Cheliax.
House Thrune has its own two-page spread in his revenge diary.
He hasn't done a survey or anything, but he's pretty sure they're on most revenge diaries, at least in Avistan. Stuff that would help them is like, the exact opposite of revenge.

He'll think it through tomorrow.
There's business he needs to attend to today.

Estrella is ordered back into his room.
She'll prostrate herself before his throne in silence.

"I would have hoped, by now, to have managed to explain to you the concept of an information-gathering mission.

You will need some punishment for that.
You will not need punishment for the mission itself.
You followed my commands as well as I judge could have been hoped for.

Frankly, I am impressed. Well done, Estrella.

Thanks to your diligent obedience, I have learnt a substantial amount about the targets situation and intentions. When you're ready, I'll explain to you the important facts you've obtained for us. Before then-"

...This was all Stristyko's plan?
He'd been expecting this? He wanted to see how they'd react?
He's the perfect master, who will rule over her forever.

She'll never doubt his orders again.

She'll start crying more.

Stristyko is physiologically incapable of empathy.

He can still perform the actions though, he remembers what they are.

He'll pick her up off the floor and sort of pull her into a hug and try to wait her out.

He'll think about his reagant supplies and if he needs to put more black onyx on the next shopping list until she seems to be feeling better.

It takes him a few tries, but Robaldo manages to disarm the obviously mind-controlled victim, and pin them down. After only a minute or so he starts trying to kill himself but is failing, and half a minute after that his expression changes, like the connection was severed by the controller. It could be a ruse, but Domination Link exists and if you've decided to flee it's a liability. Robaldo's willing to put some trust in it.

Will the victim fight back if he unpins him, and tries to get him to sit in a chair? Also, can he hand over the knife?
Great. This will be fun to explain.

They were first alerted by howling inside the walls.
Then a monster that looked more like a blur was spotted on the streets, and they tried to chase it down.

A few split off to try to find where it came from, where the reports started. It's usually worth it to do that.

It's impossible to track. Almost completely silent, even as it runs.
The only giveaway at all is the four wolves chasing after it.
Vampire, they'll assume.

An alleyway with a large lead-lined box in it.

He's seen that kind of thing before, they're used by smugglers for high-value magic items, or by murderers to hide a corpse. He hasn't seen one this big before, admittedly. It's not supposed to be there, and it's not obvious how it got there in the first place.

Obvious hypothesis: This is part of how they brought some feral night-creature into the city walls, and either it broke out, or they just left it for when dark would fall.

The chaos leads them to a house.

The door is smashed open, the insides are generally quite messed up, and local notable mystic theurge Robaldo is with a street urchin. No monsters in sight, besides the obvious candidates.

Andoren really prefers giving Good clerics the benefit of the doubt, for this kind of thing. They need as many of them as they can get and the gods often have reasons for doing unexpected things.

Still, they're going to have to do an investigation.

Robaldo will be truthful because Zone of Truth exists.
Robaldo will use surrounding evidence because he wants to avoid suspicion.
Robaldo will not be complete because he's still hopeful that wasn't Cheliax and Cheliax doesn't know yet.

He was walking home, from this location to that location. Here are some people who can testify for when he left, that he left alone with his Mud Buddy, that he left wearing his hat. Observe that he is not currently wearing his hat.

Robaldo was surprise-attacked. He experienced an arrow fired from behind him. Observe here is the arrow in question, Robaldo picked it up off the floor before he fled.

Robaldo has no realistic choice except to reveal his clever contingency item, and explain the thing with the hat.

Observe in the alleyway he describes, there is a big lead-lined cylinder. Observe it has no bottom panel. Observe Robaldo can describe its shape from the inside.

Robaldo predicts if they go there they will find the big lead-lined cylinder, probably still pushed over by the attacker. He predicts the remains of the mud buddy, and its boots, and there'll be a shattered jar but the kerosine will dry up he hopes and he really doesn't want to explain that to anyone yet if he doesn't have to.

Your description is off by a bit. The boots were missing.