My players are going to be on a cruise ship for a couple months of in-game time (needed to get to another continent and spared no expense) so I was trying to think of something to happen during that time. So I had an idea for there being a leukodaemon aboard the ship, infecting people with its disease and then telepathically coercing them into killing the other passengers, as well as spreading its disease as much as possible in the process. One important thing to note: In my setting, demons and daemons come from a gas giant planet, and as such are able to cast gaseous form at will.
So, since this isn't going to be a super combat heavy adventure, I was primarily looking for ways to give the quest more mechanical weight. Is the Victory Points subsystem appropriate for a murder mystery, and how would I be able to use it in a satisfying way? Or is there something else I should use?
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There is a technique some people use for plotting investigation/mystery games that may work for you.
Basically, design your investigation (at least the parts you think if before your players take it off the rsils) like a dungeon floorplan. Drawing it out on a piece of scratch paper you get "rooms" that are different places to investigate and "hallways" that are clues. So if you draw a room for cabin of the first victim, you might have two or three halls leading off for a letter in their personal effects, for investigation revealing the murder weapon, for something said by whoever discovered the body and for an object dropped by the killer (or whatever else).
The visual layout makes it easy to tell if paths to the final room with the daemon are too reliant on a single clue or if you have dead end "rooms" with no interesting contents of their own that might feel like a dead end. (In a dungeon those dead end rooms might gave some clue or hidden treasure, and they can here, too, even if it's just evidence that helps to clear a wrong suspect).
You can also do this as a flowchart, rather than a dungeon layout, of course, if it works better for you.
With your specific plot, you could certainly also have new entry points that open up with each new victim, and possibly make the later routes if investigation closer to the end, so that if your players are stumped and going in circles it gives them a way to get moving again.
I know it's a little off from the Victory Points question, but I think that effectively counting moves along that map to countdown to the next murder could serve as an effective mechanical background. If anything, a reverse victory point system might be in order, where the daemon gains points as time goes by and its influence spreads.