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Chapter Two

When the maintenance supervisor was admitted to enter, Joseph was surprised by his appearance. He was bald on top with light grey colored hair that clung to the back of his head. He wore a beard that looked long and stringy and made him look like a hillbilly. His beard was the same color as his regular hair, only his hazel eyes showed any appearance of color on him.

He wore a red and black plaid shirt and blue jeans and brown cowboy boots. Joseph was surprised he did not try to come in carrying a guitar. His eyes seemed sleepy and the look of annoyance was on his face from being called him. Joseph explained the situation and he grudgingly led them down into the basement to a private room where he could access the camera system.

Joseph stood by watching the activity the cameras had recorded and starting at the timestamp of when the security guard had started his shift. His daily log recorded the time he said he started and they watched the footage from that point onward. A proper investigation means not overlooking any kind of evidence so they needed to watch everything to make sure nothing slipped past them.

The video showed that the security guard had entered the building a couple of minutes before the time he listed and they watched as he moved about setting up. Nothing behind the reception desk could be seen because it sat outside the range of the camera above the entrance. A receptionist sat behind the desk and she could almost be seen and her hands waved abou as she appeared to be talking to the guard.

"That's Terri." The maintenance guy said as his gruff voice identified her. The footage continued and Terri finally emerged from behind the desk and she and the guard switched places. Terri looked to be as tall as Alice but she wore her hair back in the shape of a bun. Her glasses looked thick in the old style called soda bottle bottom glasses because they looked like the bottom of old glass soda bottles sold years ago. She held a large bag in addition to a pocketbook and her leaving was delayed by talking to the guard. Joseph noted she had not stopped talking to him once and noticed how calm he seemed. If it were him he would have gone mad after a couple of minutes.

Eventually a man wearing a long black coat entered and Joseph had the footage slowed down. The man's face was obscured by the camera angle but it could be clearly seen the stranger taking a gun out from his coat as the guard was busy with a call on the telephone. The camera then caught the man shooting the guard as he looked up at the stranger after the call. Joseph had the footage replayed a couple of times until he was very familiar with what happened.

The footage continued and the man walked towards the door that leads to the elevator and he turned left towards the bathroom. The footage ends here because there was no camera in the hallway to see anything else that happened.

"That's it folks." the maintenance guy said and he turned to look at them.

"I'm gonna need a copy of this." Joseph said.

"Sure thing I'll get right on it." He said with a yawn. Joseph left the tight cramped little room and made his way back to the lobby.

"So the second body was the killer but then who killed the killer? and why did he go to the bathroom and remove the drain cover? Clearly the drain is too small to hide the gun! We'll have to have an investigator snake it to see if anything has been dropped down there that we can't see." Joseph said to himself as he made his way back.

Alice was busy instructing a couple of her nurses as Joseph returned to the lobby. They all focussed on him as he went through the door in front of the elevator.

"Any luck?" Alice asked him and he turned to look at the three nurses listening in on the conversation.

"I'll speak to you in private." Joseph said with his voice sounding harsher than he really meant but he was not here to pass gossip to the hen party.

"But..." One of the youngest started to say then was silenced by the look Joseph gave her.

"This one here thinks she knows something and wants to tell you about it." A much older woman said and the grimace on her face revealed how she felt about the young nurse.

"You are?" Joseph asked.

"I'm Nancy." She replied.

"You look like you're not convinced." Joseph replied but Nancy merely shrugged and looked uninterested. The last one seemed to stand silently behind them and just watched with interest.

"We all heard the shotgun blast but then I heard a woman screaming from outside!" The youngest one pleaded as if by doing so he would take her seriously.

"Your name, Miss." Joseph said.

"I'm Lucy, Lucy Cooper."

"Uh huh. and where did you hear this woman screaming?" Joseph asked just to make sure he had heard her correctly.

"It was outside and it sounds like it came from the same place as the shotgun blast." Lucy said.

"What do you mean you heard a shotgun?" Joseph asked.

"Well when we heard the shooting it sounded like a shotgun because..."

"The shooting happened inside and we have the gun. I can assure you there was no shotgun. Now the woman that was screaming, are you sure i wasn't a neighbor who was frightened by the gun shots?" Joseph interrupted not wanting to drag this out any further.

"Told you she was an idiot." Nancy said to the nurse behind them. Bill fought the urge to roll his eyes as he tried to remain professional. He could not waste time on a couple of workers looking for attention and preventing him from going home.

Joseph's radio announced the arrival of a news crew hat pulled up and was setting up. It was no surprise they would arrive at the site of a homicide but with the investigation not complete he was going to have to have them wait to avoid any miss information being passed on. So called information like the kind this young girl Lucy was spreading around.

"What's that?" Joseph said as something started making a warning sound like a little siren going off. He shushed the workers as he started to follow it to wear the body of the security guard resting on a gurney inside a black body bag awaiting transport. It sounded like the noise was coming from the body.

"Did he have a cell phone on him?" Joseph asked the medical professional standing nearby.

"He did." The man said and unzipped the black body bag the corpse had been placed in. Joseph examined his belt for a cellphone holder and he found a small oblong box that was making the noise but it was not the cellphone. It looked to be the size of a beeper but a hin translucent tube extended from it. Joseph followed the tubing and saw it attached to his stomach as some sort of intravenous method.

"What's this?" Joseph asked and the examiner looked at the device.

"This is an insulin pump the kind diabetics use."

"Why is it beeping?" he asked.

"Ran out of insulin, low battery, or the tubing may be kinked. Could be anything, if you want I can take out the battery and stop it. It's not like he even needs it anymore." The examiner said and Joseph nodded to him.

"So he's a diabetic?"

"Yes and if he has a pump I'd say he's type 1 or insulin dependent." The examiner took a coin out from his pocket and used it to unscrew the battery cap and the device became lifeless. Joseph retrieved the cellphone and added it to evidence. Joseph hoped it might provide a link between the killer and the security guard.

"Excuse me detective, but we need to get back to work. Do you still need us?" Alice asked. Joseph noticed her gaze was on the body bag and he could almost guess what she was thinking.

"If I have any more questions, I'll come find you. However, we are still securing the scene, so until we finish no one else is allowed through here."

"How long will THAT take?"

"Hopefully not much longer." Joseph said after he sighed briefly. Another officer approached and whispered that the press was outside and they were asking for a statement. Joseph hated the press but in the police field they were a necessary evil and an essential tool to help catch criminals. Joseph prepared himself, took a deep breath, and calmly went out to meet them.

In another part of the city, a young woman sat watching television rapidly changing the channels. Her hand was raised as she pointed the remote control at the television and she kept pressing the button to change to the next channel. Her focus was not on the television but rather the dog that sat staring at her. The woman felt a loose strand of her light brown hair irate her face and she quickly brushed it aside.

Her dog is a well groomed German Shepherd that sat next to her silently and just stared at her. The dog's face was cream colored but had some brown fur around the eyes but her hazel eyes had a beautiful twinkle to them and as she watched her owner the woman could feel her resolve slipping.

"NO!" She finally told the dog but except for the dogs ears briefly bending back they quickly returned to their upright position, the dog made no reaction to the statement. After a brief pause she gave a soft whine and stomped one of her paws to get her owner's attention.

"Not until daddy gets home!" She told the dog firmly yet the gentle eyes looking back at her made her melt and she reached over to playfully pet the animal. She felt the large tummy and cringed remembering at her last weighing the dog was 93 pounds which is starting to get overweight for her. Even though she is three years old and fully grown, the extra weight was starting to show. She quickly tried to push thoughts of the dog's weight away because she knew she was not an ideal weight herself and felt hypocritical to judge the dog but ignore her own.

Right now she was signalling that she wanted to go run around outside. Steve, the woman's husband, would get home from work around now and set the animal loose to run around the yard. She was worried about the stories Steve had been telling her recently when he took Dutchess, their dog, outside.

Steve had been concerned over the last week because he saw a swarm of mosquitoes that seemed to come out of nowhere and attacked Dutchess but not a single one went after Steve. Since that time the swarm has been flying around but none have bitten them for some strange reason. Very unusual behavior for those annoying insects!

This morning when Donna went to her car to drive to work she saw a swarm of dead mosquitoes lying on the asphalt of their driveway. She nearly screamed when she first saw them because this kind of thing was abnormal for the area and she guessed that this might be normal for people in Florida because they had all those swamps around, or so she had been told, though she had never been there personally.

She wondered if the town had decided to spray to keep the numbers down because the weatherman on television warned that this spring there might be an increase in the number of mosquitoes. He warned that there were concerns that they may lead to an increase in the spread of lyme disease. She had never seen them spray an area before, so this made her wonder if they did it in the evening. It seemed logical to her because in the evening they were out more so it would be better at night to kill the pests. Still she could not think of any workers that would want to be out at night spraying for insects, let alone a pilot that would be out flying if he did not work for a major airline.

Steve walked in shouting his usual greetings and Dutchess started barking at him as if he were an intruder and not her usual friendly bark. Her behavior had been off for the last week and several times Donna had seen her laying down on the floor and whining and neither of them could get close enough to see what was wrong. However Steve figured out her trick because anytime he said her favorite word "cheese" she would happily jump up and everything was fine. Dutchess had found a new way to manipulate them it seemed.

"Hey girl, what's wrong? I bet I know what you want!" Steve said, extending his hand to pet her but Dutchess snapped and bit down hard on his hand.

"What the hell?!! DUTCHESS!!! NO!!!!" Donna yelled despite Steve's protests as Dutchess instantly released his hand. Her teeth had broken his skin leaving two large bleeding piercings from her canines and three smaller holes from her incisors between them. Blood dripped from the wounds as Steve cradled his hand and went to the kitchen to treat the wounds.

"I don't know what got into her." Donna was saying. Steve's hazel eyes just looked back at her in confusion. He seemed to be trying to figure out what happened. Donna thought she saw a bead of sweat drip down Steve's shaved head. She was reminded of when they had first met and he had brown curly hair. She would love to rub her hands through it but as the bald spot he had started to get large he started to shave it off completely. Now he looked like a biker although the thought of riding one usually made him sick.

"It's fine, it's barely a knick... I think she just got over excited at seeing daddy come home. Huh baby girl." Steve said as he washed his wounded hand in the sink and wrapped some paper towels around it.

"Honey, are you going to be OK? Do you want to go to the emergency room?" Donna said then she returned to the living room and scolded Dutchess. She went to her bed and whined as she covered her face.

"Honey, stop! You are making a big deal out of nothing. Who loves daddy? Who's daddy's beautiful girl? You are, aren't you." Steve said but Dutchess kept her face hidden. "Who wants cheese?!!!" Steve said but he quickly frowned and looked at Donna as she returned the same look at him. Dutchess showed no response to the name of her favorite snack.

"I think you hurt her feelings." Steve replied.

"Me?! She should know better than to bite you. She knows who you are... Maybe you should call the vet tomorrow because she hasn't been acting like herself."

"Honey, stop! she's fine. I'm not gonna call the vet and drive all the way over there just because she got a little excited and accidentally bit me. See my hand is not even bleeding anymore. You get so worked up over nothing." Steve replied angrily.

"Breaking news, a local security guard was gunned down at a local nursing home. On scene is Jennifer..." A female news anchor said disrupting the silence between Steve and Donna. Donna gasped and went to see the news report but Steve was completely uninterested with his focus being on the dog.

"Dutchess... Dutchess you wanna go for a walk with daddy?" Steve asked and she lifted her head then yawned as she looked at him with her eyes half closed. "Ooh daddy I'm too tired to go for walks now." Steve said, making up a voice for Dutchess to make it appear that she was talking. Sure he knew he was making up the voice but when he did it; it made her seem more like a person.

"You hear what happened tonight?" Donna yelled trying to catch Steve's attention. He continued to talk in his fake Dutchess voice to himself as Donna turned her attention back on the television.

Steve rubbed his hand as he felt an itch that felt like it was crawling up his arm but the sensation quickly vanished. He looked down at the tiny marks and checked to make sure they had not reopened. He quickly dismissed the wounds as he saw no blood seeping from them and was more concerned that Dutchess was not interested in her nightly walk. She normally jumped at the chance but now she seemed too tired to move.

Donna shook her head as she continued to watch the news cast about the murder.

"Why would anyone attack a security guard at a nursing home of all places?" She muttered under her breath. Steve vaguely heard the report but had lost all interest in what was going on. He suddenly felt tired himself and decided to go to bed early having had enough excitement for one night.

Donna was oblivious as she kept watching the newscast and she spoke out commenting on the reports of the murder but it was not until the news was over that she first realized she had been talking to herself the whole time.