(AN: If this story isn't all too realistic, tell me, and tell me what to
replace. I'm only 18, man! I have no idea about CSI stuff. I think this
is coming out pretty well so far...)
"Whoa...all the furniture is gone..." Kendall looked around. "Must've been evidence..."
"Yeah..." Shawn looked around. "It's like a ghost house..."
"I see a piece of hair...I see it first thing...how could dad have missed it?" Kendall asked herself.
"Let's hope it's not so important they don't want it moved..." Shawn swallowed a lump in his throat.
"Get into the bag, and hand me the tweezers..." Kendall directed, crouching down to look closer at the hair. "And grab me a baggie..."
Shawn reached into the bag, and grabbed the tweezers and a baggie. He walked over to Kendall and handed them to her.
"We'll just have to inconspicuously slip this into my dad's evidence bag..." Kendall explained. "I'll do it tonight before he gets home..."
Just then, Kendall's cell phone rang. "Shawn, tell me if anything looks suspicious." She looked at the number calling, and saw that it was Sapphire's. "Hello, Detective Kendall Grissom...WHOA...I got a little too deep into character..."
"Hey, Detective Griss...Detective Brown here..." Sapphire joked. "Maybe while we're investigating this, we should use our detective names as code, that'd be cool...but anyway...Frankie's alibi checks out. He was at poetry club, then he went to his father's wrestling match...we asked his father, too...and he showed us his ticket stub..."
"Shawn and I found incriminating evidence at Minkus' house too. All the furniture was gone, so either it was a robbery, or the furniture was evidence..." Kendall explained. "A hair that my dad missed..." she was a little surprised. "He's missed quite a bit, because I see quite a bit...thank God luminol fades..."
"You're gonna spray the room?" Sapphire asked. "A little bold, don't you think?"
"It's necessary.it has to be done..." Kendall nodded.
"Aye-aye Detective Grissom!" Sapphire grinned. "Maybe we should go to college for this...we'd be pretty good at it..."
"I agree!" Kendall snickered. "See ya later, Sapph..."
"Ciao, Detective." Sapphire hung the phone up.
"Uh...Detective...Grissom...?" Shawn looked a little uneasy. "There is a very shadowy figure in the closet..."
"What very shadowy figure? Are we in a horror movie now?" Kendall stood up, and headed toward the closet. When she came two feet away from the closet, the figure jumped up in the air and disappeared. Kendall paused in her tracks, half out of fear, and half out of interest. "Shawn...bring me a flashlight..." she held her hand out.
Shawn placed a flashlight in Kendall's hand. "What's going on?"
"The thing disappeared in the closet...there has to be a vent or something that it jumped into...I'm gonna look..." she opened the closet door. "Stay here, and if anything should happen to me..."
"You REALLY sound like your dad, now..." Shawn nodded.
Kendall rolled her eyes, and entered the closet. She flashed the flashlight onto the ceiling, and all around. "This is really weird, Shawn..." she aimed it to the corner. "All there is here is a little string coming out of the corner of the wall...hand me the tweezers again, I'm gonna put it in evidence, just in case..."
Shawn put the tweezers and another baggie into her hand. "What if it opens a trapdoor?"
"You've been watching FAR too many Scooby Doo movies with Eric..." Kendall rolled her eyes, and gripped the string with the tweezers. As soon as she pulled on it, a door in the side of the closet opened up.
"Oh, I have...have I?" Shawn asked.
Kendall's jaw was hanging open. "This is weird...maybe we should leave this for my dad..."
"Just cut some of the string off...and we can put it in evidence..." Shawn suggested.
"What if the WHOLE string is vital?" she asked. "We can't do that. Maybe we should just go check down in there...just to see what it is..."
"And who's down there..." Shawn cleared his throat nervously.
Kendall swallowed back a lump in her throat. "I'll go first..." she acted brave.
They walked down the dark hallway, only lit by a torch every ten-or-so feet. It was cold and damp, feeling a lot like a dungeon. Kendall reached for Shawn's hand, and squeezed it tightly. She glanced at the wall. Every little brick looked like it was about to pop out of the wall, and something would come out and attack them. "Shawn...this is really giving me the creeps..." Since they had walked into the hallway, almost all the color had drained from Kendall's face.
"Me too," Shawn whispered, as they came to a door. The door was made of black stone, and it was almost up to the ceiling. Shawn glanced down at Kendall, who was trembling.
"Here goes nothing..." she cleared her throat, and pushed the door open.
There stood rows and rows of beakers, each with a different chemical in them. Microscopes and computers lined the walls. It looked like a secret laboratory, like in Frankenstein. The only thing missing was the gourney in the middle of the room. "This is really weird..." Kendall looked around. "Maybe we should leave the door open so that if my dad comes back to the crime scene, he'll definitely see it..."
Shawn walked up to a computer, and looked at the screen. "Minkus had something huge going on here..." he explained. "Look at all the passwords you have to enter to get into this one file...four? Man!"
"I always knew that guy was going to be famous..." Kendall shrugged. "I guess intelligence brings death..."
"In some cases, maybe..." Shawn looked at the name of Minkus' project. "'Minkus' Miracle Age Foam?'" he read, with a laugh.
"I thought Minkus was better than a Anti-Age scam..." Kendall laughed a little. "Well, people do fall for that stuff..."
"Yeah...but what we need to be thinking about is why anyone would want to kill him...I mean, he was a pretty nice guy..." Shawn hesitated. "Tell anyone I said that, and I never speak to you again..."
Kendall laughed. "Gotcha, Detective Hunter..." she started trying to hack Minkus' account. "Do you know his birthday?" she asked.
"No!" Shawn rolled his eyes. "We weren't exactly friends..."
"Think, Shawn...anything he would've used for a password..." Kendall stressed.
"He'd always had a thing for Topanga...try Topanga's full name for one?" Shawn asked.
"T-O-P-A-N-G-A S-T-A-R L-A-W-R-E-N-C-E..." Kendall recited the letters, as she typed them in, then clicked OK. "We have password number one!" she smiled. "Think harder...her birthday?"
"Maybe..." Shawn looked over Kendall's shoulder.
"September, twenty-third, 1982..." Kendall typed in, then clicked OK.
"YES!" Shawn cheered, as the 'password correct' screen came up.
"Hmmm..." Kendall wracked her brain, then typed in 'Miracle Cream.'
"He wouldn't be that obvious, Kendall..." Shawn shook his head.
She clicked OK, and the 'password correct' screen came up again. She flashed Shawn a 'ahem?' type of glance.
"Ok, ok...think..." he turned her head back to the screen.
Kendall laughed, and tried to think of the last password. She looked at Shawn. "If he loves Topanga, who do you think he hates?"
"CORY!" they both shouted in unison.
"I hate Cornelius Matthews?" she typed in, and clicked OK.
"Welcome to the Minkus' Miracle Cream file!" came blaring out of the computer's speakers.
"Ha!" Kendall started to read. "This is going to get me famous, and I'll finally be able to get Topanga away..." Kendall paused, and glanced up at Shawn. "From Cory?"
Shawn read on. "This miracle cream will reduce wrinkles, blemishes, and any sign of aging, and it won't clog pores! Blah, blah, blah."
"He wanted to get Topanga away from Cory?" Kendall stood up. "This file may be a key factor! Shawn, write down all the passwords we used, and I'm gonna save this file to a disk..." she rummaged around the table for a disk.
Shawn started writing down the passwords. "I still don't see how this is key evidence..."
"Think about it..." Kendall found a disk, and inserted it into the disk slot. "Cory and Topanga are in love. Minkus wanted Topanga...what do they say? I would do anything for love?"
"What are you thinking?" Shawn asked.
"I'm THINKING..." Kendall explained. "Minkus staged his own death, so that Cory would get blamed...then he'd come back later on, and..."
"Whoa, whoa..." Shawn shook his head. "We're not in Nancy Drew mysteries, here. This is MINKUS we're talking about."
"So?" Kendall asked. "People are capable of anything."
"I think you need to take a couple of deep breaths..." Shawn patted Kendall on the back. "Come on, let's go, and come back tomorrow..."
"Ok..." Kendall rolled her eyes. "But just a second..." she took the disk out of the computer, and put it in her dad's evidence bag. 'I'm gonna have to remember to take this out, and check it out myself...' she thought, grabbing the passwords Shawn wrote down, and sticking them in her bag.
~~
It was eleven-thirty, and Kendall couldn't sleep. She sat at the computer, reading Minkus' file. 'You wait, with this invention, not only will I get Topanga from Cory, but I'll also win the award at the Inventors Convention. Things are all going to look up for Stuart Minkus, soon! They'll all know. My name will be in every house, on every tongue...' Kendall shook her head. "His means to an end led to his OWN end..." she said to herself.
She heard the door close, and immediately closed the file. "The hair is in dad's evidence bag...I have the file...the passwords are hidden...I think I'm all set..."
"Kendall? You still awake?" Gil yelled up the stairs to Kendall.
Kendall ran to the stairwell, and peered down at her father. "Yeah, I'm up, dad! How was your date with Sara?" she winked.
Gil smiled at Kendall. "I assume she told you?"
"Yeah, she was here with Catherine...she said she needed a file..." Kendall explained.
"Yeah, she couldn't find it. But that's all confidential..." Gil told his daughter. "Don't get me wrong, I'd love to share this with you..."
"Please, daddy? I took up forensics in school, and it'd really help me if I could look at a real case!" Kendall begged.
Gil always fell for whenever Kendall called him daddy. She rarely did, but when she did, she always got whatever she wanted. "Ok, come on...we'll look at my evidence files on the Stuart Minkus case..." he led her upstairs to his room.
Kendall smiled. 'Wait until he sees the...' she thought. 'That's gonna crack this case wide open, I bet!' she slipped the baggie into the evidence bag as they were walking up the stairs.
~~
"And this..." Gil took out the baggie with the hair in it. "Whoa...I must have overlooked this...maybe Sara put it in...what the...?"
Kendall suppressed her grin, and put on a pair of rubber gloves. "What is this?" she asked, referring to a fiber of clothing.
"This is from a black jean jacket..." he explained. "Sara found this on the floor of the closet..."
Kendall's jaw dropped. She recognized this fiber as something from Cory's jacket. 'Oh my God...now Cory is actually a suspect...' she closed her mouth quickly. "Did you identify where it came from yet?"
"Not yet..." Gil shrugged. "Why, look familiar?"
"No..." Kendall lied. "Just curious...to me...it looks like a men's black jean jacket...I saw one on sale at JCPenny last week..."
Grissom smiled proudly at his daughter. "Who knew your love of fashion would come in handy?" he asked. "I'll run that through the records tomorrow..."
Kendall was concealing her concern. She had a haunting feeling that Cory was the murderer. Now all she needed was hard evidence. But how could she try to convict one of her closest friends for murder?
"Whoa...all the furniture is gone..." Kendall looked around. "Must've been evidence..."
"Yeah..." Shawn looked around. "It's like a ghost house..."
"I see a piece of hair...I see it first thing...how could dad have missed it?" Kendall asked herself.
"Let's hope it's not so important they don't want it moved..." Shawn swallowed a lump in his throat.
"Get into the bag, and hand me the tweezers..." Kendall directed, crouching down to look closer at the hair. "And grab me a baggie..."
Shawn reached into the bag, and grabbed the tweezers and a baggie. He walked over to Kendall and handed them to her.
"We'll just have to inconspicuously slip this into my dad's evidence bag..." Kendall explained. "I'll do it tonight before he gets home..."
Just then, Kendall's cell phone rang. "Shawn, tell me if anything looks suspicious." She looked at the number calling, and saw that it was Sapphire's. "Hello, Detective Kendall Grissom...WHOA...I got a little too deep into character..."
"Hey, Detective Griss...Detective Brown here..." Sapphire joked. "Maybe while we're investigating this, we should use our detective names as code, that'd be cool...but anyway...Frankie's alibi checks out. He was at poetry club, then he went to his father's wrestling match...we asked his father, too...and he showed us his ticket stub..."
"Shawn and I found incriminating evidence at Minkus' house too. All the furniture was gone, so either it was a robbery, or the furniture was evidence..." Kendall explained. "A hair that my dad missed..." she was a little surprised. "He's missed quite a bit, because I see quite a bit...thank God luminol fades..."
"You're gonna spray the room?" Sapphire asked. "A little bold, don't you think?"
"It's necessary.it has to be done..." Kendall nodded.
"Aye-aye Detective Grissom!" Sapphire grinned. "Maybe we should go to college for this...we'd be pretty good at it..."
"I agree!" Kendall snickered. "See ya later, Sapph..."
"Ciao, Detective." Sapphire hung the phone up.
"Uh...Detective...Grissom...?" Shawn looked a little uneasy. "There is a very shadowy figure in the closet..."
"What very shadowy figure? Are we in a horror movie now?" Kendall stood up, and headed toward the closet. When she came two feet away from the closet, the figure jumped up in the air and disappeared. Kendall paused in her tracks, half out of fear, and half out of interest. "Shawn...bring me a flashlight..." she held her hand out.
Shawn placed a flashlight in Kendall's hand. "What's going on?"
"The thing disappeared in the closet...there has to be a vent or something that it jumped into...I'm gonna look..." she opened the closet door. "Stay here, and if anything should happen to me..."
"You REALLY sound like your dad, now..." Shawn nodded.
Kendall rolled her eyes, and entered the closet. She flashed the flashlight onto the ceiling, and all around. "This is really weird, Shawn..." she aimed it to the corner. "All there is here is a little string coming out of the corner of the wall...hand me the tweezers again, I'm gonna put it in evidence, just in case..."
Shawn put the tweezers and another baggie into her hand. "What if it opens a trapdoor?"
"You've been watching FAR too many Scooby Doo movies with Eric..." Kendall rolled her eyes, and gripped the string with the tweezers. As soon as she pulled on it, a door in the side of the closet opened up.
"Oh, I have...have I?" Shawn asked.
Kendall's jaw was hanging open. "This is weird...maybe we should leave this for my dad..."
"Just cut some of the string off...and we can put it in evidence..." Shawn suggested.
"What if the WHOLE string is vital?" she asked. "We can't do that. Maybe we should just go check down in there...just to see what it is..."
"And who's down there..." Shawn cleared his throat nervously.
Kendall swallowed back a lump in her throat. "I'll go first..." she acted brave.
They walked down the dark hallway, only lit by a torch every ten-or-so feet. It was cold and damp, feeling a lot like a dungeon. Kendall reached for Shawn's hand, and squeezed it tightly. She glanced at the wall. Every little brick looked like it was about to pop out of the wall, and something would come out and attack them. "Shawn...this is really giving me the creeps..." Since they had walked into the hallway, almost all the color had drained from Kendall's face.
"Me too," Shawn whispered, as they came to a door. The door was made of black stone, and it was almost up to the ceiling. Shawn glanced down at Kendall, who was trembling.
"Here goes nothing..." she cleared her throat, and pushed the door open.
There stood rows and rows of beakers, each with a different chemical in them. Microscopes and computers lined the walls. It looked like a secret laboratory, like in Frankenstein. The only thing missing was the gourney in the middle of the room. "This is really weird..." Kendall looked around. "Maybe we should leave the door open so that if my dad comes back to the crime scene, he'll definitely see it..."
Shawn walked up to a computer, and looked at the screen. "Minkus had something huge going on here..." he explained. "Look at all the passwords you have to enter to get into this one file...four? Man!"
"I always knew that guy was going to be famous..." Kendall shrugged. "I guess intelligence brings death..."
"In some cases, maybe..." Shawn looked at the name of Minkus' project. "'Minkus' Miracle Age Foam?'" he read, with a laugh.
"I thought Minkus was better than a Anti-Age scam..." Kendall laughed a little. "Well, people do fall for that stuff..."
"Yeah...but what we need to be thinking about is why anyone would want to kill him...I mean, he was a pretty nice guy..." Shawn hesitated. "Tell anyone I said that, and I never speak to you again..."
Kendall laughed. "Gotcha, Detective Hunter..." she started trying to hack Minkus' account. "Do you know his birthday?" she asked.
"No!" Shawn rolled his eyes. "We weren't exactly friends..."
"Think, Shawn...anything he would've used for a password..." Kendall stressed.
"He'd always had a thing for Topanga...try Topanga's full name for one?" Shawn asked.
"T-O-P-A-N-G-A S-T-A-R L-A-W-R-E-N-C-E..." Kendall recited the letters, as she typed them in, then clicked OK. "We have password number one!" she smiled. "Think harder...her birthday?"
"Maybe..." Shawn looked over Kendall's shoulder.
"September, twenty-third, 1982..." Kendall typed in, then clicked OK.
"YES!" Shawn cheered, as the 'password correct' screen came up.
"Hmmm..." Kendall wracked her brain, then typed in 'Miracle Cream.'
"He wouldn't be that obvious, Kendall..." Shawn shook his head.
She clicked OK, and the 'password correct' screen came up again. She flashed Shawn a 'ahem?' type of glance.
"Ok, ok...think..." he turned her head back to the screen.
Kendall laughed, and tried to think of the last password. She looked at Shawn. "If he loves Topanga, who do you think he hates?"
"CORY!" they both shouted in unison.
"I hate Cornelius Matthews?" she typed in, and clicked OK.
"Welcome to the Minkus' Miracle Cream file!" came blaring out of the computer's speakers.
"Ha!" Kendall started to read. "This is going to get me famous, and I'll finally be able to get Topanga away..." Kendall paused, and glanced up at Shawn. "From Cory?"
Shawn read on. "This miracle cream will reduce wrinkles, blemishes, and any sign of aging, and it won't clog pores! Blah, blah, blah."
"He wanted to get Topanga away from Cory?" Kendall stood up. "This file may be a key factor! Shawn, write down all the passwords we used, and I'm gonna save this file to a disk..." she rummaged around the table for a disk.
Shawn started writing down the passwords. "I still don't see how this is key evidence..."
"Think about it..." Kendall found a disk, and inserted it into the disk slot. "Cory and Topanga are in love. Minkus wanted Topanga...what do they say? I would do anything for love?"
"What are you thinking?" Shawn asked.
"I'm THINKING..." Kendall explained. "Minkus staged his own death, so that Cory would get blamed...then he'd come back later on, and..."
"Whoa, whoa..." Shawn shook his head. "We're not in Nancy Drew mysteries, here. This is MINKUS we're talking about."
"So?" Kendall asked. "People are capable of anything."
"I think you need to take a couple of deep breaths..." Shawn patted Kendall on the back. "Come on, let's go, and come back tomorrow..."
"Ok..." Kendall rolled her eyes. "But just a second..." she took the disk out of the computer, and put it in her dad's evidence bag. 'I'm gonna have to remember to take this out, and check it out myself...' she thought, grabbing the passwords Shawn wrote down, and sticking them in her bag.
~~
It was eleven-thirty, and Kendall couldn't sleep. She sat at the computer, reading Minkus' file. 'You wait, with this invention, not only will I get Topanga from Cory, but I'll also win the award at the Inventors Convention. Things are all going to look up for Stuart Minkus, soon! They'll all know. My name will be in every house, on every tongue...' Kendall shook her head. "His means to an end led to his OWN end..." she said to herself.
She heard the door close, and immediately closed the file. "The hair is in dad's evidence bag...I have the file...the passwords are hidden...I think I'm all set..."
"Kendall? You still awake?" Gil yelled up the stairs to Kendall.
Kendall ran to the stairwell, and peered down at her father. "Yeah, I'm up, dad! How was your date with Sara?" she winked.
Gil smiled at Kendall. "I assume she told you?"
"Yeah, she was here with Catherine...she said she needed a file..." Kendall explained.
"Yeah, she couldn't find it. But that's all confidential..." Gil told his daughter. "Don't get me wrong, I'd love to share this with you..."
"Please, daddy? I took up forensics in school, and it'd really help me if I could look at a real case!" Kendall begged.
Gil always fell for whenever Kendall called him daddy. She rarely did, but when she did, she always got whatever she wanted. "Ok, come on...we'll look at my evidence files on the Stuart Minkus case..." he led her upstairs to his room.
Kendall smiled. 'Wait until he sees the...' she thought. 'That's gonna crack this case wide open, I bet!' she slipped the baggie into the evidence bag as they were walking up the stairs.
~~
"And this..." Gil took out the baggie with the hair in it. "Whoa...I must have overlooked this...maybe Sara put it in...what the...?"
Kendall suppressed her grin, and put on a pair of rubber gloves. "What is this?" she asked, referring to a fiber of clothing.
"This is from a black jean jacket..." he explained. "Sara found this on the floor of the closet..."
Kendall's jaw dropped. She recognized this fiber as something from Cory's jacket. 'Oh my God...now Cory is actually a suspect...' she closed her mouth quickly. "Did you identify where it came from yet?"
"Not yet..." Gil shrugged. "Why, look familiar?"
"No..." Kendall lied. "Just curious...to me...it looks like a men's black jean jacket...I saw one on sale at JCPenny last week..."
Grissom smiled proudly at his daughter. "Who knew your love of fashion would come in handy?" he asked. "I'll run that through the records tomorrow..."
Kendall was concealing her concern. She had a haunting feeling that Cory was the murderer. Now all she needed was hard evidence. But how could she try to convict one of her closest friends for murder?