"Nothing, it just bothered me." He answered to everyone's exasperation.

"Then why'd you gape at it?" Sharona shrilled in her Jersey accent.

"It's from a vacuum. I was wondering how that piece broke off" he told them, assured of his own logic. Things like this tended to distract him. "That doesn't happen very often." He knew his cleaning tools quite well.

"But murders do!!" Jordan angrily spat her obvious hint, as her face reddened and turned into a harsh glower.

"Maybe you should leave!" Max ordered in a tone of barely contained anger. Revisiting this case had been painful enough, without Monk's raising hopes just to seemingly blow Emily's case off because of a stupid vacuum part.

Monk stepped back in wincing reaction to the barkeep's harsh, loud and accented voice.

"Mr. Cavanaugh.......I know that Adrian can get a little distracted by weird stuff...." Sharona tried to calm the man, as she hid her own impatience. "But believe me, he'll find your wife's killer." She put on a soft soothing voice that she had perfected as a nurse, and as Monk's assistant.

"Dad....she's right..." Jordan sighed, though still annoyed at Monk. As they all talked, He proceeded to explore the rest of the house.

"I thought I told you to leave!" Max huffed as he followed Monk, who ignored him, to a hallway.

"Look at that!" The sleuth pointed to what looked to everyone else a random spot on the carpeted floor.

"What? You found some lint?" Max growled; part of him wanted to grab Monk by the shoulders and slam him against a wall. Floods of dammed up pain, and anger started to posses him.

"There's an unusual dent and texture on this spot" Adrian told them, intensely studying it.

"Jordan!" Max hissed as he indicated that he wanted to talk in the kitchen by pointing to it. The medical examiner remembered this gesture from her childhood.

"He seems angry.." Monk mused seriously, hoping this wouldn't mean the end of his part of the case.

Father and daughter both paced around the round, wooden table.

"I want him outta my house, Jordan!" He ordered, holding the top of a chair roughly. "He's jerking us around!"

"Dad! He's a private consultant for the San Francisco P.D! I could give you the names of at least twenty cops who have seen him at work!" Jordan's face grew hard from the other side of the table.

"Then they can have him!" Monk's methods and mannerisms could be exasperating, but for Max, they were unbearable, given the closeness of the case.

As father and daughter continued their argument, Adrian hyper-focused on the spot, while Sharona inwardly groaned and waited. Then he nervously went into the basement. The nurse could not fathom what one had to do with the other. Curiously, lock consisted of a sliding mechanism on their side of the door. With a wipe he opened it, and to his horror, the stairs lacked a railing and were rather steep. Grimly, he put his right foot on the first step, with the dread of a person stepping into volcanic lava: he put his arms out for balance, and hesitantly put the tip of his large toe onto the step.

"You can do it" Sharona encouraged, but wished he would hurry. Who knew how long the argument would occupy Max's attention?

Out of necessity, he went down the stairs, with Sharona right behind him. Across from them stood the water heater and both saw a plethora of boxes. Monk frantically brushed off his brown suit with his hands as if someone had dumped a pound of dirt on him.

"What are we looking for?" Sharona sniffed.

"I don't know yet." He murmured, walking around, with a wipe over his mouth.

"You'd better know soon...."

"Look! It's the vacumm!" Monk indicated, after some searching, a simple, seventies style upright, with a purple colored bag, hidden among other things. The sleuth gingerly moved things out of the way. "Of course! It's a Kirby! They've always been sold door-to-door. The dent on the floor happened because something got tangled, and then strained when that spot was vacuumed." The dent was what drove him to find the basement.

"But the person who most likely bought the vacuum is dead!" Sharona retorted. "Wait! How can you be sure that's the vacuum?"

"Because of the texture....It's hard to explain" Adrian shrugged.

"So you're saying.....that a vacuum salesman did it?"

"It was in here a few years before Emily Cavanaugh was murdered. The design is from the early seventies. She was killed in '79." He explained. "That's why he would not have been a suspect."

"You study vacumm design in your spare time??" Her New Jersey accent became more nasal in her disbelief.

"This is more of a psychedelic lavender, and the vacuum is not functional." He'd been examining it as he made his explanations to Sharona.

"How do you know it's him, and not some Avon lady?"

TBC