Tuesday, 5:00 PM
23 Hours Missing
Martin knocked on the door of Clark Kent's apartment, just to ensure that there was no one home before opening the heavy door with the key that the landlord gave him. The apartment was completely silent except for a steady beeping coming from the answering machine that sat on an end table by the couch. Sam walked into the apartment behind him slowly working a pair of rubber gloves onto her hands. "Wow, this guy was either expecting company or else he's just compulsively neat."
He nooded slight while taking stock of everything at a first glance. Sam was right, there were no dirty dishes in the sink, all books and reading material were neatly shelved on the bookcase, the pillows on the couch all properly fluffed and where they belonged, and not a spec of dust as far as he could tell. Despite it's near perfect state of cleanliness, the apartment still felt homey and welcoming.
"First things first," Sam walked over to the answering machine and pressed the Play button before taking a step back and crossing her arms. The machine started to play it's messages.
"Clark! It's me, I'm done with work and will be there in ten minutes. You better have that pizza ready, I'm starving. Bye!" The distinctive voice of Lois Lane faded out as the machine recited the time and went on to the next message.
"Clark, seriously, where are you? I'm at your door, let me in already." Next message.
"Clark! I can't believe you stood me up. I understand you were being nice by letting me come over, but the least you could've done was told me if you found something better to do." Lois Lane's voice had clearly gotten more hostile and annoyed sounding as the messages went on. Time for message number four.
"Clark. I have information on Ruffner." With a solid sounding click the message ended. Martin raised an eyebrow and jotted down the time of that message. 1AM. Interesting time to be calling someone with an ominous sounding message.
The machine continued to spit out messages, the rest of them either from Lois or Perry White wanting to know where the blazes he was and to get into work. Just as the final message finished the phone rang, startling Martin slightly, it wasn't something he expected. He motioned Samantha to come over and raised the phone up to his ear, leaving it so that Sam could hear the conversation as well. "Hello?"
"Who is this?" It was the dark ominous sounding voice from the earlier message.
"A friend of Clark's, he's out at the moment, can I take a message?"
Instead of an answer the connection was terminated abruptly at the other end. Sam just looked at Martin with a raised eyebrow. "Interesting fellow, I'll get Danny to start work on some phone records, maybe we'll get lucky and he called Dark and Doomful here from his home phone."
Martin just nodded slowly, lost in contemplation. "Yeah, let's finish up on the apartment so we can get back to the office."
Sam nodded and headed toward the bed room to see what was in there. The bed was made up nicely and nothing seemed to be even remotely out of order, even the closet door was neatly closed. A thin wallet sat on the small table by the bed and she opened it. Inside was a Metropolis driver's license, one credit card, a bank card, a few bills, and a press pass, all under the name of Clark Kent. That told her that he made it home from work at least and probably did not intend on leaving again, it was rare that a reporter left behind his press pass, you just never knew when something was going to happen. She put the wallet back down and wandered over to the clothes hamper, lifting the lid when she got there. A few articles of clothing at the bottom and she stuck a hand in to shift through them. A piece of blue material appeared out of the mess and she tugged it a little, trying to dislodge it so she could identify what it was. The entire piece of fabric came out and when she turned it around to look at the front her eyes widened, "Hey Martin, come see what I found!"
He appeared from around the corner, a piece of mail in hand that he had apparently just been looking at. When he saw what Sam was holding in her hands he stopped short and raised an eyebrow, "That's a Superman suit"
"Yeah, do you think it's real or does our Mr. Kent just have a thing for superheros?"
"Who knows, maybe Superman isn't the straightlaced boyscout that everyone thought he was."
Sam snorted and dropped the Superman outfit back into the hamper. "I think I'm done here, there isn't even a pencil out of place, let alone anything incriminating."
Martin nodded and they walked back out together, just giving him enough time to toss the mail back in the pile he found it before walking out the door with Sam.