"How much longer is this going to take?" Stottlemeyer grumbled.
"International rules are until one side's king is in checkmate; knight to E-3," Ambrose made his move and hit the clock to his right. "Your turn," he told the members of the other team on the opposite side of the coffee table. They'd been playing with Ambrose's 3-D chess set for close to three hours now, since the children had immediately claimed Adrian's television set the moment the four families had moved into the detective's apartment (they were sitting on Ottomans they'd bought earlier in the day, as Adrian had made it clear he was uncomfortable with people sitting on his rug directly). It had been agreed they'd play men against women, but Karen Stottlemeyer had declined to join in, so Disher had joined with Sharona and Natalie, leaving his boss with the two teammates he least wanted.
The captain's radio buzzed at this moment. Stottlemeyer, believing "The Goblin" might make another attempt on their lives, had turned Adrian's apartment building into a practical fortress, with cops on every floor checking every person that entered the building. "Status check sir; everything clear," came the voice of one of his men on the other end, "No one suspicious around."
"Good work, Miller," Stottlemeyer told him. "Well, I think we'll be pretty safe in here," he said, moving his bishop to the middle of the board.
"That's easy for you to say," Adrian said softly, centering the captain's bishop on its square. He was already uncomfortable with having ten people under his not-so-big roof. His solution to working out the logistics of this was to divide his apartment into equal-sized sections for each family (for the sake of logistics, he'd convinced Ambrose to share a section with Disher), retaining his bedroom for himself. Each section had its own tent for the family to sleep in, their own hygienic utensils, and an instruction sheet detailing where they could put the personal items they'd been able to save from their homes and what in their section they were absolutely forbidden to touch. The kitchen and bathroom were for everyone, but Adrian had made it clear the latter could only be used at certain times. As such, he'd drawn up a very large chart stating who could use it at what times. He'd also instituted a trash schedule for everyone, but he could tell already with the amount of soda and juice the kids had already drank that he might have to revise it.
"You, you can't make that move," the detective informed Disher as he made his next move on the lower chessboard, "The galley moves like the rook."
"You sure?" Disher frowned.
"Absolutely," Ambrose interjected, "Prince moves like king, princess like queen, abbey like bishop, cannon like knight, and galley like rook."
"That's another thing," Stottlemeyer spoke up, "Why do they bother calling it a rook? It looks nothing like a crow."
"That's because it's another example of Anglicization," Ambrose informed him, "Rook comes from the Arabic rokh, meaning chariot. It became a tower battlement since that was the closest thing in Western culture to the piece's design. Both the queen and bishop are also named for this reason; in Arabic the queen is called the vizier, and…"
Stottlemeyer thumped his fists on the table in displeasure at being told what he considered meaningless points of chess, causing the pieces to shakes slightly and move around in their squares. Adrian scrambled to re-center them all. "Whatever you do, don't do that!" he pleaded his boss. Stottlemeyer gave him a look that made it clear he was already regretting his decision to stay at Adrian's.
"So chess is Arabic, then?" Natalie asked, moving a pawn on the top board to the left. Adrian grabbed it and centered it for her.
"Scholars are divided on it, since many cultures have games in their past traditions that incorporate elements of modern chess, but consensus nowadays is that it originated in northwest India," Ambrose said, moving his right knight forward on the middle board to capture one of Sharona's pawns. She sighed in frustration; already Ambrose had relieved her of six pieces.
"Yep, those Indians must have had a load of time on their hands to spend hours doing this," Stottlemeyer said, zipping his king backwards out of the way of one of Disher's bishops. The lieutenant eagerly moved his bishop forward toward his boss's abbey, only to have Stottlemeyer capture it from across the board with his queen. "That was pretty obvious," he informed a stunned Disher.
"Hey," Benjy entered the room with his script and approached Ambrose, "I wrote you into this. Do you like it?"
"Where am I?" Ambrose took it and leafed through it. "I take it you're taking licenses here for dramatic effect, since we weren't meeting on a regular basis at this point in time," he said.
"I felt it would make more sense if you made up with him before the end of the story," Benjy informed him, "It gives the audience closure that you're friends with him again."
Ambrose stared at two particular lines he'd been allotted. "I wouldn't say this or this, but otherwise this is looking pretty good," he lauded the boy, "I think this has a pretty good chance of publication if you can get the right publisher."
"Thanks," Benjy grinned and walked back into the living room. "I think this could be the start of something big," the instruction manual writer said, capturing one of Sharona's rooks, "My brother the movie star; who would have thought of it?"
"Indeed," Adrian agreed, capturing a cannon off Natalie on the top level with his galley, "And I don't really think my life that interesting to…don't drink that much, Ambrose. Your Sprite'll be uneven with our drinks."
He gestured to his bottle of Sierra Springs and Stottlemeyer's coffee cup, which were lined up perfectly. Ambrose shrugged and removed it from his lips. "So I've been thinking about the case," he said as Adrian lined it up perfectly with the other drinks, "I think that the one thing we need to look at most is opportunity and motive. Who stands the best chance of getting that waste out of the plant, and why?"
"I say it's Don Wiley the guard," Natalie proposed, checking her boss's queen, "He has opportunity; he could shut off the alarms when he needed. And since he works nights too, he can get it out without being observe too much."
"How does he get them out, though?" Ambrose posed, "Did you see anything he might use to carry it that would irradiate him?"
"Not yet," she admitted, shaking her head as Adrian swept up her abbey from behind with his bishop. "He's going to Pakistan and not coming back, though; that's got to be suspicious."
"It would seem it on first glance, but I thought I read that his brother's a missionary over there," Ambrose took another sip of Sprite, prompting his brother to drink a similar amount of his Sierra Springs, "Then again, there's also a load of extremists in that region, so if he is indeed guilty, he'd certainly have buyers."
"Only it's not foreign extremists behind these thefts, Ambrose, it's homegrown terrorists," Adrian pointed out, once again centering every piece on the board, causing everyone to groan, "Unless the Pakistanis are funding it, though."
"Well, I think it's Angela Moreno," Disher moved a pawn ahead and promptly lost it to Stottlemeyer's knight, "She's got the motive, and backup that could support her in a crisis."
"But from the list she hasn't got access to the stuff anymore, Randy," Stottlemeyer pointed out, "And that vault clearly wasn't broken into even the first time."
"Well, she could have stolen someone else's card key, or perhaps threatened someone else to do it for her; she's clearly not the type to be above intimidation," Disher pressed his point."
"So I've read," Ambrose captured Sharona's queen. He was now closing in on her king, "And true, she might have put someone up to it."
"That's an interesting point, Ambrose," his brother said, taking out another of Natalie's pawns, "It may very well be a conspiracy; two or more of these suspects—or other suspects we don't know about—could in fact be behind this."
"Aren't we forgetting that it took a master chemist to put that poison together in the first place?" Sharona interceded, jerking her king away from Ambrose's queen, "That points definitely to Jerry Malcolm. He's there every day; he could scoop up as much as he wanted any time he wanted, and he'd be able to put it together perfectly so it could kill an elephant but not irradiate him. And he was at the girl's funeral."
"It's not him," Ambrose said quickly, continuing his assault against her king.
"And how can you be sure?" she demanded.
"His father's one of my major customers, sells paper shredders. Anyway, they're hardcore Quakers. Joining white supremacist groups would be against every grain of their existence…and, checkmate."
Sharona glared at him. "You had an unfair advantage from the start," she complained.
"Three hours a week playing against myself, I'm still undefeated. Good game though," Ambrose extended his hand to her. She only reluctantly shook it.
"And on that note, Ambrose, Jerry told me at one point when he was alone that he considers Manny his best friend in the plant," Adrian was now assaulting Natalie's prince, "I know it's true because there's pictures of the two of them together all over his desk. It's very unlikely he'd try and frame someone he cares for that much."
"Well maybe he digitally altered Manny's image over someone else; I just have a deep down feeling it's him, Adrian," Sharona grasped at straws.
"I don't think so, Sharona," the detective shook his head slowly. His heart sank when she reacted by jumping to her feet roughly. "I know," she glowered, "I'm just wrong about everything, aren't I?"
"I didn't say that, I…Sharona, it's not you turn for the bathroom," Adrian called after her as she skulked toward it and slammed the door. The detective put a hand to his face. "I know she's going to throw the toilet paper all over the place, I just know it," he moaned.
"That's a good point, though, that they'd have to know a lot about chemistry," Ambrose started putting his pieces away. Adrian took them off him and started putting them perfectly lined up in the bag. "Thanks," the instruction manual writer told him, "Anyway, one of these people other than Jerry Malcolm has to be an amateur chemist. Whoever it is is probably our guilty party."
"Actually, I've got another suspect for us here," Stottlemeyer captured Disher's knight after the lieutenant had foolishly left it out in the open, "I ran a check through the files in search of any disgruntled employees. One name came up; Bud Harms. He was fired after hitting Ertley about a year ago and swore revenge, and he's definitely got extremist ties. And his job at the plant, ladies and gentlemen, was working in the lab with our man Jerry, so he knows his stuff about making poison."
"Again, what about access to the waste? How does he get in to get it; checkmate," Adrian cornered Natalie's king. She sighed and more readily shook his hand than Sharona had with Ambrose's. "You two are good," she confessed to the brothers, "Have you ever considered joining tournaments?"
"And leave my house?" Ambrose protested.
"Right now you don't have a house," Adrian reminded him.
"I will in the near future," Ambrose told him, "Maybe Dad'll kick in some money when he shows up here…"
"He's not showing up here, Ambrose," it was Adrian's turn to shake his head.
"Oh just you wait and see!" Ambrose said indignantly, "After these bombs all went off, he's got to…"
Stottlemeyer's radio buzzed again before the argument could get more heated. "Sir, a letter addressed to Miss Teeger just got slipped under the door," announced another officer.
"A what?" Stottlemeyer's eyes darted to Natalie, who looked as puzzled as to the matter as he was, "Well, check it for any germs or explosives, and if it's kosher, send it up, Beats," the captain told the officer.
"We already did, sir," the officer informed him, "It looks like it's from her apparently late husband."
"I'll go check it," Natalie rose up, looking strange, Adrian thought. She walked out the door. "And checkmate," Stottlemeyer cornered Disher's king. "We win," he told the Monk brothers, "I still think this is a stupid and wasteful game, but we just rolled, and that's always something you'd like."
"Thank you," Ambrose managed a smile, something he, like his brother, rarely did. "While we're thinking about who might be involved in this, let's think of this: how would they know exactly where we all live?"
"That's something I've been wondering about too," Adrian helped his brother disassemble the chessboards, "I think there's something else at work here that…"
The unmistakable sound of a candy bar crunching from the living room caught his attention. "Oh no!" he groaned, barreling through the curtains he'd painstakingly hung throughout his apartment to delineate each section (he'd taken care to color code each curtained section: red for the Flemings, green for the Teegers, purple for the Stottlemeyers, gray for Ambrose and Disher, and a blue curtain sealed off his own bedroom). "Jared!" the detective cried, staring in horror at the boy, who was holding a Mars bar in his fist.
"I was hungry!" Jared said in self-defense. Without answering, Adrian rushed to his closet, dragged out his vacuum, plugged it in, and began frantically vacuuming the floor between the sofa and the TV along the diagonal lines. "We can't hear the TV, Mr. Monk!" Julie complained, pointing to the screen, on which Home Alone 2 was playing. Adrian responded by reaching for the remote—but stopping midstream to pull out a wipe and give it a thorough wiping down—and jacking up the volume to an almost ear-splitting level before returning to his wild vacuuming.
"Monk, what the hell are you doing in there?" Stottlemeyer yelled in, his voice practically drowned out by the sounds of Harry and Marv being nailed with the tool chest Kevin had thrown at them on the screen.
"Just performing my civic duty as the manager here at Hotel Monk," Adrian called back at the top of his lungs. He shut off the vacuum and nodded. "That should do it for now," he said, breathing a large sigh of relief, "Better make sure later, though."
"You've got THREE SOFAS in here?" Max stared in amazement at them stacked inside the open closet.
"I like to be sure," Adrian told him as he pushed the vacuum back into the closet, "Just in case, you know."
"Just in case of what?" Karen had to ask him. Adrian didn't answer, because at that moment Natalie returned. "Mr. Monk, I'd like to have you for a minute," she called at him, looking misty-eyed. Adrian followed her into her allotted section of the apartment. "What did the letter say?" he asked her.
"I think it might really be Mitch, Mr. Monk," Natalie handed the letter to him, which he took hold of with his tweezers, "Look at this: he knows our anniversary date, and that we went to Paris, he knows Julie's birthday, he knows the exact date and circumstances he disappeared, he knows where we first met; he knows a lot of things only Mitch would know."
"This is typed," Adrian examined the letter, "Where would he get a computer?"
"Well maybe he stopped by the library; they have free access computers there," Natalie countered. She glanced through the curtains at the living room. "I think it's about time I told Julie about this. It's time she knows."
"Why? Don't," Adrian pleaded her.
"And why not, Mr. Monk? I think she deserves to know her father might well be alive and well after all."
"And what if he's not?" Adrian said loudly, "If you build her hopes up, and it turns out not to be true, her heart's going to shatter into a million pieces. I don't think you want her to feel like that."
"Yeah, that would be a tragedy," came a sarcastic barb from the bathroom.
"What's that supposed to mean?" Natalie demanded.
"You're the detective; you figure it out!" snapped Sharona.
"I'll, I'll handle this, you just go do what you want to do," Adrian told his current assistant. He walked over to the bathroom door (he'd taped a large copy of the bathroom schedule on it, along with a sign labeled, THE MANAGEMENT RESERVES THE RIGHT TO EVICT YOU FROM THIS BATHROOM IF YOU GO OVER THE ALOTTED TIME LIMIT OR IN EVENT OF EMERGENCIES. THERE ARE NO EXCEPTIONS TO THIS RULE). "I, I think your time in here's up, Sharona, he called in, "And house policies are not to insult others here."
"Tell me something, Adrian, was I just along for the ride?" came Sharona's voice.
"What, I don't, what is that supposed to mean?"
"You know what it means. Did you really appreciate me helping you, or was I just there to make you feel better?"
"I don't…that makes no sense whatsoever. Of course I appreciated you," Adrian said. He forced himself to sound authoritarian. "And I really don't like your tone of voice, young lady."
"Well you could have fooled me," Sharona growled, "After all, you're always right and I'm always wrong!"
"I never said that!"
"You just as much said it with every gesture you made!"
"I don't talk without speaking, if that's what you're getting at."
"Once again, you're blissfully and completely out of it, Adrian! Not to mention you still have no concern for my feelings!"
"OK, that's it, you're, you're grounded missy," Adrian said with poorly forced anger, "No, no TV, no computer, no nothing until Christmas. Now come on out of there and go to your sector. You're grounded."
"Oh yeah? Why don't you come in and make me?" Sharona dared him. Adrian stood and stared at the door. There was now way he could, even if he wanted to.