It was a half hour later when Lieutenant Randall Disher came strolling through the apartment door to find it swarming with police. "Monk?" he called to the detective, who was still throwing cleaner on the carpet, "The captain's on his way; he had me call the theater Natalie's at. You OK?"

"Oh fine, wonderful, never better. Here," Adrian handed him a second can of cleaner, "You start at that end, and I'll meet you in the middle."

Disher glanced slowly down at the carpet, which was now so completely covered with mounds of white cleaning powder that it now looked as if it had snowed inside the apartment. The lieutenant's gave fell on the still uncovered corpse. "Oh boy," he grimaced, "Not Arthur Schmidt."

"I guess so," Adrian said, evening out several mounds of cleaner with his foot, "Who is he by the way?"

"Haven't you ever done business with Schmidt and Hallett Financial House?" Disher asked him, "Everyone else in the city has. He took over every other small banking business in town over the last ten years. Anyone would have wanted to kill him."

There was a rush of footsteps as a worried Natalie came tearing into the apartment. "Mr. Monk, what happened?" she asked him breathlessly.

"Oh, nothing major except for the dead body befouling my rug, but that's hardly worth mentioning," Adrian told her, dumping more cleaner into the corners of the apartment where no blood had been spilled, "Don't let Julie see the body."

"I dropped her off at a friend's before I got here," Natalie reassured him, "I'm just a strong about not letting her see dead bodies as you are. Do you need any help?"

"Of course I am," the detective said, "We're going to have to tear the whole building down because of this; that's going to take a while."

Before Natalie could respond to this, the familiar figure of Captain Leland Stottlemeyer appeared in the doorframe, this time with the lovely Linda Fusco on his arm. "Well, welcome to the heart of Monkworld," he told his date as if he were a tour guide, "Abandon all hope ye who enter. What've you got, Monk?"

"He's got Arthur Schmidt dead as a doornail on his rug," Linda strode forward toward the corpse, not looking upset at the dead man's fate at all. To the surprise of all, she rolled Schmidt's head upward with her foot and flashed an obscene gesture in his face, apparently not caring that there was no way he could see it being dead. "What was that for?" Disher asked her.

"For the time he lied to me about giving me a loan on my first house and used the money instead to buy out the bank my best friend's husband started, the son of a…!" the ending of Linda's sentence was abruptly muted out as a loud blast of heavy metal music from the floor above them. Adrian winced from it. "Could you keep it down up there, we're in the middle of an investigation down here!" he shouted out at the roof. "The Bentsens, Kevin's college cousins; he's renting out his apartment to them while he takes his mother to Veracruz this week," he explained to everyone in the room, "They've driven me crazy all week!"

The music stopped as quickly as it had begun. "So anyway, back on planet Earth," Stottlemeyer stepped forward and examined Schmidt's body, "What do you have on him so far, Monk? Did he tell you anything that could help before he went?"

"He did, but he didn't," Adrian explained. Before the captain could say anything about how contradictory this was, he squatted over the body, which had four large wounds on the chest and a gunshot to the neck. "He was stabbed first," he remarked, "You can tell because there's more clotting with the blood now than with the gunshot wound. But that's very interesting."

"What is?" Stottlemeyer inquired, checking over the visible blood stains on Schidt's neck and chest just to confirm his main man's observations.

These stab holes are all perfectly lined up," Adrian pointed to them. Indeed the wounds formed a perfect square on the right side of Schmidt's chest. "Plus, they all go straight in, like he was stabbed head-on. If it were a knife, they would be at an angle depending on how the murderer would be holding the knife. Why are they like that?"

"It might have been a vampire attack," Disher abruptly blurted out. Everyone around turned very slowly to look at him. "Well, it is after dark," the lieutenant said quickly, "You never know who you'll find in back alleys."

"Don't you think a vampire would go for the neck rather than the chest?" Natalie pointed out to him.

"Well, he could have tripped as he started to attack him, and the fangs could have gone into the chest while…" Disher theorized.

"Stop, all right, just stop!" Stottlemeyer held up his hand, "It was not a vampire that killed Arthur Schmidt, Randy, so put that whole thought out of your mind!"

"Well if his corpse rises back up and tries to suck our blood we'd…" Disher started to say, but a growl from his superior convinced him to revise his statement to, "I'd better call Schmidt's wife and tell her we've got her husband's body here."

He strode toward the hall. "It wasn't a bite that got him either," Adrian explained to everyone still left, "These stab wounds go in too deep to be caused by fangs. Something else was run into his chest, something long and sharp."

"Well, that narrows it down to just about every…" Stottlemeyer started to say, but then noticed Disher walking back into the apartment not more than ten seconds after he'd left. "Lieutenant, did I not ask you to call Mrs. Schmidt?" he had to ask.

"I did sir," Disher told him, "I got her on the line and told her that her husband was dead, and she said 'Good' and hung up on me."

"Who could blame her?" Linda remarked, glaring down at Schmidt's body, "It's no secret that he was seeing other women for the last five years. One of my clients divorced his wife because she gave into advances by this son of a…"

Another blast of loud music suddenly exploded from Kevin's apartment above, once again covering up her final epitaph. Even Stottlemeyer was wincing from this latest acoustic intrusion on the investigation. "All right then, Lieutenant, go up and tell them they need to be quiet up there," he instructed Disher, "Then go up the street and see if anyone else saw Schmidt coming here."

Disher nodded and sauntered off. It was about two minutes later when the music ground to a halt again. "So anyway," the captain continued once it was all quiet again, "If the wife hated him that much, I think we've got ourselves our first suspect. In the meantime, we can analyze the bloodstains to see if that can help us with anything."

"We can't. There are no more bloodstains, Captain," one of the officers pointed to the overly clean floor. The blood had been completely cleaned off. Stottlemeyer turned slowly toward Adrian and put his hands on his hips. "Nothing anyone else would have done," Adrian tried to rationalize, "You can have the rug anyway, though; no way I'm ever using it again. Just wrap it in plastic first; I can give you some. "

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It took about a half hour for the other police in the room to fully wrap up the rug in enough plastic to satisfy Adrian—using up two and a half rolls of the plastic he'd had stored under the sink (fortunately he'd stocked up on enough backup rolls). Every one of them had to strain together to carry it out into the hallway Disher returned just as this was being done. "Captain, we found Schmidt's car crashed in the alley two blocks up," he told Stottlemeyer, "Witnesses saw him swerving all over the place before he hit the wall."

"Tell me you've got some blood we can use?" the captain had to know.

"Yes," Disher nodded, "It was all over the front seat. You want to know what else we found?"

He paused for a long time. "Yes, of course I do, please spit it out!" Stottlemeyer reprimanded him.

"There was an old rifle of some kind on the floor, looked like it was from the 1800s or something" Disher explained, "We're not sure what it was doing there, but it definitely looked out of place."

"Well, we'll have to go get a good look at it, right Monk?" Stottlemeyer asked the detective, only to find him spraying even more cleaner on the now bare floor on parts that had been directly underneath the bloodstained part of the rug. The captain rolled his eyes and strolled over to the window, where Linda was surveying the cruisers parked below. "Again, I'm sorry we had to cut dinner short for this," he told her with genuine sympathy.

"It's no problem," she said, clearly having no problem with events having played out the way they had, "The day was slow anyway. Maybe we could finish tomorrow at lunch."

"Can't," Stottlemeyer shook his head, a very disappointed look on his face, "I forgot to tell you earlier, they want me back in court tomorrow morning. I have no clue what they want now; I thought we settled everything already with..."

He growled again, a pained expression on his face. "I know, these things just keep going on and on just when you think they're over with," Linda nodded in agreement, "My ex's lawyer, that son of a…"

The music from upstairs exploded on again without warning, muting out anything else she had to say. Adrian winced and dropped to the floor with his hands over his ears. "Mr. Monk, why don't we step out for a minute?" Natalie took his wrist and gently led him outside and down the stairs to the street, where he slowly stopped hyperventilating. "I swear, we need to get them one of these days," the detective complained, glancing up at what was normally Kevin's window, "What they do is so un-American."

"Well, anyway, are you going to be all right by yourself tonight, Mr. Monk?" she asked him.

"Absolutely not," he shook his firmly, "I told you earlier, we're going to have to tear down the whole building, burn the rubble and rebuild from scratch."

"Just because Arthur Schmidt got a little blood on your rug?" Natalie shook her own head.

"Hey, if everyone else in the building pitches in, we could have it back up to normal in six months, easy," the detective pointed out, "In the meantime, I'll need you to clear out everything from your spare bedroom, since I'm going to…"

"Mr. Monk, you are not moving in with me again!" she told him firmly, "Once was enough for that!"

"Well I can't stay here!" he cried, "How would you feel if someone barged in on you and…sorry, don't answer that," he raised a sheepish hand after realizing that it was something similar to this that had brought Natalie into his employment in the first place.

"Mr. Monk, you have to realize this isn't going to kill you," she told him firmly, "And you can clean up whatever's left in there; I have faith that you can make that room spotless."

"You're right," Adrian nodded, "In fact, I should really go back in and finish now, or it'll take all week."

He went back into the building, still wincing form the continuing loud music. Natalie shook her head as she watched him go. "Well, at least he'll have it all over and done with by morning so we can move on with this case," she told herself out loud, "I hope."