The Fifth Dectective

Prologue

Take a coin, a penny, quarter, euro, franc, whatever kind you want. When you flip it, the chance of it landing heads up is 50%. The chance of it landing on tails is also 50%. And if you were to do this test, let's say, about a thousand times, the results would be more or less 500 times heads and 500 times tails. Now the chances of the coin landing on neither heads or tails is impossible, however, if you were an expert coin flipper and have an incredible amount of luck, you maybe, just maybe, might be able to get the coin to land on its side.

When asking your friends to go out to grab a bite to eat with you, the chance of one of them saying yes is very likely. If you didn't ask many friends, the chance of all of them saying yes fairly likely also. The chance of all of your friends saying no is unlikely too, however, if you never had any friends to begin with, the possibility would be 100%. Or if you did have a ton of friends and all of them said no, maybe it would be time for you to find some new friends.

When living on a ten acre piece of land, the chance of finding a two feet by two feet trapdoor hidden under a carpet is 1 in 217,880, exact. If you narrow down the search to only indoors, which, let's say is 4 acres, your odds become 1 in 87,120, which is still pretty depressing. If you narrow the search down even more to just carpeted areas, which we'll say is one acre, your odds are still at 1 in 21,780. You might still think that these odds are just awful, but look on the bright side, at least you're not at the 1 in 217,880 chance of finding the trapdoor you started with.

Now, continuing with our hypothetical situation, let's say that you searched 100 square feet of carpeting each day. The odds of you finding the trapdoor would be anytime from day 1 of your search to roughly around day 2178 and 19.2 hours, where you would be thirteen and two months older than when you started searching for the trapdoor.

On the 58th day of the third year at 2:00 a.m., Kyle Benedict found that trapdoor, though it was completely unintentional. In fact, it was a combination of a heavy suitcase and environmental science that led the confused detective to find the hidden door.

Turns out, the odds of damp wood rotting in a few years is 100%.

***

The suitcase went down first.

It was as if an invisible force had suddenly pulled it downward into the abyss below. That invisible force was gravity, though Mr. Benedict didn't realize it until it was too late.

It's debatable whether or not Mr. Benedict had zoned out or that he had just forgot to let go of his suitcase, but either way, he fell straight down into the suitcase sized hole created in the trap door. He was a rather big man, and falling through the trapdoor had creating a slight, man shaped hole over the suitcase shaped hole. It was much like how Alice fell down the rabbit hole, except a lot less graceful and a lot louder. And of course, "Alice fell down the rabbit hole" sounds a lot more interesting than "Mr. Benedict and his suitcase fell down a trapdoor".

Based on past experiences, however, even if someone were to hear Mr. Benedict falling through the floor of the west wing at two in the morning, it was almost guaranteed that nobody would say anything.

Mr. Benedict always had a rather severe case of insomnia. Actually, it was more of a case of insomnia combined with frequent wild hallucinations. It had always been described as a paradox of whether it was the insomnia that caused the hallucinations or the hallucinations that caused the insomnia. In the early mornings, Mr. Benedict was often seen sleeping in the most random places, such as the on top of a table, on the balcony, or in the bathtub. It was ironic that he never slept in a bed. And now, the interesting thing was that Mr. Benedict would have these continuous nightmares in his sleep, always rolling back and forth wherever he was sleeping. There was even one incidence where he crashed a bridge party by somehow rolling off past the second floor banister and landing smack in the middle of the parlor beneath it.