Too Hot to Breathe

Two Might Be a Coincidence...

The Police were informed rather quickly, and it wasn't by me. Atkins and his partner showed up, asking all kinds of questions to me, and most of them were ones that I couldn't answer. The ones I could, I chose not to, simply because I wanted the investigation to be performed by me. 

At that point, I was stumped... I had no clue who was the killer. Baytress and Alam seemed innocent, but maybe Alam had taken care of Mr. Nature and Ulric was just a coincidence. At the same time, Demar could've ordered someone to take care of both robbers, to try and silence them. Demar Jr. could've also murdered Spiegel, thinking he was responsible for his father's murder, and then, when he found out his father was still alive, he tried to frame it on someone else, by murdering Ulric. 

Another theory was that Ulric, out of guilt, had committed suicide. Or he had accidentally drowned. Or maybe these were separate events and either Linda or Philip had decided to kill their teacher and Ulric had died because of something related to his family. And last but not least, they could've both been killed accidentally. Ulric drowned because he couldn't swim and Casey Spiegel had been poisoned by himself. I had read an article recently that proved that a car could be filled with benzene if it stayed exposed to the sun for too long, like after a long beach day. And since his windows were closed, the air conditioner had released the poison, killing him. 

"No, wait... That can't be right". I had a massive headache from the fight the day before. "Because..." I couldn't remember why, but there was no way these were accidents... At least not Casey's murder. "Was it because of his car? Did he say something that contradicted it? Were his windows open?". At that point, I felt like punching myself. The clue to solving this murder was deep inside my head, and I couldn't understand what was happening.

I waited a few hours for Maggie's first autopsy report. Fortunately, it actually showed me something that I wasn't expecting. Ulric had been poisoned with alcohol, and, quoting her, "If he hadn't passed out by yet, then he was dead already". However, since the actual cause of death had been drowning, we both concluded that someone had forced him into ingesting a lot of alcohol so that he'd be unconscious, something that several scratches on the inside of his throat showed. A bottle had probably been shoved through his mouth, forcing the liquid ingestion. 

After knowing this information, I asked several people in the beach, to know if they had seen anybody with Ulric, and some pointed me to a little shack where they claimed he had been. Entering such shack, I found his flip-flops and the bottle. I took a bit of DNA from the bottle and kept it to make sure that that was the bottle that had been used. After that, I searched around the shack a bit more, but I didn't find anything interesting, except for a floaty that I assumed had been used to carry unconscious Ulric to the ocean. I tried collecting fingerprints from it, but the handle had been slashed and taken, and the rest of it was soaking wet, meaning that there wouldn't be any fingerprints. 

Desperate for information, I talked to Ulric's family, but I uncovered nothing relevant, except for the fact that he didn't drink. He had been definitely murdered, but I still had no idea what was happening. 

I went back to the hospital, to check on Franklin Demar. He could be able to talk since he was in such excruciating pain (or at least I thought). When I arrived there, he was completely high on morphine. I tried asking him a few questions, but sometimes the answers didn't make sense, and some other times I couldn't even understand what he was saying. At least I knew he couldn't have murdered Ulric, so I had one less suspect. At that point, his sheets started to turn red and his heart rate started going down. I turned him over and noticed a tiny wound from where he was bleeding. It had the shape of a syringe. 

I yelled for a nurse, to help me. If his heart rate kept going down, he could die. Suddenly, the whole room was filled with a crash cart and several nurses, trying to aid each other and prevent his death. But it was no use. After a couple of minutes, I saw everybody leaving the room, carrying his dead body. Was it also an accident on his operation? No, it couldn't have been. Was he now the fifth victim? I didn't know. But I did know that two might be a coincidence...