Test some of the Items

An hour later found Daniel at his apartment. It was a nice little one bedroom afair, neat and tidy just like him. It was in a good neighborhood in a nice part of Miami, low crime, mostly afluent neighbors. They were friendly enough, but Daniel usually kept socialization to a minimum. He was more of an introvert and kept to himself when he wasn't on the job. To him, advancing his career and protecting the public were the most important aspects of his life, much to his mother's chagrin. She wasn't getting any younger, as she was so fond of telling him, and as the eldest child of three she expected him to have had a family by now. Daniel usually only nodded and pretended to listen to her incessant whining; some times he just wanted to strangle her just to shut her up.

The detective shook off such dark thoughts and focused on the matter at hand. He had pushed the couch and coffee table to the sides of his living room, and in the center of the floor was the briefcase along with all the items that had come with it. He had included both the pawn shop items as well as the things found in Jewel's pack. All in all they looked like an ordinary collection of junk, but he knew they were more. Much, much more.

Unfortunately, for some strange reason, the items had stopped working. When he got into Jim's car outside Hidden Treasures, Daniel had tried to use the map to find some of the addresses of the customers who had bought the items. Yet try as he did, he could not get the map to show him anything. The strange red circle that highlighted the destination refused to appear on the aged paper. Frustrated, he looked in the evidence box and found the airplane ticket. He placed it onto the dashboard, fully expecting it to float as it usually did, only to find that gravity had somehow managed to affect it again as it remained firmly flat. He then attempted to use the paperclip to make some coins float, but it too remained unmoving.

Daniel deduced that since the objects stopped working as soon as he returned from the pawn shop, then it could be that one of the items he had taken was interfering or even nullifying the powers of the other objects. Now the question was which one of the pawn shop items was doing it? He had arranged all the items in neat rows on his living room floor, and had spent the better part of an hour just staring at them.

The best way to find the nullifying item was probably to test each and every one of the objects one by one, perhaps moving it away from another item like the paperclip and seeing if it would work. The problem was that he didn't know the range of the thing he was trying to find; it could be a few feet, or it could be several miles. Frankly, driving around town testing one item at a time seemed extremely time consuming.

"Which one of you is it?" He asked aloud.

It was at that moment that his cellphone vibrated, rattling loudly on the nearby counter top. Daniel cursed and went to pick it up. He had kept it on silent and left it inside Jim's car for the better part of the day. After checking it, he found seven new messages. Three were from his mother, which he deleted without listening to, and the rest were from his captain. Daniel sighed, then dialed the captain's number knowing that he was in for an earful.

After the incident on 22nd Street, his captain, a gruff former marine who frowned even when he was happy, had ordered him to take a few weeks off and see the department psychologist. Daniel did not follow those orders, returning to work the following day and acting like twenty two officers didn't just die in a horrific firefight the previous day. The captain was quite livid. It was now obvious that the captain had heard that Daniel had been at work today as well, and was most likely pissed off at the fact.

Before the old man could start his screaming, Daniel spoke up, apologizing for his behavior and telling his captain that he would take a few weeks off to "get his head straight." His superior was silent for a moment, obviously not expecting the young detective, who though bright was quite stubborn when he wanted to be, to acquiesce so easily.

"Uh, good," the captain stated over the phone, sounding both annoyed and relieved at the same time. "I'm not trying to be an asshole, Sihn, I know you just wanna get to work and not let what happened get to you. But you just went through something completely fucked up, son. You saw Jim and a lot of other good men and women die. That'll affect you no matter how tough you think you are. So take an easy, you hear me? Rest up, clear out your demons, then come back to work when you're ready. Got it?"

"Yes, sir. Understood."

"Good." The old man quickly hung up.

Daniel put the phone in its charger, then turned his attention to the items on his floor. At least now he had much more time to devote to finding the strange objects.