How Did an Anti-Corruption Board Fail?

Will County Sheriff Department, 14 E Jefferson St, Joliet, Illinois, 4:24 PM

The taxi stopped and Daniel and David left out of the right side of the vehicle. The cabbie drove off once she knew the duo was safe.

Daniel and David met up with badge number 444567, Linus Movian. Lin was 182cm tall and he had very short hair and there was a swirl on his head. His face was bare except for his short brow and lashes. He was Caucasian. His suit was neat and contained no dust whatsoever.

Dan presented his badge to Lin, and he showed the duo the way to the elevator to the Will County Anti-Corruption Board.

Dan and David bowed to Lin when they arrived at the elevators. Lin went back to wait in front of the building.

Dan took out his FORMAL security card and scanned it against the FORMAL scanner. It beeped and the doors opened. They entered the elevator and pressed the button that would make them descend.

The elevator moved downward and soon the door opened. The stench of cheap American beer attacked Dan and David without remorse, and they had to pinch their nostrils to try to survive this onslaught.

"Yo! Get rid of the booze, those guys are actually from formal." Peter Juice spoke in a drunk manner. He was 159cm tall, wore a green suit and an orange shirt with white petals decorating it as well as vomit that presumably came from his mouth. His eyes were bloodshot, and his irises were a strangely shiny blue. He had a five a clock shadow and his bronze hair was 22cm long, and it swung about wildly as he spoke.

"Shiiiiiiit..." Stated a male voice from somewhere to their left, the owner was hidden somewhere nearby, probably stumbling about drunk near one of the many pillars supporting the sheriff's office above. "You can't be serious."

PJ stood up and straightened his clothes and put on a jumper over his suit to cover the vomit and hide the stench. "Damn, this is embarrassing." Peter added.

Izaiah Unity finally emerged from the pillar he was hidden behind and started gathering the beer cans and bottles as well as the wrapping and boxes from the chips, burgers and hot wings that they had been eating earlier and the scents from those things mentioned above were intermingling the scent of beer to create the most horrid stench imaginable. "Geez guys." Izaiah sputtered drunkenly in a deep voice, and he sounded slightly fatigued. It seems that his alcoholism had taken him out of it.

Izaiah was 165cm tall, with blonde hair that looked messy, as if he just rose from his bed.

David and Dan stared at them with disappointed expressions painted on their face. This is not what they envisioned this place looking like. What was supposed to be a sophisticated office with neon borders around the screens producing the results of the video feeds from cameras put into place in houses under investigation was now a toxic dump nightmare.

"Wait..." David noted. "Isn't there supposed to be three men in here?"

"Oh?" Izaiah noted. "Where's *hic* George?"

"Didn't he, like, go to the toilet about two hours ago?" PJ answered as he checked his Rolex.

David sighed. "I'll go check on him." He then went off toward the restrooms.

"So," Dan said as he picked up a slimy pizza slice that was on the ground nearby. The cheese slid off as he held it. "Did you guys have a fun party today?"

"Yeah." Peter stated. "But we didn't think anyone would come down here."

David came back, carrying George Pascal's limp body over his shoulder, "He's still breathing, thank goodness. Do you guys have a first aid kit? He seems to have sliced his head on the toilet seat. You'd think those plastic things would be less dangerous but look at that cut." David relayed.

Daniel looked at the wound. "Oof. I'm not even a medical doctor and even I can tell that's bad."

Izaiah sobered up quickly and grabbed the first aid kit from the kitchen cabinet and brought it back. David took off his jacket and wrapped it around George and started cleaning the wound. "How about a sowing kit?" David asked.

"You're going to stitch him up? Here?" Peter stated with shock.

"No, I need scissors to cut off some of the padding in the box, it's best that we get this wound covered. Trust me, I am first aid certified." David explained.

Peter nodded and grabbed a pair of scissors.

David dressed the wound neatly. "Someone called 911. He'll have to get that wound stitched, it's too big to heal by itself."

Izaiah called an ambulance and now they just had to wait for its arrival.

"Good job David." Daniel stated.

"Like you couldn't have helped. I just saw you standing there watching me." David relayed.

"Well, I don't have the same first-aid training you do. You've been doing that for years." Dan stated.

"Oh, I see. You didn't want to get in the way and potentially make the situation worse, good call." David stood up and grabbed Peter's collar. "As for you, you have some explaining to do, Izaiah too."

"Woah man, there's no need to be aggressive." Peter replied.

David let go of PJ's collar and got a chair and helped him sit down. "There, happy?" David asked. Peter nodded. "Now, PJ, we are going to ask you some questions and you'll answer honestly, you don't want to know what I do to liars."

Peter gulped and nodded.

"Did you receive reports on Adrian Deux?" Daniel inquired.

Izaiah sat himself on a different seat. "Seven." He stated.

"When did you get your first notification that something may have been amiss?" Dan asked.

"That was before Izaiah and my time. Only George was around back then, but it was in 1997, just after he graduated, but he didn't have stable housing so George and the two others who were on the board back then monitored him via the hotel cameras of the hotels he stayed at." Peter relayed.

"We learnt recently that he now has stable housing." David added. "Would you happen to have cameras set up in there?"

"We do." Izaiah relayed. "They aren't official FORMAL cameras, but we paid in full for all of them so we could cover every possible angle, except the bathroom and toilet, we also had an alarm set up that would warn if both Veronica and Adrian were to enter a room we can't monitor by law. Of course, it's set to only trigger if they entered the same unmonitored room, so one could be in the toilet and one in the bathroom and the alarm won't trigger, because we ascertained that those rooms aren't connected, not even by a secret passage."

"I see, and how long was that ago?" Dan inquired.

"From the fourth report in 2001. So, five years ago." PJ stated. "Each report we received was followed by us watching the two for one week's worth of footage from the cameras."

Dan and David nodded in understanding.

"Now, can we see all those recordings?" David inquired.

"We only have the fourth week, the others got corrupted and were lost." PJ relayed. Things must have been heating up as he was now beginning to sweat.

"Really?" Dan stated and he put his hand to his chin. "What of the backups?"

"Gone." PJ relayed.

"Cloud saves?"

"A glitch disabled them; FORMAL fixed the bug but couldn't recover the saves." PJ states, trying to stay calm. But he felt like he was on the edge of breaking. Lancer was intimating by himself, but combined with the intelligence of Daniel Smith these two were an unstoppable duo.

Dan smiled and hopped onto the computer and typed into it, he took out a shimmering neon crystal from a container on the left side of his belt and lay it atop the keyboard. After some more typing Daniel was able to create four small windows producing fast forwarded segments of footage. The footage in each screen was exactly the same as the others, there was not a single difference between them.

Izaiah and PJ gulped and laughed a bit nervously. "What is that?" PJ asked, the sweat was slowly becoming a cartoonish waterfall.

"Oh, look, I found the footage from those other three weeks." Daniel relayed. "Strange that they show the exact same thing. I wonder if that is true for the whole 168 hours."

"T-T-There's N-N-No way..." PJ Stuttered. "How?"

David smiled smugly and gave PJ his famous stare. "Because he's goddamn Detective Dan." He stated. "Nothing ever escapes him. So, you better speak up, or we'll expose you all for the failures you are."

PJ began to cry.

"It was Adrian." Izaiah spoke. "No use hiding it anymore, the three of us are doomed anyway."

"What do you mean, Izaiah?" Dan inquired, quickly reading Izaiah's name tag so he knew what to say.

"Adrian said that if we kept him off FORMAL's naughty list, he could get us cheaper airfares and free travel along Illinois railing networks. He was able to keep his side of the deal, so we kept ours. We only kept the original week and every time we get a call to investigate him, we just make a copy of the footage, name it week two and have the first week mysteriously deleted by a bug. How you found a copy is beyond me." Izaiah explained.

"Did you have the impression that he was a bad person?" Dan inquired.

"No, he seemed nice, but the things he did, the actions he took, they were suspicious, but that deal was too good. So, we all agreed to take it. We are sorry we failed your organisation." Izaiah relayed.

"Whatever." David huffed. "You'll get your punishment later. So, what about what the cameras really recorded on weeks 2 through to 4?"

"We turned off the cameras after that initial week of the investigation." PJ cried. "There is no footage for those weeks."

"Perfect, just perfect." David added.

Dan removed the crystal and put it back from where it had come from. "Regardless of the results, I still believe this to have been a productive visit. Not only did you save a life Lance, but we were able to reveal the Will County Anti-Corruption Board for the corrupt place it is. Sort of ironic I must add." Daniel remarked.

"I couldn't have said it better myself." David added. "Literally. I don't have the same way with words that you do."

Dan smiled. "Anyway, we've had a long day. We should go hit the hay. Maybe do a little more research before falling asleep. But it seems we'll have to continue solving this case tomorrow."

"I'll make sure I'm up and ready for when that comes." David relayed.

Dan and David left the office and got separate taxis to separate hotels. Dan slept in an upscale place while David found lodging in a 3-star place.

Dan did a little research on his watch before going to bed. He found that despite being married, Adrian never wore his ring, he didn't want people knowing he was off the market. He also noted that the three women that had relationships with him that ended their own lives and Veronica, his current wife, were all different shades of brown. Adrian was almost as white as an Irishman. Could Adrian have been a racist abuser?

Daniel felt sick. He tossed and turned for a while before he could finally get his eyes to rest. What truths would be revealed in the morning? Daniel wasn't even sure if he wanted to get to the bottom of this anymore. But then he remembered, the train Adrian was on was derailed. He must solve the mystery, not for Adrian, but for those people who were injured so that the killer could remove Adrian from the world.