He was tired... so very, very tired. The exhaustion in fact, was nearly overwhelming now and as he sat there in that hotel room on the 15th floor and recounted the events of that morning... he remembered why.

"I was practically falling asleep sitting at the table." He murmured when she asked what made him decide to return to his room. "I'd finally felt tired enough to sleep."

And he felt tired enough to sleep right then too. His head felt like lead, his eyelids heavy... a combination of mental and physical and emotional exhaustion that were now all rolled into one and they were hitting him full force. He took a sip from the cup of water the kind female detective had handed him moments earlier. It moistened his lips, which were so dry and had started to bleed from the past few hours of being constantly chewed on -- because he always chewed on his lips when he was scared or nervous. He glanced back up towards the woman, "Amy Keenerson" -- the name on her badge read -- and their eyes met. She'd seemed so tough and rigid when she'd entered the room... the picture of professionalism. And she'd met the stereotype of what he'd always imagined from a female detective. She was pretty and he'd noticed that right away... but she had an air of seriousness about her that he knew could only come from her line of work. As the hour had gone on he'd noticed a change. Her demeanor shifted. Her voice softened, her eyes showed emotions (even though she tried to hide them)... she seemed more human to him. Less like a professional and more like an individual. It wasn't a bad thing either. He knew she'd seen the same things he had and he might have been disturbed if he'd thought a person could see something like that and not feel anything at all. Especially when he had so many feelings running through his mind he thought his head might explode.

She'd walked into the room nearly an hour before and taken a seat across from him. Howie had left to go to a separate room with the male officer and once again he'd found himself alone. Far away from the only people he felt he could trust in this world. The woman had asked him to tell his story... exactly as he'd remembered it... and he'd spent the last hour recounting the events.

He'd told her about laying in bed all night after the argument with his mother on the phone and then about deciding at around 7:00 in the morning that he would go down to the coffee shop on the ground floor for some coffee. He had thought that maybe if he tried doing something other than laying in bed and thinking, he would be able to forget the horrible things she'd said to him. He told her about riding down in the elevator alone and stepping out into the empty lobby alone and walking to the coffee shop and sitting down at the table... alone. His whole life that morning had seemed filled with lonliness. And then the waitress had asked him his order and she'd stopped to chat for a few minutes and they'd talked and laughed and he'd been thankful to her for filling the lonely void if even for a short while. And then she'd brought his coffee -- black -- and he wasn't sure why he'd ordered coffee because coffee wasn't something he even liked... but he had and he sat at that table alone while a few other people (probably businessmen and women) milled about the shop, ordering their drinks to go and rushing off to whatever big meeting seemed to await them. And he'd found himself sitting there, drinking his coffee and he was tired... so tired... and he'd nearly fallen asleep at the table and because of this he'd finally gotten up and headed back in the direction of his hotel room in the hopes that he could finally sleep.

"And where did you go next?" She asked, her voice soft.

He looked at her and then down at his hands and then back up at her again. This was where it all began. This was where things turned from lonliness to madness... from an early morning cup of coffee just to take his mind off his problems... into a nightmare.

"I walked back into the lobby and rode the elevator back up to our floor." He said as he rubbed the hem of his shirt between his fingers.

"Did you see anyone... pass anyone on your way? In the lobby? The elevator?"

He looked at her then, just now thinking of the people he'd passed. The woman in the doorway of the coffee shop with the red purse and the sweet smile. He'd bumped into her causing her to drop her purse on the floor and he'd apologized as she reached to pick it up. She'd smiled at him assuringly and said it was no problem. The man at the front desk who was chewing on his ink pen... he hated when people chewed on their ink pens, but the man had nodded and said, "Good morning" and Nick had nodded back and replied the same in response. The little boy in the overalls who was trying hard to get away from his mother's grip. He'd kept begging for a doughnut as she'd hurried him across the lobby in a rush to get to wherever they were headed in such a hurry. And the man getting off the elevator. The man with the red baseball cap and the tan jacket and the scruffy beard. He'd bumped rudely into Nick as he hurried off the elevator but he'd just hurried around him and Nick had watched him leave the building as the doors closed together and he hadn't thought anything else about any of them.

He watched as detective Keenerson hurridly took down notes on a small pad of paper. Notes that may or may not be the key to finding this killer. And he wondered how many people he might have missed... was there someone there he hadn't noticed? A man all dressed in black with a gun hidden in his breast pocket and an evil sneer on his face perhaps. Or a clue somewhere he hadn't seen? He had to wonder. And if he'd only left the coffee shop a few minutes earlier... or if he hadn't gone at all. But then again, maybe if he'd done anything different he'd be dead... he didn't want to think about that.

"And when did you realize that something was wrong?"

"The moment the elevator doors opened and I heard them screaming?"

"Who was screaming?"

"Everyone was screaming."

But mostly he'd heard his brothers. Brian's scream was the first he'd noticed and then Howie's... they'd been together for nearly 15 years now. He would know those voices anywhere. He could hear them a dark room... in a sea of thousands... and he could pick them out. He'd heard Brian's screams and his heart had stopped because never before in his entire life had he heard one of his friends scream like that. They screamed a lot... sometimes like girls, and especially Brian when they pulled pranks on one another, but this was totally different, and totally terrifying.

"And where did you go?"

"I ran towards the room where I heard the screams. Brian and Aj's room." He wiped a tear from his eye. It had been a minute since he'd stopped crying and he guessed his body figured that had been long enough.

"What did you see when you arrived there."

"I couldn't see much. There were so many people crowded around and everyone was screaming for help and someone kept saying to call 911 and that's when I heard her scream... and that's when I ran to the other room."

And this was the part that he most feared remembering.

"Who is 'she'?"

"Cynthia Claron. Jim Claron's wife."

"And what did you do when you reached Cynthia?"

The tears were flowing faster now and he was doing his best to still the sobs that were building within him. This had been the worst part of the entire nightmare. This had been the moment his world and everything he'd ever believed in... that despite anything bad a person could do, that people were good... this was when it all came crashing down.

"I opened the door of their apartment." He took a breath. He knew what the next question would be... he knew it in his heart and in his gut and he knew he'd never be able to answer... not without losing it all again.

"And what did you see."

What did he see?

He'd seen his loss of faith in humanity. He'd seen it in the eyes of a dead man, lying on the floor in a mass of blood and guts and surrounded by evil. He'd seen things he'd never wished or dreamed or even imagined he'd see in his entire lifetime and things he could go infinite more lifetimes without ever seeing again.

"I saw Jim Claron dead on the floor."

And that was all he could say before his stomach protested even the thought of saying more and he had to excuse himself, leaving the room quickly to vomit the thoughts away.