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talking.
    “I always wear earplugs in the club. See, I wear these,” she reached into her bag and dug out the earplugs that she’d been wearing that night. Reagan held them up for everyone to see. “I don’t want my hearing to get damaged while I’m filming the footage for my blog so I wear earplugs. Maybe we were exposed to something in the music or some type of sound signal or something.”
    “Hmm… We’ll have to test the CDs or records or whatever they used at the club for some type of signal,” Simms replied. “We hadn’t thought of that. Everything that we’d looked at so far was some type of chemical attack either through the drinks that people consumed or from some other means of delivery.”
    “Yeah, but that doesn’t make any sense about the animals all the way down in Alabama,” Reagan stated.
    “You’re right,” Agent Quintana said. “But there was only a slim possibility that the two were related anyways. It just seemed too convenient that both of them happened a few days apart. Maybe it is just a coincidence.”
    “Alright, seems like you’ve got some work to do. Is Miss Lockhart free to go?” the lawyer asked.
    “I believe so. Those were the two things that we wanted to ask her and she has given us a lead that we hadn’t thought about,” Simms replied.
    Erin stood up and said, “Let’s go, Reagan. Your father is in the lobby waiting for us.”
    Both officers offered to drive Reagan home, but she declined since her father was at the station. As she walked out into the waiting area, Garrett Lockhart stood up and rushed over to her. He wrapped her in a bear hug that left the girl in need of a big breath of air.
    “What was that all about?” he asked the lawyer.
    “It’s best that we leave and we can talk about it on the way back to my office,” Erin answered.
    “Okay, let me grab my jacket and we can be on our way. Are you alright, honey?”
    “Yeah, Dad. I’m fine. I just want to get out of this place and take a shower. I’m feeling really skeeved out by the place.”
    “Of course. Whatever you need, honey,” the older Lockhart said. He went to his chair and grabbed his jacket and book. When he returned to the two women he said, “Thank you for being there for us, Erin. When Reagan called and said that the FBI wanted to talk to her, I didn’t know what to do.”
    Several of the city’s residents, sitting within earshot of the trio in the waiting room, made comments about Reagan being a bad girl and other, less savory statements about her character since the FBI was involved. Erin Weston shot a worried look into the assembled group of people and said, “Like I said, it’s best if we talk about this out of the station. There’s a lot more privacy that way.”
    The three of them exited the police station quickly. The wind was already beginning to pick up and it carried a chill with it that seemed too cold for early October.
     

 
    SIX
     
    “Geez, that was a rough shift,” Pamela told her partner Andrew.
    “You’re tellin’ me. I can’t wait to get home and crack open a beer, let off a little steam, you know?” the officer replied.
    Pam and Andrew had been partners for a little over eight months. They worked the 4 p.m. to midnight shift five days a week, Friday through Tuesday, in the wild desert oasis of Las Vegas. There’d been maybe a handful of times since they’d been patrolling together that either one of them could legitimately say that they’d had a quiet night. The Vegas neighborhoods that they worked, just a few blocks from the strip, were anything but boring.
    They thought that they’d seen it all until tonight. Something was causing every dog and cat in the city to go insane. Maybe the heat had finally gotten to them, like the commissioner suggested, but it didn’t make any sense. What would cause all the animals in town to begin attacking people? Pam shuddered to think of the number of dogs that she’d been forced to put down in the past eight