Unknown Means (34 page)

Her mouth twisted in an irritated grimace. “Showed up at the convalescent center. I don’t know how he found out Craig was even in an accident, much less where he was. He even came to the trial of that rich bitch that destroyed my boy, but I couldn’t do much about that.”

“About her trial?”

“About him being there. I stopped him from coming to the care center, I told him the cops would be waiting for him next time he pulled into the lot, but I couldn’t do anything about a trial in a public courtroom. I didn’t want to make a fuss, not there. I thought that bitch’s attorney would use it against us, say Craig was from a dys-functional family . . . Which of course he was, but that didn’t make it okay for her to walk just because she had money. But I wasn’t going to let him sit next to Craig’s hospital bed and whisper all his sick thoughts into my child’s ear. Don’t look at me like that,” she warned Riley. “You think I’m vindictive. I don’t care. Craig is my responsibility, not John.”

“I don’t think that, ma’am.” Riley spoke with unusual solemnity, or perhaps simple exhaustion. “In light of recent events, you may have been right all along. More right than you realize.”

She blinked at him, as if recalling how the conversation had begun. “What do you think he’s done now? You think he killed somebody?”

David hesitated. “Ma’am—now keep in mind we can’t be sure about this, yet—we believe your ex-husband may be responsible for a series of rapes over the past four years.”

She went still. Then in one movement she stood, swept up her overloaded tote bag in one hand, and strode off toward baggage claim.

David hurried to keep pace with her. He didn’t mind walking; it would keep the blood flowing. “Ma’am, I know that must be an up-setting thought.”

“You don’t have any idea what it feels like, for a woman to hear that.” She would not look at him. Riley paced along on her other side but said nothing.

“I’m sorry to have to hit you with this, when I’m sure you’re tired from your trip. But—”

“You’re wrong. You have to be wrong.”

“Look, ma’am—”

“He’s crazy, but not that crazy.”

“Joan.” He took one elbow in a firm grip and stopped, whirling her in a ninety-degree arc. The tote bag swung and nearly took him out. “It’s not your fault.”

Nothing moved in her face for a moment; then it began to crumble. “Yes, it is. I should have known. I should have followed him, figured out exactly what he was doing, I should have forced him to go to a shrink, I should have slit his throat in the middle of the night if it could have prevented this.”

“It’s not your fault,” he repeated. “Why don’t you sit down?”

“I don’t want to sit down! I want to go back in time and kill the bastard the minute he walked into my geometry class in high school, that’s what I want to do!”

“Joan, where can we find him?”

“I don’t know.”

Riley stood between her and baggage claim. “Ms. Sinclair—”

“There’s nothing I would like to do more than get him behind bars,” she insisted. “Maybe then I could take an easy breath. But I don’t know where he is. I haven’t seen him since the trial.”

The older cop flipped open a notebook. “What’s the last known address?” He wrote it down in careful letters as she spoke, raising her

voice over the hum of a transport cart going by. Then he asked,

“What does he do for a living?”

Joan Sinclair scratched one cheek, where her tan had already begun to peel. “He works on elevators.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know, now. He got fired from his old job about the time I said good-bye, because of those complaints at work.” The lines around her eyes softened just a bit. “The only thing he’d talk to Craig about, besides sex, was mechanics. Craig rebuilt that engine in his car, the one he drove that night. I sure as hell hope that’s the only characteristic he’s inherited from his father.”

C H A P T E R

34

EVELYN LEFT ED TO EAT HIS BREAKFAST AMONG THE

compressed-air tanks and returned to the lab. Tony had been annoyingly efficient for once and had locked his office, cutting her off from the computer with Internet access. She picked up the phone book and turned to Elevators—Parts and Service. To her surprise they had twenty-four-hour service centers, no doubt a comfort to riders stuck between floors in the middle of the night.

David would, no doubt, find out Craig’s father’s name, address, and occupation as soon as Mrs. Sinclair stepped off the plane, but just in case the flight got diverted, or Mrs. Sinclair didn’t know her husband’s current whereabouts, or she had downed one too many margaritas and missed her flight from Cancún . . . Evelyn pulled the telephone toward her.

There were only nine companies, but halfway down the list she found E-tech, the name embroidered on Jack’s shirt at the Riviere.

She could not remember if the man at the salt mine had had a logo on his, but the color had been the same.

“Hello,” a young woman answered, sounding entirely too perky for the wee hours. Evelyn wondered if the customer service department might be in India—where it would be lunchtime—but the girl’s accent sounded purely midwestern.

“Hi. I’m calling about the Riviere apartment building in downtown Cleveland.”

“What is your customer number?”

“No, I don’t work for the Riviere. I want to know who you have working there.”

Even over the phone line, the girl’s silence sounded baffled.

“I mean if someone got stuck or something, what’s the name of the guy you send there to get them out?”

“You’re stuck in the elevator? I’ll have to page the mechanic on call.”

“No, I’m not stuck. I’m saying if someone were— Look, you employ the man who fixes and maintains the elevator in the Riviere apartment building in Cleveland, Ohio, right?”

“I really can’t tell without the customer number.”

“Can’t you look it up by the name of the building?”

Silence again. “I suppose I could try.”

“Thank you.”

“But we don’t usually do it that way. We usually have a customer number.”

“Just this once. Please.”

It took ten minutes of listening to the girl breathe into the phone, to pages flipped with impatience, and a keyboard tapped at a rate of perhaps ten words per minute, but finally the operator said,

“Yes. We have one elevator at the Riviere—on West Tenth Street?”

“That’s it.”

“Wow. I never knew you could do that, look it up by the name.

Peggy, did you know you can look up jobs by the name of the building?”

“Now, what is the name of the guy who works for you at the Riviere?”

“—yeah, I didn’t know that either. I’m sorry, what did you ask?

Who is our regular mechanic there?”

“Yes.”

“I wouldn’t know. You’d have to call the local office. Why do you want to know? Do you have a complaint?”

Lightning crossed the sky in a hissing crack, and the overhead lights flickered. Great, Evelyn thought. That’s all we need, a three-story building full of dead people and no power. “No, no complaint.

I need to know who works in the building. Who do you call if someone gets stuck?”

“Are you stuck?”

“No! But if someone were—”

“Then it would be the guy on call.”

On call. She and Marissa rotated weekend calls, coming in on Saturday and Sunday mornings if a homicide or suicide victim had to be autopsied that day. “So that might not be the guy who’s there every day?”

“Well, he wouldn’t be there every day anyway. The building would be on the regular mechanic’s route. He probably comes in every week or two to do maintenance, or if the building calls with a problem.”

“And that wouldn’t necessarily be the same guy you call if someone is stuck?”

“Right, that’s whoever is on call. This week it’s John Tufts. I’ll page him. What elevator are you stuck in?”

“I’m not stuck!”

“Then what do you need service for?”

“I don’t need service. I just wanted to know the name of the guy.

Look, never mind. I’ll call the local office in the morning.”

“You don’t need immediate service, then? I can cancel the page?”

“Yes, cancel it.”

“Okay. Anything else I can do for you?”

“No.” Evelyn rubbed her forehead with a sore palm. “Thank you.”

“Thanks for using E-tech!”

“Wait!”

“What?”

“How do the repairmen get into the buildings? I mean, if someone was stuck—”

“Are you—”

“No, I’m not stuck! But if someone was and it was late at night, how could they get into the building?”

“Peg, get this. Now she wants to know— Oh, sorry. Um, let me think. Any place that would call for twenty-four-hour service would be a place like a hospital or a hotel, and they would have a doorman or a lobby open twenty-four hours.”

“What if it didn’t?”

“It depends on what kind of facility it is. They might have a key to the maintenance unit, or at least the public areas so they can get to the maintenance area. Or we might have to wake the building super up. Why are you asking all this? Are you sure you don’t have a complaint?”

“What about from the roof?”

“Ma’am,” the girl said wearily, “machine rooms are usually on the roof. If you see a guy walking on the roof of your building, there’s nothing wrong with that.”

“They would have keys to those rooms?”

“Of course. So they can get in and fix the elevator.”

From the roof. Evelyn pondered this so long that the girl let an impatient huff out into the receiver, then asked if there would be anything else.

“No, I don’t think so. Thank you.”

“Thanks for using E-tech. Peggy, you won’t believe this one—”

“Wait!”

Across the line, she could hear the gears turning in the girl’s mind. Pretend you didn’t hear her, and hang up . . . Professionalism won out. “Yes?”

“Does your company also service Gold Coast Apartments in Lakewood, Ohio?”

Sigh. The novelty of looking up a job by the building name had worn off in no uncertain terms. “Let me check.” After several more minutes of page turning and keyboard tapping, she said, “No.”

“No? You’re sure?”

“Yes, ma’am. Will there be anything else?”

“Metro General Hospital.”

“We have a lot of hospitals,” she admitted. “Let me see . . . yes.

No.”

“No?”

“We have the service and passenger elevators in the new wing only. So it depends which elevator you’re talking about, whether it would be ours or not.”

Close enough. An E-tech guy still had opportunity to become familiar with the hospital and its exits. “How about the Alexander salt mine on Front Street, in Cleveland?”

“A what?”

“A salt mine.”

“They get salt from mines? I always thought they, like, evaporated it out of seawater or something like that.”

“Do you have it?”

Long pause. “Yes. We have two mechanics assigned there, John Shea and Mike Yugama.”

So the two green uniforms she’d noted had come from the same company. The same men didn’t work at both Grace’s building and the salt mine, but both could have visited either place during their on-call rotation.

But then, so could any of the elevator mechanics. “How many men do you have working for you in the Cleveland area?”

“I don’t know,” the girl snapped. “Probably about thirty.”

Still, it narrowed down the suspect pool. “Thank you.”

Click. Not even a “Thank you for using E-tech.”

Evelyn rubbed absently at the healing abrasion on her palm. The evidence pointed to a mechanic or maintenance man, someone who

knew the back ways of a large facility, ways to get in and out without catching the attention of its occupants. Elevator men would also be familiar with the roof access doors.

David would learn all this, very shortly, from Craig’s mother, but Evelyn couldn’t keep her restless mind from pursuing it as well.

Grace’s elevator repairman—Jack, which could be a nickname for either of the two Johns mentioned—had told her right off that he could have gotten into Grace’s apartment. Why hadn’t she listened?

He’d also said he wasn’t working in the building that day, but he could have lied. Had anyone verified that? Even if he hadn’t killed Grace, any one of his coworkers could have. Any one of them could get in and out of the Riviere without being seen—through the roof or, if they could get into the building, up the back staircase.

Evelyn pictured what she could remember of the top of the elevator—after all, she’d been trying not to look at it at the time.

From the machine room, the killer could have jumped out of the controller to move the car to the right floor, riding on the top—he couldn’t get down the shaft without a ladder, unless he actually slid down the cable . . . which would leave cable grease on his hands and clothing. Perhaps that was how Grace got that smear on her arm.

Then through the hatch into the top and into the apartment.

But how would the doors open without the code?

Tenants entered the code when they got into the elevator at the lobby. Once the elevator reached the right floor, the doors opened automatically. The killer could leave after the murder by doing the same thing in reverse, if he left the hatch ajar so it could be opened from inside the elevator. He’d kill Grace Markham, call the elevator, get in it, and climb up and through. There would be no chance of finding another tenant in the car when he went to leave, and the elevator would simply arrive at the lobby apparently empty. Justin or one of the other doormen might notice that, but they might not.

The killer knew Grace, would have stalked her, riding on top of the elevator and listening to his potential victim. People discussed

anything in elevators, believing that they were alone. Grace and William could have spoken of the upcoming pregnancy, the safe combination she could never remember, what time he had to leave for work.