Unknown Means (7 page)

“No, I mean I don’t know why Mr. Markham bothers. He’s going to move out in a week or two anyway. I guess he just wants his stuff safe in the meantime.”

Evelyn leaned her arms on the marble countertop, feeling the weariness flow through her body. “Had they been planning to move?”

“No, it’s just because of the murder. He told Frank not to renew the lease—it’s up at the end of the month—because he never wants to come back to where Grace was killed. Can’t blame him, really. It would make my skin crawl.”

Evelyn pictured Grace’s body at their kitchen table. “I don’t blame him either. Do the officers know about that?”

“I guess so. Frank probably told them. It’s lucky for Mr.

Markham that the lease is almost up—we rent in five-year incre-

ments, so he’d lose a bundle if he moved out prior to that without at least a six-month notice.”

Enough about Grace. Evelyn wanted to learn more about Marissa’s attack. “How long has Robert Tenneyson lived here?”

“He was here when I started, and that was two years ago. I can look it up for you if you like.” When she deferred, he went on to tell her that the doctor seemed like a nice guy, worked irregular hours, and always gave him a Christmas bonus. The phone rang, cutting him off, and Evelyn stayed quiet while he took the call.

The woman’s voice still filtered, nonstop, out of the manager’s office. Justin transferred the phone call. Evelyn zoned out for a moment, lulled by the warm lobby, trying to remember the last time she’d seen her daughter. She hadn’t been home for dinner and had collapsed in bed by the time Angel entered the house, giggling after her date. The late-night phone call had dragged her out long before Angel had to get up for school, so it had been about thirty hours. No problem, really . . . Angel had school all day, and Evelyn’s mother lived next door, always ready to stuff her granddaughter with more calories than any teenage Cosmopolitan reader wanted to encounter.

“Justin,” she asked when he hung up the phone, “how many people work in this building?”

“There’s me, Terry, and Leroy on the desk. We rotate. There’s Frank, of course. Our maintenance guy is Gerard. He’s got an office off the garage. That’s it, really.”

“No cleaning staff?”

“Gerard takes care of the lobby and the stairwell and maintains the heating and air-conditioning. The tenants hire their own staff and make their own arrangements for them to come in and out, so that’s got nothing to do with us,” he clarified with something like relief. “That includes home improvements like paint or appliance installations—of course, that has to be approved by Erie Realty first, but on the whole the tenants are free to do anything they want as long as it doesn’t make too much noise.”

The building did seem pretty streamlined. Not a potted plant or even a piece of carpet took up space on the lobby’s white marble floor. Ditto for the sidewalk out front. “No valet parking?”

“Nope. That adds a lot of liability, I guess, so Erie just doesn’t do it. Besides, there’s only fourteen suites in the entire building. The garage has three floors, and that’s plenty.”

“No way from the garage into the building?”

“Only that door right there.”

“Such wealthy people don’t mind parking their own cars and carrying their own groceries?”

“Well, there’s me to carry stuff.” He grinned. “But our tenants are kind of more interested in being left alone than they are in being pampered. That’s why there’s no fitness center, no party room, no rooftop deck—just residences. It’s a quiet place. And they don’t have to haul too many groceries, they have people to do that. There are only three floors with children, and not even those families are into home cooking, I don’t think. There’s an elderly couple on four—he made piles of money in munitions during the Korean War—and they eat every single meal out. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner.”

Her stomach rumbled. “I can’t decide if that would be good or bad.”

“Oh, bad. Definitely bad. All the preservatives and additives in food these days, not to mention the sodium level in most prepared dishes.” He patted his textbook. “It’s amazing that stuff hasn’t given them four heart attacks apiece by now. Which would be a pity,

’cause they’re nice.”

“Are most of the residents nice?”

He thought. “Most are just in and out. We don’t interact enough for me to know.”

The door to the office remained closed. “What’s Erie Realty?”

“The owners’ group. That’s where Frank and Gerard send their reports. They pay our checks and manage our benefits. That’s why I

took this job—dental.” He tapped his two front teeth for her, apparently demonstrating some recent work. “That, and it gives me plenty of time to study, especially on weekdays, when it’s quiet.”

“Do they own any other buildings?”

“Sure, a bunch. They have the Crown Point place on Ninth, the Guarley Towers next to Jacobs Field, two office buildings side by side across the river, the Harrity in Euclid, a big complex out in Lakewood . . . and more than that, but I don’t know them all.”

“And here there’s just you and the other guys you mentioned?”

“Yep. Why, though? I mean, you don’t think—”

“At the moment I don’t know what to think, Justin. Could you show me where Gerard’s office is?”

He plunked a small “Be right back” sign on the counter and came around to the front. She cringed a bit when he plunged through the door to the parking lot, half-expecting the hovering monster that had attacked Marissa to be waiting, but the garage held only cars and the echoes of passing traffic. Justin led her to an unlabeled metal door in the southeast corner of the garage. She had left it covered in black fingerprint powder the night before.

A trim man with a graying beard and a uniform crouched in the doorway, backlit by the lights of his cluttered office. He tossed a blackened paper towel into a garbage can and tore another off the roll, then looked up at her. “I have you to thank for this, don’t I?”

“Sorry.” Don’t apologize, she scolded herself. You were doing your job.

“He couldn’t have gotten in here, anyway,” the maintenance man insisted. “I lock it when I leave. Did you find anything on it?”

“No.”

He straightened, then leaned over a set of three streaks, darker in color than the background. “What about these?”

“Those are smudges. They could have been left there by fingers, but they’re not distinct enough to be of any use to us. The paint has oxidized—it’s exposed to at least some of the elements—so it’s not a

very good surface for prints.” Most of the powder had wiped away, but some had worked its way into the porous paint. The door would have to be repainted if he wanted it to be clean.

“Then why did you have to stain my entire door if there was no chance of finding a fingerprint?”

“There’s always a chance.”

He rolled his eyes, then cleaned the smudges as best he could.

“Have you caught the guy who killed Mrs. Markham? Or grabbed that other girl?”

“Not yet.”

“Nothing like that has ever happened here before—at least that I know of, and I’ve been here seven years. You think the same guy attacked that girl out there last night?”

“We’re not sure yet.”

He threw away the paper towel and replaced the bottle of cleaner next to similar items. “Well, what do you know?”

“We’re investigating,” she said through gritted teeth. “And I need your help. I’m collecting oils.”

He blinked, his exasperation temporarily turning to confusion, and gestured at his overflowing shelves. “Well, I have WD-40—”

“Not right out of the bottles, because any contaminants—dirt or debris from the building—could be distinctive as well.”

The exasperation returned. “Then what?”

“I need to collect from places around the building, particularly entry and exit points. Lock mechanisms, hinges, that sort of thing.

Could you show me around?”

“I got a choice?”

“No,” she lied.

“Might as well. Not going to get any work done today anyway with you guys swarming around like mosquitoes.”

He didn’t seem like the type to volunteer information, so she made her questions specific. “I know there’s a side door to the alley at the end of the hallway behind Frank’s office. Aside from that

door, the lobby door, and the door to the garage here, are there any other doors into or out of the building?”

“Nope.”

“Is there a freight elevator?”

“Yeah, at the other end of the building.” He crossed his arms, gave another puffing sigh. “We use it to deliver large items like furniture. It opens into the stairwell at each floor.”

“And there’s only the one stairwell.”

“Yep.”

“Can I see that, please?”

“Sure.” He locked his door behind them, and they entered the lobby, where Justin had returned to his post. “But he couldn’t have gotten into the Markhams’ apartment that way. It would have set off the indicator light in the building manager’s office. I already showed the cops that, but I don’t know if they understood it.”

“What if Frank had gone to lunch when it lit up?”

“Doesn’t matter. The light stays on until you reset it.” He paused before a steel door labeled “Fire Use Only,” near the exterior door leading to the alley. A flight of small but clean stairs stretched upward, seemingly without end. The freight elevator doors sat to her right. “You really want to walk up ten stories?”

“Not particularly, no. I’m going to think of it as my exercise for the day.”

“Suit yourself.”

He began to climb, and she followed. Her knees let out squeaks of protest, beginning with the first step. “The door isn’t locked?”

“Of course not, in case of fire. And you can’t get into the penthouses from the stairwell anyway—each penthouse door is steel with huge dead bolts. You’d need a stick of dynamite to get through them.”

Gerard, she noticed as they approached the fourth floor, did not seem put out by the exertion. His breath did not come heavy, and his pace did not slack. I need to work out more, she told herself. “Do the tenants ever use the stairwell?”

“Only Mrs. Cameron on six. She’s kind of a health nut—she’ll walk up, set off the light in Frank’s office, and then call to tell him there’s no fire. It never occurs to her to let him know in advance. So then he frets, thinking maybe there is a fire and her smoke detectors aren’t working.” He snorted, passed another landing. “Frank worries a lot.”

“Is there a camera in here? In this stairwell?”

“One, on the first floor. We passed it when we came in. It’s motion-activated, since the stairs are hardly ever used.”

“So tenants could move around from floor to floor up here without being on camera.”

“And there have been tenants who have taken advantage of that little fact, believe me. Spouses often work conveniently long hours around here,” Gerard said—still not breathing heavily, damn him.

“Like who?”

“Geesh, don’t quote me. I don’t need to get fired here. Besides, I’m exaggerating—there was only one, and I only know about them because both couples divorced and moved out, a year ago. Besides, the camera idea was to protect from outside criminals—I imagine the designers figured there was no reason to be afraid of anyone rich enough to live here.”

She paused on the eighth-floor landing to take a breath, unable to keep up appearances for two more floors. “They may have been wrong about that.”

C H A P T E R

6

THE OFFICERS HAD ALREADY INVESTIGATED THE

stairwell, and she did not notice anything they might have missed. No debris. No dirt, save for a light coating of dust in the corners. The freight elevator doors sat closed and silent at each floor. All the apartment doors, including Grace’s, appeared undamaged. The fingerprint powder she had left there the day before had been removed.

“I washed that off. Did you have to cover the whole door in that stuff? Took me a half hour to clean off,” Gerard complained. He peered at a nearly invisible smudge remaining next to a hinge. “And I still couldn’t get it all.”

A man with a neat streak. Normally she would wonder where he’d been all her life, but under his fierce glare she hoped that, wher-ever Gerard had been, he would stay there.

The Markham crime scene had been surgical-suite clean. Was that a clue, or merely the joint result of Josiela’s talents and a very quick murder?

“So did you get any vitally important clues after ruining my door?” he asked.

She didn’t point out that, if the killer had entered this way, either he had a key or someone had let him in. “I see what you mean

about the dead bolts. He’d have to use a bazooka to get it open without a key.”

“There’s always Dial M for Murder.”

She grinned in surprise. Perhaps she and Gerard had something in common besides a bent for cleaning. “The husband gives the killer his key and gets it back afterward?”

“Or the husband gave the killer Grace’s key and he put it back in her purse before he left.”

“But he’d have shown up on the stairwell surveillance tape.” She didn’t add that the stairwell door had been locked behind him—impossible if the killer had left Grace’s key—because she did not know which facts the police might want to hold back. Instead she turned her face to the ascending steps. “Okay. Onward and upward.”

“You’re going farther?”

“I need to see all of it. There’s only five more floors, right?”

The stairwell ended at a door, heavy with a bank-vault-quality dead bolt. Gerard pulled a set of keys from a deep pocket, and they emerged onto the roof.

There are worse places to be than fifteen floors up on a temper-ate day. They had even hit a dry-weather moment, a lucky break during a Cleveland spring. Water pooled across the asphalt expanse.

In the distance, through a short forest of air vents and other duct-work, the hazy blue lake spread into nothingness. Traffic below melded into a low hum, and the Terminal Tower gleamed in the distance, stolidly holding its own against the upstart BP and Marriott structures. She took a deep breath, tasting the rain, lake water, fish and oil scents in the air, then headed for the edge. Gingerly. Heights could be scary, but she loved the view.