Killer Market

As expected, the door was locked, but the second key that Dixie tried unlocked it. It took her a moment to find the light switch.

When the lights flooded on, we saw a large room, about twenty feet square, complete with drawing table, file cabinets, chairs, a cabinet full of colored inks and drawing pens. The Persian rug on the floor looked authentic and the prints that hung beside the door had been professionally framed by someone who valued them. Bookshelves ranged along one wall and were jammed tight with both books and loose-leaf notebooks. The ceiling followed the slant of the roof and the short wall held a full-length mirror framed in heavy ornate gilt.

A corkboard covered one whole wall from floor to ceiling and was thick with sketches, ads, old photographs, and scraps of papers with phone numbers, names, addresses and memos that had been hastily jotted down. All were dusty and curling at the edges.

Dixie peered inside the adjoining lavatory and ran her fingers lightly over the sink. “Dry,” she said, “but it doesn’t feel dusty.”

Yet the office itself had a neglected, abandoned air and had clearly not been cleaned in months.

The industrial-size wire wastebasket held candy wrappers, crumpled potato chip bags and wadded-up sketches of chests and chairs, but they could have been there for ages.

As Dixie splashed cold water on her face and freshened her lipstick, I smoothed out some of the sketches. Knowing nothing about furniture styles, I couldn’t tell if these were new or from a past season. But then I smoothed another sheet and saw two unmistakable faces. Drew might not have changed much in eighteen months, but Lynnette’s snaggle-toothed smile was quite recent.

“Look,” I said as Dixie emerged from the lavatory.

“This was hanging behind the door,” she said at the same moment.

It was a new green nylon tote bag with the logo of a waterbed company, identical to the one those Southern belles at Market Square had given Lynnette yesterday.

18

« ^ » “The necessity for a place to sleep, by its daily recurrence, has made the bed we use one of the most important subjects for consideration.”The Great Industries of the United States, 1872

“Did the police search this office?” I asked Pell when he rejoined us almost an hour later.

“Underwood knew it was here,” he reminded me. “They must have.”

“Savannah may be using the place occasionally,” Dixie said, “but where does she sleep?”

I threw up my hands in frustration. “If you ask me, she’s starting to sound like the Phantom of the Market. Drew says she pops up when least expected. Heather McKenzie says she went scurrying through the bowels of your building like Alice’s White Rabbit. And—”

“Of course!” Pell exclaimed. “Through the looking glass.”

“Excuse me?”

“I almost forgot about this.” He walked over to the large, gilt-framed mirror. “Years ago, she was grumbling about the lack of storage. The owners wouldn’t give her a bigger space, so she bribed one of the carpenters—”

He tugged at the mirror and it swung toward him on concealed hinges to reveal an open space between the wall of the office and the slanting roof. It was six feet tall at the doorway and several feet deep before rafters, studs and joists took over.

The storage space had been floored with rough plywood and Dixie and I immediately stepped inside, but it was much too dark to see anything beyond some sealed cardboard cartons. Heat had built up under the tin roof and the air was uncomfortably warm and stuffy.

“Look,” Dixie said and pointed to an electrical box down near the floor.

“That carpenter must have known a little something about splicing wires,” I said.

My brother Herman is an electrician and he would not have approved those exposed sockets, but the plug end of an orange drop cord lay on the floor beneath them and I could never resist an invitation. As soon as I plugged it in, a dim glow appeared about ten feet away.

Cautiously, Dixie skirted more cartons and walked through the hot still air toward the light. I was right behind her when she pushed aside some sheets that had been rigged to curtain off a small area. We found tote bags, a box of sketchpads and pencils, a bundle of winter clothes, and a deep mound of designer bed linens: sheets, comforters, blankets, and pillows (including a gold-tasseled black cushion) tossed together to form a human nest.

An empty human nest.

From behind us, Pell said, “Oh, my. You should have heard Jordan cuss when that whole Ralph Lauren setup went missing this winter. She thought one of the workmen stole those linens.”

As I turned to let him in, I saw numerous scraps of paper pinned to the curtain. Some had been clipped from Furniture/Today, a few were from the High Point paper, but most of them were pencil sketches done by Savannah. All but three were of Drew Patterson—Drew on Chan’s arm at a party, Drew and her father in a group at some Fitch and Patterson event, Drew’s lovely face smiling, laughing, full of mischief, serene and thoughtful.

The odd three were of Lynnette.

“I don’t think I like this,” said Dixie.

“I think we’d better call your friend David,” I said.

Detective David Underwood wasn’t in his office, but when I called his pager he returned my call within minutes, so I guess the three-five worked.