“I’m sorry, Detective. He went sledding with some friends this morning. One minute they want to be treated like adults, the next minute they’re five-year-olds playing in the snow. Is it important?”
“That’s okay,” Hentz said easily. “It’s just routine. We’ll catch up with him later.”
“I’m sure he doesn’t know anything that could help you.” She stood as if to indicate that this meeting was over.
The others stood, too, but as she rose, Sigrid said, “Were you aware that the day man walked off the job this morning because someone took the elevator when his back was turned?”
Her brow furrowed. “I knew that Sidney was covering for Antoine, but I didn’t know why Antoine wasn’t here.”
“Is taking the elevator when it’s unattended something your son does very often?”
“They told you that? None of the men have ever complained to us about Corey’s behavior. Besides, we try to compensate with very generous Christmas bonuses.” She flushed under Sigrid’s steady gaze. “He’s only seventeen, Lieutenant. Adolescent humor is sometimes hard for adults to understand.”
CHAPTER
14
—
, 1909
SIGRID HARALD— SUNDAY (CONTINUED)
As they left the Wall apartment, Sigrid’s phone vibrated in her pocket and she glanced at the screen. Elaine Albee.
Once they were out in the hall with the door closed, she answered the phone and heard Albee say, “Lieutenant? We’re down here in the basement. Does Hentz still have Lundigren’s keys? I think we’ve found where he kept his papers.”
A few minutes later, she and Hentz stepped off the elevator into a basement that smelled of musty cement overlaid with a faint aroma of motor oil and a stronger one of hot pastrami. Off to the left lay the boiler room, and beyond that, a hall that terminated at a steel door to an areaway outside. A high window in the door had bars embedded in the glass for security. The hall was lined with garbage bins that had wheels and tight-fitting lids so that no odors escaped. Although gray and utilitarian and crowded with the equipment needed to keep a building like this running, the basement felt clean and there was a sense of orderliness and purpose.
Straight ahead was a short hall that seemed to open into a locker room where the men could change from their street clothes into the brown wool uniforms provided by the board. Many articles of indoor and outdoor clothing hung from hooks along the wall. Through the arched opening, they saw two large men who sat with their backs to the door while they ate sandwiches at a Formica-topped table. Judging by the sounds from deeper in the room, they were also watching some sort of loud sports program on television. The announcer spoke excitedly in a language that was neither English, Spanish, nor French, the only languages Sigrid could confidently identify.
She glanced at her watch. Almost three. No wonder their fragrant sandwiches were making her hungry.
Battered chairs and occasional tables stood around, castoffs abandoned from above and rescued by the staff. A miscellany of pictures hung on the walls—everything from kitsch framed in ornate gold leaf to a cover of a
“Down here,” Lowry called from somewhere off to the right.
They followed his voice through the dimly lit passage to a double bank of ceiling-high wire cages that measured about four feet wide by six feet deep. Each bore the number of an apartment and served as a storage locker for off-season clothes, luggage, or anything else an owner could not find room for upstairs. Most were neatly arranged; others looked as if the doors had been opened and stuff thrown in with a snow shovel.
Lowry pointed to a unit at the far end where Albee waited. “This one’s assigned to the Lundigren apartment,” she told them.
Somebody—Lundigren?—had built shelves to the ceiling to accommodate several cardboard boxes and two rows of books, but had left an alcove large enough to hold a rump-sprung swivel chair, a two-drawer file cabinet with wheels, and a small steel desk that was missing one of its original legs. A fairly new-looking laptop sat on the desk.
Hentz handed the super’s set of keys to Albee, and after four tries she found one that turned in the lock. They rolled the files out into the passageway, and after they found its key, Hentz and Sigrid each took a drawer while Albee tackled the laptop and Lowry went through the desk.
Sigrid hit paydirt immediately. “His birth certificate,” she said and handed it to Hentz.
There it was: Phyllis Jane Lundigren, female, born fifty-three years ago in Littleton, New Hampshire. In the same folder was a marriage certificate dated twenty-four years earlier for Phillip James Lundigren, age twenty-nine, and Anna Denise Katsiantonis, age twenty-seven.
“Cute,” said Lowry. “Don’t change the body, just change the name.”
Another folder was devoted to Mrs. Lundigren. It held her birth certificate and her medical records, including a stay in a New York psychiatric facility for treatment following a pseudocyesis when Denise was thirty.
Puzzled, Hentz said, “What’s pseudocyesis?”
“Hysterical pregnancy,” Sigrid told him. “Where a woman thinks she’s pregnant and develops all the symptoms, including morning sickness and actual birth pains.”
