Three-Day Town

Horvath watched impassively from inside the elevator.

Dwight spotted the outer door at the end of the passage and started toward it, flicking on light switches as he went. Something lay on the floor off to the side, and when he picked it up, he saw it was a glove, Deborah’s glove.

His mind raced as he tried to figure out why she had come down to the basement and why she hadn’t used the elevator.

He went back to Horvath and dangled the glove in front of the older man. “She was here. This is her glove. Who’s the first porter on duty today?”

“Ruzicka and Laureano both come at eight,” Horvath said again. “Although Laureano usually gets here a few minutes early.”

“One of them sort of thin?”

“Laureano’s on the thin side, but Ruzicka’s built more like me.”

Even from that height and even though he had not been paying that man much attention, Dwight knew that someone as hefty as Horvath would not have registered as thin.

He went back to the door and opened it to a freezing wind. Turning the deadbolt on the door so as to leave it ajar, he hurried up the ramp to the street. Still no sign of Deborah or of the man he’d seen come through this entrance. The garbage truck had crossed Broadway and was turning onto Amsterdam Avenue at the far end of the next block. He supposed he could chase it down, but to what point? Deborah had left the apartment before the truck got here and he was reluctant to leave the place where she had so recently dropped a glove.

Earlier, he had been irritated that she would go out without telling him. With two murders in this building and the teenage boy who could have killed them still on the loose, his irritation was turning into serious worry.

He pulled out his phone and ran through recent calls till he located Elliott Buntrock’s number. When the man answered, his voice groggy with sleep, Dwight identified himself and apologized for waking him, “but I need Sigrid Harald’s phone number.”

Three minutes later, he was apologizing again. “Y’all hear anything on the Wall boy yet? Deb’rah’s gone missing.”

Without giving the lieutenant a chance to speak or offer reasonable alternatives, he explained his own reasoning for thinking that his wife could not have gone far, dressed as she was. “There was another guy here in a brown uniform. I saw him from the apartment balcony, out on the sidewalk, but the elevator man on night duty says he’s the only worker here and nobody else is due till eight o’clock. I’m thinking that if there’s an extra uniform around—What does the kid look like? On the skinny side? Something’s pretty damn wrong here, Lieutenant, and I either get your help or I’m gonna start tearing this place apart room by room by myself.”

“I’ll be there in half an hour,” Sigrid promised.

“And I’ll be here in the basement,” he told her. “If that bastard’s hurt her—”

“Don’t do anything rash, Major,” she said. “I’m on my way.”

Dwight turned to Horvath, who gave an involuntary step backward when he saw the big man’s face.

“Honest, mister,” he said fearfully. “I never saw her since last night. And nobody else is here. Honest. Just me.”

“I need a flashlight,” Dwight said grimly.

Horvath scuttled across the passageway, past a small laundry room, and down to the break room. Dwight followed. Two unmade bunk beds stood against the back wall at the far end of the long narrow room. The blankets were tumbled and the pillows lay haphazardly on both beds as if someone had pushed the covers all the way back against the wall and had made no effort to pull them smooth again. At this end were an old wooden table, several mismatched kitchen chairs, and a refrigerator. Along one wall lay a long counter that held a sink, a microwave, a toaster oven, and a television set. Off to the other side was a lavatory and a closet. An empty lavatory.

Ditto the closet.

When the white-haired elevator man handed him a powerful flashlight, Dwight used it to throw a beam of light under the bunk. Nothing. Back in the main landing area in front of the elevator, he gestured toward the end of the basement farthest from the outer door. The place was a warren of narrow halls and jumbled shadowy objects. “What’s down there?”

“Storage. Every apartment has its own space. And there’s a room for bicycles and kayaks and sleds.”

With the flashlight probing everything he could see from where he stood, Dwight pointed the light at the recess that housed the service elevator. “Fire stairs?”

Horvath nodded. “You can’t open the door to the stairwell from this side without a key, and Phil’s the only one that had it. You have to go up to the second floor and walk down to open it from the other side. Same with the door in the lobby.”

Farther down the wide passage, halfway between the niche for the service elevator and the outer door was another door. “What’s that?”

“Goes to the boiler room,” Horvath said.

Diagonally across the passage, close to the outer door, was another closed door. “And there?”

“That’s the tool room. You know—snow blower, shovels, stepladders, leaf blower. That sort of stuff.”

“Locked?”

Horvath shrugged.

Dwight strode down to the door and it opened easily. He found a light switch near at hand and used the flashlight to peer behind all the equipment.

The door to the furnace room was also unlocked, but the overhead bulb did little to brighten the cavern’s dark