Death Mask

They ventured into the offices. They were laid out in cubicles in much the same way as the office on the seventeenth floor, except that these cubicles had higher sides to them, and the chairs and desks were very much smarter and more modern. The carpets were deep purple, and there was purple lettering across the wall — OHIO RELOCATIONS, MOVING OHIO — and a picture of a circus strongman with an uprooted buckeye tree over his shoulder.

“Sissy,” said Molly. “Are you okay?”

“I’m out of breath. Otherwise, I’m hunky-dory.”

“You know what I’m talking about. Frank.”

Sissy looked away. “That wasn’t the real Frank, and you know it.”

“He was real enough to make you happy.”

“Yes. But I knew that it couldn’t last. Apart from anything else, look at the difference in age.”

“There’s still Red Mask number two.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning we’re going to need another Frank. And another Deputy, too.”

Sissy pressed her hand over her mouth and kept it there for a long time. Eventually, she said, “If that’s what it takes.”

“But what about afterward?”

“Afterward?”

“What if Frank survives this time?”

“You have plenty of erasers, don’t you?”

“I’m not so sure that you mean that.”

“No,” said Sissy. “Neither am I. But let’s cross that bridge when we come to it, shall we?”

Molly looked into one of the cubicles. “What exactly do you think we’re going to find here?”

“I don’t know. Let’s try the secretary’s office.”

“You really do have a feeling about this, don’t you?”

“Yes, but I don’t exactly know what I can feel. During that seance, I think that George Woods was desperately trying to cover something up — something he was ashamed of. Usually, when people die, they don’t care what they confess to. They like to clear the air. But George Woods was hiding something, and I’ll bet that whatever it was, it had something to do with his life at the office. What other life did he have? He went to work, he came home.”

They walked along the corridor until they found a frosted glass door with gold lettering on it — FRANCES DELGADO, PERSONAL ASSISTANT. Sissy went inside and looked around. A desk, a PC, a dried-up yucca plant. A bookshelf, with rows of files and framed photographs of Ms. Delgado’s family.

Sissy picked up one of the photographs and peered at it through her bifocals. “God almighty. They look like orangutans.”

Molly went across to the gray filing cabinet marked “OR Personnel” and tugged the handle, but it was locked. Sissy opened the drawers in Ms. Delgado’s desk, but Ms. Delgado was plainly a neat freak, because it contained nothing but Magic Markers in order of color, and paper clips in order of size, and dictation CDs arranged A to Z.

As she closed the drawers, however, Sissy noticed a cardboard box under the side table, the one on which the dried-up yucca stood. She maneuvered the box out with her foot so that she wouldn’t have to bend too far, and then she lifted it up onto Ms. Delgado’s desk. On the lid was scrawled “G. Woods, desk” in felt-tip marker.

Inside, Sissy found mostly trash. Unused matchbooks from Jeff Ruby’s Steakhouse and Neon’s. A dog-eared copy of How To Win At Horse Racing. A blue flashlight with no batteries in it. The instruction booklet for an HP desktop printer. Nail clippers. Six or seven ballpoint pens, all with their ends gnawed. A wooden Indian’s head, roughly carved, with the name “Quamus” on it.

She found heaps of old receipts, too. Receipts for gas, receipts for pharmaceuticals, receipts for drinks at Japp’s and the Crowne Plaza bar. And five receipts for a dozen roses.

Sissy lifted the florist’s receipts out of the box. She could sense at once that these were what had alerted her psychic sensitivity. They almost prickled her, like real roses. Roses. Just like the roses that had appeared in every DeVane card that she had turned up recently.

Each delivery had come from Jones the Florists, on Fountain Square. They had been delivered every Tuesday for five weeks to Ms. Jane Becker at Taft, Clecamp & Evans, Attorneys at Law, Twenty-one Giley Building, Cincinnati.

“You see this?” said Sissy. “I thought Jane Becker told you that she didn’t know George Woods.”

“That’s right, she did. She called him ‘that poor man.’ ”

“Did she? Well, ‘that poor man’ was sending her a dozen roses every week. Fifty-three dollars’ worth, including delivery. That was from the second week in March to the third week in April.”

“Do you think they were having an affair?” asked Molly, peering at the receipts over her shoulder. “That would account for George Woods wanting to say sorry to his wife, wouldn’t it?”

“Yes. But I don’t understand why Jane Becker should give everybody the impression that she didn’t know George Woods at all. If some man sent me a dozen red roses every week for five weeks, I’d sure want to find out who he was, wouldn’t you?”

“Every order had the same message on it,” Molly pointed out. “ ‘Remember the Vernon Manor. when our dreams came true.’ So she must have known who he was.”

“I think we need to go talk to her,” said Sissy. “I’m pretty sure she’s only told us half of the story. If she was having an affair with George Woods, that would have given Red Mask a motive to attack her, too, wouldn’t it? Red Mask didn’t stab her at random, just because she happened to be in the elevator at the wrong time. It was premeditated. He meant to hurt her. He might even have intended to kill her.”

Sissy tucked the florist’s receipts into her purse, and they left Frances Delgado’s office. As they began the long, careful climb down the stairs, Molly said, “Red Mask could be one of Jane Becker’s boyfriends. or maybe some guy who was obsessed with her, a stalker, who didn’t like to see her getting too friendly with anybody else.”

“Or a relative of Mrs. Woods,” Sissy suggested. “A brother or a cousin who wanted to punish them for cheating on her. So there’s a chance that Jane Becker knows who he is.”

“So why lie about it?”

“That’s what we have to find out, don’t we?”

Sissy paused on the fourteenth landing and pressed her hand to her chest.

“Whoever said exercise was good for you was lying through their teeth.”

“Do you want to stop and rest for a while?”

“No. I think I want to get out of this building as soon as I can. There’s still a second Red Mask on the prowl, remember?”

They carried on down. As they reached the ninth floor, Sissy said, “Remember. even if we do find out who Red Mask is, it’s not going to stop him from murdering more people. We have to track him down — the same way we tracked down this Red Mask today.”

“So you do want me to bring Frank back?”

Sissy looked down at her, and her eyes were glistening. “What do you think?”

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR Talking to Detective Bellman

Detective Bellman was hot and exhausted after nearly an hour in the elevator. He sat astride one of the office chairs with his necktie loosened, drinking from a bottle of mineral water. His white shirt was sticking to his back.

Sissy had explained to him exactly what had happened on the seventeenth floor. She had told him the truth about Frank, and who Frank really was, and how Molly had created Deputy. She described how Red Mask had come bursting out of the closet and stabbed Officer Gillow.

She told him how Frank and Red Mask had burned into ashes, right in front of their eyes.