77 Shadow Street

Of course, if Blandon left the grounds by the east gate of the courtyard, he could have gone to the garages behind the Pendleton and driven away without requesting valet service. With that possibility in mind, Logan phoned Tom Tran and asked him to check the senator’s garage stall.

Two minutes later, the superintendent reported that Blandon’s Mercedes was in the garage. He had not driven away.

After ringing the bell at 3-D yet again and after receiving no response, Logan unlocked the door with his passkey. If the senator was at home, he had not engaged either the security chain or the blind deadbolt that couldn’t be unlocked from the corridor.

Holding the door open but remaining in the hall, Logan called, “Senator Blandon? Sir, are you home?”

The senator’s apartment was half the size of that occupied by the Cupp sisters. Unless he was unconscious or in the shower, he should have heard Logan.

In an emergency, when there were reasons to believe that a resident might be mortally ill or otherwise incapacitated and unable to grant admittance, the owners’-association protocols required that a security guard enter the apartment with a passkey but only in the company of either the concierge or the superintendent. The idea was to further minimize the already small chance that anyone on the well-vetted security team might use such an occasion to engage in theft.

Because Earl Blandon had a short fuse and was so reliably saturated in alcohol that he was flammable if not explosive, Logan Spangler decided to enter the apartment alone. If the senator wasn’t in need of help, he would be greatly displeased by the intrusion. Paranoia was Blandon’s armor, righteous indignation his sword, and he never missed a chance to take offense. One uninvited visitor would anger him, but two would infuriate.

Interior design held no interest for Logan, but when he turned on the living-room lights, he noticed that the senator had mimicked the power decor of certain men’s clubs. Deeply coffered ceilings. Dark wood paneling. Immense leather armchairs. Heavy wood side tables on claw feet. Bronze lamps with parchment shades. Above the limestone fireplace mantel hung a glassy-eyed stag’s head with a fourteen-point rack that Blandon had undoubtedly bought rather than earned by his skill as a hunter.

In the dining room, the table was a long slab of highly polished mahogany. Every seat was a captain’s chair with arms and a high back, but at the head of the table stood a larger and more ornately carved chair, with silver inlays, as if to imply that the host, if not technically of royal blood, could nevertheless claim to be of a station superior to that of his guests.

As he toured the apartment, touching nothing but light switches and doors that needed to be pushed open, Logan remained, as always, aware of the pistol at his right side, though he did not imagine that he would need it. In a withering world that seemed to be darker and more violent by the day, the Pendleton offered an oasis of peace.

Continuing to call out to the senator as he proceeded through these chambers, Logan came to the master suite. Here, the ceiling coffers, with their baroque moldings, were painted white, and pale-gold paper gave a soft texture and a light pattern to the walls.

The bed was neatly made, everything in order. Because Earl Blandon didn’t seem to be the kind to routinely, meticulously clean up after himself, Logan suspected that the man had never made it to bed the previous night.

Those residents who did not have full- or part-time housekeepers of their own, like the senator, contracted with a domestic-service agency, approved by the owners’ association, for whatever assistance they required. Generally, they preferred a maid once or twice a week. According to the schedule filed with the security office by the head concierge, who arranged for the service, Earl Blandon’s maid came every Tuesday and Friday.

This was Thursday. No housekeeper had been here to make the bed.

In the master bathroom, a couple of large rumpled towels lay on the floor. When Logan stooped to finger them, he found they were not damp. When he opened the glass door, he saw not one bead of water in the marble-clad shower stall, and the grout joints appeared dry.

The senator had showered perhaps twenty-four hours earlier, before going out for the evening. He evidently had not slept in his bed the previous night. Evidence was mounting that on returning home, he’d gotten into the elevator but, impossibly, had never gotten out.

As much as politicians might try to convince the public that they were mages with magical solutions, they didn’t have cloaks of invisibility or get-small pills that shrunk them to the size of an ant. If the senator hadn’t disembarked from the elevator by its doors, he must have gone through the emergency exit in the ceiling.

How Blandon could have done that in the twenty-three seconds during which the elevator camera wasn’t functioning and why he would have done such a thing baffled Logan Spangler. A close inspection of the elevator might reveal a clue.

When he turned to leave the bath, another rumble rose from under the building, and the lights went off both in this room and the next. In the blinding blackness, he unclipped the six-inch flashlight from his belt and clicked it. The crisp white LED beam flared brighter than that of a traditional flashlight, yet he almost stepped out of the bathroom before he realized that everything around him had changed.

A few seconds in the dark seemed to have been years. The white marble floor, polished and gleaming earlier, was dulled by dust. Pieces were missing from the decorative braided border of green and black granite. Green stains and rust streaked the nickel-plated sink. Tattered cobwebs festooned the faucet handles and the spout, as if no water had been drawn here in a long time.

In the mirror, now clouded and mottled as if fungus growing behind it had eaten away portions of its silver backing, Logan’s reflection seemed to be an apparition, lacking the substance of a real man. The inexplicable sudden deterioration of his surroundings left him for a moment breathless, and he half expected to see that he had aged with the room. But he remained as he had been when he shaved before his own bathroom mirror that morning: the brush-cut gray hair, the face seamed by experience but not yet haggard with age.

As the rumbling faded, Logan saw that the glass in the shower-stall door was gone. Only the frame remained, corroded and sagging. On the floor, no towels were to be seen.

Bewildered but able to breathe once more, he crossed the threshold into the bedroom, which contained no furniture. The LED beam revealed that the bed, the nightstands, the dresser, the armchair, the art on the walls were all gone. The imitation Persian rug had vanished as well, revealing more of the wood floor.

The surprise of finding the space unfurnished gave way to consternation and to concern about his sanity when