“Funny you would mention that.” His green gloved finger pressed the elevator button. “Mr. Bane took it upon himself to change his lock some months back, around the time he started acting odd.”
They boarded, and he tapped the button for the tenth floor.
“He’s supposed to give us a key. We got to have a key in case of an emergency, and we’ve kept asking him, and we still don’t have one.”
“Sounds to me like ol’ Oscar doesn’t want anybody in his place,” Morales said. “I’m surprised you didn’t kick him out.”
“It was getting to where there was going to be a confrontation with the building manager. Nobody wanted that. We kept hoping he’d get around to it. Sorry it’s so slow—slowest elevator in the city. You’d think we got someone on the roof pulling us up with a rope. Anyway, Mr. Bane keeps to himself. Never has visitors. Has never caused any problems around here, but like I said, he started acting a little unusual, and about the same time he changed his locks. I guess you just never know about people.”
“Is this the only elevator?” Scarpetta asked.
“There’s a freight elevator. We ask the residents to use it when they take out their dogs. Not everybody wants to be on an elevator with a dog. Poodles are the worst. The big standard ones? They scare me. I’m not getting on an elevator with one of those. Rather ride with a pit bull.”
“If someone took the freight elevator, would you be aware of it?” Morales asked. “Like if somebody tried to slip by you?”
“Don’t see how they could. They’d still have to come in and out of the front of the building.”
“No other access at all? I mean, we’re sure Oscar hasn’t come in tonight, and nobody saw him?” Morales asked.
“Not unless he climbed up the fire escape and came through the roof,” the doorman said, as if Oscar would have to be Spider-Man.
Scarpetta recalled noticing a zigzag of horizontal platforms connected by stairs on the west side of the building.
The elevator stopped, and the doorman stepped out into a hallway of old green carpet and pale yellow walls. Scarpetta looked up at a steel-framed plastic dome in the ceiling that wasn’t an ordinary skylight.
“That’s the roof access you mean?” she said to the doorman.
“Yes, ma’am. You’d have to have the ladder. Either that or use the fire escape and come through somebody’s window.”
“And the ladder’s kept where?”
“In the basement somewhere. That’s not my department.”
“Maybe you could check and make sure it’s still there,” Benton said.
“Sure, sure. But obviously he didn’t come in or out that way, or the ladder would be under the roof hatch, right? You’re starting to make me nervous now. Like maybe we should have some cops on the roof. Since they let him out of Bellevue, now you’re giving me the willies a little.”
He led them down to the end of the hall, to Oscar’s dark wooden door, the number on it 10B.
“How many apartments on this floor?” Scarpetta asked. “Four?”
“That’s right. His neighbors work, aren’t around during the day. Out a lot at night because they’re single, got no kids. For two of them, this isn’t their only residence.”
“I’ll need their information,” Morales said. “Not just them but a list of everybody who lives in the building.”
“Sure, sure. There’s forty units, four per floor. Obviously, this is the top floor. I won’t call it a penthouse, because the apartments aren’t any nicer up here than on the other floors. But the view’s better. From the ones in the back you can see the Hudson pretty good. I gotta tell you how shocked I am. Mr. Bane sure doesn’t seem like the type to do something like that. But you know what they say. They never do, right? And then he did start getting weird. I’ll check on the ladder.”
“A little reminder, pal,” Morales said to him. “Mr. Oscar Bane’s not been charged with a crime. Nobody’s saying he killed his girlfriend. So be careful what you spread around, got it?”
They had reached Oscar’s door, and Morales had a key that Scarpetta recognized as belonging to a high- security Medeco lock. She noticed something else that she didn’t want to draw attention to while the doorman was standing there—a strand of black thread, maybe eight inches long, on the carpet directly below the bottom door hinge.
“I’ll be downstairs,” the doorman said. “You need me? There’s a house phone in the kitchen. A white wall phone. Just dial zero. Who do I call about the ladder?”
Morales gave him his card.
The doorman looked like he didn’t want it, but he had no choice. He walked back toward the elevator, and Scarpetta set down her crime scene case, opened it, and handed out gloves. She picked up the piece of thread and examined it under a magnifying lens, noticing a thick knot on one end that had been coated with what appeared to be a flattened bit of colorless soft wax.
She suspected she knew the purpose of the knotted thread, but the door was almost twice as tall as Oscar, and he couldn’t possibly have reached the top of it without assistance.
“What you got?” Morales said.
He took the thread from her, looked at it under the lens.
“If I had to guess,” she said, “it’s something he draped over the top of the door so he could tell if it had been opened in his absence.”
“What a clever little guy. Guess we better find out about that ladder, huh? How did he reach the top of the door?”
“We know he’s paranoid,” Benton said.
Scarpetta placed the thread in an evidence bag she labeled with a Sharpie as Morales unlocked the door and opened it. The alarm started beeping, and he stepped inside and entered a code he had written on a napkin. He turned on the lights.
“Well, look here, we got another ghostbusting gizmo,” he said flippantly, bending down to pick up a straightened coat hanger on the floor just inside the door. “Either that or Oscar was roasting marshmallows. I’m looking for a line of flour across the floor like the crazies do to make sure aliens haven’t entered their houses.”
Scarpetta examined both ends of the straightened coat hanger, then looked at the small flattened piece of wax inside the plastic bag.
“It’s possible this is how he’d get the thread on the top of the door,” she said. “He’d stick the waxy knot on the tip of the coat hanger. There’s an indentation consistent with the diameter of the wire. Let’s see if I might be right.”
She shut herself out of the apartment, and there was just enough space between the door and the floor for the coat hanger to fit. She slid it back inside the apartment, and Morales opened the door.
“Looney Tuney,” he said. “I don’t mean you, of course.”
The living room was immaculate and masculine, with walls painted a deep shade of blue and hung with a fine collection of original Victorian maps and prints. Oscar had a fondness for dark antiques and English leather, and an obsession with anti-mind-control devices. They were strategically placed everywhere, inexpensive spectrometers, radio frequency field strength and TriField meters, for the supposed detection of various surveillance frequencies such as infrared, magnetic, and radio waves.
As they walked around the apartment, they discovered antennas and strips of vinyl-coated lead, and buckets of water, and odd contraptions like aluminum foil-lined metal plates wired to batteries and homemade copper pyramids, and hard hats lined with soundproofing foam and topped by small sections of pipe.
An aluminum foil tent completely enclosed Oscar’s bed.
“Wave-jamming devices,” Benton said. “Pyramids and hats to block out sound waves, beamed energies, including psychic energies. He was trying to create a bubble force field around himself.”
Marino and a uniformed officer were carrying a box the size of a washing machine as Lucy got out of a cab in front of Terri Bridges’s brownstone.
Lucy slung a nylon satchel over her shoulder, paid the fare, and watched them load the box into the back of a police van. She hadn’t seen Marino since she’d threatened to blow his head off last spring in his fishing shack, and decided the best approach was to walk right up to him.
