on prime-time television, people were a lot more cooperative. They felt like they were part of something when the police came to ask questions unless, of course, they had something to hide. Anthony Donofrio impressed Ford as the kind of guy who visited his mother, had a hard time with the ladies, and still hung out with the same guys he went to grade school with. If he had something to hide, maybe it was that he jerked off every night with a copy of
“So how did the camera get turned off that night, Anthony?” asked Ford, taking out his notepad.
“I don’t know,” he said with an exaggerated shrug. His eyes were wide and innocent, but Ford saw it. A quick shift of the pupils. “I never noticed it go off. Only when you guys looked at the tape did they find that it had been turned off and back on.”
Ford didn’t say anything for a minute, just looked down at his pad as if deep in thought. He let the silence grow thick and uncomfortable between them.
“Yeah, I don’t know,” Anthony said again, this time with a nervous chuckle. Ford cocked his head to one side and gave Anthony a thoughtful frown. Suddenly he sensed Anthony wasn’t enjoying himself as much anymore.
“That’s the only place where the camera could be turned off, from behind
Again the shift, and an uncomfortable stepping from side to side.
“Uh, yeah, behind the front desk.”
“Did you leave your post at any time? To take a leak or take a smoke-what ever?”
Anthony looked down at his feet and was quiet for a minute.
“Yeah, maybe,” Anthony said. “Yeah.”
“What was it?”
“A leak, I guess.”
“You guess?”
“Hey,” he said, moving in close to Ford and giving a quick look around him. “I’m not supposed to take breaks. I could lose my job.”
“Anthony,” said Ford. “You’re not straight with me and your job’s gonna be the least of your worries, man.”
Anthony let out a long slow exhale and shook his head. “Every so often,” he said, with his eyes down, “I’d, you know, step outside for a smoke.”
“So the equipment was left unattended a number of times throughout the night. Someone could have walked in, turned it off, and turned it back on while you were outside?”
“I guess. Yeah, its possible.”
Ford gave a hard look at Anthony. Maybe he had more to hide than that
“No, that’s it. I swear,” he said, casting an earnest look at Ford.
Ford nodded but gave Anthony eyes that said he wasn’t a hundred percent convinced that they were finished talking.
“Listen,” Anthony said, lowering his voice. “I really need this job.”
“You probably should have thought about that before, huh, Anthony?”
The laundry room looked like every other laundry room Ford had ever seen-fluorescent lights, cinderblock walls painted a light gray, Formica floors. The scent of detergent and that unmistakable smell that comes from dryer vents was heavy in the air. Only one dryer rumbled and through the glass Ford could see rose-colored sheets and blue and white towels tumbling. A bulletin board held building announcements, a page printed from a computer printer offering babysitting services and some inspection documents. The room looked clean, innocuous. That would change. He looked at his watch; forensics should be joining them any moment.
“Nobody touch anything,” he reminded Lydia and the other detectives.
“It’s a laundry room, Ford. This place will be covered with prints. You gonna have everyone authorized to use this room fingerprinted so that we can compare?” asked Piselli.
“Hey, you volunteering to head that up?” said Ford with a scowl. Piselli rolled his eyes.
“Fucking rookies been on the job less than five years and they think they know everything. It’s not out of the question. Not easy, but not out of the question.”
Lydia looked around the room. It felt like a dead end; there was nothing to see but washers and dryers, bland walls, white floors.
“How often is this room cleaned?” she asked.
“Maintenance comes in here once a week to dust and mop the floors,” Anthony answered, pleased to be helpful.
“Have they been here since Richard Stratton was murdered?”
“No, they come on Fridays-day after tomorrow.”
Lydia walked along the edge of the dryers, tracing the path that the person caught in the video camera must have taken. She walked to the end of the row where there was a small space between the last dryer and the wall. Here she dropped to the floor and peered under the dryer.
Ford walked over to her. “What do you see?”
“I’m not sure,” she said, standing up and wiping the dust from her nose. “We need to move the dryer.” Piselli and Malone removed surgical gloves from their pockets and easily slid the dryer forward. The four of them crowded in to peer behind the dryer.
“Well, will you look at that,” said Malone.
“What’s going on?” asked Jeff as he and Dax walked into the room.
“Christ, you two smell like a couple of sewer rats,” said Ford when they got closer.
“It’s a trapdoor,” said Lydia, not looking up at Dax and Jeff. She was too fascinated by their find. And besides, she hated both of them at the moment.
“Yeah. But leading where?” asked Piselli as if he didn’t really want to know.
It was a wooden door with a wrought-iron ring for a handle. It appeared to have been nailed and painted shut at some point, the Formica laid over it. But the flooring had been cut away, the nails had been pried out, and the paint chipped through around the edges. Ford moved in and lifted the lid. A ladder led down into a pitch-black hole. A foul dank odor of mold and rot wafted from the darkness. It was a smell that Dax and Jeff recognized all too well.
“Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in,” said Dax in a bad impression of Al Pacino. Nobody laughed.
chapter twelve
It’s the dark spaces, the secret passageways, the hidden doorways that the demons use to enter your life and rip it to pieces. It’s where the light doesn’t shine that they dwell and breed like bacteria in a warm, moist wound. The hole in the floor they’d discovered opened a similar blackness within Lydia. Someone had crept through this trapdoor in the floor to visit death on Richard Stratton and horror onto Julian Ross. Julian’s bogeyman, her worst nightmare, was alive and well and moving with stealth beneath the city streets. So was Lydia’s. She was more kindred to Julian than she had imagined and wondered how far she was from sharing Julian’s fate.
When Lydia had faced Jed McIntyre in the flesh, she felt sure that she would burst into flames. He had always been a ghost in her life, shadowing any peaceful moments, growing large in times of pain and sadness, and, in many ways, the reason behind most of her drive. If he hadn’t murdered her mother, she wasn’t sure she’d even be the person she was today. Certainly the pain that had always impelled her to understand the minds of madmen-her hopeless and relentless effort to pick up the pieces they left behind them, sort them, name them, make them understandable-had been visited upon her by Jed McIntyre. But actually, he had become almost
