dropped from sight, and Ricci’s probing mind couldn’t rule out the chance that someone else might have gained entry.
He thought about using the card trick to admit himself right now but then dismissed the notion. That very sort of tactic had once helped his detractors pin the rogue-detective label on him. And he was just getting comfortable at UpLink.
He stood there at the door, attempting to remember the street where he passed the management office. Fuchsia, was it? Or Manzanita? Unable to decide, he returned to his car and drove around a while, looking for the place.
A quarter hour and multiple wrong turns later, he found it on Lupine. The building manager was a man named Perez whose reservations about admitting a stranger to Palardy’s apartment unit began to dissipate the instant Ricci flashed his UpLink Security ID card. And no wonder, since the company owned half the complex.
“We’re pretty concerned,” Ricci said. He kept his card displayed. “Nobody’s heard from him in days.”
Perez seemed fascinated with the Sword insignia.
“I do this, got to stick around while you’re inside,” he said with a heavy Mexican accent.
“Okay by me.”
Perez nodded. “Lemme grab the key ring, I meet you over there.”
Ricci offered to give him a lift instead, dreading another wrong turn. With Perez beside him to furnish directions, it took under five minutes to get back to the condo.
In the walkway Perez fumbled with his keys for a second, found the right one, and pushed open the door.
They found the living room unoccupied. Utterly still except for the ticking of the cuckoo clock.
“Palardy?” Ricci stood in the entry. “You here?”
Silence. Stillness.
Ricci stepped past the building manager to another door, slightly ajar. He glanced over his shoulder. “This the bedroom?”
Perez nodded.
Ricci rapped the wood. Again no answer. He grabbed the doorknob and entered.
In the doorway behind him, Perez inhaled sharply at the sight of the body.
Ricci’s memory of the photo he’d pulled from the security files confirmed it was Palardy. He was lying in bed on his back, his eyes wide open. A blanket covered him to the chest. His face was gray, with dark purple blemishes on the cheeks and forehead. His mouth was twisted into what appeared to be a grimace of pain. The hand sticking out from under the blanket was hooked into a claw, the visible portion of his bare arm also lesioned.
“You should stay back,” Ricci said to the building manager.
He didn’t need encouragement.
“Have a cellular on you?”
Perez nodded.
“Good.” Ricci inclined his head toward the telephone on the bedside stand. “I don’t think you want that one anywhere near your mouth.”
Perez nodded again and crossed himself, staring inside from the entrance.
Ricci produced a business card and pen from inside his sport jacket, wrote hastily on the back of the card, and handed it to him. “Do me a favor; contact the guy whose name and number I jotted down. That’s Pete Nimec, at UpLink. Let him know what we found here. If you don’t mind, I think it might be better if he’s the one who gets in touch with the police.”
Perez nodded a third time and took the portable phone out of his pocket.
Ricci turned back into the room, reached into his own pocket for the scrub mask and latex gloves he’d brought with him, and put them on. Then he went over to the bed for a closer look at the dead man.
The skin at the back of his neck pebbled.
Palardy’s stomach had tossed up whatever was inside it. His gaping, cyanotic lips were crusted with vomit. His face, too. It had overflowed onto his pillows, sheet, and blanket, leaving them splashed with yellowish stains.
Ricci examined the nightstand. Besides the phone, it held a small reading lamp and a half-filled glass of something that might have been apple juice or a soft drink. The glass was on a coaster between the bed and phone. Ricci frowned, thinking. Or rather, letting a thought that had already occurred deep in his mind rise to a conscious level. Had he felt an attack or seizure coming on, Palardy surely would have attempted to call for help. Very likely overturned the glass when he was groping for the phone. Dropped the receiver, if he’d managed to get his hand around it. But they were neatly in place. And the way Palardy’s blanket was pulled up to his chest, he almost could have been tucked in. Passed away without stirring from his sleep.
But his contorted features and hand signified that his death had been neither peaceful nor painless.
Ricci’s frown grew. So far, the picture wasn’t coming together for him.
He looked around the room. The two windows to the left of the bed were closed. On the right wall was what looked like a vintage baseball-dugout clock, the Brooklyn Dodgers logo on it. Quite a collector’s item. The rest of the sparse furnishings were contrastingly unremarkable. A television on the small dresser opposite the foot of the bed. A desk with one of those inexpensive fabric office chairs pushed underneath it. Next to the desk, a computer printer on a wheeled stand. All he could see on the desktop was a small stack of billing statements clipped to their payment envelopes, a few pens and pencils in a souvenir coffee cup, and a box of facial tissues. Its surface was otherwise bare.
Ricci stepped over to the desk and rolled back the chair, then crouched to look into the kneehole.
The two bidirectional data cables on the floor weren’t attached to anything at his end. One had a parallel port connector, the other a phone-style plug-in jack. Ricci’s eyes traced the first cable to the back of the printer. The other cable went to a LAN modem on the carpet about four feet away. The network modem’s power light was glowing green to indicate it was turned on. From there another cable ran along the edge of the carpet toward the bed and then behind the headboard to a small metal plate below the windowsill. Yet another led from the same plate to the television set.
Palardy had a high-speed cable Internet connection. Made sense. It was probably on the corporate tab.
Ricci rose and turned toward the entrance. Perez was already putting away his phone.
“I talk to your friend,” the building manager told him. “Says he gonna call police right away. Says you should stay and meet them.”
Ricci nodded.
“I want to look around some more, anyway,” he said through his mask. “You still feel like keeping an eye on me, that’s fine. But I figure you might rather wait outside.”
Perez glanced over at the corpse, then back at Ricci.
“Yes,” he said. “Maybe outside.”
Ricci nodded again.
“One question,” he said. “Do you know if Palardy owned a computer? Ever notice a machine on his desk when you were doing repairs, or anything like that?”
Perez shrugged.
“Can’t remember. I come inside here maybe two, three times before today, that’s it,” he said. “Why you ask?”
Ricci grunted and shook his head.
“Just curious,” he said.
Ashley Gordian was alone with her husband. Such a basic thing. So fundamental. A woman and the man she loved, the man with whom she’d shared a thousand intimacies, together. But she’d had to battle a small army of doctors, plow through their unanimous objections, to make it happen. She understood their reasons, of course. Their fiduciary responsibilities, their obligation to prevent the transference of his infection, their genuine concern for her welfare. And she’d agreed to abide by their restrictions when they finally relented and allowed her into the room into which Roger had been moved, a room in isolation from the rest of the hospital… what she’d overheard one of them refer to as a “warm zone.” She had put on protective attire. Let herself be wrapped from head to toe. A cap,
