“Detective Bellman took the elevator, so he’s trapped between floors. The engineers reckon at least a half hour before they can get it working again.”
“I really need to talk to Detective Bellman. He’ll understand what happened here.”
Brush Mustache jammed his notebook into his breast pocket. “Okay, ma’am. That’s fine by me, so long as you don’t mind sticking around to make a statement. But you will stick around, won’t you? You won’t leave the building?”
“Of course not. I’ll wait in the lobby.”
Brush Mustache and his red-cheeked partner went across to examine the black scorch marks on the office carpet. One of the burns distinctly resembled the outline of a man with one arm outstretched.
Trevor said, “Are you going to be okay with the stairs, Momma? It’s seventeen flights down to ground level.”
Sissy picked up her purse. As she did so, she lifted her head and frowned.
“Momma? We can always wait till they fix the elevators.”
“Actually, sweetheart, I think I’m going to go up first.”
“Up? What the hell for?”
“If I remember rightly, George Woods used to work on the nineteenth floor, didn’t he, Molly?”
“Yes,” said Molly. “He was a Realtor for Ohio Relocations.”
“I’d like to go up and take a look-see.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I’m not so sure that I understand, either. I have one of my tingles, that’s all. George Woods told a deliberate lie during my séance.”
“So?”
“It’s very rare for gone-beyonders to tell lies, even to spare the feelings of the loved ones they’ve left behind. I told Frank about it, and he was interested to know what George Woods was lying about, too.”
As Sissy and Molly and Trevor walked across to the stairwell, Brush Mustache called out, “Can you manage all those stairs, ma’am?”
“I’m not an invalid, Officer. I walk ten miles a day, as a rule, and I smoke forty cigarettes down to the filter.”
“Nothing like a healthy lifestyle, ma’am.”
As they went through the door, Trevor said, “Listen, I need to go to the office to pick up some paperwork. Why don’t I catch you later? I can take a cab home.”
“In other words, you don’t want to be involved in what I’m going to do now?” Sissy asked him. “Okay. if you feel like you have to.”
Trevor lifted both hands. “Momma. psychic investigation, I can put up with. But when it comes to real serial killers. I don’t think I really want to know. Especially when you’re going to go poking around in somebody’s private office. I have my job to think of here.”
Sissy tapped her forehead so that the little bell on her index finger jingled. “Sorry, Trevor. There’s a little voice inside of me someplace, and it’s telling me to go upstairs.”
“Yes, Momma. I believe you, Momma. But all I can say is, don’t do anything stupid. I don’t want you ending up in the women’s reformatory, at your age. Molly — make sure she doesn’t do anything stupid.”
Trevor kissed her on both cheeks, and kissed Molly, too. Then he took the left-hand staircase and went down. Sissy and Molly took a quick look around to make sure that nobody was watching them, took the right-hand staircase, and went up.
“Christ on a bicycle.” Sissy found it much harder to climb up two flights of stairs than she had imagined. On the landing of the eighteenth floor, she stopped to take a rest, tilting against the railings, trying to get her breath back.
“What’s happened to me, Molly? I used to bound up stairs like a mountain goat.”
“I hate to say this, Sissy, but forty years and forty Marlboros a day can take their toll on you.”
“I don’t believe it. They’re just building stairs steeper than they used to, when I was a girl.”
“The Giley Building was completed in 1931. You weren’t even born in 1931.”
“Don’t split hairs.”
They carried on slowly climbing until they reached the nineteenth floor. Sissy tried the door to Ohio Relocations, and to her surprise it was unlocked.
“This is very handy indeed,” said Sissy, as she opened it up and peered into the offices. “I thought I would have to use my lock-picking skills.”
“You can pick locks?”
“A very smooth conjuror taught me — amongst other things. All you need is the right kind of hairpin.”
“The staff probably left in a panic, after that last attack. Forgot to lock it.”
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 séance, 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.