Maybe the entire building had experienced a power outage.
“Gemma?”
“I’m here, by the desk. Just stay where you are, I’ll see if I can find a switch,” I said. I groped blindly with my arms outstretched in front of me low, to protect my belly. I felt the edge of the table and ran my hands up the sides of the study carrel and then up and on to the wall.
Left or right?
Tilly had mentioned a copy machine around the corner and I headed that way, keeping a hand on the wall like a tether.
“Gemma? I’m going to come back to the desk,” Finn called. He sounded far away, much farther than if he had indeed stayed where he was when the lights went out.
Maybe it was a trick of the dark, causing our voices to ricochet and bounce around in space. My hand ran along the smooth flat surface of the wall until it hit an edge. I reached around and decided it was a corner and rounded it, careful to keep my other hand stretched out to fend off any tables or chairs.
I hit the copy machine with my foot and stopped and felt along the wall, but there was no button or switch… just more of the same smoothness that seemed to stretch on into infinity. With no idea what lay before me, and getting farther and farther from my partner, I was hesitant to keep going.
“Finn?”
I listened and heard nothing but the ticking from my Timex, and a low shifting noise as though the building itself was settling in for the day.
“Finn? Are you there?”
The darkness had a weight all its own, and the silence around me grew. It pressed against me and I took a deep breath and slowly exhaled, willing my nerves to settle.
A few feet away, a soft scuffling noise, like a sneaker catching on carpet, caused my heart to hiccup.
“Hello?” I called softly. “Tilly? Finn?”
Another scuffle and I backed up against the wall next to the copy machine. For the second time in one week, the feeling of being watched by someone unseen slipped over me and settled in my bowels like a shard of ice.
I held my breath and listened and almost screamed when I heard the low, steady inhalation and exhalation of someone else breathing. My heart felt like it was going to crawl up out of my throat and my hand went automatically to my belt, where I found… nothing.
I was in the summer dress I’d worn to the circus. My Glock was locked in the gun safe in the trunk of my car.
“Who’s there?” I called. “I can hear you breathing, damn it.”
A low laugh, followed by, “Yes, I’m here.”
The voice was too low to tell the age or sex of the speaker but there was a familiar quality to it, one that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. The words were enough to make me slide down the wall and land on my rear end. I wrapped my arms around my knees and shrank into myself and closed my eyes and tried not to breathe.
I heard another soft scuffle, this time closer.
The stranger was approaching me, one slow step at a time. He, or she, was just on the other side of the copy machine now.
“Gemma,” the voice whispered in a singsong voice. “Where are you?”
A low electrical hum began and the copy machine gave a shake and lit up with red and green buttons. In a far corner of the cavernous space, lights began flickering on. Then running footsteps and a door slamming and as the lights came on in my corner, dazzling and blinding, I stood and jogged down the corridor in the direction of the noise.
“Gemma?” Finn called.
“Down here!” I said. “Hurry.”
I reached the end of the corridor and saw a door to my right and one to my left.
Damn.
Which door, which door… I ran to the door on the right and pushed against it and then looked down and saw a rusty padlock gripped by an equally rusty chain.
Finn met me on my way to the door on the left. “What is it?”
“There’s someone else down here,” I panted. I hadn’t run this much in months.
Next to me, Finn bent down and removed a small snub-nosed revolver from an ankle strap.
“Nice,” I said as I pushed open the door.
“Like my American Express and condoms, I don’t leave home without it,” he replied.
Above us, a dark staircase loomed and I hurried up it as fast as I could, Finn behind me. We reached the top and I pushed open another door and we emerged into bright afternoon sun at the back of the library in an old parking lot.
It was empty, save for the tangled weeds and trash that lay in the cracks and holes of the cement. A tall chain-link fence lined the perimeter of the parking lot and I sighed as I saw a dozen different holes cut into the wire.
We spun around but there was no one in sight. From the looks of it, no one had been there for months.
Chapter Twenty-nine
“So it wasn’t you?” I asked Finn. We were back in the basement, picking through the materials to decide what to take home and what to leave for another day.
“How could it be? I was clear on the other side, trying to find a light switch.”
“But you didn’t answer when I called.”
He sighed and looked at me. Rubbing at the five o’clock shadow on his chin, he replied slowly, “Because, as I just said, I was on the other side of the room. I didn’t hear you.”
I put a few folders in my shoulder bag and looked around.
“Anyway, are you certain someone else was down here? You know, it was pitch-black. Our minds can play, ah, tricks on us sometimes,” Finn said. He held the folder with the Danny Moriarty transcript and I watched him flip through it, alarm bells going off in my head.
I looked back at the desk. A mountain of stuff, piles of it, and in the first few minutes of searching, we found a decades-old confidential police report pointing a big fat finger at one of our colleagues.
Scratch that, we hadn’t found anything.
Finn had found the folder.
Finn.
How many times had I watched as the two of them, Finn and Lou, left work together, headed to one of the taverns on the south side, their heads together, their laughter comfortable, familiar? Too many times to count.
I tried to keep my voice casual. “Finn, how well do you know Moriarty?”
He shrugged and tucked the folder into his briefcase. “Well enough, I guess. We’ve shared a few beers, you know, the usual. I mean really, Gemma… how well do any of us know one another?”
We drove back to the station in silence, each lost in our own thoughts. I dropped him off and wondered, again, how it was that I ended up driving everyone around so much. You’d think someone would give the pregnant lady a break here.
My stomach growled and the next thing I knew I was parking in front of Chevy’s Pizzeria and Arcade. I squeezed through a group of teenagers and entered a world of pinball machines and arcade games, comforting lights and sounds and laughter. The smell of mozzarella and garlic and roasted tomatoes hit me hard and I made my way to the back of the restaurant and found an empty booth near the restrooms.
I sank into the leather seat. And then I looked up and saw Darren Chase emerging from the men’s room, his ball cap angled low over his eyes, but not low enough to miss seeing me.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi.”
He slid into the booth before I could stop him. “Are you here alone?”
I nodded. Out of habit, I’d taken my cell phone out of my purse and laid it on the table. I started playing with it, turning it over in my hands. “You?”
He leaned back and took off his ball cap and ran a hand through his dark hair and nodded. “Yup.”
A waiter stopped by and set two menus down, then gave Darren an exaggerated gasp. The young man’s laminated name tag read “Fitch,” and he had decorated it with more glitter and sparkle than I’d seen since my high school homecoming dance.