Wouldn’t it be something, the killer thought, standing up and showering down, if that was what people saw when they opened their doors on Halloween?
Better stock up on those treats.
After dressing in designer jeans, a Yankees T-shirt, and soft-soled leather moccasins, the Gremlin unpacked the blue gym bag in which he kept his knives, tape, and various other instruments of his obsession, and replaced them with half a dozen books on the subject of elevators. Their history, variations, uses, and safety features. He’d bought the books at the Strand bookstore, where aisle after aisle was packed with used books covering everything fictional or factual. He paid cash so there would be no charge record of the purchase.
He had learned virtually everything about elevators, from their invention to their present state. They got progressively safer, but still, there were occasional accidents. And there was human error in construction, installation, usage, performance.
When the bag contained the books, along with a few other contents, he saturated them with bleach. Then he carried the bag out to the deserted hall and to the chute to the building’s basement compactor.
He fancied that he heard it hit bottom. Even heard the sound of the compactor’s harsh welcome. Trash pickup was scheduled for tomorrow.
So much for incriminating books, or bag. Other evidence the killer wiped clean and placed in cabinets, drawers, or toolbox.
Soon everything was where it might reasonably be found, or not found at all because it could be easily replaced. The killer could always buy another, different color bag, different rope, cigarettes of another brand. Different knives.
Helen the profiler could have taken the elevator up eleven floors to the rehab-center gym, but decided instead to take the stairs. She told herself it was because the building was cool and she needed the exercise. Sure.
Charlie Vinson was using an aluminum walker to get around, but his therapist said he’d soon be graduating to a cane. He’d come through the operations better than anyone would have thought, since what looked like serious injury in the MRI images turned out to be congested blood.
He was on a treadmill, wearing knee-length shorts, an untucked sleeveless shirt, and worn-out-looking jogging shoes. The outpatient rehab center was in a brick and stone building that also housed apartments and a corner deli. The exercise room was on the eleventh floor. On the tenth was a rooftop garden area with small, decorative Japanese maples in huge concrete pots. Beyond the pots, bright red geraniums lined the roof. There were a few webbed chairs. Sometimes, when it wasn’t so hot and the roof garden was in the shade of taller buildings, it was pleasant to sit outside.
It was ninety in the shade this afternoon, and no one at rehab was sitting in the garden. In the bright light streaming through the window, a shapely woman in tights was bicycling to nowhere. Helen was pretty sure it was Emma Vinson, Charlie’s wife. An attractive Asian woman was on a nearby stationary bike, pedaling almost as fast as Emma Vinson but seemingly with less effort. She looked over now and then at Emma, as if she’d like to challenge her to a race.
Emma didn’t look up as Helen walked over to Charlie Vinson. She might have been taken for an instructor, with her six-foot-plus frame and muscular legs. She was wearing a lightweight green dress today that somehow made her look even taller.
Helen got closer and could hear the rasping breathing emitted by Vinson. They had an appointment to meet with a police sketch artist today. She hoped he hadn’t forgotten.
When she was only a few feet away she glanced at the complex instrument cluster on the treadmill, and saw that several wires ran to Charlie Vinson’s ears, and to what looked like a blood pressure cuff on his left arm. What appeared to be the treadmill’s odometer read 1,055 miles.
Pointing to it, Helen, who wasn’t the athlete she appeared to be, said “If I’m going that far, I’m taking the bus.”
“That’s the past week,” Vinson said.
“Impressive,” Helen said. “All your miles?”
“Well, no.”
Vinson smiled and pressed a button on the treadmill, and the thing slowed down. He slowed with it, and didn’t step off until it had come to a complete stop.
“I didn’t forget,” he said breathlessly, “about our appointment with the sketch guy.”
“He’s on his way. I thought he’d already be here.”
The elevator door opened and Richard Warfield, the sketch artist, stepped out. He was a small man holding a cardboard contraption with three steaming paper cups. A broad strap across his right shoulder supported a leather attaché case. It was the scent of doughnuts that commanded attention.
“Since I was taking the elevator up,” he said, “I thought I’d stop and get us something from that place around the corner.”
Vinson looked at Helen with a superior half smile. “You took the stairs.”
“You know me,” Helen said, though he didn’t. “An athlete.”
“You certainly look like one,” a woman’s voice said.
Emma Vinson, Charlie’s wife, had dismounted her bicycle and come over to them.
“How have you been, Mrs. Vinson?”
“Okay. Compared to how I could be.”
“Charlie looks like he’s well on the road to recovery.”
“The road’s a steep hill sometimes,” Vinson said. “The leg’s not all the way back. Arm’s almost there, though. I’m a tough guy, except for when I’m not.” He leaned over and kissed his wife’s cheek. “Helen’s taking me to see the sketch artist,” he said.
“You don’t have to go far to see him,” Helen said. She put a hand on Richard’s shoulder. She looked as if she might dribble him. “This is Richard Warfield, our best sketch artist.”
“She’s being polite,” Richard said. Helen thought that in the bright light he looked about twelve years old.
She said, “Richard’s modest.”
“Well, I am that.”
Everyone took a cup of coffee except for Emma, who said water wasn’t on her diet, and coffee was almost a hundred percent water.
Helen said, “What do you do for . . . liquid?”
Emma smiled. “It’s everywhere, in everything we eat. We’re even mostly composed of liquids.”
“So I’ve heard,” Helen said. Somehow without burning her tongue, she finished her coffee, crumpled the paper cup, and tossed it halfway across the room into a wastebasket.
“I thought so,” Emma said. “Basketball.”
“I could have kicked it in, too,” Helen said, hoping she hadn’t used up the next six months of good luck.
“I’d like to be there,” Emma said.
Helen looked at her. “In the wastebasket?”
“No. To see Richard do his work.”
“Your husband will be doing most of the work,” Richard said.
Half a dozen women entered the room and dispersed to various exercise machines. Seeing who could laugh the loudest seemed to be part of their regimen. They wore exercise outfits of various colors and fashion, all of it designed to make them look thinner.
“They look like starving cheerleaders,” Emma Vinson said, in a tone somewhere between jeering and jealous. “’Specially the ones with those boobs.”
Her husband, Charlie, seemed to view the exercisers in a different light altogether. He was leaning forward on his aluminum walker, and the expression on his face was so fixated it was almost comical. Helen wondered if there had been breast augmentation going on here.
Helen and company had come here to observe Charlie Vinson and hear what he had to say. They wanted to know how certain he seemed, or if there were any contradictions in whatever he said in conversation. While he was searching his memory to recall how someone looked, something he heard might bob to the surface of his thoughts.
“I have a department car in front of the building,” Helen said. “We can drive over to Q&A and get Richard set up. The air-conditioning’s been repaired, so it will be cooler there, and Quinn might have something to add.”