He took the clipboard out of his shirt and set it on the floor. When he put his socks and shoes back on, he noticed that his ankle was bleeding. He checked the shelves for a first aid kit, but didn’t find one. He’d just have to wash it as soon as he could and hope for the best.
In the meantime, he pulled his dirty sock over the wound as gently as he could.
Then he found a dry paper towel and used it to wipe his face, hands, and arms, leaning forward to shake dust and cobwebs out of his hair and onto the clean floor. Not the equivalent of a shower, but it would have to do.
He tried the door handle. Open. He poked his head through and looked right and left. A darkened empty hallway. Best-case scenario. In he went.
He was inside a new building, one that he had never seen. That was not to be taken for granted. He was over a mile from his house, and he’d come all the way without going outside. The tunnels under New York might be dank and full of rats, but they had given him a new sense of freedom. He had miles and miles yet to explore.
The hallway led to a door that opened onto a grimy set of fire stairs leading up. It was a universal law: Even the fanciest buildings had grungy fire stairs.
He hurried up the stairs. The first floor was marked by a giant number 1 painted in red on the door. The bright red 1 bothered him — it should have been cyan. One was always cyan.
He pulled open the door and entered a well-lit hallway lined with industrial gray carpeting. Offices with tall glass windows and closed doors sat on each side of the corridor. At least he was in the center of the building, away from the giant sheets of glass on the exterior walls that looked out onto the outside.
He had no idea if an autopsy had been completed on Rebar, although he imagined so. If so, he had no idea how to find it. Flaws in his plan bubbled up in his mind. First, he had to find a computer.
“What are you doing here?” asked a voice to his side.
Joe jumped. “I’m here about the problem with the heating.”
A woman with dark hair pulled into a bun eyed him sternly over a pair of purple reading glasses. She was tiny, about five feet, in a white lab coat. She seemed a little out of breath, as if she’d been hurrying from somewhere. “The heating? It’s about time. My office has been alternating between Antarctic wasteland and jungle swamp for six years.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Joe replied. “Where’s the head of your physical plant?”
He must have gotten the terminology right, because she scowled. “Marcus? Marcus Gruber? He’ll be gone for the day, I imagine.”
Joe shook the clipboard. “I need to have him sign the work order before I can start. Maybe I could wait awhile for him, just in case? We’re running late, and I hate to put this off until tomorrow.”
She sighed and glanced at her wristwatch. Joe upgraded her age to at least forty. Nobody younger than that wore wristwatches anymore, except for him. “You can wait in his office. I’ll see if anyone knows where he is.”
“Thank you, ma’am.”
Joe fell in behind her as she trotted off at a good clip, clearly annoyed at him for wasting her time. He hoped that Gruber really was out of his office. Time in an empty office was what he needed.
They ended up inside a nice modern elevator with steel sides, completely unlike the antique rattletrap he rode every day. He thought about the modern safety features it must possess and smiled.
“Gruber’s on the third floor. I’m on the eighth.” She held out her hand. “Dr. Stavros.”
Joe wiped his hand on his pants and shook hers. “Buck Ornish.”
He had no idea where that name came from, but she nodded as if it were believable. Really? Did he look like a Buck?
Gruber’s messy office was two (blue) doors down from the elevator on the right-hand side. Papers covered a massive oak desk that looked as if it had sat in the same spot for a century. The papers at the bottoms of the piles had yellowed with age. Three (red) half-empty ceramic coffee cups held down a half-curled-up map on the right corner. A computer with smear marks on the dark monitor sat on the left.
Dr. Stavros pointed to an empty chair. “When you see him, remind him about the drain in the second autopsy room. It’s been draining slowly for a week.”
Joe had a flash of sympathy for Gruber. “What floor is that, ma’am?”
“Ground floor,” she said. “He’ll know.”
As soon as she had closed the door, Joe shot over to the computer and sat down in the creaky desk chair. One key tap brought it out of sleep mode. No password. Wonderful. He started walking through the network. He didn’t expect to find the computers that he was looking for, but at least he’d get a better idea of who worked here and what they did.
He got lucky and found Dr. Stavros’s computer. A quick search confirmed that she was a medical examiner. It took a few minutes with a password cracker to get her password, knowthyself. A literary choice pulled straight from the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. A literary medical examiner with Greek roots.
He figured out how she organized her reports and her notes and, after a few false starts, found the autopsy for a John Doe killed by blunt force trauma on the same date as Rebar. A description of his clothes and location where the body was found told Joe that this John Doe was the man he’d met in the tunnels. Clearly, they hadn’t yet confirmed his identity as Ronald Raines.
Joe didn’t know what he was looking for, so he downloaded everything onto his jump drive while reading. The cause of death seemed clear — hammer to the head. Joe didn’t care about the time of death or what the man had had for dinner, but one item from her notes jumped out at him.
Brain tissue severely damaged, but there are several lesions present that seem consistent with toxoplasmosis.
The computer finished copying the files. He slipped the jump drive into his pants pocket and closed the files as fast as he could. Time to go. He’d made it. But he’d only started toward the door when a fat man opened it and entered the office.
“What are you doing here?” He glared at Joe from close-set brown eyes set in a bullet-shaped head.
“I’m waiting for Mr. Gruber.” Please don’t let this be him, Joe silently pleaded.
“That’s me.” Joe’s heart sank. “Why are you in my office? Do you have a pass from security?”
Joe moved toward the door. How could he keep Gruber from having him arrested? His heart raced. He wasn’t some glib action star — he was a programmer.
Clearly not willing to let Joe leave, Gruber folded his massive arms. “What did you want from me, Mr… ”
“Buck Ornish,” Joe said. He searched for a good lie. “A Dr. Stavros called my department about a slow drain.”
As Joe had hoped, an aggrieved expression flitted across Gruber’s face. He’d obviously tangled with Dr. Stavros before. “She needs to submit her complaints directly to me.”
Joe was glad to see the conversation shift away from him and onto Dr. Stavros. Time to add fuel to the fire. “They sent me right over. I heard she was pretty worked up.”
“I bet she is. It still has to go through me.”
“Look.” Joe tried to sound helpful, like someone who could solve Gruber’s problem. “I go off shift in a half hour, and I still have to look at some steam pipes under the building. I can do that now, and put off the drain problem until tomorrow, after a report is filed through proper channels. How does that sound?”
“That’d do,” Gruber said grudgingly. “I’ll take care of it myself.”
Joe shrugged. “If I don’t get a report to fix it, I’m happy. I’m on salary.”