“It’s OK. Calm down, Mr. Du Maurier,” I said, patting the little old man’s shoulder as he began to weep. “I just have one more question. This building where you saw the men. What’s the exact address again?”
CHAPTER 33
THE BUILDING ON LENOX was old and crumbling and had a creepy, vaguely Gothic look to it.
Standing on the sidewalk in front of it with Doyle, I saw that instead of a front door, it had an aluminum riot door with a thick laminated steel padlock. On the hood of the rolling gate, there was a sticker with the name of the Realtor, Luminous Properties, along with a phone number. But even after two calls during which I let it ring a long time, no one picked up.
“What do you want to do now?” Doyle said, giving the steel gate a savage, frustrated kick.
“Let’s use your head to bash a hole through the gate,” I said as I looked up and down the block. “On second thought, let’s take a walk.”
We walked the two blocks back to Du Maurier’s building. My theory was that Naomi had left the man’s apartment and headed straight to the abandoned building. As we walked, I searched for security cameras that might have picked Naomi up. But there was nothing. It was another dead end.
We were heading back to the abandoned building when I suddenly stopped in front of a hardware store. I stared at its plate glass uncertainly. I had an idea. But it was pretty radical even for me.
“What is it?” Doyle said. “Is your Spidey sense tingling?”
Instead of answering him, I went in. Doyle grinned from ear to ear when I came back out of the store two minutes later with a pair of eighteen-inch bolt cutters.
“I think they must have skipped this lesson at the academy,” Doyle said as I knelt down at the front door of the abandoned building.
“Yeah, well,” I said as the teeth of the cutters finally bit through the thick padlock. “Sometimes, Doyle, you just have to improvise.”
It was surprisingly dark inside. I passed the beam of my flashlight over the ruined floors mounded with crumbled plaster and garbage and busted pipes. The heavy smell of burnt wood and rot was almost sweet.
We could hear birds flapping around on the upper floors as we came up a sketchy staircase. There was a loud, hollow rattling sound as Doyle kicked a bottle back down the stairs behind him.
“Sorry,” he said sheepishly.
We walked across a dusty third-floor landing through a doorless threshold into a space that had probably been an apartment. A column of sunlight fell through a gaping hole in the structure’s roof.
“This must be the room that Du Maurier saw through the hole in the roof,” Doyle said as he circled the beam of light, staring up at the hole. “It lines up. I can see the windows of his building.”
I looked around at the walls, the floors.
“Anything strike you as strange, Doyle?” I said.
“Just about everything,” the rookie said, shrugging. “This place gives me the damn creeps.”
“The floors, Doyle. Look at them.”
Doyle looked down and then his eyes suddenly brightened.
“You’re right. Downstairs, it’s a landfill, but up here, the floors are clean. Broom-swept, looks like. Someone cleaned up this joint recently. What the hell do you think happened?”
I looked up at the column of light. As I watched, a tiny plane high up in the blue of the sky crossed the hole in the ceiling.
“I think Naomi interviewed Du Maurier and then came here and interrupted somebody cleaning up, and it cost her her life.”
CHAPTER 34
AS I WAS COMING back out into the bright street from the shadows of the building, I got a call from Mary Catherine. It took me by surprise. She hardly ever called me at work.
“Mike, finally I caught you,” she said quickly.
There was something in her voice. She definitely sounded strange, subdued and yet sort of frantic, which was not like her at all. My adrenaline and blood pressure immediately spiked. What now? I was still as paranoid as hell about everyone’s safety since my brush with the Mexican cartels.
“What is it?” I said quickly. “Is it the kids? Is everyone OK?”