77 Shadow Street

10

The Basement Security Room

When Devon Murphy went off duty at 7:00 A.M. Thursday, Logan Spangler came on for the next eight hours. Of the five guards that covered the twenty-one weekly shifts at the Pendleton, Logan was the most senior, the chief of security.

He had been a beat cop and then a homicide detective, and he had busted more punks than the combined series heroes of a hundred thriller writers, which maybe wasn’t saying much because, in Logan’s estimation, ninety percent of the guys who pounded out those books were sissies who knew less about real evil than did your average librarian and who were no tougher than a Twinkie. He was eligible for retirement at fifty-two, and he only turned in his badge at sixty-two because that was the mandatory retirement age. Now at sixty-eight, he could still whup the ass of any forty-year-old on the force.

Logan gave himself totally to his security-guard position. If he failed to take it as seriously as he had once approached his work with the police department, he would be disrespecting not only his employers but also himself. Consequently, he was not inclined to shrug off the failure of video surveillance during the previous night, even though it had been down just briefly.

Devon thought the cameras were out of commission about half a minute. After the kid left for the day, Logan reviewed the time-stamped recordings—images from the cameras were stored for thirty days—and found that in fact the system malfunctioned for only twenty-three seconds.

During the morning and early afternoon, as his duties permitted, Logan ran the security-system diagnostic program, hoping to discover the cause of the interruption in surveillance, but he could find no explanation. He also reviewed the stop-motion recordings from key basement and ground-floor cameras during the two hours that led up to the failure, which had occurred between 2:16:14 A.M. and 2:16:37 A.M. He half expected to see a previously undetected intruder who might have tried to sabotage the surveillance equipment, but everyone on those DVRs was a resident or an employee of the Pendleton, engaged in legitimate business.

A few minutes before his shift began at 3:00 Thursday afternoon, Vernon Klick arrived, his owlish green eyes clouded behind heavily smudged eyeglasses that hadn’t been cleaned since maybe Thanksgiving. He carried a lunch pail and the usual large briefcase, as if he were an attorney burdened with case files. His shoes were not polished, his khaki pants poorly pressed. He had shaved, but there was just enough grime under a few of his fingernails to make Logan want to scrub his subordinate’s hands with a bristle brush. For whatever reason, Klick had gone into a decline since being hired. He didn’t know it, but he would not be in his job the following day’s shift.

Logan mentioned the rumpled pants and scuffed shoes, but he refrained from commenting on the fingernails. If Klick realized the disgust that he engendered in his boss, he might be alerted to the fact that his days were numbered. Logan preferred to surprise an employee with his termination notice only minutes before he was escorted from the building.

Relinquishing the main command post, Logan moved to the spare chair. He again ran the diagnostic program, fruitlessly seeking the cause of the brief video outage.

“What’s the story?” Klick asked.

“Story?” Logan asked.

“What’re you looking for?”

“Nothing.”

“You’ve got to be looking for something.”

Logan sighed. “There was a brief failure of cameras last night.”

“That’s big.”

“It’s not big,” Logan said. “It was twenty-three seconds.”

“Somebody maybe pulled a heist.”

“Nobody pulled a heist.”

“Somebody pulled something,” Klick said.

“Nobody pulled anything.”

“Somebody did,” Klick insisted. He’d never been a policeman, only a security guard; but he believed that he possessed a cop’s intuition. “Maybe somebody killed somebody.”

“Nobody was killed.”

“Just because you haven’t found the body yet doesn’t mean it isn’t somewhere in the building for someone to find sometime.”

Logan refused to keep the idiotic conversation alive. He closely and repeatedly reviewed the video of Senator Earl Blandon’s return to the Pendleton the previous night, his time in the elevator, and the third-floor corridors immediately following the dissipation of the blue static.

He was aware of Vernon Klick’s barely repressed frustration at having to share the room with his boss for more than a minute or two. No doubt the freak had a pornographic magazine in his briefcase or a pint of Irish whiskey, or both, and was eager to pleasure himself one way or another.

What kept Logan at his task was a problem with the timing of Earl Blandon’s return to his apartment. The elevator required twenty-one seconds to go from a full stop on the ground floor to a full stop on the third. According to the time-stamped video, camera coverage had been lost four seconds into the elevator’s ascent. Subtract the next seventeen seconds of ascent from the twenty-three seconds of outage. That left only six seconds of blue static during which the man could have stepped out of the elevator, walked the length of the short west-wing corridor on the third floor, turned right into the north corridor, unlocked his door, and entered his apartment.

Like Devon Murphy, Logan knew the telltales of the senator’s drunkenness: the careful posture, the exaggerated poise. The footage of Blandon crossing the lobby left no doubt that he came home in a state of extreme inebriation.

Perhaps a sober man could have walked briskly from the elevator to the door of 3-D and let himself into the apartment in a mere six seconds. In an advanced state of drunkenness, Earl Blandon moved not briskly but at a stately pace, almost with the measured progress of a bride matching her steps to the processional music on her way to the altar. Surely he had needed at least six seconds just to fumble the key from his pocket and insert it successfully into the lock.

“Before I leave for the day,” Logan said, “I’m going to check on one of the third-floor residents.”

Indicating the screen that his boss had been studying, Klick said, “You mean the senator?” When Logan didn’t reply, Klick said, “You think he’s dead?”

“No, I don’t think he’s dead.”

“Then you think he killed somebody?”

“Nobody killed anybody.”

“Somebody killed somebody, I bet, or robbed somebody, or robbed and killed somebody.”

Getting up from his chair, Logan Spangler said, “Vernon, what’s your problem?”

“Me? I don’t have any problem.”

“You have some kind of problem.”

“My only problem is that missing twenty-three seconds.”

“That’s not your problem,” Logan said, “it’s my problem.”

“Well, then you shouldn’t have got me worried about it.”

“There’s nothing to worry about.”

“There is if someone killed or was killed.”

“Work your shift. Follow procedures. Don’t let your imagination run wild,” Logan advised, and left Klick alone to do whatever he did when he was supposed to be on duty.

As Logan pulled the security-room door shut behind him, a rumbling rose seemingly from underfoot, and the Pendleton shuddered. The same thing had happened earlier. Foundation work was under way for a high-rise on the eastern slope of Shadow Hill, which was no doubt the source of the disturbance. He decided to inquire with the city building department after checking on the senator.