Robert Knightly - The cold room

‘But you can’t guarantee it?’

‘Adele, you saw the photographs I took at the crime scene. You know what was done to Jane Doe #4805. Where would your priorities be if it was your case?’

‘There was a time when I could have answered that question without hesitating. But now, I don’t know. Your victim is dead. Nothing you do can change that. But those women and their children are alive. And they’re victims, too.’

I was up at four o’clock the next morning and out the door by four thirty. By five, I was rolling through the deserted streets of industrial Greenpoint, looking for an elusive parking space, which I eventually found several blocks from Domestic Solutions’ Eagle Street warehouse.

I remember taking a minute to collect myself, to reflect, before getting out of the Nissan. I’d slept for less than four hours, but my thoughts were doing a little cancan through my brain, kicking high, flashing a glimpse of lacy bloomers. Eye on the prize, they demanded. Don’t fuck it up.

The still air, as I walked along Eagle Street, was damp enough to bead on the peak of the gimme cap I’d pulled down over my forehead. I wore the rattiest shirt in my closet and jeans so frayed they might have been dumped months before. According to Adele, I have a hard time saying goodbye. If so, the quirk had played out to my advantage.

I’d made up a little kit before I left the house, stuffing a six-battery flashlight, a small pair of binoculars, a pair of wire cutters, a jug of water, and a Thermos of coffee into a plastic bag I now carried over my shoulder. I might have left the wire cutters home. A section of the fence that fronted the lot across from Domestic Solutions had been pried away from its supporting post, leaving a gap large enough to squeeze through.

I ducked inside just as a light came on in the upper windows of the Domestic Solutions warehouse. For a long moment, I felt like a cockroach trapped on a wall. Then I began to trudge through the yard as if bearing the weight of the world on my shoulders, taking my sweet time, just another homeless skell in search of a safe place to lay his miserable head. I kept going until I was safely tucked behind a metal box large enough to shield me. Open at the top, the box had been fabricated from four squares of sheet metal joined with hundreds of tiny rivets.

In no hurry now, I took a few minutes to get my bearings. The only street light was at the end of the block, at the corner of West Street, and it was very dark inside the lot. I couldn’t be sure I was alone, or that the abandoned warehouse, a few yards from where I sat, wasn’t a crack house, or a shooting gallery inhabited by junkies made feral by years on the streets.

My objective was an opening in the warehouse wall, at the very end of the lot, where some enterprising soul had torn away a few dozen bricks. Of one thing, I was certain — the best place to stake out Domestic Solutions was from inside the warehouse.

I looked around the edge of the box, at the light filtering through the curtains across the street. There were no silhouettes behind the curtains, nobody watching as I made my way over to the warehouse, then sat next to the hole with my back to the wall. The sky was beginning to lighten, revealing a network of thin motionless clouds that would burn off by mid-morning. That was another advantage to being inside, a roof to shield me from the elements. According to the early forecast, the temperature would rise into the nineties by early afternoon.

For the next few minutes, I simply listened, my ear a few inches from the hole. Off in the distance, I heard the roar of an accelerating truck, its driver throwing a new gear every few seconds. A car alarm went off closer by, a quick whoop-whoop, followed by a series of beeps. From across the street I heard the raised voices of a child and a female adult, though I couldn’t make out the words. But from inside the warehouse there was only silence.

Turning to my left, I dropped onto my knees and crawled through the hole, dragging my gear behind me. I came all the way through, rising into a crouch as I finally drew my weapon. From the other side of the building, a flickering yellow light filled an open doorway, seeming as flat as paint from a hundred feet away. The building was occupied and somebody was at home.

With an effort, I tore my eyes away from the light, forcing myself to systematically probe the darkness around me. I was searching the shadows for any sign of movement, my finger inside the Glock’s trigger guard. Eventually my eyes adjusted and I was able to pick out the general shape of a corridor that ran all the way to the faint light at the opposite end. The floor of the corridor was concrete and free of obstacles. That was all to the good because the only view of Domestic Solutions, if there was a view to be had, was from the front of the warehouse. And the only way to get there was to walk.

I swept the room as I stepped inside, keeping my back to the wall, trying to register every detail at once, a mattress on the floor, a lit can of Sterno beneath a grate, an open trash bag holding a pile of neatly folded clothing, a half-dozen air fresheners shaped like pine trees dangling from a clothes hangar, a copper-skinned woman who wore a kimono-like robe that fell to her knees. The robe was the color of heavy cream and there was a heron on the back that fixed me with an impossibly blue eye.

I raised my left hand to display my shield. ‘Good morning, ma’am.’

The woman’s shoulders flew up and she rose onto her tiptoes, scattering crystals of sugar from the jar she was holding. Then she spun to face me, revealing cheeks filmed with black stubble that contrasted sharply with the green mascara on her upper lids and a well-defined adam’s apple that bobbed up and down like a yo-yo.

For a long moment, until I finally broke the silence, her eyes jerked back and forth, from my weapon to my shield, from my shield to my weapon, as if was I offering her a choice, pick one or the other.

‘Is there anybody else in this building?’ I asked.

She raised her head to look into my eyes. ‘Dimitri,’ she shouted, ‘you best get your sorry Greek ass in here. We got company.’

The door on the other side of room opened a second later to reveal a short muscular man wearing a T-shirt and a pair of blue boxer shorts covered with little red hearts. The man’s black hair stuck out in all directions, while his once-prominent nose was flattened at the bridge and bent at the tip. In his right hand, he carried a length of galvanized pipe, maybe two inches in diameter and three feet long.

I let the barrel of the Glock swing in his direction. ‘I’m a cop,’ I told him, ‘and I’m going to be spending some time here. My business has nothing to do with you, but if you don’t put down that pipe, I’ll kill you anyway.’

Dimitri didn’t hesitate. He tossed the pipe into the room behind him where it clanged on the floor.

‘If there’s anyone else back there,’ I said, ‘now would be a good time to tell me.’

‘There’s nobody else in this building,’ he replied, his wide mouth twisting into a sneer of defiance. ‘I don’t allow nobody else. This is my home.’

I turned to his companion. ‘Tell me your name.’

‘Giselle.’

‘Giselle, if I put this gun back in its holster, Dimitri’s not gonna do anything stupid, right?’

‘Not stupid enough to make you take it out again.’

I holstered the Glock, put my badge away, then removed my wallet. ‘Call this rent,’ I said, offering Giselle a twenty.

She took the bill, stuffing it into the pocket of her robe. ‘You plan to stay long enough for breakfast?’

‘What’re you making?’

‘Making?’ Giselle swept the room, her vermilion-tipped fingers somehow at odds with a forearm that would have embarrassed Popeye. ‘Do you see a stove? Do I look like somebody’s housewife?’