Линвуд Баркли - Elevator Pitch

She eyed him warily.

“How’d you do it?” she asked.

“It was a simple tackle. Nothing to it.”

“No, not that. Was the guy driving the van in on it? He waited until I got there, and you were in position?”

He met her skeptical eyes with his. “You figured it out. I come from a long line of conspirators. My dad helped fake the moon landing. You want some fucking ice for your elbow or not?”

Mayor Headley followed Brian Cartland, of Homeland Security, NYPD chief Annette Washington, and Martin Fleck, from the city department that oversaw elevator operations, to a stairwell. The fire chief, who’d evidently been up here earlier with Fleck, had stayed in the lobby.

Headley had been worried they were heading all the way up to the hallway where they’d find the rest of Fanya Petrov. But it turned out that, for now, they were going only as far as the second floor.

They came out onto a hallway and approached the four elevators. Only one had the doors in the open position. A police officer was standing guard, keeping people away, because there was no elevator car beyond the opening. At least, not one that anyone could step into.

But someone could step onto it.

Given that the car was one floor below, at lobby level, what the mayor and others were looking at was the roof of the elevator car. Two large steel beams ran crossways, left to right, across the top of the middle of the car. Attached to it were various cables and metal boxes with large buttons on them. More cables, electrical ones, were snaked neatly across the top of the car. In the far left corner was what appeared to be a hatch.

Headley pointed. “That’s where people can get out?”

“They can be rescued from there,” Fleck said. “But it’s not like in the movies where you see passengers pushing it aside and getting out themselves. It’s locked. It can only be opened by rescue workers.”

Headley pointed tentatively into the shaft. “Can I poke my head in there?”

Fleck nodded.

The mayor stood at the edge, braced himself with one hand where the door slid into the wall, and leaned in. He craned his neck around to look up. The shaft’s four corners appeared to disappear into infinity.

“Christ,” he said, and pulled himself back into the hallway. “So what did you want to show me?”

Cartland pointed to something close to the hatch. “You see that?”

Headley squinted. “What?”

Cartland looked at Fleck. “Can you help us here?”

Fleck stepped from the hallway, directly onto the roof of the elevator. Headley was the only one to give a short gasp. But the elevator was as solid under Fleck’s feet as if he were standing in the lobby. He lifted his leg over the beam to get closer to the far side of the car’s roof.

He knelt down and indicated, without touching it, a small black box, not much bigger than a cell phone but thicker, that had a short black wand attached.

“This is an antenna,” Fleck said. “And this,” he said, pointing to the box, “is a remote pinhole camera.”

Headley watched. “Go on.”

“Someone’s drilled a small hole here that provides a view of what’s happening inside the car.”

Fleck stood, used one of the beams to lean against. He looked as relaxed as if he were sitting on a park bench.

“Cameras in an elevator don’t seem all that unusual,” Headley said.

Fleck said, “People think cameras are everywhere, but that’s not necessarily so with elevators. There may be cameras in the hallways and the lobbies so you see who’s going in and out of the elevators. But while they’re inside? Not so much. Freight elevators, that’s a different story sometimes. Security likes to keep tabs on those.”

“But some buildings must have cameras in the regular elevators,” the mayor said.

“You’re right,” Fleck said. “But we’ve talked to building management. They don’t have them here. The other elevators? No cameras in those.”

Headley looked at the man from Homeland Security and the police chief. Their faces were grim.

“Only this one,” Cartland said, for emphasis. “Well, and one other.”

Headley waited.

“We had a look at the elevator from yesterday. There was a camera attached to the roof of that car, too. Like this one. It was the only elevator in the building outfitted that way.”

“Jesus Christ,” Headley said.

“We have a definite link between both events,” Annette Washington said. “Same kind of camera, identical placement.”

“What you’re telling me,” Headley said, “is that somebody could have been watching everything that happened. Somebody could have watched those people die yesterday. Somebody could have watched that scientist’s head come off.”

No one said anything.

“Fucking hell,” Headley said. He pointed first to the camera, then to the beams and other equipment that sat atop the elevator car. “Fingerprints?”

“Working on it,” Washington said.

“And what about surveillance cameras? In the halls, and the lobby?”

Cartland said, “We don’t know when this camera might have been placed here. It could have been a week ago, a month ago, or a year. Fleck here is going to have to go back and see when this elevator was last inspected. It’s doubtful this would have been overlooked during an inspection. That’d mean it was outfitted with the camera since then.” He sighed. “We don’t know how far ahead this was planned.”

Fleck said, “My experience, someone walks in wearing maintenance coveralls and a hard hat, he can pretty much get into any part of a building he wants.”

“This is unbelievable,” Headley said. He turned on Fleck. “It’s your fucking department! Aren’t your people looking for this kind of thing?”

Fleck didn’t flinch. “No. We’re looking for mechanical and safety problems, although like Mr. Cartland said, I’d like to think that our people would have noticed this.”

Headley tried to stare him down. “‘Like to think’?”

Cartland cleared his throat. “If you’ve got the strength to walk up a few more floors, Fleck’s got something else to show you.”

Headley trembled at the thought of having to look at the headless corpse. Surely they didn’t need him to see that.

“If you’re asking me to see what’s left of Dr. Petrov up there, you can spare me the trouble,” Headley asked. “ Is her body still up there?”

Cartland nodded gravely.

“Seeing her head was enough,” the mayor said.

Fleck threw his leg back over the beam, got himself off the roof and back into the hallway. He dusted himself off and then looked at the mayor.

“That’s not what we want you to have a look at,” he said.

“What then?”

“As bad as what you’ve seen so far,” he said, “it gets worse.”

Driving back into Manhattan, looking straight ahead as she drove over the Queensboro Bridge, Lois Delgado said, “So talk to me.”

Jerry Bourque said, “Talk to you about what?”

She glanced his way. “What’s with the texts that aren’t texts? I’ve got ears, you know. If someone had sent you a text, I’d have heard it.”

Bourque ignored her, watched the traffic.

“You can’t breathe,” she said. “You’re sneaking puffs on that thing.”

Now Bourque shot her a look.

“What?” she said. “What kind of detective would I be if I hadn’t noticed?”

Bourque, looking away, said, “I use it, the odd time.”

She sighed. “It’s not allergies or bronchitis or anything like that, is it? If it was, you wouldn’t be hiding it. It’s in your head, right?” Before he could reply, she said, “Shit. It’s not like cancer, is it? Emphysema? I’ve never seen you smoke.”