Elevator Pitch (UK)

by Linwood Barclay

  “New York plate,” Bourque said.

  “That narrows it down,” Delgado said.

  “Last two numbers 1 and 3.”

  “Maybe.”

  Bourque tapped the screen a couple of times. “Just want to know when. … this was taken.” He squinted. “Here we go. This looks like middle of last month? The fifteenth?”

  “That sounds right,” Terrence said.

  Bourque said, “I’m going to email this to myself.”

  “Sure, yeah, okay.”

  Bourque did a few more taps, then hit Send. Seconds later, there was a familiar ding from his jacket pocket.

  Terrence had never gotten a closer look at Otto’s friend, and had never learned anything about him. Same with Walter.

  “Did you buy the Mustang?” Bourque asked.

  Terrence grinned. “I did. Got it for two grand.”

  Delgado asked, pointing toward the open door, “What’s wrong with the elevator?”

  Walter shrugged. “Just routine maintenance.”

  Delgado took a step closer, stuck her head beyond the door’s edge, and peered down the shaft. Twelve floors down to the bottom.

  The car was twelve floors down, at the bottom.

  “Yikes,” she said.

  Walter chuckled. “That’s nothing. Come into Manhattan sometime. You look down, you think you can see all the way to hell.”

  When they returned to their car, Delgado got behind the wheel of their unmarked cruiser, waited until Bourque was settled in beside her, then got out her phone. She began tapping at the screen.

  “What?” Bourque said.

  “Hang on,” she said. Her phone made a brief woop sound. She’d sent a text.

  Before Bourque could quiz her again, he heard the ding of an incoming text on his own phone. He reached into his jacket, saw the one-word message from Delgado:

  HI.

  He looked from his phone to her.

  “I heard that one,” she said. “Funny I didn’t hear the other two. In the stairwell, or on the High Line.”

  She put the car in drive and hit the gas.

  Twenty-Five

  Save her? Or not save her?

  It was incredible how many thoughts could go through one’s head so quickly. But even in the fraction of a second that Chris Vallins had to make a decision, he realized what he had here was an opportunity. As that truck bore down on Barbara, whose eyes were still focused on her damn phone, Chris saw that a solution to the mayor’s problem had presented itself. In a millisecond, this walking-talking-writing thorn in the mayor’s paw could be dead.

  A gift has been handed to us.

  Some gifts, it turned out, were more difficult to accept than others.

  He darted into the street like an Olympic runner who’d just heard the shot from the starter’s pistol. His left arm went into the air, palm facing the truck, as if he were Superman and could stop its progress. Even if he could have, the truck swerved.

  Barbara looked up from her phone.

  Her head turned a couple of degrees in the direction of the truck, but there wasn’t time for her to get a full view of it. Chris had thrown his right arm around her waist. He was moving so quickly that she was literally swept off her feet.

  And then, basically thrown.

  It was, pretty much, a football tackle. Barbara went down, hitting the pavement just shy of the opposite corner. Chris went down with her, the knuckles of his right hand scraping the pavement, tearing his glove. Barbara let out a scream as her right elbow hit asphalt, but it was drowned out by the brake squeal, and the subsequent gunning of the engine, from the truck. It sped through the intersection. The driver, knowing that at least he hadn’t killed anyone, evidently saw no reason to hang around.

  Barbara’s phone slipped from her hand and skittered across the pavement, bouncing off the curb. Her Duane Reade bag was airborne. When it landed, some twenty feet away, its contents—a box of Tampax, a stick of Halls lemon cough candies, and a bottle of shampoo—scattered across the pavement.

  “Shit!” she cried. Instead of trying to get up, she rolled over onto her back. She winced as she gripped her elbow. “Fuck!”

  Chris had hit the ground hard, too, but at least he knew what was coming, and had thrown himself into a roll as he struck pavement. As he slowly got to his feet, half a dozen people gathered. An elderly woman who’d gone to fetch Barbara’s phone glanced at Chris and said, “Well done!”

  As she stood over Barbara, ready to hand her the phone, she asked Barbara, “Do you need an ambulance?”

  “I think … I think I’m okay,” Barbara said. “It just hurts like a motherfucker, is all.”

  Chris watched Barbara working her arm, try to determine whether her elbow was broken. She could move it without screaming, so that was a good sign. He was pretty sure, despite the close contact he’d had with Barbara, she’d not actually seen him. She didn’t know who had pulled her from the van’s path. The identity of her Good Samaritan could remain a mystery.

  Perfect.

  All he had to do was walk away, blend in with others on the sidewalk. He started heading north.

  “Hey!”

  Chris was pretty sure who was doing the yelling, and who was being yelled at.

  “You! With the hat!”

  Chris pulled the ball cap lower onto his forehead and slowly turned. Barbara had gotten to a standing position. The old woman had moved on, but a young man in a U.S. Postal Service uniform and a short, round-shouldered woman with a wheeled, wire cart full of groceries were on either side of her, offering support. Someone had gathered her Duane Reade purchases and put them back in the bag. Barbara, now standing on her own, was staring at him.

  Chris slowly pointed a finger to his own chest, pretending to be puzzled.

  “Yeah, you!” she said, pointing. “Jesus, you play for the Jets?”

  She’s going to recognize me. Get ahead of this. Don’t let her be the one …

  He took a step toward her, let his jaw drop with feigned astonishment.

  “Christ, it’s you,” he said.

  Barbara blinked a couple of times, as though trying to focus. “What?”

  He took off the hat. “I was in the limo. Yesterday. I work for the mayor.”

  Barbara’s astonishment appeared 100 percent genuine. “I don’t believe it. It is you. Uh … Chris something.”

  “Vallins,” he said, moving in closer. He looked at the man and woman flanking her. “It’s okay,” he said. “I got this.”

  They nodded with relief that they didn’t have to hang around.

  “What the hell were you doing, walking off? You fucking saved my life.”

  He shrugged. “You looked okay, so I didn’t think I was needed. Are you okay?”

  “I think so, but my elbow hurts like a son of a bitch.”

  “You should get it checked out. You should go to the hospital.”

  “I’ve had enough of hospitals,” she said. “I just need to put some ice on it.”

  Chris appeared to be considering something. “Look,” he said, “my place is only a couple of blocks from here, and if I don’t have ice, I’ve probably got some frozen dinners that’d do the trick.”

  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?”

  Twenty-Six

  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.”

  Twenty-Seven

  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.”

  “I don’t have cancer and I don’t have emphysema.”

  “So it’s the other thing.”

  Bourque said nothing.

  “Maybe you came back too soon.”

  “I took two weeks. I was fine. I could have taken two years. It wouldn’t have made any difference.”

  Delgado said, “You don’t know that. What happened to you, that kind of shit can mess you up. There’s no shame in not coming back until you’re ready.”

  She decided not to push, and drove a few more blocks without saying anything, except for one “Fuckin’ asshole” when a cab cut her off.

  “The doctor says there’s nothing physiological,” Bourque finally said.

  “Okay.”

  “It’s … like you say. It’s a reaction to stress.”

  She nodded. “So … at those times, your windpipe starts shrinking on you?”

  He nodded.
“More or less. Couple hits off the inhaler usually takes care of it. Until the next time.”

  “And this has been going on since it happened?”

  Bourque shook his head. “No. Maybe three, four months after. I’d been having a lot of trouble sleeping. And when I did finally nod off, there were nightmares. And then, through the day … there’d be times when I found myself struggling to catch my breath. The memory gets triggered, and it starts.”

  “You can’t blame yourself,” Delgado said. “It wasn’t your fault. Is that what this is about? Guilt? Because you didn’t do anything different than I would have done.”

  “Tell that to the kid,” Bourque said.

  “You know and I know the only person who gets the blame is Blair Evans. What were you supposed to do? Stand there and let him shoot you? There was a review. You did nothing wrong.”

  “I should have taken the bullet. He might have missed anything vital.”

  “Listen to you. More likely he would have put it right between your eyes.”

  Bourque’s voice went low. “I should have been ready. I was going for my weapon but I wasn’t fast enough.”

  “Well, the son of a bitch got what was coming to him anyway. Running into traffic right in front of a double-decker tour bus. Wham. Look, you’re going by the Waldorf when you hear a shot. This Evans asshole comes running out the front, armed, before you’ve even got a chance to react. You yell, ‘Freeze.’ He’s aiming right for you, he pulls the trigger, and you dive out of the way. Exactly what I would have done.”

  “I didn’t know she was behind me,” he said so quietly that she almost didn’t hear him.

  “How could you, Jerry? You got eyes in the back of your head? If it hadn’t been her, that bullet would have kept heading up Park Avenue until it found someone.”

  “Her name was Sasha.”

  Delgado nodded. “I know.”

  “And her baby’s name is Amanda.”

  “I know that, too.”

  Bourque’s voice went even quieter. “There were drops of blood on Amanda’s face. She’s in a baby carriage, on her back, she’s looking up. Imagine being fourteen months old … and seeing your mother … take a bullet through the head. Tasting her blood as the drops land on your lips.”