by R. L. Akers
Gray smiled humorlessly. "No, I seem to recall the one you were carrying looked a bit different."
"A bit like this?" Mack asked, holding up something he'd just found in a drawer.
"Yep, that's it," Gray said, motioning towards Bobbi. Mack carried it over and handed it to the tech. "Anything look unusual about that smoke detector, Bobbi?"
The middle-aged woman turned it over in her hands. "Definitely. This isn't a smoke detector—it's a spycam in disguise. I've seen this model before... pretty low end, you can get them online." She retrieved a screwdriver from her kit and started removing the back of the device.
Saunders was staring at the device, mouth hanging a little too far open to be natural. "It's... But how?"
"You're saying you didn't know?" Gray clarified. "If you really thought it was just a smoke detector, then what reason did you have for removing it from Barton Chan's apartment?"
The landlord's eyes widened just slightly.
"That's right," Gray confirmed. "It was positioned right over his bed. You retrieved it today after you thought we'd left—I know, because you left drywall dust all over the man's sheets." Gray shook his head. "Just in case we came back and searched Chan's apartment, you didn't want us finding that camera, did you? As obviously guilty as Chan was of murdering the Howells, it still would have raised a red flag if we found a spycam over his bed."
"I— Really, I didn't know—"
"Mr. Saunders," Gray interjected, changing tack. "How would you characterize your investment in the Harkley Building? Would you say it's been a good investment? Profitable?"
The man blinked, surprised at the sudden change of subject. "I, um, sure. I didn't turn a profit as quickly as I would have liked, but it's coming around." He seemed to warm to the subject, which was surely a familiar one. He couldn't possibly think his denials about the spycam were convincing, but he adopted a conversational tone anyway, pretending he hadn't just been accused of spying on a tenant's bedroom. "Rentals are a very good long-term investment, and Harkley is one of the best investments I've ever made."
"Really?" Bobbi broke in, motioning at the screen of the landlord's computer. Looking over her shoulder, Gray saw that she'd managed to pull up some financial statements. "According to this," she said, "last year was the first year you broke even."
"Ah, well, it takes a few years," Saunders said dismissively. "I've made a number of capital improvements."
Gray smiled. "I can well believe a building like this incurs some hefty expenses. But expenses weren't your problem, were they? Your issue was poor income."
"I'm not sure what you're—"
"You have eighteen units in this building, yes? You said they usually rent around $2,500 a month?"
"The updated units, yes. Not all of the units have been remodeled yet."
"Fair enough. But let's put the numbers in perspective. Eighteen units... no, I suppose it's seventeen units if we leave out the one we're standing in. Seventeen units at two and half grand each... Bobbi?"
She punched some numbers on her smartphone's calculator. "Forty-two-five a month. Just over five hundred annually."
"Half a million dollars in income each year," Gray said thoughtfully. "That does sound like a good return on a building like this. But that's nowhere near what you're actually earning, is it, Mr. Saunders?"
Bobbi spoke up again. "His financials show income barely over $300,000 the first several years he owned the units. Very little income growth until about two years ago, when it started growing significantly. He reported $390,000 last fiscal year, finally breaking even."
Gray turned to face the landlord, just in time to see his face twitch slightly. The man pretended exasperation. "This is an investment property, a long-term investment! I knew full well it would be years before it really paid off, but eventually, it would pay big." He gestured to Bobbi. "Like she just said, I break even around four hundred. When I finally get rents up to five hundred—where they should be—I'll be clearing a hundred thousand a year." He smiled, shrugged. "I'm willing to lose a little money in between now and then for that kind of prize."
"So you're managing okay?" Gray persisted. "You can afford this kind of loss for the time being?"
"Sure." Saunders said, even managing to sound casual.
"Your personal finances are okay?"
The other man hesitated, clearly sensing the trap.
Gray didn't wait. "I spoke with your wife, Mr. Saunders."
"My... wife?" His face was suddenly emotionless.
"Yes. Mrs. Saunders tells me the two of you have been under a terrible financial strain these last couple years, and she blames the Harkley Building."
The landlord waved a hand. "Well, she doesn't really understand business."
Gray ignored this. "She says you were losing so much money on Harkley that you had to make cash infusions." He glanced at his notebook, which was open in one hand. "You took out additional loans, and when that wasn't enough, you sold your car... and then hers. That was when she kicked you out of the house, almost a year ago." He cocked his head. "You lied to Detective McMurphy this morning, didn't you? You have been living in this unit."
Saunders seemed to sag just a bit. Obviously taking a moment to collect his thoughts, he moved across the room and settled into an armchair. "Okay, yes." He made an exasperated noise. "It's embarrassing—of course I don't tell anyone." His voice grew heated. "That doesn't explain why you're searching my apartment, treating me like a criminal. None of this is a crime."
"Fraud is a crime," Mack spoke up melodramatically from the kitchenette. "So is murder."
The landlord turned to stare at him. As if the man could have doubted that's where this interrogation was leading.
Gray wrested the man's attention away from Mack. "It's all because of your rent-controlled units, isn't it, Mr. Saunders?"
Saunders caught himself from saying something and intentionally clamped his mouth shut.
"That's the only way to explain your income problem, after all," Gray continued. "Even if your whole building was full of units like Barton Chan's, you'd have no problem renting them at two grand a pop, no remodel necessary. That would put you at breakeven." Gray thought back to the rent check he'd seen on Chan's desk. "But Mr. Chan's unit is rent controlled at $150 a month, isn't it?"
The landlord hesitated, but there was no point lying, not when Bobbi Falmer was sitting right there, combing through his financial statements from the last decade. He nodded.
"And how many units were rent-controlled when you bought the Harkley?"
Saunders paused. "I think maybe five...?" he tried.
"Nine," Bobbi corrected him cheerfully, not even bothering to look up from the screen. "There were nine units renting for less than five hundred a month when he bought the place."
Gray shook his head in amazement. "Half your units were rent controlled." He actually felt a pang of sympathy for the man. "You didn't know that going in, did you?"
"Nine, wow..." the other said, shaking his head as if amazed at his memory loss. "But you're right, when I was looking at buying this place, the seller did fudge some of the financials." He gestured vaguely. "The overall income figure was accurate enough, but he evened out the individual rent amounts—made it look like rent was low across the board, but still reasonable on all but two units. I..." He sighed. "I didn't dig as deep as I should have." He forced a smile. "But I'll get the rent up eventually."
Gray ignored this. "So, nine rent-controlled units. Half your income potential strangled." He paused, a gleam in his eye. "And now? How many rent-controlled units do you still have?"
Saunders braced himself unconsciously. "Five?"
Bobbi caught Gray's eye and gave a half shrug; apparently this time, five sounded plausible to her.
"Only five left out of nine," Gray mused. "That means four tenants left rent-controlled units, all in the last two years, it seems. But why? It's rare for anyone to leave such a good deal, but four of them in such quick succession?"
Saunders shrugged unconvincingly. "If you say so. I'd honestly forgotten there were—"
"You needed to get rid of those tenants, but you had no legal recourse. So that's when the Haunting of the Harkley began."
Standing abruptly, Saunders scoffed, but it was a weak performance. "Oh, please! This building is not haunted!"
"Of course," Gray agreed, "you don't want most people thinking that, because it would be bad for business. But you didn't mind losing the business of your rent-controlled tenants, did you?"
"You know what? You're just making wild accusations, Detective!" The landlord's words were confident, but he was definitely nervous now. Gray could see sweat stains around the man's armpits that he was pretty sure weren't there before. "Do you have proof of any of this?" Saunders demanded.
Gray smiled, gesturing to Bobbi, who began digging in her kit. Looking back at Saunders, he said, "I didn't think to do it at first, but I finally searched the database for police reports filed by tenants in this building. There've been several over the last few years, though none of them were investigated very thoroughly. The tenants were claiming paranormal activity, after all, so they were hardly taken seriously." Gray rapped his knuckles on a wall. "But I was very interested to see a report from a year ago, filed by the tenant who lived in this unit. A Mrs. Balder, yes? I assume she was rent controlled?"
The landlord didn't respond. By now, he himself was starting to look a little haunted.
"There was a 911 call from Mrs. Balder on June 7th of last year, claiming that her apartment—Harkley 201—was haunted. She had apparently awoken one morning to find a message written in blood across one wall... in this room." Gray glanced around, eyes resting briefly on each wall. "She called from unit 203 down the hall, having apparently panicked and raced out of her own home. But when she came back with the police two hours later, there was nothing; the walls were clean. Because you'd already cleaned it up, hadn't you?"
"This is ridiculous," Saunders said tiredly.
By now, Bobbi had found and switched on her portable UV light, and she was methodically moving up and down each wall. She gave a little grunt of excitement. "Found something!"
The words were very faint, and it took several back-and-forth sweeps of the light before they were able to get a sense of the entire message, but eventually they puzzled it out: Leave my home or join me here forever.
"A little direct, don't you think?" Gray asked rhetorically. "It's a wonder no one caught on that it was only rent-controlled tenants being haunted.
"But it wasn't," the landlord complained.
"Ah," Gray said, mock-appreciatively. "You threw in some red herrings too, in order to avoid suspicion. Smart."
"I. Didn't. Do. Anything!" Saunders waved at the words on the wall. "I'm as surprised to see this as you are! You have no proof that I had anything to do with it."
"True," Gray admitted. "I have no proof about the first four tenants you defrauded; you were careful and smart in your handling of them. But you got too creative for your own good when it came to Barton Chan and the Howells. Then again, you had to get creative if you wanted to vacate two units in one fell swoop."
"Barton murdered the Howells!" Saunders all but screamed as his frustration finally overflowed. He turned to Mack, to the uniformed cops, looking for allies. "It's all on tape! And he confessed!"
"All of that is true as well," Gray agreed. "But what drove Barton Chan to murder his closest friends in the world?"
"He went crazy!"
"Exactly," Gray nodded. "With a considerable amount of help from you." He glanced at Bobbi. "You found something?"
Bobbi was practically bouncing in the desk chair. "Yeah, two huge directories of video and audio files. Only deleted this morning."
"But—what?" Saunders sputtered.
The tech looked inordinately pleased with herself, and her words were condescending as she explained. "Deleting a file doesn't remove it from your hard drive; it just marks that space as available for use." She cracked her knuckles deliberately, going a bit overboard as she milked the moment. "It's easy enough to find deleted files if you know to look for them. Well, easy enough for someone like me."
Gray sighed. "What can you tell us about the deleted files, Bobbi?"
Bobbi was all business once more as she turned back to the screen. "One directory has 24 hours of video surveillance, from 7 a.m. yesterday to 7 a.m. this morning, which is when I assume he disabled the camera feed and deleted the folder. Filenames indicate it was a tenth camera, not one of the nine feeds he provided us on your thumb drive earlier."
"Can we view one of the deleted files?"
"Sure." Bobbi pulled up a video and started playing it. The picture was very dark, but it was easy enough to make out the outline of a bed, a restive figure tangled in its sheets; much like the elevator surveillance, this perspective was top-down from the ceiling.
"You used the smoke detector spycam to keep an eye on Mr. Chan," Gray said musingly. "So that you would know when he was asleep. And once he'd been out a couple hours... Bobbi, let's hear one of the deleted audio files."
"Here's the one that shows as being played most recently." Bobbi clicked and sat back, but nothing happened. She frowned.
"The speakers are probably disconnected," Gray suggested, cutting his eyes back to the landlord. "When we were watching the elevator video earlier, it was simpler if he didn't let us hear there was an audio component."
Bobbi nodded, finding and reconnecting the audio cable, then cranking the volume and restarting playback. A low hiss emanated from the speakers.
Ding. About ten seconds of relative silence. Ding. More silence. The recording repeated this pattern for some time, and even Gray was growing impatient when they finally heard something new.
"Hello, Barton!" The voice was rich and friendly. Ellis Howell's voice. "Fancy seeing you here today!"
"Hello, honey!" a woman said. Kathryn Howell.
"Unseasonably warm weather we're having, wouldn't you say?" Mr. Howell again. There was silence, as if the recording included just one side of the conversation, and then the sound of rich laughter. "Yes, yes, I agree."
"Won't you come over for dinner later this week?" Mrs. Howell asked. "We would so love to have you."
The silence seemed to stretch long again, and then—inevitably—the words. The trigger phrase. "Your parents would be so proud of you, Barton." It was both of them saying it at the same time; or rather, separate recordings of their two voices had been overlaid, because the words didn't quite line up.
The recording turned decidedly ugly after that. "You are so worthless," a man's voice spat in a poor imitation of Ellis Howell's rich baritone. "Worthless! You sit around collecting social security, letting the hardworking people pay for your indolence." Now a nasty female voice: "The world would be a better place without people like you." Back to the fake Mr. Howell again. "Your parents asked us to take care of you, so I'm going to do just that. I'm going to take out my sword and cut your worthless head off." There was the recognizable sound of a sword being pulled from a sheath, the kind of sound effect Gray had heard countless times in the movies. And then the animal sounds began. Inhuman cries and grunts that grew in intensity until they were screams, punctuated with tearing and splattering noises.
When the recording finally ended, Gray realized he was breathing hard. In fact, it looked like everyone in the room had been affected by the horrific sounds. He waited until the thumping of his heart had slowed before he dared speak again.
"Mr. Chan kept a daily journal, and according to that journal, he had a recurring nightmare about the Howells attacking him in the elevator. I counted fourteen total occurrences of that nightmare over the last three months. There didn't seem to be a pattern to it, nor should there have been, if these were naturally-occurring nightmares." He paused. "But when I compared the dates to Vanessa Watkins' calendar, I discovered that Chan's nightmares lined up exactly with the nights she was working late at the hospita
l.
"With your security cameras, Mr. Saunders, it would have been easy enough to keep tabs on Miss Watkins, and that was important. Since her bedroom shares a wall with Mr. Chan's, you couldn't risk playing your nightmare-inducing audio file when she might hear it too."
Mack spoke up. "But how did he play that recording where Chan could hear?"
Bobbi held up the bogus smoke detector, the back of which had been removed to expose wires and miniature electronics. "Little speaker, right here."
Gray continued. "You knew Barton Chan had a history of mental illness, and you played on that. You literally drove the man insane."
Robert Saunders was no longer denying anything. He sat with his face in his hands, weeping quietly. "I didn't mean for anyone to get hurt," he mumbled. "I thought... I thought maybe I could get Barton to flip out. Maybe he'd scare them away, or maybe he'd end up back in the asylum; then the Howells would want to leave too, all their positive memories of this place destroyed."
"No," Gray said softly, keeping the very real anger out of his voice. "Doesn't sound like you wanted to hurt them at all."
Saunders looked as if he might say something more, but he bit his lip.
Gray jerked his head toward one of the uniforms, who approached with handcuffs. "Mr. Saunders, you're under arrest for conspiracy to commit murder." In truth, Gray wasn't sure what charge to bring against a man whose manipulation of someone else had the unexpected effect of driving him to murder; he'd let the DA figure that out. Reading the landlord his rights, he allowed himself a feeling of satisfaction that he'd done his part in resolving this strange mess.
As the uniformed officers led Saunders from the room, Mack sidled up to Gray. "That's messed up."
Gray nodded his agreement.
"But how did you figure out any of this? What made you even suspect the landlord?"
"It all came down to motive. The landlord had the most powerful motive for getting rid of the Howells and Barton Chan, one way or another. I found out that Chan's unit was rent controlled, and it stood to reason that the Howells' unit was also, since they'd moved in shortly after Chan's parents did. And once I thought about it, I realized it was suspicious Saunders had never mentioned any of his units were rent controlled." Gray smirked a little. "All the landlords I've ever known take every opportunity to whine about rent control. But Saunders gave us the impression that most units rented for $2,500."