Warning Signs

CHAPTER 46

The dust was silky and light, the color of fresh concrete after a rain. It hung in the air like a gentle fog.

Dust or no dust, I'd been in the lobby of the Colorado Building often enough to know where I was heading. The lobby was small, maybe fifteen feet by thirty feet, and it was unfurnished. The only two elevators were side-by-side in the northwest corner, far from the front doors.

One of the mantras of my psych ER training days entered my head as I scanned the space. The first thing to do during an emergency is to take your own pulse. Heeding the dictum, I tried to stay calm and was surprised that the chaos in front of me was offering an insistent conclusion about what had occurred.

The two pairs of elevator doors had been blown outward in the center like envelope flaps puffed out by a sharp burst of air. Across the lobby, the glass wall of the brokerage was decimated, the shattered glass fragments blown into the offices, not back into the lobby. The doorway that led to the fire stairs and the lobby's alley exit seemed undamaged.

My conclusion? The direct force of the bomb blast had blown into the lobby from the thick reinforced concrete of the elevator shaft, which focused its explosive intensity like a lens. The bomb had not been placed in the lobby.

I remembered the cascading bricks tumbling from what appeared to be four or five stories up. The bomb had exploded about halfway up the elevator shaft of the eight-story building.

I poked my head through the opening that was created by the damaged elevator doors. One of the two elevator cars, the left one, was below me, in the building's only basement level. The other car had to be somewhere high above me, invisible in the lingering dust. I sniffed the air in the shaft, recognizing nothing but the nasty tang of hot electrical motors. The air was unusually pungent with an odor that wasn't familiar. The explosive?

I glanced down again. The elevator car that was below me sat cockeyed in its concrete channel, the top collapsed on one side, its cable curled on top of it like a sleeping snake.

I listened for motion in the shaft, but heard nothing. The elevator on the right side was still somewhere high up the concrete cavern.

I yelled down to the damaged car that was in the basement, "Lauren! Cozy!"

I didn't hear a reply.

I yelled up into the darkness.

Nothing.

Behind me someone said, "Hey!" Through the dust I could see a firefighter in full regalia. An ax in one hand, he stood silhouetted against the morning brightness on Fourteenth Street.

The firefighter would soon see what I'd just seen and he would either evacuate the building until the bomb squad checked it out, or he would participate in an immediate effort to rescue anyone caught in the car that had fallen into the basement. I didn't know which option he would choose. If Lauren and Cozy were in the fallen car, I could only pray that the firefighters would get down there as soon as they could. But if Lauren and Cozy were still in the other elevator car, the one high in the shaft, I knew that I had work to do.

I spun and pushed open the door to the stairs. Inside the stairwell, a locked door blocked my path to the basement. Another steel door led directly outside to the alley, and safety.

The firefighter called after me, "Sir? This way out! This way! We need to evacuate the building. Sir!"

Ignoring him and the pain in my butt, I took off up the stairs, taking the treads two at a time. At the landing between the first and second floors, I met two women descending furiously toward the exit. One of them carried her high heels in her right hand while her left was gripping the handrail. The two women were so focused on their retreat from danger that they paid no attention to me as I raced past them.

I passed no one else in the stairwell as I climbed. The other people working in the building must have been using good judgment and exiting the building down the south stairs, as far as possible from the site of the explosion.

At the fifth floor I ran from the stairwell to the elevator lobby. The damage to the elevator doors was much worse than I'd witnessed downstairs. They were peeled back from the center like flower petals seeking the morning sun.

A number of psychologists and social workers I knew and liked had offices down the hall on the fifth floor. I prayed none of them had been arriving at work when the bomb went off.

It took some effort to get close enough to the shaft to try to find the location of the elevator car in the right side of the concrete tower. From that vantage, I spotted the car easily. It was above me, maybe fifteen or twenty feet. I yelled, "Lauren! Cozy!" but heard no reply.

I sprinted back into the stairwell. My destination was the seventh-floor elevator lobby.

From there, it was clearly apparent that the top of the elevator car was about eight or ten feet down the shaft, somewhere between the sixth and seventh floors. A series of steel treads formed a ladder on the east side of the shaft. I stepped gingerly through the opening in the damaged doors and balanced myself on the narrow stainless-steel threshold above the shaft. Four or six inches at a time I shuffled sideways closer to the steel treads that would lead me down to the car. When I reached the far end of the threshold, with little room for error, I lurched for the closest tread and sealed my fingers around it, allowing my feet to swing down and find purchase below.

It was at that moment that I began to worry what would happen if the elevator suddenly began to rise.

I was down to the roof of the car in seconds. I paused before I left the relative safety of the ladder to check the cable for obvious signs of instability. I couldn't see any, but then, if the thick cable wasn't cut or frayed, I didn't have a clue what I was looking for, nor did I know whether the elevator was operated by counterweights or hydraulics or both.

Gingerly, I stepped to the roof of the car and made my way to the hatch that led to the inside. It took me a moment to free the latch and lift the cover.

A dim light bathed the interior of the car in a glow that reminded me of the lighting inside an aquarium at night. At first all I saw below me was a tableau composed of six legs and five shoes. I counted two wingtips, two New Balance athletic shoes, and one black Cole Haan slide.

My heart jostled my soul. The slide was Lauren's.

"Lauren," I said. "Cozy?"

The wingtips had to be Cozy's.

I lowered my head into the hatch.

Cozy was on his back, his head propped unnaturally against the wall of the car, a trail of blood running from one ear down his neck and disappearing below the collar of his perfectly starched shirt.

A woman dressed in cutoff carpenter's pants and a tight sleeveless T-shirt was resting on her side. At first I thought she was covered with blood, but I spotted a pressed cardboard tray and three toppled cups and realized she was covered with spilled coffee.

She squirmed on the floor and a brief grimace spasmed across her face. Her eyes were open and she appeared dazed.

Lauren was against a back corner in a position that approximated sitting, but her left hand and wrist were caught in the elevator's railing at an angle that was painfully unnatural.

None of the three people looked coherent. Only the other woman's eyes were open.

I didn't know what to do.

I heard a faint moan and prayed it was Lauren's.

Fighting every instinct that made me want to drop down into the car to be with my wife, I made my way back to the ladder and climbed away from her. I don't know exactly how I managed to get from the ladder to the elevator lobby. I'm pretty sure I set a world record for descending stairs before I literally ran into three firefighters near the second-floor landing.

I grabbed one of them on his arms and much too loudly, much too breathlessly, I stammered, "The east elevator-the one on the right-it's caught just below the seventh floor. There are three people in it. They're all hurt. Please help them."