The Chemistry of Death

Chapter 23

Joe had a camera detector. He’d ordered it online when he first moved in and had swept the house for cameras and bugs. His work at the time had been so confidential that he hadn’t been able to run any risk of being overheard. Back then, he hadn’t found anything.

This must be new. Maeve and her people had been all over that wall, cleaning and painting. They would have found the camera during their work. Perhaps one of them had put it there, and it had nothing to do with the dead women in the tunnels. Maeve and her employees had been vetted pretty thoroughly before they were given access to his house, but that didn’t mean one of them hadn’t left the camera. He was surprised by how much he hoped that the camera hadn’t been left by Maeve.

He went back to work. Even though the camera detector was a little bigger than a pack of cards, it scanned all available frequencies for video transmissions. He discounted the surveillance feeds he was currently monitoring himself — namely all the subway platforms on the A line — and didn’t find anything else. That just meant that, if there were cameras out there, they weren’t using radio frequencies to transmit right now. Maybe the person who set up the cameras had turned them off remotely after they saw him find the first camera.

He had a bug detector that worked the same way for audio signals, and it didn’t turn up anything either. That didn’t mean everything was clear, but he didn’t know what else to do.

For now, he’d have to try a low-tech solution. He pulled the camera out of his pocket and held it at knee height. “Smell it, Edison.”

The dog dipped his nose into Joe’s palm and sniffed obediently. He growled. Interesting.

“Can you find more of these?” Joe asked.

Edison dropped his nose to the ground and sniffed. He sniffed in seemingly random patterns across the ground. He wasn’t trained in any kind of tracking, but he was a smart dog, so hopefully he was looking for things that smelled like the camera and not tracking all the places his own tennis ball had been.

Joe let the dog wander while he tried to sort out his own muddled thoughts. If it wasn’t Maeve or her people, then someone else had come into Joe’s sanctuary and left a camera. Who? And how? There were only three entrances to Joe’s underground house. First was the elevator, but that was manned at the top by the staff at Grand Central Terminal during the day. There was no way someone could open the door to the round information booth under the clock, walk past the people sitting there, and unlock the door that led to the elevator without being noticed. The booth was so small they’d practically bump into the workers stationed there, workers who never left their posts all at once. That entrance was secure.

Maybe they could have done it at night if they managed to hide in Grand Central until the building was closed, but even then there were cleaners around, and Joe usually disabled the elevator so it couldn’t be called up to the concourse at night. He’d forgotten to do that when Maeve visited earlier that evening: who was to say that he hadn’t forgotten it on another occasion? Joe tried to think back, but he couldn’t be sure.

Edison nosed the front door. He hadn’t found anything outside. Joe followed him inside, camera and bug detectors out and sweeping. An hour later, neither of them had found anything inside, either.

Joe disabled his security and went out the second exit to his house: the main tunnel exit. Edison sniffed the ground and growled. If the dog was saying what Joe thought he was saying, the man had been here, too. But to come in via this entrance, he needed Joe’s security code. Only two people knew that code: Joe and Celeste. It couldn’t have been her — she didn’t leave the house, and she never would have told anyone. So how else could an intruder find the code?

His phone beeped. It had come out of its Faraday pocket again. He pulled it out.

It was a text from Alan. Must cancel tennis. Things heating up. Maybe a quick drink next week instead?

Alan had never cancelled tennis before, not when he was in town. There must be more going on with him than the season. Joe didn’t like him, but he texted him back anyway. Meet at Campbell instead of the club. The Campbell Apartment was trendy enough for Alan, and it was inside Grand Central so Joe could get there.

I want to come down to your house, Alan answered.

That was weird, too. Alan had never had any interest in Joe’s living space, had never wanted to visit him there. Edison scratched against the door, reminding Joe that they were supposed to be looking for traces of a man who had broken into Joe’s sanctum.

Meet at the clock, Joe told him. He didn’t like the idea of being down in his house with Alan, alone, but he pushed the thought away. He’d known Alan for years. The man wasn’t exactly harmless, but he wasn’t a psycho killer either.

Before he forgot, he texted his lawyer, Mr. Rossi, to get Alan Wright added to the list of approved visitors. Given his high visibility, the security checks would fly right by.

Matter decided, Joe punched in the code and opened the door. He stepped out quickly with Edison, so they wouldn’t be silhouetted against the light from his chamber. After his eyes had adjusted to the light outside, he looked around.

“You smell anyone?” he asked Edison. He could tell by the dog’s relaxed manner that no one was there.

Joe examined the dusty ground, searching for footprints. It was hard to see if anyone had walked through the dust because he and Edison walked this way every day, sometimes a couple of times a day, and their footprints had disturbed the ground.

Edison sniffed the ground around the door, ending up at the wall. He barked. Joe shone his flashlight where Edison was looking. Two neat rectangles had been pressed into the dust. The rectangles were parallel to each other a few feet apart, and about a foot from the wall.

He swept his flashlight up at the ceiling and stopped at a small square of clean rock. That was odd. His best guess was that something had been taped up there, and when the tape had been peeled away, it had taken dust and soot with it.

The camera inside had been taped up against the wall with double-sided tape, so it made sense that one out here would have been, too, but he didn’t have any proof. It was just an empty square. Still, it was the right place to record Joe entering his code in the security system when he came home.

This probably cleared Maeve and her crew, and he breathed a sigh of relief on that score. He liked Maeve and wanted to trust her.

He reset the system, choosing new random numbers, colors floating in his head as he entered them. He leaned low over the device, so that, if there were another camera out there, it couldn’t see what he was typing in.

“I think he came in here, Edison,” Joe said. “He got my security code with that camera and came in through the tunnel door. What do you think? Do you smell anything?”

Edison cocked his head and wagged his tail.

“This would be a lot easier if you could talk,” Joe told him.

Edison licked his hand.

“Yeah, you’re pretty good at the nonverbal communication thing,” Joe said. “Because you are a great dog!”

He gave Edison another treat, then looked around the rest of the tunnel. He found nothing else out of place.

He returned to his parlor and ran through the footage from his own surveillance cameras. He had one by the elevator and one by the inside of the tunnel entrance. He’d need to install one outside, too.

Most of the footage was boring, and he fast forwarded through it until two (blue) o’clock. At that point, both cameras blacked out. Someone must have cut the power. The cameras had backup batteries, so they kept filming.

At first it was all black, then a thread of light leaked in from the tunnel entrance as someone opened the door. Proof in black and white that someone had broken into his sanctuary. All this time he’d thought he was invulnerable here, but he wasn’t.

A figure dressed in black entered holding a tiny flashlight with a red bulb, like the ones used by astronomers. The red light illuminated such a tiny scrap of darkness that Joe couldn’t see a face or determine a gait, but the size and shape told him it was a man. He crossed the ground quickly, as if he knew where he was going.

The man stopped and set his backpack on the ground near where Joe had found the camera. He pulled a square object out of his backpack and extended it to about six (orange) feet. A ladder. He scampered up. His movements were hard to see, but he must have been fastening his camera to the ceiling. He climbed down, folded up his ladder, and turned off the light. Several minutes passed before the door to the tunnel entrance closed. He could have done anything during that time.

Joe played and replayed the footage. He could tell little about the man. He was about Joe’s height, six (orange) foot tall. He seemed bulky, but that could have been his clothing or the shadows. Joe couldn’t see his face. He might have been wearing a ski mask, but Joe couldn’t even be sure of that. The light was too poor. He could tell that the guy was wearing gloves, which meant that he wouldn’t find any fingerprints.

He ran the footage through some filters to lighten and enhance it. Nothing worked.

His laptop beeped. Probably that track worker ending his shift. Still, Joe tabbed over to the surveillance window to make sure. Nothing to see now, but he rewound a few minutes.

A light-haired woman stumbled down the empty platform at 23rd (blue, red) Street. She wore a dark-colored outfit with expensive-looking high heels. She wove from side to side as if she were drunk.

A man in a light-colored fedora held her elbow. As if he knew right where the camera was, the man adjusted his hat so its shadow fell across his face. Joe couldn’t see his features. The man walked with a slight limp. There was something familiar about his gait, but Joe couldn’t pinpoint it. Athletic, long stride length. The limp was awkward, almost artificial.

The man pointed to the end of the platform, and the woman nodded. Blond hair hung halfway down her back. She leaned against the man, resting her head against his dark shoulder. It looked as if she were crying. Her shoulders shook. The couple reached the end of the platform, climbed over the gate, and walked off into the tunnel.

Joe took his phone out of his pocket. He’d call Vivian and have her alert the transit cops on the way. They might make it in time.

If they didn’t, he had to get to that woman before she died in front of a train.

He ran.