4
"All quiet on the Western Front?"
The TP in the lobby kiosk jumped as if he'd heard a shot. He dropped his newspaper and blanched when he saw who was speaking.
"Sir!" He shot to his feet. "You startled me, sir!"
"At ease," Jensen said, holding back a laugh.
He rarely used the elevator when he traveled from his office to the lobby. He'd found it much faster to take the stairs from the third floor. He'd eased through the stairway door at the south side of the lobby and silently made his way toward the security kiosk. He'd wanted to see how close he could get before the TP on duty realized he wasn't alone.
It had been easy. Too easy. The TP, whose name was Gary Cruz, had been so engrossed in the Sunday paper's sports section that Jensen had had to announce himself.
Jensen should have been angry, but he was too pleased with his own stealth to take Cruz's head off.
"Everything under control?"
The TP nodded. "Only one mouse in the house."
That wasn't unusual, even at this hour. A certain number of FAs would stay late or come in early to study, or catch up on assigned duties, or simply spend time on the Communing Level. The busiest after-hours periods tended to be Friday into Saturday, and Saturday into Sunday. The early hours of Monday usually found the Temple deserted. Except, of course, for the security detail.
"Thought he was a homeless guy at first," Cruz added.
"You're sure he wasn't?" This TP had better be damn sure.
"His card read him out as LFA, so that explained his looks."
"A lapser?" A sour note chimed in Jensen's head. "What's his name?"
Cruz sat and tapped at his keyboard. "John Roselli, sir. Came in about twenty minutes ago."
Roselli… he knew that name. He knew all the lapsers. He kept an eye on them to make sure they were complying with their punishment. But that wasn't the only reason. He'd kept a special watch ever since Clark Schaub. He'd been depressed because he thought his LFA designation was unjust—they all thought that—and killed himself.
A Dormentalist suicide was news under any circumstances, but when it happened in the Temple itself, and when the member did it in such dramatic fashion, it created a field day for the press. And not just rags like The Light—all the papers.
Schaub had seated himself in the center of the Great Room on the twenty-first floor, removed a straight razor from his pocket, and slit his own throat.
Covering it up had appeared impossible at first, but Jensen found a way. The only witnesses had been devout Dormentalists and they took a vow of silence to protect their Church. Jensen and Lewis and Hutch moved the body to a grove in Central Park. A police investigation listed Schaub as murdered by an unknown suspect. The case remained unsolved.
"Where'd Roselli go?"
Cruz checked his screen again. "Straight to twenty-one."
Shit. Like any other LFA, Roselli thought he'd gotten the shaft. He'd always struck Jensen as pretty stable, but you never knew. And the last thing Jensen needed now was a replay of the Schaub mess.
"Access the cameras up there. Let's see what our lapser is up to."
Cruz complied with practiced efficiency, alternating between mouse and keyboard. But as he worked, his brow began to furrow; a puzzled expression wormed onto his face.
Jensen didn't like that look. "What's wrong?"
"I can't find him."
"Well, then he must have left the floor."
Cruz pressed a button under one of his screens. "Not by the elevators. They haven't moved."
"Check the stairwell doors."
Jensen's mind raced. Each floor had access to the north and south stairways, but the doors were monitored. Access to the twenty-second floor from the stairways was blocked by password-protected steel doors that would have been at home in a bank vault.
"No record of either being opened."
"Then rerun the tapes, damn it. Let's see where he went when he left the elevator. No, wait. Do the elevator first."
Like a giant Ti Vo, the security computer stored each of the digital feeds on huge hard drives that made them accessible at any time.
Jensen moved behind Cruz and waited as he fiddled with the monitoring system. A bank of eight small screens arced across the inner front of the kiosk, just below the counter. Images from each security camera were supposed to rotate through the screens. The rotation had been halted while Cruz accessed specific cameras.
"Coming up on screen eight," Cruz said.
The black-and-white image of an elevator interior lit the screen. Car 1 blinked in the upper-left corner; a digital clock ran in the upper right. The camera showed the knit-capped head of a scruffy-looking guy staring at his shoes. Jensen got a glimpse of beard but never the face.
According to the clock, Roselli stepped off the elevator onto twenty-one at 11:22:14. Something about the way he kept his head down bothered Jensen. But no problem. The other cameras would provide a good head-to-toe look.
"Roll the floor cameras back to 11:21."
Cruz did just that and Jensen watched as he scrolled through every feed from the twenty-first floor.
John Roselli didn't appear on one.
Cruz kept shaking his head as he made a second run through the feeds. "This is impossible! Something's got to be wrong!"
Jensen looked toward the elevator doors.
No, it wasn't impossible. Every surveillance system had blind spots. And yes, something was definitely wrong. Because whoever had gone up in that car had taken advantage of gaps in the system. Jensen doubted very much that John Roselli had the know-how or even the inclination to do that.
A thought hit like a horse kick in the chest.
Roselli—the Farrell-Amurri-Robertson guy had seen him during his tour… tried to talk to him… even asked questions about him…
Could it be him? But even so, Jensen didn't know what the guy hoped to accomplish up on twenty-one.
But the floor above…
"The elevators—did either go to twenty-two?"
Cruz looked up at him. "How could they? Mr. Brady left around—"
"Since Roselli checked in."
Cruz manipulated the mouse, then, "No, sir. Nothing's gone to two-two since Mr. Brady called for it earlier."
Jensen hid a sigh of relief. And yet…
What if this Farrell-Amurri-Robertson had somehow got hold of Roselli's card? And what if he'd found a way to twenty-two?
Jensen cursed Brady for not allowing surveillance on twenty-two. He understood it—after all, Brady lived there—but it left a major gap in security.
"Call Roselli's home. See if he's there. And if he is, ask him if he's still got his swipe card."
"But—" Cruz began, then the light dawned. "Oh, I get it."
He placed the call, waited a long time with the receiver against his ear, then hung up.
"No answer, not even voice mail."
Okay. Then it was probably Roselli up there. He could have stepped out of the elevator, sat himself down right in front of the doors, and killed himself: knife, poison, whatever.
But then again, it was possible, just possible, that it was someone else.
"I'm going up for a look."
"I'll go, sir."
"No. You man the fort."
Either way, a dead Roselli or a live mystery guy, Jensen wanted to handle it alone.
But he hoped—no, he prayed—it was the mystery guy. He needed to slip his hands around the bastard's scrawny neck and watch his eyes bulge out of his head.