CHAPTER TWENTY ONE
The basement elevator was slower than the main one, and it groaned faintly as it descended past the lobby level.
The noise of the cable was audible through the brass gate, and it legitimately sounded like some long-sleeping beast waking up.
Rachel stood alone inside it, watching the floor numbers tick down on the small panel above the buttons.
The car smelled faintly of motor oil, vastly different from the cedar-and-polish scent of the elevator the residents used upstairs.
When the doors opened, she stepped out into a corridor lit by bare overhead bulbs spaced too far apart, leaving stretches of dim gray concrete between each pool of light.
Her phone buzzed in her hand. A text from Novak, already: You okay?
She typed back quickly. Yeah sorry. Just checking something. brB.
She put the phone in her jacket pocket and kept walking.
Though she had been down here yesterday, it still felt strange—almost alien—when coming directly from the fine furnishings above.
The hallway walls were unpainted block, and the row of pipes she noticed yesterday still ran along the ceiling, insulated in places and bare in others, with a faint hiss coming from somewhere she couldn't pinpoint.
She had forgotten, though, just how much cooler it was down here as compared to upstairs.
Pruitt's apartment was past the laundry room, the door unremarkable. Rachel knocked twice and waited. There was no answer at the door, but the faint hum from the electrical panel back down the hall seemed to ask her: hmmmm? She knocked again, harder, and called his name once.
“Mr. Pruitt?”
Again, there was no answer. Taking a bit of a risk, she tried the handle and found it locked. No surprise there.
She stood there for a moment, looking at the door, then turned and kept moving deeper into the basement.
The hallway narrowed slightly past the apartment, the concrete giving way to a section of exposed pipe and conduit that ran along both walls, bundled and labeled in faded yellow tape.
All of this was new to her, as she’d not explored the basement any further than Pruitt’s apartment yesterday.
A water heater the size of a small car sat in an alcove to her right, ticking quietly as it worked.
A thin film of rust spread from one of its seams down the side of the tank.
She stepped around a folded hand truck someone had left leaning against the wall, along with a stack of empty plastic buckets, a beat-up step ladder, and a coiled length of garden hose.
She studied it all, not quite sure what she was looking for, and kept going.
A few yards farther down, the corridor opened slightly, and the lighting changed.
Here, the bulbs were replaced by a longer fluorescent fixture that buzzed faintly overhead.
This had to be the stretch Hale had described the day before, the section without cameras, the one that ran from somewhere near the boiler room out toward the back of the building by the service entrance.
She followed it, her footsteps flat and nearly soundless against the concrete.
Within just a few seconds, the corridor ended at a heavy metal door with a push bar.
A small window in the door showed daylight and a stretch of asphalt beyond it.
She could just make out the edge of a dumpster and a parked maintenance van.
She turned and started back the way she'd come, moving more slowly now, looking at the walls instead of straight ahead.
She passed the water heater again, the hand truck, the bundled conduit, paying closer attention this time.
She looked for signs of give, places where the walls might have been damaged or cracked.
She studied every seam and gap in the concrete that she walked by.
She saw nothing out of the ordinary and felt slightly embarrassed that the sudden hunch that had come to her upstairs was turning out to be nothing.
But then, just before she reached the boiler room, something made her stop.
It was a narrow stretch of wall she'd walked past without registering on her way through. It was tucked into a recess beside the boiler room entrance, almost as an afterthought. It was the sort of space you might place a spare bucket or prop up a broom or a mop. What she saw in that little recess wasn’t quite a door…
she wouldn’t have called it that at first glance.
It didn't have a handle or a frame that stood out from the surrounding concrete, but the section of wall was a slightly different shade than the block around it. It was newer-looking, as if it had been patched or repainted at some point more recently than everything else down here. At the base of it, faint scuff marks curved out across the floor in a shallow arc, the kind of mark left behind by something swinging open again and again over a long stretch of time. It was so faint that she honestly didn’t think she’d have thought it out of the ordinary if she hadn’t specifically been looking for something just like it.
Rachel crouched and looked at the marks more closely.
There was no way to be sure, but she thought these marks might be old.
They looked as if they’d been wiped down several times, faded by not just time but some sort of cleaning solution.
Then she stood and pressed her fingers into the seam at the edge of the panel.
Nothing happened at first, but when she pressed much harder, it gave slightly.
She wedged her fingers deeper into the crack and pulled.
The panel swung outward with a low scrape of metal against the floor.
Beyond it, she found a passage barely wide enough for her to turn around in.
It smelled of dust and old paint, with something faintly chemical underneath that she couldn't place.
A few rusted cans sat along one wall, their labels long faded and illegible.
The floor was bare concrete, undisturbed in most places except for a thin layer of grit that had settled into the corners.
The passage ran into darkness in both directions, narrower than the corridor she'd just left; it was close enough on either side that she could have touched both walls at once by stretching her arms out.
She pulled out her phone and turned on the flashlight, sweeping it slowly across the space.
From what she could tell, it was just an old storage cutout—somewhere the original janitorial staff might have kept paint or supplies decades ago, long since forgotten and walled half shut behind the boiler room.
She almost let it go at that. She nearly stepped back out, ready to pull the panel shut behind her.
But something kept her standing there a moment longer, a habit built over years of looking just slightly past the obvious explanation.
If this was truly an old, forgotten space, why had the door (the slightly hidden door, at that, she thought) opened so easily once she applied pressure?
She thought of those scuffs on the floor, indicating something opening and closing fairly regularly.
Curious, she pointed the phone’s light up toward the ceiling.
At first there was nothing to see…just a flat ceiling panel, painted the same dull white as the walls. She moved the light slowly across it, inch by inch. She was balanced on the edge of excitement and feeling embarrassed because really, what exactly was she looking for?
And just as she almost mentally stumbled across this thought, she saw something that looked just barely out of place: a fine scatter of dust and grit along the seam where the panel met the wall.
It was fresher than anything else in the space, not the gray buildup of years but something recent.
No, this was something that had fallen within the last few days rather than over the span of decades.
She stepped up onto one of the paint cans, testing it first with her foot before putting her full weight on it.
It held, though it wobbled under her, and she braced one hand against the wall to steady herself.
She felt a bit like a small child trying to clamber up onto the counter for whatever snack might be waiting up there.
She reached up and pressed her palm flat against the ceiling panel near the dusted corner, half expecting it to be solid, fixed in place like every other ceiling panel she'd ever touched.
Instead, it gave way under her hand.
It wasn't drywall. It was a slightly thicker section of plywood, painted to match the rest of the ceiling. It had been fitted into a frame that let it lift and slide rather than stay fixed in place. She pushed it up and to the side, and it slid over the surrounding panel. It was a bit heavier than she’d initially thought, but it moved to the side with barely a sound.
When it had been shifted over, it left behind a square opening above her head, black and silent.
Rachel raised the phone higher, angling the light up into the gap. She nearly lost her balance on the paint can again, and when she righted herself again and peered up into the newly illuminated space, she felt something cold settle into her stomach.
A ladder ran up into the dark, thin iron rungs bolted directly into the interior of the wall.
The metal was pitted and dark with age, clearly part of the building's original construction rather than anything added later.
It rose past the reach of her light, disappearing into the darkness above her.
As she swept the beam slowly along its length, she thought she could make out small openings cut into the shaft at intervals, places where the ladder broke away from a straight vertical climb and gave access to something beyond the wall itself.
There seemed to be more than one of them, spaced out unevenly as the shaft rose, each one a darker rectangle against the surrounding iron and stone.
From this vantage point and with limited light, it was hard to tell for sure.
She stood there on the wobbling paint can, the light trembling slightly in her hand, and understood exactly what she was looking at.
This was the sound Irene Baxter had heard in her walls and mistaken for rats—the scratch and shuffle of something moving behind the plaster that had nothing to do with rodents at all.
This was how a man could be seen on the fourth floor at seven thirty and never once cross the lobby to get there.
This was how he could move from one end of the building to the other without appearing on a single camera.
She knew, with a certainty that settled into her chest like something physical, that Pruitt was the killer.
Rachel lowered her phone and stepped back down onto solid ground.
She then looked back up at the iron rungs disappearing into the shaft above her.
The shaft itself was narrow but easily wide enough for someone to climb that ladder without much of a problem.
She gazed up into the dark with the cold feeling still in her gut, wondering how many of those breakaway points threaded through walls she'd walked past a dozen times in the last week without ever suspecting what was behind them.