CHAPTER TWENTY THREE
He liked that about this building. People here still said thank you like they meant it.
He was also quite pleased that the agents were gone for the day.
He'd watched them leave from the front window three hours ago, the male agent driving, the female partner in the passenger seat. Pruitt had stood near the window in the mail room, with its copy machine and several printers, a moment longer than necessary while watching the car pull out onto the street. He’d felt something settle in him that he could only describe as relief.
He knew he’d been as helpful as possible yesterday without accidentally revealing his truth.
He'd answered every question, and had even taken a risk and told them most of the truth about the service entrance.
He thought he'd handled himself well. He thought, if he was being honest with himself, that he'd handled himself better than well. He’d been professional and eager to please.
He sat down on the edge of his bed and pulled off his boots.
The apartment was small, a single room with a kitchenette along one wall and a bathroom tucked behind a thin door near the closet, but it was his, and he kept it clean.
And over the years, he had come to love the quiet of it down here, away from the foot traffic upstairs.
What none of them knew, not the FBI agents and not Hale and not a single resident who'd ever ridden the elevator past his floor, was that he knew this building in a way none of them ever could.
He knew it from the inside. And that was why he had stayed down here for so long, relegated to the basement of a swanky apartment building without any fuss.
He'd found the false panel in the closed-off little recess a little over eleven years ago.
It had been a total mistake, and when he'd explored it closer, the panel gave under his hand, sliding sideways on a track worn smooth by countless years, and he knew his world had changed.
He had no idea who'd built it, or why, only that it had been intentionally hidden away, tucked behind a stack of old paint cans he'd shoved aside the first week and never put back.
He liked to think it had been built in with the original construction, some forgotten access point from a different era when buildings like this one had service tunnels running through them like veins.
Almost every apartment in the Hargrove had one.
He'd found that out slowly, over years, moving through the walls at night and discovering, one by one, that nearly every closet on every floor had a matching panel tucked into the back.
Some were on the same sliding mechanism, and others were simply well-designed tongue-and-groove recess panels that could be plucked out by hand.
He had never gone looking for an explanation beyond the obvious one.
The building had been built this way. And who was he to question to the original builders?
He didn't go in every night. He was careful about that, more careful than people would have given him credit for.
He never watched the same apartment two nights running, never stayed longer than twenty minutes in any one spot, never took anything, never touched anything that wasn't already broken.
He thought of it the way a doctor might think of rounds.
A quiet check on each patient, never intrusive, never more than necessary.
It hadn't started as anything more than curiosity.
Years ago, before he understood the full reach of what he had access to, it had been a private game, something to pass the long stretches of evening when the building went quiet and there was nothing left to fix.
He'd listened to arguments through the walls--arguments that flared up between married couples about money or in-laws or whose turn it was to deal with the parents.
He'd listened to people fight and then, sometimes, make up in ways that left him standing very still in the dark, his face hot, telling himself he'd leave in just another minute.
He'd learned who was cheating on who, which husband on the third floor had a woman who came by on Thursday afternoons when his wife was at her book club.
There was one woman, a few years back, who'd lived alone on the second floor before she moved away. She’d been young and pretty in an effortless way that made him feel like an old, worn-down thing whenever he passed her in the hallway.
He'd been so eager to see her, just to see her, that on four separate occasions he'd slipped out of the passage entirely and into the back of her closet, pulling the panel shut behind him. He’d crouch among her hanging coats and shoeboxes, watching through the thin crack where the closet door didn't sit perfectly flush against the frame.
He remembered the way her boyfriend used to come by on weekends, the sounds that carried through that crack of light, and how his own breathing had gone shallow and careful in the dark so as not to give himself away.
That had been close to two years ago. He didn't think about her often anymore.
None of that had ever felt like the beginning of anything. It had felt like a private hobby, a small comfort, something he kept to himself and never spoke of, tucked away like secret in a desk drawer.
What changed things was Margaret Osley, just a few months ago.
He hadn't gone into her wall looking for anything specific that night.
He'd simply been making his rounds, working his way along a stretch of passage on the third floor, when he heard her voice through the vent near her bedroom, low and steady, talking to Gloria Rivers, who'd come by for tea like she did most Wednesdays.
He'd stopped to listen, expecting nothing more than the usual small talk about grandchildren and weather and whatever program they'd both been watching that week.
Instead he'd heard Margaret tell Gloria that she'd made up her mind.
She wasn't moving into assisted living. Samantha could keep pushing all she wanted, but Margaret was staying right here, in this apartment, in this building, until the end.
She hadn't figured out how to tell her daughter yet. She was still working up to it.
Pruitt had stood in the dark behind that wall for a long time after Gloria left, long after the apartment had gone quiet again.
He’d turned the conversation over in his head until it had worn a groove there.
It wasn't that he minded the idea of an old woman dying in his building.
People died everywhere. Several had died here, in their apartments.
But that wasn't what had gotten under his skin.
It was the rest of it…the slow part. It was the wheelchairs and the home health aides and the hospital beds wheeled in through the service entrance because the regular doors weren't wide enough.
And it was the smell that built up in a unit when a body started failing faster than its owner's will to leave.
He'd seen it before, years back, in a building he'd worked at before the Hargrove; he’d witnessed an old man who'd insisted on staying put until his daughter had finally found him on the bathroom floor three days after a stroke, and the whole building had smelled different for a month afterward no matter how many times Pruitt scrubbed the hallway carpets.
The Hargrove wasn't going to become that. He wouldn't let it. He’d grown too close to it.
He understood the building the way other men understood their wives’ bodies, or the way a man might know exactly where every old scar and ache sat beneath his skin.
He'd crawled through every shaft, fixed every leak, listened through every wall until the place had stopped feeling like a structure he maintained and started feeling like something closer to an extension of his own hands and ears.
When residents decided to let themselves rot in place rather than move somewhere they'd be properly cared for, it didn't feel like their decision alone.
It felt like something happening to him, a slow decay creeping into a body he considered his.
So he'd helped Margaret Osley along.
It had been easier than he'd expected, that first time. Cleaner. After that, each one had come a little more naturally than the last, the fear wearing down the same way any unfamiliar task wears down with repetition. One by one, they became so much easier.
Tonight, he'd be watching Agnes Carmichael. He wasn’t sure when he’d help her along as well, but it would be soon.
Right now, he just needed to start studying and preparing.
He did already know a few things but not enough.
He knew that her husband had died eight months ago.
She'd had two falls since then, one in the bathroom and one coming down from a step stool she shouldn't have been on in the first place.
Ever since then, her children had been at her about moving in with one of them, calling more often than they used to, sending pamphlets in the mail that she left unopened on the kitchen counter.
He'd heard her on the phone with her son last week, her voice tired and sad as she denied their requests again.
It was too soon to move on her. He knew that.
Baxter wasn't even cold yet, and the building had FBI agents walking its halls asking questions about rats and security footage.
He wasn't a fool. Tonight would just be listening.
Learning her schedule, when she went to bed, when she got up to use the bathroom, whether she kept her door chained at night or simply locked.
Patience was part of the work, maybe the most important part.
The building would still be here when the time was right.
He crossed to the small dresser against the far wall and crouched in front of the bottom drawer, pulling it all the way out of its track.
He reached into the empty space behind it and pressed against the drawer's underside, a section of plywood he'd cut and fitted himself years ago, until it lifted free in his hand.
Beneath it sat a spiral notebook, its cover soft and curled from handling, and he drew it out carefully, the way another man might handle something he loved.
He opened it on his knee. The first pages held a rough map of the passages he'd traced out over years of moving through them, every shaft and breakaway point marked in pencil, corrected and recorrected as he'd learned the building better than its own architect ever had. Further in was a hand-drawn floor plan of the Hargrove itself. He’d drawn it and pieced it together over the years, each apartment numbered and labeled in his small, careful hand with the name of whoever lived there now, the names crossed out and rewritten as residents came and went.
He found the page for the third floor and ran his finger down to Agnes Carmichael's unit. He looked at the little square he'd drawn for her closet, the access point marked with a small dot he'd added himself, the same as all the others.
He closed the notebook and sat there for a moment with his hand resting flat on the cover, thinking about how much of this building he carried inside himself that no one else would ever understand.
He’d come to care for this building the same way he cared for his body, and he intended to keep it clean and running smoothly.
No matter what it took.