CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR
They’d come back to the building shortly before noon after breaking for coffee and putting together a plan of attack for the next stage of the case.
Hale had not been at the front desk when they’d come back in and they’d not seen Pruitt either.
So as far as they knew, they were flying under the radar.
They’d let themselves into Irene's apartment with the key Purcell had left at te front desk, and they'd been at it ever since, working through the rooms one section at a time.
It had taken hours. They'd moved slowly and quietly, careful not to leave marks on the walls or disturb anything that might draw attention to the unit later.
They yapped and pushed against baseboards and door frames and closet backs, listening for the hollow sound that would tell them they'd found something.
The bedroom closet had given them nothing, just the usual rows of hanging clothes and a shelf of folded sweaters Rachel had moved aside and replaced exactly as she'd found them.
The bathroom had given them nothing either, the medicine cabinet and the space behind the toilet tank both solid when she'd knocked against them.
They'd gone through the kitchen cabinets and the hall closet and the space behind the headboard in the main bedroom.
After a while, Rachel had begun to wonder if they were wrong about this apartment specifically—that maybe the access point Pruitt used to reach Irene Baxter ran somewhere else entirely, through a different room or a different wall they hadn't thought to check.
Then, in the spare bedroom, behind a low bookshelf that Novak had shifted six inches from the wall, Rachel found it.
It was a narrow section of wall between two studs, no more than two feet wide.
It had a seam running along one edge that she might have mistaken for a trim line if she hadn't already spent the better part of the afternoon looking for exactly this.
She pressed her fingers into it the same way she had downstairs in the basement.
When she did, the panel slid sideways on a track, smooth and nearly silent, disappearing into a pocket built into the wall itself.
"There," she said. “Novak…I got it!”
He hurried into the room and crouched beside her. He looked at the opening, then at the panel itself, running his thumb along its edge. "It's seamless," he said. "You wouldn't find this in a hundred years unless you already knew it was here or look specifically for it."
"I almost missed it twice," Rachel said. "It blends right into the trim."
The back of the panel, the side that had been facing into the passage rather than the bedroom, was a different color than the front.
It was darker and weathered, the wood grain raised slightly the way old lumber went when it had been sitting untouched for decades.
Rachel ran her fingers over it and looked at Novak.
"This isn't new construction," she said. "Look at the wood. This has been here as long as the building has."
"You think it was built this way on purpose? Back during original construction?"
"I don't know what else to think. There's no way Pruitt cut this himself without leaving fresh tool marks somewhere. And there's nothing fresh about this wood at all." She sat back on her heels. "Whoever built the Hargrove put these passages in. Pruitt didn't create this. He just found it."
Beyond the panel, the opening gave way not to a vertical shaft like the one she'd found behind the boiler room, but to a horizontal passage.
It ran off in both directions, low-ceilinged and narrow, vanishing into darkness past the reach of the bedroom light.
It told her immediately that this was bigger than what she'd found that morning. What she’d found this morning had been a single artery running up through the building.
This was something else; it was a network of veins running sideways through the walls between units, branching and connecting in ways she couldn't begin to guess at from the doorway.
Rachel drew her weapon and pulled out the small Maglite she’d taken from the car before entering. Novak had one, too. He followed her lead, pulling his out as well. angled the beam into the passage before she climbed through.
"I'll go first."
"Copy that," Novak said, holding his Maglite like a weapon and following close behind her.
She stepped inside and found that passage was worse than she'd expected.
The ceiling sat low enough that she had to keep her head bent forward at an.
The walls pressed in close on both sides, narrow enough that she had to turn her shoulders slightly to keep moving without scraping against the studs.
Decades of dust coated every surface, thick and gray, disturbed only by what looked like the faint outline of boot prints pressed into it here and there, the only sign that anyone had ever moved through this space before her.
Boots, she assumed, that belonged to Dale Pruitt.
The air was stale and close, carrying the smell of old insulation and something faintly metallic underneath it.
After about a minute of crab-walking along, they reached a T-junction where the passage split off in two directions. There were no obvious sign of which way led anywhere useful.
"We split up," Rachel said quietly. "Check in every few minutes. Text only, nothing that makes noise."
"You sure about that?" Novak asked, glancing down each branch.
"We need to map as much of this as we can. We don't know what we're dealing with yet. The more ground we cover, the better. Just…I think maybe we stay on this level for now. No sense in trying to go up or down if we come to that ladder.”
Novak nodded and took the right branch without further argument. Rachel watched the beam of his flashlight bob and shrink as he moved away from her, then turned and took the left.
To her left, the passage twisted after a few yards, doubling back at an angle that made no sense from outside the walls.
Rachel found herself moving past what had to be the backs of more than one apartment, the wood paneling shifting subtly in age and color as she passed from one unit's wall into the next.
In some places the passage narrowed further still, forcing her to turn nearly sideways to keep moving.
Her shoulder brushed the rough wood on either side and right away, she could understand how someone—especially someone older with faulty hearing—might think it was the noise of rats in the walls.
She kept one hand against the wall as she moved, mostly to feel for more of the panels, running her fingers lightly along every seam she passed, marking each one in her head the way she'd marked the first.
A few minutes in, the passage opened into a slightly wider space.
Ahead, her flashlight caught the dull gleam of iron rungs bolted into the wall.
It was another ladder reaching down into the dark below her.
Based on her position within the building, she didn’t think it was the same one she'd found that morning behind the boiler room.
This one sat at a different angle entirely, descending at a slight diagonal rather than straight down, and the rungs looked older still, pitted with a rust that flaked away when her light passed over it.
A faint draft moved up out of the opening, cool against her face, carrying with it the same stale, metallic smell she'd noticed since climbing through the panel.
She stepped carefully over the opening rather than down into it, crouching to study the angle of the shaft and trying to build a rough map in her head of how the passages connected.
As she did this, it started to become clear how Pruitt could move from the basement to nearly any floor in the building without ever touching a hallway or an elevator.
That was when she heard it.
A low, faint thudding came from somewhere behind her.
It was distant enough that she almost mistook it for the building's own pulse, an ambient sound an old structure made when its pipes settled or its heat cycled on.
But there was something else folded into it, a scrambling quality underneath the thud.
It was quick and uneven, not the steady rhythm of machinery at all.
And it was coming from the direction Novak had gone.
Rachel pulled out her phone, the screen glaring too bright in the dark of the passage, and typed quickly. You good?
She waited, watching the screen, listening for the thudding to repeat itself. It didn't come again. Or, if it did, it was too faint now to separate from the low hum of the building around her.
No reply came.
After a full minute had passed, she typed again. Novak. Check in.
She waited a few seconds longer, but no reply came through. There was not even a bubble showing he was even typing a reply.
“Shit,” she muttered.
Rachel stood as straight as the low ceiling allowed and turned back the way she'd come.
Turning around was quite the feat. In the narrow space, she had to get creative with how she moved her shoulders and her feet to turn around completely within the space.
Her flashlight beam cutting a tight cone through the dust hanging thick in the air ahead.
Sweat had soaked through the back of her shirt at some point without her noticing, and grime from the walls had streaked across her forearms. The passage felt narrower now than it had a few minutes ago, the ceiling lower, the air thinner, and she had to fight down the tightening sensation building in her chest as she moved.
She moved faster now, back toward the junction where she and Novak had split up.
She checked her phone one more time, but there was still no response. She sighed deeply, drew her Glock with her free hand, and moved deeper through the passage.