CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Shelf's eighth-floor apartment was dark under the door and quiet when Rachel knocked. They waited for several seconds, to no answer. She knocked again, harder, and the hallway gave back nothing. A television murmured somewhere further down the corridor but nothing moved behind Warren Shelf’s door.
"You looking for Warren?" he said.
"We are," Rachel said. "And you are?"
“Do you know Mr. Shelf?”
"We're not close, but we talk in the hallway sometimes,” Escher said with a shrug. “I had him water y plants one time when I was out of town for a week. That’s about it.”
"How well do you know his schedule?" Novak asked.
"Well enough to notice when it changes." Escher shrugged. "He's been getting in late this past week or so. Mentioned a contracting job going, some conversion project downtown."
"Do you know which building?" Novak asked.
Escher eyed them a bit closer, as if making sure he wasn’t giving up this information to a couple of creeps. Apparently, they must have passed his test because before Rachel could pull out her ID to reassure him, he answered.
"He said it was near Quirk Hotel. That's all I've got. Like I said, it’s not like we’re buddies or anything."
“That should be enough,” Rachel said politely. “Thanks.”
He nodded and headed for the stairwell, earbuds back in before he'd reached the door. Rachel pulled out her phone and looked up the Quirk Hotel. When she zoomed in, it wasn’t clear which property might be in the midst of being converted.
Novak was already on his phone, too. "I'll call the field office and have them look into records for any recent commercial conversion projects in that area,” he said.
He stepped a few feet down the hallway and Rachel heard him introduce himself, badge number and all.
Novak leaned against the wall and looked at the ceiling.
The wait stretched to nearly four minutes, long enough that Rachel had walked to the end of the hallway and back before he straightened up and reached for his own phone to take down the address.
He came back. "West Broad Street. Between Foushee and Belvidere. The permit was pulled six weeks ago for interior demolition and renovation, commercial to entertainment use. I even got a company name: Lockdown Richmond."
"Good work," Rachel said.
They took the elevator down and told Hale they'd be back, which he received with a look that suggested he'd given up hoping otherwise.
Outside, the evening had gone fully dark and the temperature had dropped another few degrees since Rachel had been sitting on the bench.
It seemed that it was going to be one of the chillier nights of the season.
They walked the half block to where Novak had parked and got in.
The drive across town took twenty minutes in the early evening traffic.
Richmond's downtown grid moved well enough once they cleared the blocks immediately around Monument Avenue, and Novak navigated it without consulting the GPS, which Rachel had long since stopped finding surprising.
He'd been working cases in this city for three years and had quietly learned it quickly.
She used the drive to go back through her notes on Shelf.
Six years in the building, mid-fifties, a handyman who had done work on the side—and, if she had to guess, probably off the books as far as the Hargrove's management was concerned.
Pruitt had referred work to him when he was backed up, which meant Hale almost certainly knew about it even if he'd never formally acknowledged it.
She made a mental note to circle back to Hale on that point.
Had he been keeping these little off-the-books repairs and assistance quiet on purpose?
She let those thoughts temporarily fall away as they neared the building.
It was a narrow three-story commercial structure wedged between a dry cleaner and a Vietnamese restaurant.
It was the kind of building that had been a dozen different things over the decades and wore all of them faintly on its face.
The ground floor windows had been papered over from the inside, and a dumpster on the sidewalk was loaded with old drywall and splintered trim.
Light leaked through the gaps in the paper, and from the street they could hear the intermittent whine of a power tool from somewhere inside.
Novak tried the door and it pushed open without any resistance. He held it open for Rachel and they stepped inside.
The interior was further along than the exterior suggested.
The ground floor had been gutted to the studs and reframed into a series of connected rooms, their doorways cut at irregular angles.
Bare bulbs on extension cords ran along the ceiling joists, throwing everything in a mix of harsh light and deep shadow.
The floors were raw plywood over concrete, and the walls that had been drywalled were already getting their first coat of a dark paint.
It smelled of sawdust and joint compound and the faint chemical bite of fresh paint.
Rachel thought she could already see a few hints here and there as to what the place would eventually look like when it became an escape room.
Two men were working at the far end of the space.
One was on a ladder doing something to the ceiling joists with a drill, and the other was crouched near a section of newly framed wall, checking something with a level.
The one on the ladder looked over when he heard them come in but didn't stop what he was doing.
If anything, he looked a little annoyed.
The man with the level stood up. He appeared to be in his fifties though it wouldn’t be a stretch to assume he was sixty.
He was broad across the chest and shoulders, with a close-cropped beard going gray at the jaw.
He looked at Rachel, then Novak, and his expression shifted into something careful.
“This is a private building,” he said, matter-of-factly. “Plus, as you can see, this is an active construction site. You could get hurt. Who are you and why are you here?”
Novak pulled his ID and showed it casually. “FBI, agents Novak and Gift. Sir, are you by any chance Warren Shelf?”
"Yes, that’s me." He set the level against the wall and wiped his hand on his jeans before extending it. He looked a bit concerned but apparently, that wasn’t enough to stop his manners as he shook their hands one by one. "What can I do for you?"
“Do you have a moment to speak?”
Shelf glanced over his shoulder at the man on the ladder, who had the drill going again and wasn't paying them any mind, and then he gestured toward the front of the building, away from the noise.
They moved to a cleared area near the papered windows.
A makeshift workbench that was nothing mor than a door laid across two sawhorses held a row of tools and a thermos.
“So what can I help you with?” he asked.
"We're investigating the recent deaths at the Hargrove," Rachel said. "We've been speaking with residents and staff throughout the day. Your name came up as someone who would potentially have access to keys to some of the apartments due to your handyman work."
"Sure," he said. "I heard about it. About the investigations, I mean. Between all the cops and that lead detective, I feel like pretty much everyone in the building has spoken to someone about them."
"Did you know any of the three victims personally?"
He thought about it without rushing, crossing his arms and leaning confidently against an exposed beam.
"Sylvia Marsh, yes. I knew her somewhat well.
The other two, not really. I knew who they were by sight…
you know how it is in a building like that.
But I didn't have any kind of relationship with them. "
"What was your relationship with Marsh?"
"I did some work for her not too long ago.
Four or five months ago, maybe? She had a bedroom door that had dropped on its hinges; the building's old and the frames settle, it happens a lot up there.
It was dragging on the carpet every time she opened it and she couldn't lift it herself to get the clearance she needed.
" He shrugged, indicating it was really no big deal.
"I fixed it for her. Shimmed the hinges, planed the bottom edge a little. Took me about forty minutes."
"Did she talk about anything odd or unusual while you were there?” She was asking the questions but also trying to gauge him closely enough to see if he understood that at the core of it all, they were eyeing him as a potential suspect.
"No, not that I can remember. She went on and on about one of her grandkids. But I barely listened to it. She made me coffee while I worked. I mean…as far as I can remember, she seemed fine.”
"Did you go into any other rooms in her apartment?"
"No. Just the bedroom doorway and the hallway outside it."
Rachel looked at him steadily. "As we’ve already said, we understand you may have keys to some units in the building. Keys that residents gave you directly for jobs you did for them."
The color that came into Shelf's face was immediate and genuine.
It moved up from his collar and settled in his jaw and he looked briefly at the floor before looking back at her.
"Yeah," he said. "That's — yeah. I should have gotten those back and I didn't always follow up on it the way I should have. "
"How many keys are we talking about?"
"I'm not entirely sure." He said it in a way that suggested he knew just how bad it sounded.
"Some residents gave me a spare so I could come back and finish something if they weren't home, or to do a follow-up.
I always meant to return them when the job was done and sometimes I did and sometimes it just — didn't happen. "
"Do you still have them?"
"Probably a few, yes. In a drawer at home." He met her eyes and she could see that if he hadn’t understood why they were really there at first, he did now. "I don't use them,” he said plainly. “I want to be clear about that. I'm not going into anybody's apartment."
"Which apartments do you have keys to?"
He pressed his lips together, thinking. "I'd have to look. I know I have one for a woman on the third floor, and I think there's one for a unit on five. Maybe one more, I'm honestly not certain."
"We're going to need you to account for all of them," Novak said.
"I understand that. I'll go through the drawer tonight and write down everything I find." He said it without argument. "Whatever you need."
“We’ll need the keys. Or to see you hand them over to Hale.”
“Absolutely,” Shelf said.
“Do you recall if you ever had the keys to the apartments of any of the victims?”
“I never did. Ms. Marsh’s job was easy enough where I knocked it out with no problem while she was there. And I never did any sort of work for Osley or DeLuca.”
Rachel studied him for a second. The embarrassment was still visible in his face, but it was the embarrassment of a man caught in a sloppy habit rather than anything that ran deeper.
She watched him work through it and decide that full cooperation was the only reasonable response.
If they were catching him red-handed, he was doing a very good job staying cool.
"Mr. Shelf, if we were to give you the dates of each death, would you be able to tell us where you were?”
“I could do my best. But we’re talking…what? The first was almost six weeks ago, right?”
“Right,” Novak said. He pulled out his phone and listed off the dates of each suspected murder.
Shelf, in turn, also pulled out his phone.
He went through his calendar and did his best to give them straightforward accounts for each evening: a family dinner for the first, a poker night with three friends from within the Hargrove, for the third.
But for the death of Deluca, he admitted that he’d been free.
He’d been at home and couldn’t recall what he’d been doing.
And yes, he admitted, that wasn’t much of an alibi.
"There's one more thing," he said, when she'd finished noting the third date. He said it with the air of a man deciding to clear the whole table and let the chips fall where they may. "I have a minor criminal record. No sense in trying to keep that a secret, I suppose.”
“What was the charge?” Novak asked.
“A drunk and disorderly from about fifteen years ago,” Shelf said, looking to the floor. “I wasn't charged with anything beyond that. There was no conviction.”
"We appreciate the honesty," Rachel said.
He nodded once, as though a formality had been completed. Behind them, the drill started up again and the man on the ladder said something to the other worker that was lost under the noise.
They wrapped up the remaining questions and Shelf walked them back to the front door.
He had a mostly composed look to him when he held the door for them, again shaking their hands as they left.
Rachel believed his account of the Marsh job and she believed the drunk and disorderly was the full extent of his record.
After all, why even tell them about the record if there was more on it to hide?
But she was less certain about the keys — not because she thought he was lying about their use, but because a man who couldn't account for how many spare keys he was carrying around was a loose end the investigation couldn't afford to leave unturned.
So far, it was indeed the most damning bit of the entire case.
Outside, the cold had sharpened and the Vietnamese restaurant next door was doing a brisk early-dinner business. The smell of it reached the sidewalk and Rachel breathed it in. She and Novak walked to the car without talking. She could feel him waiting for her read on it.
"I don’t think he’s our guy," she said, when they reached the car.
"I don’t know,” Novak said. "I’m not ready to make such a claim until he shows us those keys.”
"Speaking of keys," Rachel said. “Hale would have a key for each apartment.”
“Yeah, maybe. But that does make sense. Of course the building manager would have access that other people don’t.”
She nodded as Novak pulled away from the curb. “I think we should go ask him before we call it a night.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
He started back in the direction of the Hargrove once again and already, Rachel found that she was getting pretty damned tired of the place.