Page 16 of 56 Days
“Is the front door the only access?”
Michael shakes his head,no. “Theground-floorapartments haverailed-interraces. You could easily hop over. The sliding door that leads out of number one looks closed from the outside, but I didn’t check if it was locked. I was trying to touch as little as possible.” He points over his left shoulder. “There’s also a side gate and two fire exits, all alarmed according to Ms. Fannin, plus you have the underground car park. The entrance to it is round the back.”
“Anyone coming or going?”
“Not in or out this way. I think the time of the day is on our side there. One guy did try to leave for a run but he went back without much hassle. But we don’t know about vehicles.”
“Fire exits—is there one at the far end of the corridor?”
Michael nods.
“So there’s nothing between that exit and the door to apartment one? No other apartments?”
“There’s a door to the stairwell,” he says, “but that’s it.”
Lee nods at Karl, who understands: the fire exit will be their main access through the cordon. They’ll have to get the alarm system disabled first.
“Okay, good. Michael, I’m going to leave you with DS Connolly here to help him get things organized while I go inside and see what we’re dealing with. We should have a few more hands on deck any second now and once we do, I want to get that car park blocked off and this place secured. Hopefully, Number Four is just an early riser and all her neighbors are still asleep.”
Michael winces. “No such luck there, I’m afraid, Inspector. When we arrived, we thought we could go in via the side entrance. But when we pushed it open, well, it turns out it was an emergency exit. The fire alarm went off throughout the building, woke everybody up. So by the time we located Ms. Fannin—she met us in the courtyard—we, ah, we had an audience. The residents were all out on their balconies, watching.”
“Oh,great,” Karl mutters.
“The main thing now,” Lee says to Michael, “is making sure everyone stays put.” To Karl, “I’m going to take a look inside. You’re good to go out here?”
“Yes, boss.”
Lee says a silent prayer for Garda Michael Creedon as she turns and heads inside.
One of the glass doors has been propped open with a fire extinguisher; a keypad and electronic sensor suggest it’d be locked otherwise, accessible only by residents.
As soon as she crosses the threshold, the smell hits.
A sign on the wall directs her to the right for apartment number one, but the corridor curves so she can’t tell how many feet away from its door she is right now. Judging by the shape and size of the building, she must have somewhere between thirty and forty feet to go yet, and a door is open directly behind her and the air this morning is fresh and cool, and yet...
She can already smell it: the cloying, pungent aroma of rotting human flesh.
Like a cheap perfume years past itsuse-bydate mixed with meat that’s been left to turn in the sun, spores multiplying and warming and spreading until they’ve replaced every last molecule of unscented air. It’s not that bad in the lobby, but it’s bad enough in the lobby to know that that’s how bad it’s going to get.
She thinks about poor Declan, standing outside the apartment’s door all this time. This will definitely be a story he trots out over pints with the lads in the years to come. She just hopes he won’t be ending it withand that’s the day I decided toquit.
Lee has a rummage in the pockets of her blazer, triumphant to find the very end of a packet of forgotten Silvermints just about still wrapped in their foil. There are benefits to forever failing to be organized and making clothing choices based purely on what looks the cleanest.
Two clean mints, one fuzzy with lint. She puts them back in her pocket, then takes a face mask from another one and snaps the bands around her ears.
The lobby is small but bright, benefiting from a second pair of glass doors directly opposite the ones she’s just come through. They lead to a central courtyard. Lee doesn’t go out there but scans it through the glass: a pleasant area landscaped to within an inch of its life, with vibrant green trees, wooden benches, and a trickling water feature that she knows will make her want to pee as soon as she hears it. The building bends around the space in a gently curved U shape, with a pair of large,wrought-irongates filling in the open end. Emergency vehicle access, she guesses.
She counts three floors of apartments, about thirty in all if each one has one balcony. Theground-floorunits have little tracts of private space outside patio doors, maybe about a narrow parking spot’s worth, demarcated by a metal railing. But the railings are low and open between their horizontal lengths, so easily climbed over, just as Michael said. There’s no one in the courtyard that she can see and from this angle, it’s hard to tell if there’s anyone watching from a balcony.
She turns back around.
Next to the main doors is a small and clearlybrand-newhand-sanitizerdispenser. She looks for a lever before realizing it has an electronic sensor and sniffs the air as she rubs the clear liquid into her hands.
Lemongrass. Fancy.
The steel holder where the fire extinguisher should be is attached to the wall below a row of framed notices. The first is headlined “House Rules” above a bulleted list of—Lee squints—twenty-threeseparate instructions the residents of the Crossings apparently have to abide by.
Sounds like school, she thinks. Or prison.
