"Boss," Marcus’s voice carried up the flues, deadened by forty years of boiler soot. "The dot-matrix feeder is empty. Somebody took a blade to the continuous ribbon."
"Find her," Julian’s reply crackled through the guard’s handheld radio, tinny and vibrating with fury from the executive office above. "Check the sump trenches and the compressor room. She can’t get past the magnetic plates on the stairwell doors. If she’s down there, corner her and take whatever she’s carrying. We have forty minutes before the courier walks."
I didn't pause to breathe. I pulled myself upward rung by rung, the iron biting through the wet leather of my work boots. The heat in the chase rose steadily, thick with the smell of mineral wool and baked rust. At the first-floor juncture, where the copper mail chutes branched out into the concierge station, a steel access panel was held shut by four wing nuts. Arthur had kept them greased with graphite so the line maintenance crew could clear postal jams without tearing out the ornamental wainscoting in the lobby.
I backed two wing nuts off with my thumb, feeling the faint, cool draft of lobby air seep through the seam.
Through the quarter-inch crack, the Alder House lobby looked like an empty cathedral under low museum lighting. The mahogany grandfather clock beside the revolving doors read ten minutes to two. The grand brass chandelier had been dimmed to twenty percent, casting dim bronze pools across the checkerboard marble.
Tyler was leaning over the reservation desk, his charcoal vest unbuttoned, tapping his foot against the lower cabinetry in a nervous, jerking rhythm. On the counter beside the brass call bell sat the black leather lockbox Julian had taken from the sub-basement safe. Beside it lay the courier’s vellum folio.
Behind the plate glass of the front vestibule, trapped between the exterior revolving doors and the locked inner magnetic gates, stood Officer Miller. Julian’s second private contractor, a thick-shouldered man in a dark windbreaker, stood outside the inner glass with his arms crossed over a holstered Glock, barring the release lever. Miller wasn't shouting. He was standing with his palms resting against the glass, his service cap tucked under his arm, watching Tyler with the grim, patient disgust of a man who had seen small-time crooks try to outrun their own paperwork for thirty years.
The private elevator chime rang once, clear and crystalline.
The brass doors slid open. The man in the camel-hair coat stepped out into the lobby runner, his leather gloves already on, his silver-handled umbrella tucked under his forearm.
"Is the disbursement packaged?" the courier asked. He didn't raise his voice; he spoke with the flat, transactional boredom of a corporate courier picking up an overnight pouch.
Julian emerged from the executive corridor behind the desk, his camel-hair coat open, his silk tie slightly askew. He carried a heavy manila envelope sealed with red strapping tape—the forty-five thousand dollars extracted from Arthur’s operating account.
"Forty-five in untraceable fifties," Julian said, resting the envelope on the green marble. "The transfer voucher is clipped inside. Take the service alley to the cab stand on Market. Once you clear the 30th Street concourse, text the single-word confirmation to my private burner. My attorneys enter Room 412 at eight-thirty. By nine-fifteen, the receivership is official, and Arthur’s name is scrubbed off the corporate charter forever."
"And the girl?" the courier asked, glancing toward the rain-streaked exterior doors.
"A homeless nuisance with an invalid power of attorney," Julian said, offering a tight, venomous grin. "Marcus has her locked in the sub-basement. She’ll spend the morning answering trespass questions in a holding cell while Judge Sterling bangs the gavel on the foreclosure order. Tyler, give him the signed master folio."
Tyler reached for the black leather presentation folder, his fingers trembling slightly as he slid it across the blotter toward the courier.
I pushed the service panel out with my shoulder.
The decorative oak molding gave way with a sharp, splintering crack that echoed off the coffered ceiling like a shotgun blast. I dropped four feet down onto the wool runner behind the concierge desk, my boots hitting the hardwood beneath with a heavy thud.
Tyler leaped back, knocking his swivel chair against the key cubbies. Julian spun around, his hand instinctively dropping toward the pocket of his coat, his face draining of color before twisting into an expression of sheer, uncontrolled rage.
"Claire," Julian snarled, his voice dropping into a ragged rasp. "You crawling little rat. How did you get past the basement gates?"
"My father built the chase vents, Julian," I said, stepping past the counter into the center of the marble floor, keeping my distance from the courier. "He built every foot of conduit in this property while you were running shell corporations out of strip malls in Camden. You never knew where the risers went because you never spent an hour of your life working a shift here."
Outside the glass partition, the contractor in the windbreaker turned toward the noise, his hand going to his hip. But through the glass, Miller moved. With the speed of a street cop who had spent twenty years breaking up bar fights on South Street, Miller drove his heavy shoulder directly into the inner push-bar of the fire override door, hitting the mechanical emergency release that Julian’s contractor hadn't thought to pin.