Page 88 - Labelle Gramercy, On the Case

Overtime

general area between the two elevators. If he had collapsed while
waiting for one to carry him outside to safety, then it made sense for
him to be in the middle only if he had no idea which was going to
arrive first—if either was running at all. But he was the only possible
person to be calling an elevator at that time, so at least one of the cars
should have been on its way immediately, and he would have been
able to determine which one it was by the illuminated floor indicator
above the doors. All conjecture, of course, but now the lady detective
had gotten me into a conjectural frame of mind.
“Well, where to first? MIS has most of this floor.”
“According to the floor plan, there is a utility room over here, not
far from Kates’s cubicle. You should be able to unlock it.”
I had no idea where all the closets were located, but I sure as hell
would know if they contained any skeletons—or so I thought. We
passed a few people in the hall. They gave us odd looks. Maybe it was
part of the shock of learning that their co-worker had died in harness;
maybe it was my own heightened paranoia broadcasting bad vibes. It
wasn’t all that strange for HR to be on the floor with an unfamiliar
person. Nobody could know she was a cop, unless—of course, Leah!
She could have spilled the beans all over the place by now, and
Labelle’s plan to make her inquiries incognito would be ruined. So
she wasn’t such a great genius: anyone with half an ounce of
knowledge about human nature could see that Leah Rackette was not
the type to keep for very long a secret about another female. I smiled.
“This is the door, Mr. Taper.”
It was indeed locked, as it should have been. I used my master key
to open the door. Labelle was ahead of me, somehow, preventing my
entrance. “Don’t touch anything,” she muttered sotto voce. I hadn’t
intended to; I’m not a janitor.
The room was a fairly large broom closet, as such things go,
containing supplies for the bathrooms as well as all the usual
impedimenta of the cleaning profession. Light from the hall fixtures
was insufficient to illuminate the place. I checked my impulse to
switch on the room light. Labelle was studying that switch very
intently with a sort of combination flashlight and magnifier she had
produced from inside her magician’s costume.
“Is there anything I can do for you, Powell?”

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