Page 89 - Labelle Gramercy, On the Case

Overtime

I started. Maude Lynn Story, the departmental administrative
assistant, was standing next to me. I couldn’t tell if she could see
beyond me into the closet.
“Ah, no. Just making a spot check on the Styrofoam coffee cup
situation. We don’t want to get caught short again.”
She was young enough to honor me with a modicum of deference,
but certainly sufficiently advanced in years and TWT employment to
be a confidant of Leah Rackette. Finding no words with which to
make an appropriate response, she moved on. Then Labelle switched
on the light. Drawn like a moth, I entered the utility room and was
immediately assaulted by a foul odor.
“Wiped clean,” said the detective, referring, I presumed, not only
to the light switch and the door knob but a jug of carbon
tetrachloride which looked as if it had spilled open after falling off a
shelf to the linoleum floor. This had to be bad news. She glanced up
at the ceiling; per regulation, the room was vented into the space
above the false ceiling. It contained wiring and the ducts transporting
the mix of fresh and recycled filtered air flowing into the offices
down through diffuser vents in the ceiling. That forced movement of
not-exactly-fresh—re-conditioned might be more accurate—air
created a plenum, a condition of higher pressure inside the offices,
and pushed stale air up into the intake vents, across the open space
and either out of the building through exhaust vents or back into the
system through filters, blending the legally required minimum of
fresh air with all the effluvia of human respiration and synthetic off-
gassing from office equipment and any new paint, carpeting or wall
board—not to mention residual cleaning fluids, the bouquet of
microwaved leftover fish sticks and sinus-invading vagrant mold
spores bred in a thousand nooks and crannies of the imperfectly
watertight building.
That system worked well at removing most of the noxious
airborne elements, as long as air was being pumped into the office
space; the moment it stopped, which happened sporadically during
the day and completely during off hours, odors could recirculate
around the floor simply by diffusing through the intake vents, up into
one and down through others dozens of yards away. Modern
buildings had sophisticated control systems regulating this air flow;
ours, being of recent vintage, was very well-calibrated by computer.

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