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The fluorescent lights hummed annoyingly. The detective looked around the missing scientist's office. He wasn't sure why, but he felt the room was a little bit haunted. The walls weren't pristine, but the carpet was barely worn and, he thought, recently vacuumed. The desk had one issue of the Biosciences Monthly journal on it, folded over to a middle page, as if Dr. Rehn might have been in the middle of reading it. The journal's cover had an address sticker, but it didn't have Hope Rehn's name on it. It was the Archive Enterprises research librarian's name there instead, a name the detective knew because it was on his list of potential interviewees. A neat stack of empty folders with spaces for labels filled one tray, and letterhead in the other. A gray ceramic cup held ballpoint pens and mechanical pencils.
Behind the desk, the wall was cleaner than at the police station, not unusually dirty, but unevenly. There was one rectangle that was noticeably cleaner. His thoughts went to his consultant and unofficial partner, because if she had been there, she would somehow know where whatever picture was missing there had been framed, because of its exact measurements, or gone over to it to see if a fiber was stuck to the wall that would tell her what it was made of. Something like that, anyway. Karadec looked close, but he didn't see any tell-tale fibers.
His heart beat too hard for a moment, and something ached at the back of his throat. He had noticed that empty rectangle for another reason, not just Morgan's influence. He had noticed it because he had a taller, narrower, slightly cleaner wall rectangle of the same kind at home. The picture of a blue rose had been there for a long time, but not anymore.
Empty spot on the wall of this office. Empty spot on the detective's own wall. Empty spot in his heart where Lucia had been, even when he and Lucia had not been together.
Really not the time to get distracted, Karadec told himself, and called Oz over to show him what he'd found.
..
"There isn't enough evidence of involvement by her employer to get a warrant to search their offices. We don't even know what we'd be looking for," Lieutenant Soto told him.
The frustrating thing was that she was right. His intuition was telling him, way too loudly, that there was something important to find at Archive Enterprises, the research lab where Dr. Hope Rehn was employed, if she was still alive to return to work -- which Karadec did not think she was. He hoped that he was wrong. "I know, Lieutenant, but I'm going to keep looking. I think I'll find something."
When he found it, he was surprised. Organized Crime had been looking into two members of the AE board of directors, with several pieces of evidence connecting them to money laundering operations using two local real estate firms. The building where Dr. Rehn worked for the last year had been bought by AE via one of those firms, and sold the year before to a shady-looking holding company by the other.
It still didn't tie Dr. Rehn's disappearance to anything in her employer. But it was another way in. Karadec called an old friend in Organized Crime and then called Morgan Gillory.
..
Morgan studied the case file with her usual intense concentration. Her eyes squinted as she flipped between two, now three pages. A fourth caught her attention, but was quickly dismissed. She laid the three sheets out on his desk in a wide fan, moving photographs at random between the pages. Lately, Karadec had found he enjoyed watching her do this thing she did. If you didn't know her, he remembered, because it hadn't been that long ago really, only a little over a year, she looked like she wasn't paying much attention at all. Like she was superficially glancing at each photo and skimming over each document, just pretending to read it.
But once you knew Morgan Gillory the way he had come to know her, you could see the wheels turning in her mind, see the moments she noticed some out of place detail, and lit up with possibilities. Could see her dismiss initial speculation when she found it wasn't important after all. The whole thing had become, so slowly he hadn't exactly noticed it happening, utterly fascinating to witness.
"Yeah, all right, I'll do it," she said. "Not like I've forgotten how to clean an office." Morgan's eyes surveyed the room with her desk and Karadec's and Oz and Daphne's and all the nearby corridors and rooms she used to clean on a night shift. "Wonder if the labs are real," she said.
Now that was an odd comment. Karadec gave her a quizzical look. "There's no pictures of anything that looks like a laboratory to me in this," Morgan said, patting the file she'd just finished looking through. "Kind of strange. But maybe they're hiding 'trade secrets.' " Her hands came up to air quote the last two words. "Can't see a still photograph giving away any kind of process that'd end up with the kind of gear they sell to the military, but there's at least two documentaries I haven't watched yet."
Karadec got the feeling she'd be checking them out even before her undercover assignment began. He felt a sense of warm approval. Because of her thoroughness. Being well prepared for an assignment like this was vital and she was clearly taking it as seriously as it merited. Which, with Morgan, he couldn't always count on.
..
"Are you sure you're all right with me doing this?" Morgan asked Lieutenant Soto. "Remember that time I pretended to be a cleaner at that law office and took some files. Didn't even really take them, since Karadec made me replace them, but whatever. You get what I mean. You didn't like that." Karadec hadn't liked that, either, and he'd been the one to propose this undercover scheme, so it was different, but she didn't feel confident yet that she understood why it was different, and that was bothering her.
"You can't take any files this time, either," the lieutenant said. "No searching. You act just in the way they hired you to do, cleaning where they tell you, and you look at everything the way you look at things. You see all sorts of things most people would never notice. There's every chance you'll find something there." Lieutenant Soto waved at the pictures on the crime board of the two directors of Archive Enterprises who'd been implicated in fraudulent real estate deals, Anton Texier and Gilford Lee. "These two have their hands in some dirty business, and that begs the question of what else dirty is going on at this mysterious research firm they direct."
Begs the question. Morgan saw in one part of her mind's eye the rhetoric video she'd watched a couple of years earlier, the one where the guy explained "petitito principii, it's when they take the thing they're trying to prove and sneak it into their premise as if you wouldn't notice, distracting you like it's a card trick and you won't see them palming the ace." But another part of her mind saw Ava, needing role models that were like Lieutenant Soto: a Black woman who was not only great for a cop, but also the best boss Morgan had ever had. And while a lot of kinds of wrongness kept her awake at night, using words wrong was just, as another YouTuber had been saying in a video maybe eight years back, how language evolved, how quick changed from meaning alive to meaning speedy. "Except the fingernails," she subvocalized, realizing she'd got a little bit distracted from the point here. "Right. Get in, clean like I mean it, but not like I really would if I was still doing it for a living."
Karadec folded his arms, and lifted his chin slightly.
"Don't stand there judging me; I was good at that job and you know it."
A microexpression-brief smile. "When you weren't dancing."
"While I was dancing." She smiled back at him, nothing micro about hers -- then made herself look serious for the lieutenant's benefit as she turned from Karadec to address Soto. "No, I get it. I'll pay attention like a cop while only doing the things a cleaner would. Yeah?"
That got her a nod from the boss, agreement and approval. Yes.
Not that Morgan would actually pass up the chance to read a few files if she could, but she knew by now better than to inform the cops she worked for that she felt free to break some of their rules. They knew, she felt sure, and ignored it because that way they could feel like they were doing what they were supposed to without stifling her natural tendencies so much she wasn't able to help them the way everyone was happiest with her doing.
No, that was why it was different. Because they'd figured out how to pretend to themselves that she was following their rules, and she'd figured out how to leave them that illusion just enough that they were okay with her. And because they had grown to rely on her abilities, a bit, too.
Once she felt like she had that all straight in her head, Morgan had some ideas already of what might be going on at that AE place. There was no way a real physics and chemistry lab was in the lower floors there the way they claimed. The plans for the building didn't allow for it, she didn't think, not unless the ones included with the evidence for the money-laundering nature of the two real estate transactions were even more falsified than she suspected.
And once she had cover of being an employee of their cleaning contractors, she'd be able to find evidence to prove it. Along with, she hoped, something to help Karadec find out what happened to Dr. Rehn. Who seemed like she might be a decent person who maybe found out what shady stuff her employers were up to and met a bad end, or, and this would be disappointing but not especially surprising, maybe she had been in on it and it was a matter of bad guys taking out other bad guys.
She'd do what she could to find out.
..
Morgan gave herself a disguise that was almost the exact opposite of how she'd have dressed if she was really working at this place as a cleaner. She wore mostly her own clothes all the time, and since it had been twenty-some-odd years since she'd been adding to her wardrobe, she had clothes from the nineties. She still looked good in miniskirts and fake fur, animal prints and Lisa Frank colors if she did say so herself, so her teenage taste had been great, actually.
But now she was being Ann Becker and had temporary ash brown dyed hair, with light roots because she was going white and covering it up, and she had located at the very back of her closet a dark gray pair of slacks and a plain white shirt she'd bought a decade or so earlier for a gig as a catering assistant. There was a red wine stain on the left sleeve of the shirt, but that was fine, it made it look less like something never worn before.
Morgan looked a way she didn't usually look. No one was going to recognize her. She wouldn't really have to do anything else different. Office workers didn't look too hard at the cleaning staff.
..
A cleaning contractor who wore a badge with the name "Ann Becker" pushed an industrial vacuum cleaner into the freight elevator. "I'll show you around. The place is kind of a maze," the cleaning crew lead, basically a head janitor but seeming like he had some minor delusions of being a supervisor, had told her. The cleaning contractor had let the guy, name of Stuart Arnak "call me Stu", show her around.
She had kept quiet, stifling her inner urges to crack wise at multiple points in the supposed tour. The person she was pretending to be would not do that. It was interesting how seriously she was taking the fake personality she'd made up on a complete whim for this persona she was pretending was working as a cleaner. It wasn't at all like that time at Walker & Acosta's offices. Which had at least been a normal building where everything wasn't exactly on the up and up, they were lawyers after all, but not like this place.
"What about the basement levels," she'd allowed herself to ask Stu.
"I guess they let the lab techs do the cleaning down there," he'd told her. "We just do one and above. Here's the keys to the offices on your floors." Two rings of keys, each labeled with a letter and numbers that matched what was on the door. Not even key cards - low tech for a scientific research institute, wasn't it.
And oddly enough, she had seen, when he handed her the key rings, that he had several more. Too many to only be the floors aboveground, in fact. He probably didn't realize she'd noticed. Could be his personal key rings and they just looked like more of the same. Or for another building entirely. But the person who was only pretending to be Ann Becker, why, she had her suspicions.
So when the opportunity arrived, she'd entered the freight elevator alone, counting on the industrial vacuum cleaner to make her invisible enough not to be noticed doing what she'd been told not to do. She pressed the button for the lowest floor.
Nothing happened. She pressed it a few more times. Still nothing. She tried another of the below-ground floors - there were three: B, B2, B3, normal elevator buttons just as they should be. They didn't light up. "The elevator doesn't even go there? What sort of freight elevator doesn't deliver to every floor?" Morgan Gillory asked out loud. Perhaps she was asking Ann Becker, who had no idea, of course, why it wouldn't. But that sure did seem to be the case.
If there were laboratories down there, how did the equipment even get there if the elevators wouldn't go down that far? Special locks on the floors, maybe. Elevators could have those. She'd need to watch a video about elevators. Morgan couldn't remember having watched one other than the one on television, more than twenty years back, about the end of elevator operators. That had been interesting but didn't really help her figure this particular situation out.
While Morgan thought the elevator problem over, as Ann Becker she went ahead up to her assigned floor and started vacuuming the hallway carpets. She noticed the carpet was still the same one that had been on the original plans, installed back in the early 1990s, and a style that had been discontinued in 2003. Which was a shame, because it was kind of pretty, even if a bit dull in that typical office carpeting sort of way.
She unlocked each office door in turn and emptied the wastebaskets into a big garbage bag, looked at the papers or computer left out on the desk or table or shelf units in the room, and tried to find something to make this night worth spending the time on.
It wasn't until she reached the twelfth office that she found anything that struck her as suspicious. The carpet in the twelfth office, as she vacuumed, Morgan noticed it was newer than all the others. It didn't look it, though. Someone seemed to have gone to some trouble to visibly age the carpet in here, to make it look like it was nearly as old as the carpet in all the other offices, and wasn't that weird. Because the pattern on this carpet, though similar to the one on all of the other office carpets she had seen so far, was a newer one. It only started to be manufactured two years ago. Like three pattern generations later than the other one, the one discontinued back in the early 2000s. Sure, that kind of pseudo-random mottled color carpet was all kind of alike, but they really did change it, including the type of fiber it was made of.
Why had someone replaced the carpet and tried to make it look like it was still the original? That, Morgan thought, might be enough to get that warrant that her partner wanted.
..
Detective Karadec wanted to bring Morgan along when he executed the search warrant against Archive Enterprises. "It's only for the room with the new carpet and the hallway outside?" Morgan asked incredulously. "What about the lower floors?"
"AE's lawyers got it limited as strictly as they could," Karadec explained. He agreed with Morgan, something was being hidden in those basement levels, but they simply didn't have enough to get a warrant to search there past the expensive law firm Director Texier had on retainer. "But first, let's go question Texier. Maybe we can get him to give us something we can use to persuade the judge to expand the warrant to the whole building."
They had to wait their turn. The guys from Organized Crime were still talking to the Archive Enterprises director about the building's original sale. Karadec watched Morgan watch the questioning through the one-way mirror.
There were questions about his relationship with the Danoffer Real Estate agency that his lawyer - a woman that didn't really look all that much like Lucia, except when she turned her head three-quarters away from him to say something quietly to her client, probably telling him to keep his mouth shut because that was what the smart lawyers always told their clients when the clients were being questioned. At that exact angle she looked too much like Lucia for Karadec's comfort. The breakup - the second, recent one - still hurt enough that he was actively trying not to think about it at all.
Especially when Morgan was right next to him. One of the other things he was trying not to think about was that ending things with Lucia the second time should have hurt more, actually, than it did, and whether his partner was the reason for that being the case.
He had missed something significant in the questioning while distracting himself, Karadec knew, but it didn't matter because Morgan had caught it just fine. She was turning away from watching the interview. "We don't need to talk to him. He's just given us plenty of excuse to get into that basement," she said.
"What did I miss," he didn't quite ask.
She was sure to tell him.
..
"Roberts asked him about Dr. Rehn, and before his lawyer shut him up, he said like he was really exasperated, for Roberts to tell him when he found her because Texier had some tough questions of his own for her. I could tell he had no idea what had happened to her, and he suspects she's done something that gave Roberts a reason to call him into the interrogation room," Morgan explained as Detective Karadec drove them both to the AE building.
A quartet of uniformed officers were standing by, ready to keep the peace as the warrant was being executed, if necessary. A dozen or so office workers had been herded out of the building by a couple more uniforms, neither of whom Karadec recognized.
"I can't believe that wasn't enough to get us a warrant for the whole building. It should have been."
Karadec agreed, but unfortunately the judge had not. "We can still take a look at that office. I'd wager some bloodstain shows up under the black light on the subflooring."
Morgan nodded, but he could tell she was distracted thinking about something else. Probably the basement. He figured they'd get there eventually.
..
Sure enough, when he pried up the corner of the carpeting and shone the fluorescent flashlight onto the surprisingly cheap chipboard subflooring that he had exposed, Karadec found the telltale glow revealing someone had bled here. It looked like less than bleeding out, but he hadn't pulled up that much carpet yet.
He wanted Morgan to see this. But when he looked around, she was not there. "Gillory!" he called.
"She spotted someone she knew and went to talk to him," one of the uniformed officers said.
Someone she knew?
Detective Karadec left the room, handing the flashlight to the officer who'd answered his question. Their partner was the one with the camera, anyway. They'd get all the evidence needed from the office, probably. He had to find Morgan.
Knowing her as he did, he suspected she was trying to get into the basement.
He pushed open the door to the stairwell. "Gillory," he called again.
This time there was an answer. "Karadec! Hey! I'm down here with --" and then her voice was cut off, muffled sounds of a scuffle that sounded like it was a couple flights down from where he was. Then a high pitched shriek set him flying down the stairs.
He saw a man dragging Morgan, who was kicking and thrashing around but couldn't get free, through a door and as he got nearly close enough to grab it, it slammed in his face with a deadly sounding click.
Locked. He couldn't get through. He could hear Morgan trying to fight off the assault. "Backup! Down the easternmost stairwell, get down here as fast as you can," he said into his radio.
Karadec kicked the door. It didn't give, but it was flimsy enough that he knew he could get through. He bodyslammed into it and, ouch, that hurt his shoulder more than he expected, but the door gave.
A run and a flying tackle and he had knocked the perp off his partner. The hall down here was bare concrete floor. None of it even looked finished. It did not much resemble the laboratory complex it was supposed to have been. Just as Morgan had suspected.
By the time the two uniformed officers arrived to back him up, Karadec had the man in cuffs.
They escorted him out to the waiting police car.
Morgan Gillory and Adam Karadec stood in the secret basement of Archive Enterprises, the one AE's lawyers had worked so hard and so uselessly to keep them out of. "I got us down here," Morgan said with satisfaction. "And just look at this place. I was right. Bet you anything you want that Stu, that guy you bodyslammed off me, and thank you by the way for that, can tell us what happened to Dr. Rehn."
"As long as it didn't happen to you," Karadec said. He mentally rewound what Morgan had said. "Anything?" He looked directly into her eyes.
He should admit to himself how he felt. It wasn't like he could keep it from her, and if she knew, he might as well know too. Ever since that time when she was panicking when they were locked in together and she thought they'd die, and he'd hugged her, he had known, if he was honest with himself, and he really should be. That had been before he found out about Lucia, so he hadn't been willing to acknowledge the feelings. But there wasn't anything in the way anymore.
"We'll see." The smile she gave him in answer felt every bit as good as a kiss.