16th Seduction (Women's Murder Club 16)

The elevator doors opened.

I wasn’t prepared for my first look at what lurked beneath Saint Vartan’s. The basement wasn’t just huge. It sprawled. It had high ceilings and many Alice-in-Wonderland doors.

It had the look of an underground city.

CHAPTER 76

I TRIED TO take in the vast, humming, industrial-grade basement level

under Saint Vartan’s.

The off-white painted walls were notched at intervals with intersections and blue doors that led to the boiler room, cooling apparatus, maintenance services, kitchen facilities, laundry. Pipes and tubes scaled the twenty-foot-high ceilings, which were paneled with fluorescent lighting that bleached this mechanical underworld and polished it to a high shine.

Along with the thumping of the major pumps and the chopping of fans, there was traffic aplenty: maintenance workers, kitchen workers, and orderlies pushing wheelchairs and gurneys. Electric carts streaked past.

Let me just say that the almost futuristic, machine-driven quality of the place was a little creepy.

I looked to Conklin to see how he was taking it and saw that Kelly Caine had fixed her big brown eyes on Inspector Hottie and had sidled up inside his personal zone.

I butted in.

“The incineration facility?” I reminded her.

“Right this way.”

We followed the young woman down the main corridor, came to an intersection, and turned right down a spur of hallway to a door marked FURNACE ROOM. We peered through a window in that door and saw a large, blocky furnace in use. A maintenance worker opened the adjacent storage room for us.

A logbook was prominently positioned beside a computer on a long table. Shelves wrapping around three sides of the room were stacked with drugs that had been consigned to the fire. There were locks on both doors, and an operator was present “most of the time,” according to Kelly.

I asked, “What does ‘most’ mean?”

“Eighteen hours a day. But the doors are always locked, a hundred percent.”

But maybe the man with the key took a break now and then. My excitement over tracking the sux to its last known whereabouts had cooled. What now?

As we walked back toward the elevator, Kelly was saying to Conklin, “You’re here about that Stealth Killer, right?”

He said, “Could be. Any thoughts on that?”

“Well,” Kelly said, blinking up at my partner, “I probably shouldn’t say this, but I saw an aide sneaking around down here a couple weeks ago after the storage room was closed for the day.”

“Really?” I said, my enthusiasm warming up a touch. “You know the name of this aide?”

“Doreen something.”

“What does Doreen look like?”

Kelly said, “About my height, blond, hippy.”

We had been looking for a man, but could the woman Kelly described have passed as a “weird-looking” dude?

She said, “Doreen works at the Loony Bin. That’s the psych ward? It’s across Hyde and around the corner on Bush. Redbrick compound with a wrought-iron fence out front? There’s a shortcut to the Bin through our basement, you know?”

“Didn’t know,” Conklin said. “That’s very interesting, Kelly.”

“Yeah, this corridor goes directly to Hyde Street Psychiatric,” she said, pointing over my shoulder. “Psych patients are transported from the hospital to the Bin and vice versa. Like, Doreen could have come from the Bin to the furnace and no one would know. Ready to go back upstairs?” she asked.

Conklin said, “I think we’ll take the Hyde Street detour. Thanks for your help. We appreciate it.”