The Mourning Sexton (27 page)

CHAPTER 43

T
hirteenth floor.

The elevator went no higher.

The bell dinged, the doors slid open, and he stepped out into the foyer of the law library of the Civil Courts Building. Directly ahead was the librarian station, a rectangular enclosure in the center of the room with a counter, two desks, and various equipment. Inside the enclosure, a heavyset black woman was seated at a computer terminal. The ceiling above was two stories high with a mezzanine overhang filled with stacks of books.

He'd dressed for court today, the better to fit in. Dark suit, white shirt, striped tie, large trial briefcase. No briefs in the briefcase, though. And no yellow legal pads or pleading binders or photocopies of cases or outlines of cross-examinations. Nothing in there but a flashlight and a half-sized pry bar, both purchased that morning at Home Depot. The pry bar was his backup safecracking plan. He couldn't be certain that Judith had correctly written down the combination, or that it would still work more than three years later. Thus the pry bar.

He would never have gotten that tool past security at the federal courthouse, but this was the Civil Courts Building, where the security guards treated attorneys with a quaint level of deference, requiring only a display of a Missouri bar membership card to be waved around the metal detectors and X-ray machine. Indeed, the elderly guard had nodded at his large briefcase and wished him good luck in court.

Hirsch moved around the main level of the library. He hadn't been up here in maybe twenty years. The place had a threadbare feel, as if it hadn't been renovated since the building opened in the 1930s. The carpets were faded, the woodwork was dull and scratched, the lighting uneven. Visible through the windows on all sides were the bottom halves of the massive Ionic columns that ringed the Greek temple structure, eight to a side. He moved down a long row of stacks to the window, which looked out between two of the fluted columns. He turned his head sideways to peer up, unable to see the tops of the columns.

The elevator bell dinged, and he turned with a frown.

He moved back through the stacks toward the front area, but by the time he reached that area there was no one nearby except for the librarian at her computer terminal. Perhaps someone had departed.

Perhaps.

He walked around the perimeter of the first level. He counted five people in addition to the librarian. Two were elderly attorneys in baggy suits and large ties. They were seated on opposite sides of the same rectangular table—one hunched over a law book with a magnifying glass, the other reading a newspaper attached to a bamboo pole. He saw two men, both in their thirties—a skinny guy with blond hair in a brown suit, and a husky guy in a dark gray blazer and khaki slacks. They were seated at small tables on opposite sides of the room. Each had casebooks piled on his table. The skinny guy was taking notes on a laptop computer. The burly guy had an open yellow legal pad at his side. Both looked vaguely familiar, although he couldn't place either. Lastly, there was a woman in her twenties, casually dressed and seated at a carrel with a casebook open in front of her, taking notes as she read.

He took the stairway up to the mezzanine level and walked around the perimeter. From the windows up there you could see the tops of the columns, which meant that the pyramid portion of the roof was directly overhead.

The only person he found on the mezzanine level was a middle-aged woman in a pantsuit seated in a carrel. She was writing notes on index cards as she perused an unwieldy volume of what appeared to be zoning regulations or municipal ordinances dating back several decades. She didn't look up as he passed.

Moving around the mezzanine, he noted two exit doors along the walls, each bearing a stairway symbol stenciled in red. He confirmed that both doors were screened from view from the first floor. One was tucked around the corner at one end of the mezzanine. The other, though, was in the sight lines of the woman in the carrel.

He meandered back toward that far exit door, pretending to be searching for a book in the stacks. When he reached the door, he paused—right hand on the knob, left holding the briefcase—and looked back.

No one could see him.

He took a breath, turned the knob, and ducked inside, gently closing the door behind him.

He was on a stairwell landing. The stairs went up and down. At the top of the stairs was a metal door with the words
No Admittance
stenciled in black. As he started up the stairs he could hear rumbling mechanical noises from the other side.

He tried the door at the top of the stairs. It was unlocked. He pushed it open and stepped inside.

He wasn't sure what he was expecting to find up there inside the pyramid. Something exotic, perhaps. A hint of Arabia. But what struck him first was how absolutely ordinary it all seemed. And how familiar. This was hardly his first time on the top floor of a tall building—the real top floor, that is, instead of the top button on the elevator. He'd been on top floors in connection with various construction lawsuits over the years—up there maneuvering between massive heating, ventilating, and air-conditioning systems; walking around the elevator equipment; following paths to other machinery and supply areas that typically occupied the top level of tall buildings.

Including the Civil Courts Building.

No mummies or hieroglyphics up here. Just a dusty obstacle course of heavy equipment and storage sheds. Noisy, too. Just like other tall buildings. There was the deep thrum of the HVAC system and the whine and grinding clatter of elevator motors and cables. All familiar.

Until he looked up—up into what was unmistakably the inside of a stepped pyramid. The four walls slanted inward and met near the top. The interior space overhead was a warren of anchored ladders and screened catwalks that reached up to just below the rectangular ceiling. He estimated that the ceiling was fifty feet long and twenty-five feet wide.

He checked his watch: one forty-seven
P
.
M
.

He moved cautiously around the entire floor, using the large equipment as a screen, trying to determine whether any of the maintenance staff was up there.

He saw no one.

About twenty feet out from the wall near him was a perpendicular metal ladder that joined a catwalk overhead. Hirsch ran his eyes up the rungs to the catwalk and then looked down at his briefcase. He tried to gauge the added difficulty of climbing up the pyramid ladders with one hand while lugging a large briefcase with the other. It wasn't worth it. If she'd really hidden papers up there, they were likely to be inside some sort of container. A file folder, perhaps. Or even a shoe box. He could carry that down without the briefcase.

He knelt, opened the briefcase, and removed the pry bar and the flashlight. As he stood, he scanned the area for a place to hide the briefcase. Off to his right was a clothing rack on which hung about two dozen green maintenance jumpsuits. He turned off his cell phone, put it inside the briefcase, and stashed the briefcase against the wall behind the rack.

He slipped the flashlight into the left side pocket of his suit jacket and the pry bar into the right pocket. He had prepared for just this contingency by cutting through the bottom seams of both pockets, thereby adding just enough additional room to allow the flashlight and the pry bar to slide all the way inside.

He scanned the area again and then clambered up the first ladder, feeling exposed and vulnerable the whole way. He crouched on the catwalk and surveyed the floor area below.

Still no one.

He moved down the catwalk to the next ladder, and then up that ladder to the next catwalk. By the time he reached the uppermost catwalk, which was directly below the ceiling, he was breathing heavily. There were two short ladders on this level, each leading up to a small trapdoor in the ceiling.

Sadie and Sue,
he thought.

Three and half years ago, Judith had been up on this same catwalk with a package of valuable documents to hide. Which ladder had she chosen?

He decided on the nearest one. He climbed up the short ladder and pushed up on the trap door, which opened with a loud creak. He climbed through the opening.

He was inside one of the griffins. Just enough light slanted in from what was presumably its head to dimly illuminate the space, which appeared to be about the size and shape and height of a bedroom—albeit a windowless bedroom with aluminum walls and ceiling.

He took out the flashlight and moved the beam across the floor and walls. No safe.

That meant this was the same griffin that Patrick Markman had taken his sister inside. The griffin named Sue.

He climbed through the trapdoor and down the ladder to the catwalk. He moved over to the other ladder, climbed up to the trap door, and pushed.

It didn't open.

He moved his legs up another rung and pressed his back against the trap door. He braced himself on the ladder. Using his legs for extra power, he pushed up.

Nothing.

Harder.

It wouldn't budge.

He went down the ladder and up the first one again—up through the trap-door and into the griffin. He moved the flashlight beam slowly across the walls until he spotted a half-sized door in the far wall. It had a metal latch handle. He yanked up the handle and pushed on the door. It squeaked open. The room filled with light and the whistling of wind.

He bent low and stepped through the door onto the roof of the Civil Courts Building. He straightened and looked around, getting his bearings. He was standing atop the pyramid on a small platform between the two enormous griffins seated back to back.

He leaned over and looked down the pyramid—down ten stepped ledges, each about four feet wide with a four-foot drop to the next ledge. Far below, the base of the pyramid sat on a limestone platform at least ten feet thick. The bottom of the platform nestled inside a parapet wall on top of the Greek temple. Perched on each of the four corners of the parapet wall was a concrete eagle.

The sky had been partly cloudy when he entered the building nearly an hour ago. Now it was a solid gray. There was a heavy scent of rain in the air. As he turned back toward the griffins, a gust of wind flapped his suit jacket and snatched his kippah. He reached up too late and watched it sail away, jumping and swooping in the wind, quickly shrinking to a dark speck in the distance.

He turned his attention to the other griffin and spotted a similar small door on the beast's backside. He yanked up the handle, pulled the door open, and ducked inside. The interior was identical to the other.

Completely identical.

No safe.

He moved slowly around the room, studying the floor and walls for any evidence that a safe, or any heavy object, had been removed. He saw nothing.

He went outside and into the first griffin and performed the same inspection. No sign of removal there either.

Back out on the platform, he stood between the two griffins as he thought it over. Inside a griffin had seemed the logical place for a safe—hidden, protected from the elements, easily accessible in all weather.

But then again, there was nothing logical about that roof.

Carefully, he moved along the ledge around the outside of the first griffin, the one facing east toward the Mississippi River. The ledge was narrow, with about a two-foot drop to the top level of the stepped pyramid. He saw no indication of a safe along the body of the griffin.

When he came again to the rear of that griffin, he moved over to the periphery of the ledge and stared up at the back and the wings and the head of the beast, trying to imagine how he could climb up there to inspect the top. He might be able to get a handhold on one of the wings and then hoist himself up, but it would be precarious work. And even if he could, how would a much shorter woman have done it on that cold day in December?

He'd worry about that later, he told himself as he started edging around the other griffin.

He almost missed it as he moved past the front of the beast. He stopped and knelt down between the front paws. He stared in amazement at the small safe nestled down at the base, almost shielded from view and from elements beneath the fleur-de-lis of St. Louis emblazoned on the chest of the beast.

He straightened up and looked around. The only taller building nearby was the United States Courthouse. It was two blocks to the south—a twenty-nine-story mix of pinkish columns and domes and dark expanses of glass. It towered overhead, its steel dome a dull gray beneath the overcast sky. Gazing up at the tall banks of windows, he wondered whether anyone inside that courthouse had noticed a man in a business suit on top of the Civil Courts Building.

He took out Judith's note with the combination and knelt in front of the safe. The sheet of paper fluttered in the wind.

The dial was rusted and needed lubrication, but he was able to make it turn.

Eight to the right.

Twenty-five to the left.

Five to the right.

Thirteen to the left.

He pulled on the little handle. The door squeaked open.