“Maybe.” Xela switched back to the two other shots. “I haven’t cleaned these up, but if you give me a minute I can try to—”
“There!” Veek jabbed a finger at the monitor. “See that?”
Nate and Xela peered at the image. It was darker than the clean one, and not as sharp. The objects in the background were just shadows, highlights, and reflections. The coils of rope gleamed in the image
“It’s shiny,” said Veek. “It’s not rope, it’s cable.”
“Could be,” Xela said. She skipped to another picture, then back to the clean version. The enhancement and years of dust made the coils look like rope, but there were a few pinpricks of light reflecting off them.
“It is,” said Veek. She looked at Nate. “I’ll bet it’s copper cable.”
“Doesn’t look like copper,” Xela said.
“That’s a big leap,” said Nate.
“Not really. Not if we assume whatever’s in there has something to do with the power mystery.”
Xela turned from the screen. “Power mystery?”
Nate and Veek exchanged a glance. “The building isn’t on the L.A. power grid,” he said.
She blinked. “What?”
“It looks like we’re getting our electricity from somewhere else,” said Nate. “We just don’t know where.”
“Somewhere in there,” said Veek.
“Except,” countered Nate, “there’s nothing in there.”
“We can’t see half the room,” she said. “There could be a ton of stuff in there just out of frame.”
“Something that could power a building?”
Veek glared at him. “Whose side are you on?”
Nate put up a hand. “I just want the facts. No jumping to conclusions.”
“Hold on,” said Xela. She flicked back and forth between a few of the lesser photos again and came back to the clean one. “Look at those shadows.”
Veek leaned in. “What about them?”
She traced the shadows the pipes had cast when the flash went off. “They’re too big. Too wide.”
Nate tried to pull some hidden meaning from the photo. “What do you mean, too wide?”
“If the pipes were on the wall,” Xela explained, “they’d cast narrow shadows. Not much wider than the pipes themselves, because there wouldn’t be much distance for them to spread. We probably wouldn’t even be able to see them.”
“They’re not on the wall,” said Veek. “They’re out in the middle of the room.”
“Yep,” said Xela. “Those aren’t water pipes.”
Nate thought of optical illusions, and how the whole perspective of a picture would switch once you knew the trick to it. “It’s a railing,” he said. “The safety railing around a staircase.”
He and Veek exchanged a glance.
“One going down below the basement,” said Veek.
Xela had to go back to throw her laundry in the dryer and said she’d check on Oskar. Nate and Veek stood in the hall by the stairwell.
“Finding out there’s a sub-basement’s good,” said Nate, “but her bathroom was interesting, too.”
Veek gave him a look. “Why? She have something naughty drying in there?”
“It’s set up like a locker room,” he said. “She told me the other day but I didn’t think she was serious.”
“So?”
“So every single apartment I’ve seen in this building has a different layout. I mean, seriously different.”
She smirked. “You have no idea.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
She walked past him to the stairwell and set her hand on the ornate banister. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s see if I can show you another oddity of the Kavach Building.”
They walked downstairs. Veek stopped at 13, across from the padlocked 14, and rapped a few times. Nate shuffled through the tenants he’d met and tried to remember who lived there.
As it turned out, the woman who answered the door was no one he knew, but he did recognize her. She was the curvy half of the couple he’d seen walking in and out of the building a few times. Up close he could see a light sprinkle of freckles on her cheeks. “Hey, Veek,” she said. “What’s up?”
“Favor to ask you.” She cocked her head back at him. “This is Nate. He moved into twenty-eight a few months ago. Do you mind if he takes a look at your place?”
The woman smiled. “Of course not.” She held out her hand to Nate. “I’m Debbie. I’ve seen you a couple of times.”
He shook the hand. “Nate. I’ve seen you, too. You and your...boyfriend?”
“Husband,” she said. “Clive. He’s at a job right now but he should be back in a few hours.” The smile never cracked. She reminded Nate of a teacher he’d had way back in second or third grade.
She stepped aside and let Veek enter the apartment. Debbie glanced back at him. “Would you guys like a drink or something? We’ve got milk, water, orange juice.”
He walked in and looked up.
And up.
“
I’ve got half a pot of coffee,” Debbie added, “but I could make some fresh stuff. Or I’ve got tea if you like. The water’s already on.”
The brick wall across from him was at least twenty feet tall. It had two of the huge windows his apartment had, and then two more a yard or so above them. Then his eyes came off the bricks and windows and found the chandelier. It was a forest of long crystal shards, a hundred icicles in concentric rings. A brass chain bolted it to the hardwood ceiling.
And now Nate saw the rest of the apartment. The ceiling and walls were rich, dark hardwood. They looked like the floors but without a century of wear and tear on them. He looked closer and saw each one was a single plank, floor to ceiling. It was like being in the private library of a mansion, or maybe a castle.
“Wow,” he said.
“Yep,” said Debbie. “We get that a lot.”
“You guys did all this yourself?”
She smiled again. “No. Clive’s a wonderful carpenter, don’t get me wrong, but it was like this when we moved in. He made the loft, though, and our table and chairs.”
Nate looked up again and tried not to get distracted. In the corner opposite the windows was a platform, maybe ten feet on a side. It stood on tall legs of doubled-up two-by-fours. He could see a railing at the top. The whole thing was as high as the next floor, and a staircase ran alongside it. “That’s apartment twenty-three,” he said. “There’s no door because there’s no apartment.”
“You’re a fast one,” said Veek.
“Why the hell do you have a cathedral ceiling?”
Debbie shrugged. “Like I said, it was like this when we moved in.”
“No, I mean...I mean why would anyone do this? Why put a two-story room in the middle of an apartment building?” He looked at Veek. “Maybe we should put the cellar on hold for a while.”
“What? Seriously?”
Debbie stepped back from the kitchen area. “What’s so special about the cellar?”
They sat at the table and told her about the photos and the railing. Debbie made tea for herself and poured them both water from a Brita filter on the counter. She reminded Nate of every cute mom in old black-and-white television shows. Debbie was a modern day June Cleaver, with her manners and smiles and cheerful hosting duties.
She blew on her tea, two polite little puffs, and looked down at the floor. “So you think whatever’s in this sub-basement has to do with the electricity-from-nowhere?”
“Yeah,” said Veek. “That’s why I think we need to get in there.”
Nate was looking around the cathedral apartment again, examining each plank on the wall. “I think we should take some measurements. All these different layouts have to mean something.”
“Like what?”
He shrugged. “I have no idea. It just seems to be the most blatantly weird thing about this place. Apartments are usually symmetrical, but this place is as unsymmetrical as it can be. There has to be a reason for it. Maybe if we can make up some actual blueprints we’ll catch something we’ve been missing.”
“Or we could just see what’s in the basement,” said Veek.
“Yeah, but that’s going to be tough. If he is hiding something, Oskar’s going to be suspicious right now. We need to wait a couple of weeks for him to forget he found us there. And we might as well use those weeks checking out some of the stuff we can do without raising suspicion.”
Debbie set her mug down. “He’s got a good point.”
“Fine,” sighed Veek. She tapped her fingers against her glass. “It’ll be tough,” she said. “I only know maybe half the people in the building, and I’m maybe on speaking terms with half of them.”
“Between the three of us and the public spaces, we could get a lot of it though,” said Debbie. “Maybe enough to help us get a sense of the place. Clive’s got tomorrow off, so he could help.”
“Would he be up for it?” asked Nate.
She nodded. “He’s just as fascinated by this place as Veek. He just never has time to do anything. If you’ve got a plan ready to go, he’ll lunge at it.”
Veek got up to refill her glass and flinched away from the counter. Nate glanced over and saw a hint of green vanish into the sink. He glanced at Debbie. “You’ve got ‘em, too?”
“Yep,” she said. “They’re fascinating, aren’t they?”
He sipped his water. “I guess. I’ve never seen green cockroaches before living here.”
“Normally they’re only in the Caribbean and along the gulf coast,” she said. “But these aren’t
panchlora nivea
. I’m studying biochemistry, and we do tons of work with roaches in the lab. The guys in this building are unique. They might be a whole new species.”
“Oh, joy,” said Veek.
Debbie gave her a look that should’ve been condescending, but she somehow made it seem cute and motherly. “If you actually looked at them sometime you’d find them fascinating, too. Besides, if you’re looking for mysteries, they’re little enigmas, believe me.”
Nate perked up. “How so?”
Debbie smiled. Again, all the smiles should’ve been creepy, but she made them work somehow. They were so ridiculously sincere. “There’s something lurking in their DNA if I can just figure out how to study it,” she said. “I mean, I could do my graduate thesis just on their physical mutations if I can figure out how to get them and the equipment in the same place.”
Veek set her glass on the table. “UCLA won’t let you borrow stuff?”
“Not the stuff I need.”
“So the extra leg counts as a full-on mutation?” asked Nate. “They’re not just some freaks or something?”
“The extra leg’s a pretty big thing,” Debbie said. “A stable mutation along those lines that’s fully functioning is pretty rare. They’ve also got a weird mandible arrangement and the green carapace. That’s not even the weirdest bit. As far as I can tell, they don’t eat.”
“Don’t eat what?”
“Anything,” said Debbie. “You can leave food on the counter and they won’t touch it. They walk around it. They also ignore poison and bait traps, which is why you can’t get rid of them. I’ve got a tank of about a hundred in the bathroom and I’ve never fed them once.” She put her hands up. “So what are they living off?”
Veek gave the bathroom an uneasy look and she and Nate both shook their heads. “And you can’t study them in your lab because...?”
“Because I can’t get them there.”
“No car?” asked Nate.
Debbie shook her head. “I’ve tried to take some in. My first thought was to start a colony there and do some work on them.” She shook her head. “Thing is, they die if you take them away from the building.”
Nate’s glass stopped halfway to his mouth. “Die?”
Debbie nodded. “I thought the first time was a fluke. Then it happened again so I ran some tests. I haven’t done enough to draw viable conclusions, but it looks like they die once they get thirty-one feet, seven inches outside the building. They can’t even get to the end of the block.”
“What happens?” asked Veek. “Do they get sick or something or...something?”
Debbie shook her head again. “It’s like flipping a switch. They cross the line and they drop dead. I even had it marked with chalk a few months back.”
“I remember that,” Veek said. “The big green arc in the street. I thought it was kids playing a game.”
“Nope, just me. Once they get about ninety feet out they shrivel up like they’ve been dead for weeks. I can’t be exact because I don’t have a tape measure long enough. So I’m stuck working on them here with whatever I’ve got.” She had a sip of her tea. “Weird, huh?”
Clive loved being a carpenter because at the end of the day he could stand back and see all the things he’d accomplished. There was physical evidence of progress. Even the grueling days ended well because he could see he’d gotten a lot done. For a guy who was never expected to do anything, the constant reminders were a good thing.
So he was already in a good mood before he got home. He found parking with no problem, walked past the liquor store without a pause, and went home to his lovely wife. They’d talked about having a quiet night in, and they’d gotten the last disc of
Middleman
from Netflix.