As she slips the key into the lock, a man with a muffler over his lower face and a Russian hat jammed down to his eyebrows passes her almost close enough to jostle. Ondowsky? No. At least probably no. How can she be sure?

The shoebox of a lobby is empty. The lights are low. Shadows stretch everywhere. She hurries to the elevator. This is one of downtown’s older buildings, only eight floors, Midwest to the core, and there’s only the one for passengers. Roomy and supposedly state-of-the-art, but one is one. Tenants have been known to grumble about this, and those in a hurry often take the stairs, especially those with offices on the lower floors. Holly knows there’s also a freight elevator, but that one will be locked off for the weekend. She pushes the call button, suddenly sure the elevator will once more be out of order and her plan will collapse. But the doors open immediately and a female robo-voice welcomes her in. “Hello. Welcome to the Frederick Building.” With the lobby empty, it sounds to Holly like a disembodied voice in a horror movie.

The doors close and she pushes for 5. There’s a TV screen that shows news items and ads during the week, but now it’s off. No Christmas music either, thank heaven.

“Going up,” the robo-voice says.

He’ll be waiting for me, she thinks. He’s gotten in somehow, he’ll be waiting for me when the elevator doors open, and I’ll have nowhere to run.

But the doors open on an empty hall. She walks past the mail-drop (as old-fashioned as the talking elevator is newfangled), past the women’s and men’s, and stops at a door marked STAIRS. Everybody complains about Al Jordan, and with cause; the building’s superintendent is both incompetent and lazy. But he must be connected somehow, because he keeps his job in spite of the way the trash piles up in the basement, the broken side entrance camera, and the slow—almost whimsical—delivery of packages. Then there’s the matter of the fancy Japanese elevator, which pissed everybody off.

This afternoon Holly is actively hoping for more of Al’s carelessness, so she doesn’t have to waste time getting a chair to stand on from the office. She opens the door to the stairs, and she’s in luck. Clustered there on the landing—and blocking the way to the sixth floor, probably a fire code violation—is a cache of cleaning supplies which include a mop leaning against the stair rail and a squeegee bucket half-filled with wash water.

Holly considers dumping the bucket’s murky contents down the stairs—it would serve Al right—but in the end she can’t bring herself to do it. She pushes it into the women’s, removes the squeegee attachment, and dumps the filthy water down one of the sinks. She then rolls it to the elevator with her satchel of a purse hanging awkwardly from the crook of her arm. She pushes the call button. The doors open and the robo-voice tells her (just in case she’s forgotten), “This is five.” Holly remembers the day when Pete came puffing into the office and said, “Can you program that thing to say ‘Tell Al to fix me, then kill him’?”

Holly turns the bucket over. If she keeps her feet together (and is careful), there’s just room for her to stand on it between the rollers. From her purse she takes out a Scotch tape dispenser and a small package wrapped in brown paper. Standing on tiptoe, stretching until the bottom of her shirt pulls free of her pants, she tapes the package in the far left corner of the elevator car’s ceiling. It’s thus high above eye level, where (according to the late Bill Hodges) people tend not to look. Ondowsky better not. If he does, she’s hung.

She takes her phone out of her pocket, holds it up, and snaps a picture of the package. If things go as she hopes, Ondowsky will never see this photo, which isn’t much of an insurance policy in any case.

The elevator’s doors have closed again. Holly pushes the open button and rolls the mop bucket back up the hall, returning it to where she found it on the stair landing. Then she goes past Brilliancy Beauty Products (where no one seems to work except for one middle-aged man who reminds Holly of an old cartoon character named Droopy Dog) to Finders Keepers, at the end. She unlocks the door and lets herself in with a sigh of relief. She looks at her watch. Nearly five-thirty. Time is now very tight, indeed.

She goes to the office safe and runs the combination. She takes out the late Bill Hodges’s Smith & Wesson revolver. Although she knows it’s loaded—an unloaded handgun is useless even as a club, another of her mentor’s dictums—she rolls the chamber to make sure, then snaps it closed.

Center mass, she thinks. As soon as he comes out of the elevator. Don’t worry about the box with the money; if it’s cardboard, the slug will go right through, even if he’s holding it in front of his chest. If it’s steel, I’ll have to go for a headshot. The range will be short. It could be messy, but—

She surprises herself with a little laugh.

But Al has left cleaning supplies.

Holly looks at her watch. 5:34. That leaves her twenty-six minutes before Ondowsky shows up, assuming he’s on time. She still has things to do. All are important. Deciding which is the most important is a no-brainer, because if she doesn’t survive this, someone has to know about the thing that bombed the Macready School in order to eat the pain of the survivors and the bereaved, and there is one person who will believe her.

She turns on her phone, opens the recording app, and begins to speak.

6

The Robinsons gave their daughter a nifty little Ford Focus for her eighteenth birthday, and as Holly is parking downtown on Buell Street, Barbara is three blocks from Holly’s apartment building, stopped at a red light. She takes the opportunity to glance at the WebWatcher app on her phone and murmurs “Shit.” Holly hasn’t gone home. She’s at the office, although Barbara can’t understand why she’d go there on a Saturday evening this close to Christmas.

Holly’s building is straight ahead, but when the light turns green, Barbara turns right, toward downtown. It won’t take her long to get there. The front door of the Frederick Building will be locked, but she knows the code for the side door in the service alley. She’s been at Finders Keepers with her brother many times, and sometimes they go in that way.

I’ll just surprise her, Barbara thinks. Take her out for coffee and find out what the hell’s going on. Maybe we can even grab a quick bite and hit a movie.

The thought makes her smile.

7

From Holly Gibney’s report to Detective Ralph Anderson:

I don’t know if I’ve told you everything, Ralph, and I don’t have time to go back and check, but you know the most important thing: I’ve stumbled across another outsider, not the same as the one we dealt with in Texas, but related. A new and improved model, let’s say.

I’m in the little reception area of Finders, waiting for him. My plan is to shoot him as soon as he steps out of the elevator with the blackmail money, and I think that’s how this is going to go. I think he has come to pay me off rather than kill me, because I think I convinced him that I only want money, along with his promise never to commit another mass killing. Which he probably doesn’t mean to keep.

I’ve tried to think as logically about this as I can, because my life depends on it. If I were him, I’d pay off once, then see what happens. Would I plan to leave my job at the Pittsburgh station afterwards? I might, but I might stay. To test the blackmailer’s good faith. If the woman were to come back, try double-dipping, then I’d kill her and disappear. Wait a year or two, then resume my old pattern. Maybe in San Francisco, maybe in Seattle, maybe in Honolulu. Start working at a local indie, then move up. He’ll get new ID and new references. God knows how they can stand up in this age of computers and social media, Ralph, but somehow they do. Or have so far.