The third-quarter facilities variance came in twenty-two thousand dollars over budget, and the line item for exterior window maintenance had no contract number attached to
Richard Mercer sat at the head of the mahogany table, tapping his gold Montblanc pen against the rim of his water glass.
“We do not pay invoices without an approved purchase order, Amanda,” he said.
“I am aware of our protocol, Richard,” I said, sliding the revised spreadsheet across the polished wood.
Across from me, two junior analysts kept their eyes glued to their catered box lunches, avoiding the managing partner’s gaze.
A thick shadow dropped through the morning light outside the twelfth-floor window.
Metal clinked against stone. A yellow steel cradle settled on its suspension cables, stopping level with our conference room.
The man standing in the cradle wore heavy canvas overalls, a yellow safety helmet, and a faded denim jacket frayed at the cuffs.
He dipped an eighteen-inch squeegee into a rectangular bucket, shook off the suds, and raised his right arm.
The profile was sharper than it had been in the spring of 2006, but the line of his jaw and the quiet set of his shoulders were unmistakable.
It was Jamie Vance.
He drew the rubber blade across the pane in one clean, deliberate stroke, clearing a bright diagonal through the gray foam.
My hand dropped beneath the edge of the conference table to the small gold signet ring on my left pinky, twisting it until the band bit into my skin.
Inside my leather portfolio, tucked behind the quarterly audit sheets, lay the cracked laminated chemistry lab badge I had carried from job to job for eighteen years.
Jamie paused his squeegee at the center mullion, glanced through the double-pane glass, and looked straight at me.
He did not wave. He did not smile.
He pressed three fingers flat against the cold outer surface of the glass, tapped twice, and pulled the squeegee down to the sill.
“Amanda?” Richard said.
The gold pen clicked twice on the mahogany.
“You look at that glass like you expect a ghost to walk right through it, Amanda.”
“The glare was distracting,” I said, keeping my chin level.
“Then pull the blinds and tell me why the mechanical repair fund is short twelve thousand dollars.”
“The HVAC contract on floor eight required emergency valve replacements,” I replied, forcing my eyes down to the printed ledger.
“Who authorized the work?”
“Facility services filed the ticket on Monday morning.”
Richard tapped the paper with the tip of his pen, leaving a tiny black dot next to the total.
“Find out who signed the ticket before we reconvene at two.”
The meeting broke up twenty minutes later, the junior analysts leaving their boxed turkey sandwiches half-eaten on the side credenza.
I gathered my files, dropped the pen into my leather folder, and stepped into the corridor.
Instead of turning toward my corner office, I walked down the narrow carpeted service hall leading to the east alcove.
The narrow window there looked out over the same exterior elevation facing Broad Street.
A faint smell of lemon floor cleaner drifted through the alcove air, but outside, the yellow cradle was already gone.
Two wet vertical streaks ran down the glass toward the street below, catching the pale morning sun.
Up above, an empty steel cable swayed in a wide, slow arc beneath the roof davit.
Someone had already unhooked the secondary safety line and hauled it up to the parapet.
The service elevator at the far end of the hall chimed once.
The brass indicator arrow shifted from twelve down to eleven, dropping steadily toward the basement.
I did not wait for the passenger car.
I took the concrete fire stairs down twelve flights, my heels clicking on the metal treads until I reached the sub-basement.
The loading dock smelled of diesel exhaust, damp cardboard, and road salt left over from last winter.
Carl Miller, the building superintendent, sat on a green plastic milk crate near the freight bay, eating a ham sandwich out of wax paper.
“You are a long way from the executive suite, Miss Cole,” Carl said, not standing up.
“Who is on the roof today, Carl?”
Carl chewed slowly, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and set the sandwich on an overturned five-gallon bucket.
“Scheduled glass service. Same as every autumn.”
“The commercial vendor sheet on my desk lists Apex Building Care,” I said. “Apex does not run two-man drop rigs on Broad Street.”
“Apex subcontracts when they get behind on schedule,” he said, staring at the concrete floor.
“Show me the morning gate log.”
Carl looked at my Mercer Advisory badge, then at the grease on his own work boots.
“Building services answers to the board committee, not to financial consultants.”
“I am the lead auditor on your operating budget,” I told him. “Show me the log or I freeze your equipment orders by noon.”
Carl reached behind a stack of galvanized pipe and pulled out an aluminum clipboard.
He flipped back two carbon copies, keeping his thumb pressed over the vendor column.
“They signed in at seven fifteen,” he muttered.
I stepped close enough to read the pencil scrawl before he pulled the board back against his chest.
The firm name was written in hard, slanted block letters: Vance Exterior Maintenance.
Underneath, on the line reserved for the lead technician, the signature read J. Vance.
“Why are they working our high-rise drops without an approved Mercer contract?” I asked.
Carl snapped the metal clipboard clip down with a sharp crack.
“You will have to ask your boss about that.”
“Richard Mercer does not sign vendor logs at seven in the morning.”
“I take the work orders I am handed, Miss Cole.”
Carl picked up his sandwich, turned his back to me, and walked toward the boiler room door.
The heavy steel fire door swung shut behind him, leaving me alone under the flickering fluorescent tubes.
I walked out to the parking garage, pulled out my phone, and searched the county commercial registry.
The business address for Vance Exterior Maintenance was filed on McKinley Avenue, four miles west of downtown.
It took forty minutes in evening traffic to cross the river and reach the industrial rail corridor.
The address sat squeezed between an auto salvage yard and an abandoned freight spur.
A single sodium vapor light buzzed above an open bay door marked with peeling white numbers.
Parked in the gravel alley sat a faded white Ford Econoline van with rusted rocker panels and a homemade steel ladder rack.
I pulled my sedan alongside the chain-link fence twenty yards back and cut the headlights.
Jamie came out of the bay carrying two heavy coils of braided nylon suspension line over his left shoulder.
He threw the ropes into the open rear doors of the van, where they landed with a dull thud against the corrugated metal bed.
He had taken off his hard hat, and his dark hair was damp with sweat along his forehead.
He reached up to the roof rack to secure a pair of scarred aluminum spreader bars.
The sleeve of his work shirt pulled back three inches from his wrist.
Across the back of his right knuckles, running from the base of the index finger to the center of his hand, lay the thick, pale ridge of an old chemical burn.
It was the same mark he had carried away from the second-floor laboratory at Oak Creek High School on the eighteenth of May, eighteen years ago.
He paused with his hands on the rack, his head tilted as though listening to the trucks shifting gears on the overpass.
His thumb came up and traced slowly along the edge of the scar, pressing hard into the stiff tissue.
A younger man came out of the small office trailer behind the bay, holding a stack of yellow invoices.
He rattled a heavy ring of truck keys in his jacket pocket as he walked.
“The wholesale supplier called twice before four,” the younger man said, his voice sharp in the cold alley air.
Jamie did not turn around. “What did they want, Marcus?”
“They want the four thousand for the safety line by Friday, or they cut our credit off.”
“We will have the funds by Friday.”
“The Mercer job was supposed to clear that bill three weeks ago,” Marcus said, stopping at the bumper.
Jamie reached into the back of the van and pulled out a heavy brass padlock.
He closed the warehouse roll-up door with a long, rattling rumble that echoed off the corrugated metal siding.
He fitted the shackle of the padlock through the iron hasp and snapped it shut, his knuckles white against the cold iron.
The archive room in the basement of our tower stayed forty-nine degrees year-round to preserve the municipal bond spools. By eight o’clock the next morning, I had the county microfiche reader humming under the blue fluorescent tubes, running the 2006 public school risk assessments through the magnifier.
My fingers went numb against the cold plastic dial. I rolled past three years of boiler replacements until the index hit May 18, 2006, the morning after the north wing went dark.
The district fire marshal report should have been twenty pages long. The spool held only a grey card stamped with a seven-digit reference code and a single red word: Sealed.
I copied the reference code onto the margin of my yellow legal pad. Beneath it, the catalog clerk had penciled the name of our own firm’s predecessor, Mercer, Vance and Kroll Legal, along with an order from an unnamed school board trustee.
A whole municipal investigation had vanished behind a private trust ledger. When I checked the microfiche table of contents, page fourteen of the physical settlement summary was missing entirely from the reel, skipped over by the scanner.
I wiped my thumbs on my wool trousers and shut down the reader lamp.
Twenty minutes before noon, I pulled my sedan onto the packed gravel lot behind the McKinley Avenue garage. The smell of burning diesel fuel hung over the corrugated tin roof, thick enough to taste on the back of my tongue.
A younger man stepped out of the bay before my driver side door clicked shut. He looked enough like Jamie to make my throat tighten, but he carried his shoulders high and defensive, swinging a heavy iron carabiner on a nylon lanyard.
“Office is closed to walk-ins,” he said. He had grease across the bridge of his nose and his car keys rattled loud inside his canvas work jacket.
“I need five minutes with Jamie,” I said. “It concerns the commercial cleaning pre-qualification for the Broad Street tower.”
“You work for Richard Mercer,” he said. He did not ask it.
“I run facilities assessments for the firm, yes.”
“Then you know we submitted the bid packet on Friday.” He moved two inches to the right, cutting off my view through the garage door. “We don’t need a corporate consultant auditing our family accounts on our own blacktop.”
