Three-Day Town - By Margaret Maron Page 0,84

Phil Lundigren had told us that first night that pickups were on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday mornings.

“If the porter hadn’t found Antoine’s body before it got loaded onto a garbage truck, it probably never would have been found,” Dwight said. “Just wound up in a landfill somewhere.”

Sidney was standing inside the lobby when we got there and he held the inner door open for us. He looked drawn and less dapper than when we’d first met. The night man was seated in one of the lobby chairs.

“Jani Horvath,” Sidney said, introducing us.

Horvath was the oldest of the elevator men we had yet met, with thick white hair and an even thicker white mustache. He gave us a neutral look and nodded acknowledgment, but said nothing.

Once inside the elevator, I asked, “Any word on the missing Wall boy?”

“No, and his mother’s going crazy,” Sidney said heavily.

Once we were on our way up, Sidney told us that the building was buzzing with fear and speculation. Two men dead and a teenage boy missing?

“Half the people think Corey killed them both and the other half think one of the residents has turned into a homicidal maniac. They make me wait until they’ve unlocked their doors and got inside safely.” He shook his head in uncertainty. “I’m not really nervous, but it does get pretty deserted here after eleven on a weeknight. Jani’s feeling it, too. That’s why he’s up in the lobby instead of down in the basement. He’s not looking forward to his shift.”

He stopped the elevator at the sixth floor and pulled back the brass gate. “If you don’t mind me asking, I saw you two leave with those detectives… they don’t really think Corey killed Antoine, do they?”

“They won’t know till they talk to him,” Dwight said.

“I hear he was blackmailing Antoine because Antoine killed Phil, but that’s crazy. He’s just a kid. I’ve known him since he was in his stroller. He’s no killer.”

“Then why’d he run?”

“Because he’s scared?”

“If he’s scared, why doesn’t he go to the police? Or call his parents?”

Sidney’s slender shoulders drooped. “Yeah. That’s what I keep asking myself, too.”

While Dwight brushed and flossed, I checked my email. There were routine messages from friends and colleagues and six or eight messages from the nieces and nephews. Emma wrote that their mother was taking it better than they had expected. Barbara totally believed Lee but had ruled that he couldn’t post anything else on his Facebook page until it was shown who was responsible for that suggestive picture.

I clicked over to the site and saw that Lee had written in all caps: SUSPENDED UNTIL I FIND OUT WHO HACKED ME.

Ashley said she believed him, too, but she didn’t want to go out with him again and had given him back his FFA jacket.

They had questioned Jamie Benton and Mark McLamb, who had the adjoining lockers, and the freshman girl who had the locker below his. They believed the girl when she claimed to have seen nothing—“She’s a clueless freshman, for Pete’s sake,” wrote seventeen-year-old cousin Jessica, a junior—but they were convinced the two boys knew more than they were saying. They reported, only half facetiously, that they had even examined Lee’s locker with a flashlight (à la CSI) and a magnifying glass (à la Sherlock Holmes) and found no sign of tampering with screwdriver or hacksaw.

A.K., eighteen and a senior, thought perhaps someone had switched locks, substituting his own for Lee’s, but Lee insisted he had opened the lock with his own combination both before and after his lunch period and both times he had relocked it and twirled the dial on the lock.

One thing Lee did say was that he now believed someone had opened his locker and gone through his things a time or two before. “I can’t say how, but sometimes things look a little different. I thought I was getting absentminded, but maybe I wasn’t.”

The subject of their last email of the evening was “News Flash.” Emma wrote that she’d just learned that Jamie Benton had asked Ashley out right before she and Lee started going together. “More tomorrow.”

Dwight joined me on the bed and I passed my laptop over to him to let him check his mail while I went through my own bedtime routine.

When I returned, Dwight turned the screen around so I could read Cal’s message.

“Aunt Kate took me over to Granddaddy’s to see Bandit and then she let me bring him back with me. Trooper’s mean to him and