here looking for her, she cast one final look around the scene then headed for the stairwell. She continued tucking away details in her brain, each fall of her foot on a step underscoring something she wanted to consider a little more. Tonight, when she was home, lying in her bed, all these impressions would mingle and take new shape in her mind and she would see if she could come up with any new, previously unconsidered ideas. She hadn’t jotted them down, not wanting even the scratch of pen on paper to interfere with the mental connection she was trying to make with Leanne. Besides, Ronnie was a visual person, she saw scenes and mentally photographed them, and would see them again and again, able to recall them with clarity long afterward. It was probably her greatest strength as an investigator.
Arriving at the main basement level, and remembering that soft, furtive sound from before, she hesitated before continuing. Something—a cop’s intuition maybe?—made her step back out into the corridor. All was quiet, as before. All dark, all deserted. She cast her flashlight toward the right and saw nothing but those two eerie green pools of light on the cement. Turning to glance to her left, the same. Just those Exit lights, like before.
Or...not.
Something was different.
Her heart picked up its pace in her chest, her body reacting to the change that had occurred on this floor in the twenty minutes she’d been downstairs.
She focused and counted the Exit lights again.
“Four,” she whispered.
Four lights. There were four pools of green between her and that far-away emergency exit.
A short time ago, there had been six.
Her blood surged in her veins as the implication hit her. Someone had disabled two of the lights, leaving a vast, sixty-foot swath of corridor bathed in utter blackness, as dark as the back side of the moon.
Ronnie reached for her belt, unfastened her holster and retrieved her weapon. Someone had been down here a short time ago, hiding in the shadows, remaining silent while she’d called out, waiting for her to move on. They could be here still. She shone her flashlight in that direction, craning to see. Her mag, though powerful, didn’t pierce the emptiness, and mainly served to spotlight her for anyone who might be watching from down there.
She considered flipping it off right away, then thought about the layout of the sub-basement level, wondering if this floor would be laid out the same way. Her attention focused on that long corridor, she backed toward the stairwell, hoping to see a breaker box, like the one she’d noted downstairs earlier. Finding it in the beam of her flashlight, she reached for the main breaker and flipped it.
Nothing. Shit.
Beginning to feel like she had been drawn into a trap, and knowing she needed backup, she retrieved her phone to call her partner.
No signal.
Damn it. The building was probably designed that way. Future employees would likely have access to a dedicated cellular network, but right now, here in the basement, she was completely jammed.
Up another tall flight of stairs and down another corridor, her partner sat waiting for her in an interview room. But this was no typical building, it was the White House and it was huge. It would take at least several minutes to get him and bring him back here to have him help her search this floor. But if the person who’d disabled the lights was still here, those several minutes would give him time to get away. There was another, smaller set of stairs at the other end of the building, plus the construction elevators, plus the main elevator shaft, plus the emergency exit. And those were just the egresses she knew about.
There was no good, reasonable excuse for anyone to be down here, messing with the lights. So she had to consider that the person sharing this darkness with her could have something to do with Leanne’s murder. She couldn’t just leave and give him the chance to escape. Besides, Daniels had said
Arriving at the main basement level, and remembering that soft, furtive sound from before, she hesitated before continuing. Something—a cop’s intuition maybe?—made her step back out into the corridor. All was quiet, as before. All dark, all deserted. She cast her flashlight toward the right and saw nothing but those two eerie green pools of light on the cement. Turning to glance to her left, the same. Just those Exit lights, like before.
Or...not.
Something was different.
Her heart picked up its pace in her chest, her body reacting to the change that had occurred on this floor in the twenty minutes she’d been downstairs.
She focused and counted the Exit lights again.
“Four,” she whispered.
Four lights. There were four pools of green between her and that far-away emergency exit.
A short time ago, there had been six.
Her blood surged in her veins as the implication hit her. Someone had disabled two of the lights, leaving a vast, sixty-foot swath of corridor bathed in utter blackness, as dark as the back side of the moon.
Ronnie reached for her belt, unfastened her holster and retrieved her weapon. Someone had been down here a short time ago, hiding in the shadows, remaining silent while she’d called out, waiting for her to move on. They could be here still. She shone her flashlight in that direction, craning to see. Her mag, though powerful, didn’t pierce the emptiness, and mainly served to spotlight her for anyone who might be watching from down there.
She considered flipping it off right away, then thought about the layout of the sub-basement level, wondering if this floor would be laid out the same way. Her attention focused on that long corridor, she backed toward the stairwell, hoping to see a breaker box, like the one she’d noted downstairs earlier. Finding it in the beam of her flashlight, she reached for the main breaker and flipped it.
Nothing. Shit.
Beginning to feel like she had been drawn into a trap, and knowing she needed backup, she retrieved her phone to call her partner.
No signal.
Damn it. The building was probably designed that way. Future employees would likely have access to a dedicated cellular network, but right now, here in the basement, she was completely jammed.
Up another tall flight of stairs and down another corridor, her partner sat waiting for her in an interview room. But this was no typical building, it was the White House and it was huge. It would take at least several minutes to get him and bring him back here to have him help her search this floor. But if the person who’d disabled the lights was still here, those several minutes would give him time to get away. There was another, smaller set of stairs at the other end of the building, plus the construction elevators, plus the main elevator shaft, plus the emergency exit. And those were just the egresses she knew about.
There was no good, reasonable excuse for anyone to be down here, messing with the lights. So she had to consider that the person sharing this darkness with her could have something to do with Leanne’s murder. She couldn’t just leave and give him the chance to escape. Besides, Daniels had said
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