I open the door. Maksim materializes from the hallway, immediately present, immediately ready to follow my orders.
"With me," I tell him, and take the elevator down.
In the car, my phone buzzes before we've reached the end of the block. David, already. A text with the confirmed address, and below it a single additional line.
She has a camera network registered to the apartment — front door, hallway, and a third interior feed. She'll see you coming the moment you enter the building. Thought you should know.
I look at that for a moment. A woman who has been running for three years, with a child, with a constructed identity and a camera pointed at her own front door. She has thought carefully about every approach to the people she's protecting, and she has covered them methodically, with what she had available to her.
This should be interesting. Who are you, Alex?
Chapter Four
Victor
The lobby door is heavier than it looks.
I push through it with more force than necessary and catch the edge of a man's forearm with my elbow, sending the stack of papers he's carrying sideways across the floor in a slow, unhurried fan. He's sixty-something, broad, wearing a cardigan that has seen better decades, and he looks up at me with the expression of a man who has decided to be amused rather than annoyed, which is a choice I can respect.
"Son," he says, "that door has been opening inward for thirty years. Hasn't changed once."
"My apologies." I crouch and collect the papers. They're maintenance requests, handwritten, organized in some system I can't immediately decode. I stack them and hand them back.
He takes them, looks at the stack, and looks at me. "You're built like a wall, you know that? No offense."
"None taken."
"I'm Roberts, building manager." He tucks the papers under his arm, glances at his watch, and extends his hand with the easy confidence of a man who considers this building his personal jurisdiction and everyone who enters it his business. "I run the place. Are you here to see someone?"
"I know someone in the building," I say. "I wanted to pay a surprise visit."
"At this hour?" He looks at his watch, then back at me, with an expression that is not quite suspicious and not quite welcoming, and manages to be both simultaneously. "Who is it you're looking for?"
"Alex Riggs," I say. "Fourth floor."
Something happens to his face immediately — it opens, warms, the way faces do when you say the name of someone they're genuinely fond of. He waves a hand toward the elevator like he's directing traffic. "Alex. Of course. Come on then, I'll walk you up." He's already moving toward the elevator with the unhurried authority of a man who moves through this building at his own pace and expects the building to accommodate him. "You a friend of hers?"
"An acquaintance," I say. "We met recently," I quickly add, “at work.”
"She doesn't have many of those." He hits the elevator button and looks at me sideways. "Visitors, I mean. She keeps to herself, Alex does. Works constantly, that girl. I don't know how she does it — two jobs, the little one to look after, never complains." He shakes his head with the fond exasperation of someone describing a person they've decided to worry about. "I always keep my eye on them, you know. Her and Evie."
The elevator opens. We get in.
"Evie?" I say.
"Her daughter." He says it simply, the way you state facts that aren't in question. "Twelve years old. Sharp as a tack, that one. Quiet, though. Watches everything." He presses four. "Alex works late most nights. I keep my volume down so I can hear the hall if the girl needs anything." He glances at me. "She shouldn't have to be worrying about a child on top of everything else she carries, but she does it without a word. Never asks for more than she needs."
She has a daughter.
David's report said dependent on the lease, minor child, and he hadn’t found a birth certificate with Alex listed as the mother. But dependent is a word that doesn't carry much weight in reality. For some reason, I had it in mind that the minor was a sibling, perhaps a cousin, but not a daughter.
"She's lucky to have a neighbor looking out for them," I say.
"Other way around." He says it firmly, like he's correcting a misunderstanding. "I'm an old man living alone in a building I've managed for thirty years. Those two are the best things in this building." The elevator opens on four, and he leads me down the hall with the proprietary ease of someone who knows every board on this floor. "Alex brought me soup last month when I had a cold. Didn't ask, just knocked on the door with a container and told me to heat it up. Who does that?" He stops outside 4C and knocks. Three times, quiet and familiar. "Evie," he calls, low enough not to carry down the hall. "It's Mr. Roberts. You've got a visitor, sweetheart."
A pause. Footsteps — small, quick, bare feet on a hard floor. The door opens two inches on its chain, and a pair of dark eyes looks out at me and then at Mr. Roberts and then back at me with the sequential assessment of a child who has been taught to verify before she opens anything.
"He's alright," Mr. Roberts says, in the tone of a man whose word is the relevant credential here. "Friend of your mom's."
