“There’s a door.” She makes a face. “But it sticks. Landlord says it’s sealed for code.”
“Code doesn’t stop a crowbar.”
“Welcome to the thesis of this entire town,” she mutters.
I check the second floor. More doors. More smells. One of the tenants has a yappy dog that loses its mind when it hears us. Good for early alert. Bad for noise discipline.
We reach the ground floor, boasting the front entrance, tenant mailboxes, and a cramped alcove that used to be a storage closet and now has a sad vending machine and a laundry unit shoved in like an afterthought.
I test the front lock, the glass, the hinges.
“On a scale of one to ten,” Twiggy says, leaning against the wall with her arms folded, “how screwed am I?”
“Door’s cheap,” I say. “Frame’s worse. The lock’s decent, but the deadbolt could be bumped if someone knows what they’re doing. Windows are your best feature, and they’re not great.”
“Is that your way of saying I’m screwed?”
“It’s my way of saying he got in once. We don’t give him a second try.”
Her jaw works. She looks small against the chipped white wall, hands pushing deep into the pocket of her hoodie. I can tell she’s trying not to let the “he got in once” phrase land. It does anyway.
“Is there a back exit?” I ask, breaking the silence.
She jerks her chin toward the end of the hall. “Through the laundry.”
The door from the laundry room to the alley is metal, dented, and hanging slightly crooked in its frame. Great if you’re trying to shove a washer through. Less great if you’re trying to keep a determined man out.
I run my fingers along the edge, feeling where the latch meets the plate. “No security bar?”
She snorts. “My landlord won’t replace the dryer belt until it physically snaps in half. You think he paid extra for a security bar?”
“Who installed your cameras?” I ask.
“Me,” she says.
“Inside,” I clarify. “You’ve got good angles in your apartment. None in the common areas.”
She hesitates. “I wanted to. Brodie vetoed it. Said it was a liability nightmare if the feed ever got hacked, and we had other tenants’ faces on it.”
“And he wasn’t wrong,” I say. “But now you’ve got a man willing to commit felonies in the stairwell. Liability’s happening whether there’s footage or not.”
She makes a face. “You’re very reasonable for someone who looks like he eats nails for breakfast.”
“I mix it up,” I say. “Sometimes it’s screws.”
Her mouth twitches like she doesn’t want to smile but is considering it against her will. “Bran Kelly. Did you just make a lil’ jokey joke?”
Hiding a smile, I step out into the alley, scan the space. Dumpsters. A fence that’s more suggestion than barrier. A corner where shadows pool even in daylight. Beyond, the river and a gray, hazy line of trees.
“That the fire escape?” I nod to the old metal stairs zigzagging up the back.
“Yep.”
“It’s a ladder to your floor,” I say. “We’re putting a camera on it.”
Her boots crunch on the thin crust of frost as she turns back toward the building. I take the opportunity to walk the perimeter, mapping sight lines and choke points. It’s not a fortress; it’s a two-and-a-half story box attached to three other boxes.
But Thurston doesn’t need complicated. He needs one opening and enough privacy to exploit it.
