Chapter 4

4: 4

4

Moron!

I hung up on her, saved the last frame of Rosemary's stream before it cut out, then called the fire department and the gas company.

By the time I reached the complex, a police line had already gone up outside the sixteenth floor.

The elevator had stopped at the twelfth, the car canted sideways in the shaft, plaster peeling off the stairwell walls in a steady rain, dull thuds still rolling out from somewhere inside the building.

Every time one hit, someone outside the line screamed the name of a family member trapped upstairs.

Bryce Perry's wife lunged at me the second she saw me.

"You've got the nerve to show your face? You knew this would happen. Why didn't you call it in sooner!"

I shook her hand off.

"You've got the nerve to talk. The neighborhood council ordered the work stopped a month ago. What did your property company say back!"

Jennifer Lawrence's daughter was shouting at me too.

"My mom's still up there! You're the engineer. If something happens to her today, you don't walk away clean either!"

The same people who'd called me a fearmonger were all jammed up against the line now, begging me to hurry upstairs and save them.

The fire captain handed me a site diagram.

"The east unit on sixteen is the worst deformed. The stairs still hold for now. The main gas valve's shut off, but there's still a smell inside, so we can't send too many people up at once."

I spread out the as-built drawings Leo had given me and pointed at the core of the stairwell.

"Go up from here. Add a temporary shore every two floors. Everyone hugs the inner wall. The living room wall on sixteen has been cut hollow. Nobody moves toward the center."

Bryce finally came running out of the building, his face gray with dust.

I grabbed him.

"Where's Leo?"

His eyes skated away.

"How would I know? It was chaos in there. He probably already came down."

"But his phone won't connect."

"How is that my problem! He's a maintenance worker. Coming to me is pointless!"

Pointless?

I stared at him.

"The night before the open house, who told him to patch that crack? He warned you again and again. Why did all of you treat everything he said like noise!"

Bryce's color changed. He turned to leave.

A firefighter blocked him inside the line.

"You stay put. You'll cooperate with the investigation."

The rescue crew arrived fast with the steel shoring, and we worked our way up the stairs.

From the twelfth floor the corners were already cracking, and by the fifteenth Jennifer's door frame had been squeezed out of shape. The door wouldn't budge no matter what.

Her daughter was downstairs crying, begging us to get to the people first.

The firefighters pried the door open with a tool. No one inside. The balcony glass lay shattered across the floor.

Higher up, the sixteenth-floor corridor tilted visibly toward the east.

Rosemary's door was jammed by the shifting wall. Four of us pushing together couldn't move it.

I checked the drawings.

"Go around through the neighbor's balcony."

Next door, Cliff Whitney's balcony side wall had been half knocked out too, broken brick blocking the opening.

He'd been bragging in the group chat about the extra thirty square feet he'd gained by following Rosemary's lead. Now that extra space was the only way into the sixteenth floor.

The firefighters set up a ladder, and I climbed in after them into Rosemary's unit.

The twenty-foot stone island had snapped in two down the middle, the three-hundred-pound crystal chandelier smashed on the floor, wine glasses, ring lights, and phones scattered everywhere.

Where the load-bearing wall had been cut away, only jagged concrete and a few lengths of rebar were left.

More than twenty pairs of shoes sat around the unit, but there wasn't a single person in sight.

The firefighters called out a few times. No answer.

I looked down and saw drops of blood on the floor, dragging in a line toward the master bedroom.

The trail broke off at the bathroom door, which had already been crushed inward.

I'd just started to move closer when three knocks came from the other side.

Then someone crying out through the door.

"Engineer Fox, is the wall going to come down? We're all in here!"