It clicked into place the way a wrong answer suddenly resolves into the right one. The exterior cameras had shown nothing because there was nothing to show—no one had ever needed her front door. Yelena sat very still on the couch, running the past two weeks backward in her mind.
“The smell,” she realized aloud, looking toward the hallway. It was that faint, unfamiliar scent of part detergent intermingled with sweat near the closet. She remembered the cold draft along the baseboard she’d blamed on a bad seal, and Pat’s offhand comment echoed in her ears: A crawlspace running under several units, sealed off decades ago. Supposedly.
She got up, crossed to the closet, and flung the door open. She stood looking at the access panel set low in the back wall behind the vacuum. “No way,” she whispered, kneeling down. There was a thin, unmistakable line of disturbed dust around its edge. Someone had opened it. Recently, and more than once.