Page 130 of The New Couple in 5B

“They were going to kill us all,” I say, releasing a breath.

“That was the plan. They were going to make it look like a murder-suicide, a mimic of the way Paul and Willa Winter died. As if the place was cursed.”

The writer is at a rare loss for words.

“And your apartment would have belonged to them again, finally,” he says. “This, according to Mr. Bekiri, who is cooperating freely with police. He claims that they were paying for his mother’s assisted living, and threatened to stop, effectively putting her on the street. That he had no choice but to do their bidding.”

He gives me a look. If he wants to say “I told you so,” that people might kill for a five-million-dollar apartment, he has the grace to stay quiet.

All of this for seventeen hundred square feet in a Park Avenue elevator building.

“Where did she get those powerful drugs?” I ask.

“Abi claims Xavier was getting it for her,” says Crowe. “Stealing from the hospital where he worked.”

“Why would he do that?”

“The three of them—Charles, Ella and Abi, they were spying on everyone in the building. They knew everyone’s secrets. Apparently, Xavier had been stealing narcotics and selling them out of his home.”

“So they blackmailed him.”

“Abi claims that the Aldridges threatened to turn him in to the police, and he killed himself.”

“But...”

He bows his head. “But security footage shows Abi following him up to the roof.”

“I thought there was no recording.”

Crowe’s phone pings, and he looks at it quickly, then back to me. “We found the archives on a computer monitor in the basement. The footage from the roof however had been deleted. We’re having our tech team see what they can retrieve. I thought you’d like to know, though, that you did bring that box down with you that day. He never loaded it into the cab.”

I smile at him. It’s a small thing. But it’s nice to know you can trust your own memories. I wonder about the letter and ask him if he found it. But he shakes his head.

“Lots of questions, still,” he says. It’s cryptic. His eyes drift over to Chad.

“Such as?”

“I mean, what was the endgame? They stage a murder-suicide scene, kill Olivia, and then think there wouldn’t have been questions about the sudden quick claim deed? It’s just a big job, so many moving parts, so many things could go wrong. And—they’re all so old. All of this for an apartment.”

“People have killed for less. You said so yourself,” I remind him. “And maybe it’s about legacy, about the building. They all seemed to be attached to it in a strange way, like it cast a spell on them.”

“The building,” he says flatly, gives me an NYPD smirk. “The building cast a spell on them. They’d kill for it.”

I think about my conversation with Arthur Alpern.

Some buildings just have bad personalities. And I think maybe it attracts darkness. If you’re vulnerable to dark energies, if they speak to something going on inside you, maybe there’s a strange attraction, a lure to that dark part inside you.

“People act in their own self-interest only,” says the detective when I don’t answer. “I assure you that their motives were entirely worldly. Money, legacy, control.”

“And Abi. I still don’t get why he would be involved with them.”

“Abi, it turns out, was deeply in debt. And, like I said, the Aldridges were paying for his mother’s care. He was beholden to them.”

But it was more than that, wasn’t it? There was something that kept them tied together. He wore the necklace, too. Maybe Ella was right about the building having some kind of power.

“That’s motive enough in my experience,” says the detective, maybe reading my expression.

“You might be right.”

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