Free Unknown Means by Elizabeth Becka

didn’t bother to correct his assumption that she was an officer, but inwardly she groaned. Like she hadn’t heard that one before.
    The machinery made enough noise to drown out a low-flying plane. A four-foot-square steel box on her left revealed rows of switches, which clicked on and off. Next to that stood a computer-monitor stand, almost like a self-check kiosk at the airport. But the thing in the loft dominated the room.
    “That’s the motor,” the elevator repairman said, following her gaze. He wore his sandy hair in a shaggy seventies cut and held a blackened tool in his hands. Embroidered patches on his green shirt read “E-tech” on one side and “Jack” on the other. “It’s turning the cable. The motor for the freight elevator is there.”
    She glanced at a twin of the loft machine standing off to her right, quiet and unmoving, then looked back at the one she’d first seen. “Is that very old?” A dumb question, but she wouldn’t have been surprised if the engine dated back to the turn of the last century, to a time before cost dictated quality, when things were built to last.
    “The motor? No. I think this place was built in the mid-eighties.”

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    “And it winds up the rope? And that pulls up the elevator?”
    He grinned. “No, the cable is looped over the top of the driver—the wheel. On the other side is the counterweight. When the elevator goes up, the counterweight goes down. Here, I’ll show you. You’re here about that murder, huh? And that girl in the garage?”
    He did something at the computer kiosk. Then, using a rodlike key in a tiny hole at the top of the elevator doors, he opened the door, revealing the moving cables. She had to force herself to go within five feet of it. Heavy machinery terrified her, always had, and she had no idea why. As a child, she had turned her face away from the exposed areas of amusement park rides to pretend they weren’t there. She still opened a car hood with trepidation, sure that doing so involved great physical risk.
    The two men waited while she thought, listening to the hum of the metal gears. The top of the elevator appeared at the floor level, and the motor stopped. The room grew quieter. She inched forward.
    There were only two ways into Grace Markham’s apartment—the fire door and the elevator.
    The top of the elevator was surprisingly crowded, with more machinery she didn’t want to see. A heavy beam held the car like the handle on a bucket, and the main cable—actually a bundle of six cables—attached to its middle. Three buttons on the center beam were labeled Up, Down, and Stop. A squarish, flat shape seemed to glow at its edges, and she realized what it must be. “There’s a hatch in the elevator roof, right?”
    “Yep. And before you ask, no.”
    “No what?”
    “No, someone couldn’t have climbed out of the elevator through the hatch and waited for Grace Markham to stop at her floor. The hatch doesn’t open from the inside. That’s only in movies. Besides, he’d run the risk that someone else would call it first and he’d be riding up and down the shaft on the car top.”
    Evelyn tried to picture standing on top of a moving piston in a

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    dark shaft, and then tried not to. “What if he lived above her? If she stopped at her floor, could he have opened the doors to the shaft on his floor and gotten into the elevator and then into her apartment?”
    “No. Besides, a seventy-five-year-old widow lives above the Markhams.”
    “Well, any floor. Could he climb down the ladder—”
    “There is no ladder in an elevator shaft. That’s another only-in-the-movies thing. And the hall doors won’t open if the elevator isn’t there, no matter what. It’s a safety feature.”
    “But you can open it.”
    “Well, yeah—but only on the top floor and the bottom floor.”
    He pointed to the round keyhole at the top of the door. “Every building is like that. So who