Fletcher arrived carrying a paper bag of sandwiches and walked with a slight limp.
He studied the inspection entry until he reached the date, and then he sat down without asking who had sent Nora.
He remembered replacing a broken pressure valve at the building on Armitage Avenue during a week of unusually heavy rain.
The manager had complained that tenants kept calling about cloudy water and a chemical smell near the basement sinks.
Fletcher said he had been hired to repair the valve, not to inspect industrial filtration systems.
He had nevertheless noticed an unusual routing arrangement in a mechanical room and made a sketch on the back of a service ticket.
Nora asked what had become of the sketch.
Fletcher opened an old steel filing cabinet and showed her a row of drawers labeled by year.
The drawer for the relevant year held receipts, faded carbon copies, and a small cardboard box of washers.
They searched for forty minutes without finding the service ticket.
Beth suggested that the drawing might have been discarded during a move.
Fletcher agreed that it probably had, but he said the building superintendent had signed his invoice after inspecting the completed repair.
He remembered the superintendent because she was the only person on the job who had asked about the pressure readings.
Her name was Denise Rowe, and she had later complained publicly that management ignored her maintenance reports.
Nora wrote the name down, then asked whether Fletcher would be willing to describe the service visit to an independent engineer.
He refused to sign anything from memory alone.
He said an honest witness needed to recognize the difference between what he had seen and what he merely suspected.
Nora thanked him for that distinction.
Outside the workshop, Beth asked whether they had wasted the morning.
Nora pointed to the new name in her notebook and said that a closed door was not always the same as a dead end.
Chapter 9C: Denise Rowe’s Kitchen
Denise Rowe lived above a bakery whose ovens warmed the floorboards of her narrow second-floor apartment.
She wore a gray cardigan and kept her hair tucked behind one ear with a plastic barrette.
Nora had expected an angry former employee, but Denise greeted them with quiet curiosity and offered three chairs around a crowded kitchen table.
She had worked as a building superintendent for fourteen years before a management company replaced her position with an outside contractor.
She remembered Elise Bennett as a researcher who arrived with a notebook instead of a camera crew or a corporate escort.
