CHAPTER SIX – THE DOLLY

Rafael reached the side door before Daniel did.
“That’s mine,” he said, placing himself in front of the dolly.
The worker stopped rather than pushing against him.
“Sir, I just move what they tell me.”
“Then tell them not to move it.”
A second worker appeared from the truck and reached for the desk’s edge.
Nina raised her phone and called for Price.
Vale hurried into the hallway.
“This is authorized property clearance,” he announced.
“By whom?” Rafael demanded.
“Management.”
“I live here, and I never gave it away.”
Price arrived with Ortiz.
He asked the workers to leave the desk where it was until ownership and consent could be confirmed.
Vale objected that the truck was on a paid schedule.
“Then the truck can wait,

” Price replied.
The desk was rolled back into the building.
Rafael placed his palm on its scratched surface and said nothing for several seconds.
Daniel realized the old man had been preparing himself to lose it forever.
One halted dolly did not solve the problem.
Tomas told them two other trucks had left the previous afternoon.
One carried furniture from Maple Court’s north wing.
The other collected tagged items from a smaller senior residence called Birch Landing.
Daniel called a woman he knew there, a retired bus driver named Gloria Wynn.
She told him that ClearHaven workers had demanded access to her storage room after reporting bedbugs in the hallway.
Gloria had refused and called the property supervisor.
The workers had left with several communal benches instead.
“They said everything was being destroyed,

” Gloria said.
“Why do I keep seeing photos of those benches for sale?”
She sent Daniel a screenshot of a resale listing.
The bench in the photo had an unusual crescent-shaped gouge on one end.
Gloria had made that mark years earlier while moving a metal cart.
Daniel forwarded the image to Ortiz, who asked Gloria to provide it directly with a statement.
The possibility that the furniture was being resold rather than destroyed changed the investigation.
It also made Daniel think of the specimen cup in his house as something more than an attempt to frighten him.
If officials believed a donation drive had brought bedbugs into the neighborhood, ClearHaven could point to his house as a source and treat every complaint against it as reckless denial.
Carol’s strange insistence on entering his living room had jeopardized that plan.
The cup had remained intact instead of scattering insects into the clothes.
She had returned to retrieve it before Daniel discovered it.
But the plan involved more than one apartment building and more than one frightened resident.
When Daniel said this aloud to Ortiz, she stopped him.
“The facts need to lead us,” she said.
“Don’t make a complete story out of the pieces we have.”
He acknowledged the warning.
He still felt the weight of the missing furniture.
At noon, Dr. Cho began examining the flagged rooms with residents’ consent.
Her findings were mixed.
She discovered evidence of a small, genuine bedbug problem in one occupied apartment.
She recommended appropriate treatment and follow-up rather than dismissing the risk.
But she found no basis for the wholesale disposal of every yellow-tagged item in the building.
When she said that in the lobby, a woman near the elevator began to cry.
Her relief was audible.
Vale looked at the floor, then walked outside to call somebody Daniel had not yet met.