Grant thought George Tompkins must have come with the building, his age anywhere between seventy and the century mark. The super possessed a full head of hair the color of Wite-Out but had enough energy for someone half his age. He was the third generation of Tompkinses to oversee the goings-on at 988 Eighth Avenue, dating back to Grandfather Hal, who took occupancy of the same basement apartment shortly after World War I.

Tompkins led them belowground to the space where he had basically spent his entire life. Crammed with mementos, it was a visual history of Manhattan since WWI, from the glory of V-Day in Times Square to the tragedy at the tip of lower Manhattan that September day early this century.

The security cameras were orderly stacked in a tiny closet and Tompkins showed the two men how to play them back. Frankel lined up entries from Jordan’s logbook with the digital time readout to watch guests enter and exit the building.

“The tenants overwhelmingly voted down cameras in the hallways,” Tompkins explained when asked about additional coverage. “Felt it was an invasion of privacy. It was a huge expense for management to take on anyway.”

Frankel fast-forwarded through the footage. None of this was likely to help, especially since the last dead body found in the building was poor Mrs. Simmons, who had passed away three months before.

“What other ways can a person get into the building?” asked Frankel. “Besides the front door.”

Tompkins mentioned the maintenance entrance off Fifty-Eighth Street, but only a select few had keys to it. None of the employees would let someone they didn’t recognize slip inside, but he provided the cops with their names.

Then it was on to the painstaking part of the process—interviewing the occupants of the building. Grant and Frankel had discussed this on the way over during their lengthy (one traffic-snarled mile) trip up the West Side.

“We agree that we’re looking for a potential victim here, not our killer, right?” Frankel had asked between blasts of the horn.

“Seems far-fetched that, despite his bravado in trying to engage us, he would provide his actual home address. Plus, it would make no sense to start a killing spree across the Atlantic, only to go and bring it back to one’s own doorstep.”

“And we’re definitely pursuing the mother-father angle?”

“Unless you have a better idea?”

Frankel said he didn’t.

Grant realized that getting a forthcoming answer from the building’s tenants was no sure thing. If one of them had done something horrible to their folks, he couldn’t imagine that person owning up to such a transgression.

Frankel set himself up in the game room and Grant sat behind a table in a lounge near the building entrance. They’d decided to conduct the interviews separately to move more quickly through the tenants, then regroup and compare notes.