“Just a few minutes,” she said.
Perhaps conceding more to the weather than Tracy’s request, Tulowitsky opened the door and stepped back to allow them entry. They stepped onto a couple of rows of cracked tiles leading to a front room. The shades had been drawn over both windows, giving everything a yellowish tint, and the air held the thick smell of cigarette smoke. After the hellish ride on the ferry, Tracy’s nausea didn’t need much to be reactivated. She quickly felt queasy. Sufficient time in here, and she’d breathe enough secondhand smoke for an entire city. Tulowitsky picked up a remote from a cluttered coffee table and turned off the television. He seemed uncertain about what to do or to say next.
“Can I get you something to drink?” he asked, then made a face as if he regretted the offer. “I don’t really have much.”
“We’re fine,” Tracy said. She gestured to the living room. “Maybe we could just sit for a minute.”
Tulowitsky sat in a brown leather recliner. The faded color of the chair’s arms, and the pile of newspapers on the floor beside it, indicated the recliner was his preferred seat. An ashtray on a side table overflowed with butts, and the smell of cigarettes intensified. Tracy took shallow breaths to fight off her nausea.
They sat across the coffee table from her on a worn cloth couch. Hot air poured out of the floor vents with enough force to shake the leaves on a fake palm in the corner of the room. “You said you had a question?” Tulowitsky asked.
Tracy read from a blank page in her notepad to give Tulowitsky the impression these were follow-up questions to their prior conversation. “I’ve had a chance to go over the security tape for that evening we talked about. It looks like you arrived at the building at just after 11:00, 11:03 to be precise, and began emptying garbage cans, as you said.”
“That’s what I do first,” Tulowitsky affirmed. He had his hands on the arms of the chair, like a man about to be strapped down for an electrocution.
“Right.” She returned to her notepad. “You left the building again at 11:17.” She glanced up at Tulowitsky. “That was to take out the garbage, correct?”
“That’s right.”
“I was wondering, did you take the garbage anywhere to be shredded or incinerated when you left?”
“No,” Tulowitsky said. “No, we just drop off the bags before we leave the base.”
“So you just take it out to your truck, grab cleaning supplies and a vacuum, and continue on with your duties.”
“Pretty much,” Tulowitsky said.
“You don’t do anything else at that point, right?”
“Like what?” He gave her an inquisitive stare.
“I mean when you go outside, you don’t fill out paperwork or call in to the office?”
“Oh, uh, no,” he said. “Nothing like that.”
“Did you have a cigarette when you went out, Mr. Tulowitsky?”
That question got his attention. Tulowitsky glanced between her and Owens. “What’s that?”
She pointed to the pack of cigarettes on the side table. “When you stepped out to empty the garbage, did you have a cigarette? Is that part of your routine?”
“No,” he said. “There are designated areas for smoking on the base. So . . . no.”
She got a sense he was not being honest. “Is there a designated area near that building?” She was playing a hunch. She doubted Tulowitsky could go long between cigarettes.
“No.” He shifted as if someone had started to apply electrical current to the chair.
“Mr. Tulowitsky, I’m not passing judgment, and I’m not here to create trouble for you, but you left the building and you didn’t return for nine minutes. That’s a long time to just dump the garbage and grab cleaning supplies.”
“I might have been looking for something,” he said quickly.
“Such as?”
“Oh, I don’t know. It’s been a long time now.”
“I understand. But you didn’t recall doing anything other than loading the garbage bag and grabbing supplies. That’s also what you told NCIS.”
“But that doesn’t mean I didn’t.”
“You would have told NCIS if you had, wouldn’t you?”
He paused again. “I don’t know.”
Tulowitsky hadn’t. She had his statement. “Did you see anyone when you went out?”
“Meaning what?”
“Anyone standing by your truck or near the building?”
He shook his head. “I don’t think so, no.”
She took a different tack. “You shut the door to the building when you go out, right?”
“It shuts automatically,” he said.
Tracy set down her notepad and picked up the log of Social Security numbers entered on the pad that night. “This is a list of people who entered and left the office that evening. It should show you initially logging in at 11:03, and then logging in again when you returned at 11:26, correct?”
“I guess so,” he said.
“How come it doesn’t for that day?” Tracy said.
Tulowitsky didn’t immediately answer. When he did, he said, “What’s that?” He was stalling.
“How come the log for that night shows you arriving at 11:03 but doesn’t show you returning nine minutes after leaving to dump the garbage, at 11:26?”
“You said it did.”
“No. The security tape documents your return at 11:26, but the security door does not.”
Tulowitsky pressed his lips so tight they nearly disappeared altogether. “I . . . I don’t know.”
“Mr. Tulowitsky, did you leave to have a cigarette and prop the door open so you wouldn’t have to log back in nine minutes later?”
Tulowitsky folded his hands in his lap, fidgeting with his thumbs. His lips began to move as if he were craving that cigarette right now. After another beat, he said, “I could get fired.”
Tracy felt a twinge of excitement and had to calm herself. “For having a cigarette?”
“In a non-designated location? Yeah,” he said.
“And you had one that night?”
Another nod.
“Some place out of view?”
“I go around the side of the building,” he said. “Just one cigarette.”
“When you go around the side of the building, can you see the door to get back in?”
“No.”
“And did you prop it open so you could get back inside without using your code and thereby registering how long you’d been out?”
“Yes.”
Tracy glanced at Owens before reengaging Tulowitsky. “Is that something you do every night?”
“You mean have a smoke?”
“And leave the door propped open?”
Again he paused. “Pretty much every night; there might be a night when I don’t.”
“How do you prop the door open?”
“There’s a wood block, a wedge. I just pop it between the door and the jamb. Look, there’s nobody else there that late, not usually anyway, so it’s really not a big deal.”
Only this night there had been, and whoever it had been, Tracy was betting they also knew Tulowitsky’s routine.
They knew it well.
CHAPTER 43