The notice from management was taped to the inside of the lobby door at Sefton Court at a height that made you read it whether you wanted to or not, and Kurt Brisco had read it so many times by the second Thursday in October that he could see it with his eyes closed. RESIDENTS: DUE TO CONTINUED PACKAGE THEFT, ALL DELIVERIES WILL NOW BE PLACED IN THE SECURE PACKAGE ROOM OFF THE MAIN LOBBY. PLEASE RETRIEVE ITEMS PROMPTLY. OUR COURTESY OFFICER IS ACTIVELY MONITORING THE SITUATION. Somebody had drawn a pair of googly eyes in ballpoint next to the words courtesy officer, and somebody else, or maybe the same person, had written under it in smaller letters, monitoring from his couch.
He had not taken it down. He had thought about it, and then he had decided that taking it down would look exactly like what it was.
Sefton Court was three stories of tan stucco and brown trim on South Pine Street in Tacoma, built in 1978 and remodeled twice since, the second time badly. It had forty-two units arranged around a central courtyard with a dead fountain and a single elevator that worked roughly four days out of seven. The lobby had a row of brass mailboxes, a corkboard of lost cats and guitar lessons, a fake ficus, and, since August, a former storage closet with a steel door and a keypad lock that the management company called the secure package room. The code was 4-2-4-2. Everyone in the building knew it. Most of the delivery drivers knew it. Kurt suspected the kid who threw the Tacoma News Tribune knew it, and the kid who threw the News Tribune was, as far as Kurt could tell, about thirty-five.
He was forty-four years old and had been a patrol officer with the Tacoma Police Department for sixteen years, the last nine of them on swing shift out of the South Sound sector, and for the last three he had lived in unit 1D at Sefton Court under an arrangement that the property management company, Treadwell Residential, called the Courtesy Officer Program and that Kurt, privately, called the only reason he could afford a two-bedroom. The deal was simple and written down in a two-page addendum to his lease. He paid four hundred dollars a month less than the posted rent. In exchange he parked his marked patrol car in the lot, which discouraged a certain kind of visitor, and he walked the property twice in the evenings when he was home, and he responded, within reason, to resident concerns, and he filed a monthly incident summary with the property manager. He was not to act as private security. He was not to enforce lease terms. If there was a crime, he was a police officer and acted as one, and if there was not, he was a neighbor with a badge, which was a sentence the addendum did not contain but which the woman who had recruited him, a property manager named Shirlene Treadwell, had said to him across her desk in the leasing office three years ago with a smile that was, he understood now, only partly a joke.
The four hundred dollars was the difference between a one-bedroom and a two, and the second bedroom belonged to his daughter. Ione was nine. She stayed with him every other weekend and on Wednesday nights when his shifts allowed, and she had painted the second bedroom herself, with his help and against his advice, a shade of green called Lagoon that turned out in daylight to be the color of a highlighter. There was a bunk bed in there, although she was the only child who slept in it, because she had wanted a bunk bed so badly and for so long that he had not been able to explain to her why it was silly. She slept on the top. The bottom was for stuffed animals, arranged by size. When his ex-wife, Lisa, moved to Gig Harbor two summers ago, the custody agreement had specified that Kurt would maintain suitable sleeping accommodations for the minor child, as if Ione were a shipment that needed to be kept dry.
So he walked the property. He wrote his monthly summaries. For three years they had been short. A car broken into in the back lot. A man asleep in the laundry room in January, who turned out to be a resident's brother-in-law and was mostly embarrassed. A domestic in 3A that had ended with a protective order and the woman in 3A bringing him a plate of lumpia at Christmas. People in the building waved at him. Some of them called him Officer Kurt, the way kids called a teacher Mister plus a first name, and he had never minded it.
Then, in late August, the packages had started to go.
A pair of running shoes from a unit on the second floor. A box of printer cartridges. A set of kitchen knives that a young couple in 2B had ordered for their anniversary and that they had watched, on the tracking app, get marked as delivered at 1:14 in the afternoon and that had not been there at 5:30 when they got home. Kurt had taken their report and passed it along to the property crimes unit, where it went into a queue with several thousand other reports of things that had been left on porches and in lobbies across the city and had not been there later, and where, he knew, it would stay. He had told the couple that. He had tried to tell them gently. The husband had looked at him for a long time and then said, "So what's the point of you, exactly," not angrily, just like a man asking a reasonable question, and Kurt had not had an answer for him that he believed.
Treadwell Residential had installed the package room in the second week of August. The thefts had slowed for a week and then picked up again, because a lock whose code everyone knows is not a lock. There was a camera in the corner of the lobby, an old dome unit left over from some previous remodel, and Kurt had asked Shirlene about it in the first week, and she had said, after a pause, that the camera was what she called a deterrent installation, which meant that it was a plastic shell with nothing inside it, and that a real system was in the budget for next fiscal year. He had written that down in his September summary. He had written it down in a way that he hoped would read as a recommendation and not as a complaint.