Smith lived in a tremendously ugly apartment complex in an unincorporated town called Tyson’s Corner, which is a little southwest of Langley; an area where frugal government employees live so they can commute to Washington or Langley or Pentagon City. Where Langley is tree-lined and largely suburban, Tyson’s Corner is paved over and filled with mid-rise buildings like the one where Smith passed his time. The building was one of a half-dozen identical buildings in the complex, each as bland as the next. It was a rectangle made of concrete, rising twelve stories. Each floor was the same as the one below. It had no penthouse, no balconies, no distinctive or memorable architectural features. Much like Smith himself, the building was boring, functional, and someone in the seventies had thought it was a good idea. Inside, the lobby was just an empty square, where on both the right and left walls there were two elevators and a stairway door. Other hallways ran to first-floor apartments, and somewhere to the left there was a laundry room that could be heard but not seen from the lobby.
