Page 10 of Her Last Doubt

"We appreciate your help with it all," Novak said, and Rachel could tell he mostly meant it.

"I also gave them each my word that this was voluntary." Hale's eyes moved to Rachel. "I want to be clear that I told them that."

"It is voluntary," Rachel said. "Which residents were you thinking we'd start with?"

He slid a handwritten list across the desk. There were eight names, unit numbers beside each one, floor noted in a third column. Rachel picked it up and looked at it, then passed it to Novak.

"Is there anything we should know going in?" she asked. "Anyone who was close to the victims, anyone who had issues with any of them?"

Hale considered this with a care that told her he'd already been considering it. "This is a building where people have lived alongside each other for a long time. There are friendships and little communities. But there are also…histories."

"We'll keep that in mind," Rachel said. “Thanks again.”

Hale only nodded solemnly as Rachel and Novak turned for the door.

***

They started on the fourth floor, with a woman named Val Dixon. Val answered her door in a cardigan and reading glasses. She looked at their credentials for approximately one second before waving them in. She was seventy-four years old and had lived in 4-D for nineteen years. She invited them in warmly, and they found her apartment the textbook illustration of an elderly woman living by herself. There were small bookshelves on every wall, a writing desk near the window buried under correspondence, and the smell of tea coming from the kitchen. As soon as they entered, a cat appeared from behind the couch and assessed them briefly before going back to its business.

"I've been expecting someone," Val said, settling into the chair across from them with her hands in her lap. "After Sylvia, I thought…well, I thought there'd be questions."

"Did you know Sylvia Marsh well?" Rachel asked.

"Well enough. We had coffee on Thursdays, most weeks. She was a librarian for thirty years, so she had opinions about books, which I appreciated." She paused, and her eyes went distant, as if she was trying to gaze back into the past. "We'd had a falling out, actually, about four months ago. Nothing dramatic. A misunderstanding over something she felt I'd said to another resident. We were in the process of getting past it."

"What was the misunderstanding about?" Novak asked.

"It doesn't matter now, does it?" It wasn't quite a question, and her tone remained polite. She smoothed the front of her cardigan. "I feel guilty about it. I'd rather not say."

Rachel let it go for the moment. "Did you know Frank Deluca or Margaret Osley?"

"Frank I knew to say hello to, but that’s about it. He kept to himself after his wife passed. But yes, I did know Margaret reasonably well. She was on the floor committee for the building's centennial event last year. Very organized woman." She looked at the cat, who had gone to sleep on a patch of sunlight that had come through the window and slanted on the hardwood floor. "They were good people. All three of them were good people."

"Is there anyone in the building you're aware of who had problems with any of them? Any ongoing disputes?"

Val tilted her head slightly. "There's always something in a building like this. People get territorial about storage units and parking and whether someone's dog is too loud in the hallway." She hesitated here, and Rachel could see her carefully choosing her words. "But if you're asking about anything more significant — the only name that comes to mind is Neil Baxter. And that's not really about any of your three victims."

"What's it about?" Rachel asked.

"His aunt, Irene Baxter. She lives in 6-A. She's been here almost as long as I have. Neil has been after her for the better part of a year to move into assisted living. He lives here, too, you know. He swings by her place from time to time and argues with her about it. From what I hear through the Hargrove grapevine, he's written to Hale about it twice. Last month he brought a brochure, and she apparently threw it back at him." A small, satisfied look crossed her face. "Irene is not a woman who responds well to being managed."

"Has it stayed between them?" Novak asked.

"Mostly. But in a building this size, nothing stays entirely between anyone for long. Rumors and gossip get hurled around quite frequently."

They spoke with her for a bit longer, and the entire time Rachel came back to the disagreement that Val had not wanted to talk about. She pinned it mentally, knowing that to press a woman like Val on such a thing would not be fruitful. Besides, if rumors truly did move quickly around the building, surely someone else would have heard about it.

They excused themselves, and Val walked them to the door with a smile. She even rested her hand on Novak's forearm as they left. They then made their way up to the seventh floor, where they stopped by apartment 3-A.

There, they were greeted by a man named Bernard Coles. He answered the door in a pressed shirt and told them he had forty-five minutes before a doctor's appointment and that they were welcome to use all of it. He was seventy-eight and had the straight-backed posture of someone who had played a sport seriously at some point in his life. His apartment was spare and orderly, and it smelled of light perfume.

“Do you live alone?” Rachel asked when she noted the perfume.

"No. It's my wife and me. But she's been having migraines lately." He hitched a thumb back toward a hallway off of the living room and said, "She sleeps them off, and she's good for about a day or so, but they keep coming back."

“Anything serious?” Novak asked.

“Not really. The doctors say it’s some sort of gluten allergy. But she refuses to even think about going gluten-free."