Page 14 of Her Last Doubt

"Can I ask you something?" Novak said, not looking up from the list.

"You're going to regardless."

"Bernard Coles. 7-A. When we interviewed him this morning, did he strike you as nervous?"

Rachel thought about it. The pressed shirt, the straight posture, the offer of water. The forty-five minutes before a doctor's appointment that he seemed to make a point to mention. "Not exactly nervous. Careful, I’d say."

"Careful about what?"

"About being useful without being involved. There's a difference." She set her phone down and cupped her tea again. "He gave us Frank Deluca at chess, gave us the Baxter situation, and answered every question directly.

But he was…I don’t know…seemed like he was walking down a checklist, you know?"

"You think he knows something?" Rachel asked.

"I think he's lived on the seventh floor for however long and pays attention. Whether that means he knows something relevant…” He shrugged and said, "We can go back to him." He then looked at the paneer dish and then at Rachel. "Do you want the last of this or are you being polite?"

"I'm not being polite, I just didn't want to look grabby."

"It's lunch."

"Take it," she said. "I want to look at the floor breakdown."

She pulled the list back and ran her finger down the unit column, grouping by floor. The deaths had occurred on three different floors — four, seven, and nine — with no obvious geographic pattern within the building. The victims hadn't been neighbors. They hadn't been on adjacent floors and according to interviews and the preliminary police reports, they hadn’t been friends. Whatever was connecting them wasn't proximity.

She looked at the ages clustered on each floor. The building didn't appear to organize itself by age. There were older residents scattered throughout, mixed in with the handful of middle-aged tenants. Irene Baxter was listed at 6-A. She looked at the note Purcell had made beside Irene Baxter's name: 78. Long-term resident, 21 years. Declined interview.

"Irene Baxter is one of the three who didn't open the door," Rachel said. “Seems weird, right?”

Novak looked up. "Interesting."

"Could be nothing. Could be she's just private." Rachel looked at the note beside Neil Baxter's name, which has been added to Irene’s as sort of an addendum: 54. Resident 3 years. Interviewed — cooperative but agitated. Repeated concerns re: building management response.

"Cooperative but agitated," she said.

"That tracks with what the residents told us about him."

"Our friend Mr. Mitchell, the retired judge, said someone ought to say something to his face." Rachel set the list down and picked up her tea. "Maybe we should be that someone."

"You want to antagonize a man whose only documented offense is being loud in an elevator?"

"I want to talk to the only name that keeps coming up. And I want to do it before he has a chance to hear we've been in the building all day and gets his story straight." She looked at him over the rim of the cup.

Novak smiled at that, briefly and without making a thing of it. "Agreed. We hit Neil Baxter first when we get back."

They finished the tea and Rachel paid after a bit of light-hearted arguing over the matter. It was the same way they’d argued about small things over the years, in a comfortable, low-stakes back and forth that always ended the same way. Novak left the tip.

Outside, the afternoon had gotten colder while they were inside. The sky had gone gray and the wind off the avenue moved with some purpose. Rachel buttoned her jacket as they walked, the Hargrove's green canopy visible after they’d covered the first three of the four blocks.

"There’s one thing that keeps nagging at me," Novak said, as they walked. "The security footage."

"Pruitt?"

"No, not Pruitt himself. But the idea of gaps in the footage before the police got their hands on it. When I spoke to Purcell, she said there seemed to be a few angles that don't cover certain parts of the building. The freight entrance, the stairwells, the basement corridor."

"Seems sort of standard for a building this age. They didn't design it for cameras."

"No," he said. "But someone who'd lived there for twenty-two years and knows every hallway and corner would know exactly where the gaps were."