Page 27 of Her Last Doubt

“I did not. But in hindsight, I should have kept better track of it." He said it evenly and without much guilt.

Rachel watched him closely. His cooperation throughout what had been, as he’d put it, a long day, had been real and helpful. He had answered everything asked of him even though he clearly didn’t want to, and had not obstructed them in any way. But there was a quality to the answers, a kind of pre-measured quality, that she'd been noticing over the last of the day. It was in the slight pause before certain responses, the way he tracked their questions before answering rather than just answering. He wasn't lying. She was quite sure of that. But there was something that didn’t quite fit, and she wasn’t sure what it was.

"One more thing," she said. "Access to the building. We've talked about the lobby entrance and the elevator. What else is there?"

Hale shifted his weight, as if wanting to reach for his bag again and get out of there, but then thought better of it. "There's a rear service entrance off the alley. It connects to the freight corridor that runs along the back of the building." He said it as though it were an afterthought, something he rarely ever thought of. "It's used for deliveries and maintenance. The exterminators use it, the linen service, anyone who's bringing in equipment or taking out bulk trash. It's nothing unusual for a building this size."

"Does it show up on the camera system?"

"There's a camera on the exterior door, yes. It covers the alley-side entrance."

"But not the interior corridor."

"No," he said. "Not the interior. There would really be no need for that."

Rachel nodded and let that sit. She looked to Novak and waited for him to give a brief nod before she said, “Well, that’s it. Thanks again for your time, Mr. Hale. We'll be back in the morning."

Hale picked his bag back up and looked as if all the weight in the world had been removed from his shoulders. "I'll be here."

They left him to his exit and crossed back through the lobby. Pruitt had stepped away from the front desk and headed elsewhere into the building. The clipboard he’d been handling was left neatly on the front desk. The lobby was empty now, the elevator sitting open and unoccupied at the far wall.

"The service entrance," Novak said as they made their way to the front doors. "That's a direct path into the building that doesn't cross the lobby."

"And the camera only covers the exterior door," Rachel said. "Not what happens on the other side of it."

"Someone who knew the building well enough would know exactly what that camera did and didn't catch. And that brings us to the same two men we’ve been sort of eyeing already: Hale and Pruitt. And quite frankly…”

“It doesn’t seem like either of them did it,” she finished for him.

She thought about Pruitt, his certainty about the lobby route, and the precise way he'd described it. There was no basement shortcut to the upper floors that bypassed the lobby. She believed him on that point. But the service entrance was a different approach entirely, and she'd need to look at where it connected to the rest of the building's layout before she could say whether it changed anything.

She decided that she’d ask him in the morning. And while she had him, she'd ask something else that had been forming quietly at the back of her thinking all evening.

"In the morning," she said, "I want to ask Pruitt about that service entrance. I want to have a look.” She frowned and said, “maybe we should push for it tonight.”

“If you want. But I think it’d be better served to wait until morning. After a small break from us, maybe Hale will be a little more hospitable.”

She nodded because while it pushed things off a bit, it did make a good deal of sense. On top of that, though, she knew they were going to have to look at other possibilities, too. Maybe the killer was someone outside of the building, someone with a grievance against the place or the management. Honestly, it wasn’t too big of a stretch to think Hale had maybe crossed someone at some point.

“Well, I guess we call it a day, then,” Novak said, though he took a moment to turn and look at the grandeur of the lobby. But the look on his face indicated that he was taking it in as if it were a crypt rather thana well-to-do apartment building.

Outside, the cold was sharp and the avenue was nearly empty. They walked the half block to Novak's car without talking, their breath showing briefly in the chill air. Rachel got in and the door shut behind her with a solid sound, and Novak started the engine. As they pulled away, Rachel looked into the sideview mirror at the Hargrove shrinking into the distance and found that, as she squinted just right, it did look a bit like a haunted house, just waiting and filled with secrets in the dark.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Irene Baxter had not read a Colleen Hoover novel until four months ago, when a woman on the sixth floor had let her borrow one. Irene had always been a big reader, but she refused to buy anything from Amazon, and the last time she'd gone into a Barnes & Noble, she'd been appalled at how the entire back portion of the store had essentially become a mall with puzzles, games, vinyl, and toys. So she had taken to going to the library again and, when the opportunity arose, borrowing books from others in the building.

When her friend and neighbor had passed along the Hoover book, Irene accepted it with polite skepticism and had fully intended to leave it on her nightstand until she found a dignified way to return it unread.

She'd finished it in two days. She was now on her fourth one.

She was not especially proud of this. She'd spent forty years teaching high school English, had actual opinions about actual literature, and here she was at 9:15 on a Thursday night, propped up against her headboard, turning pages of something she would have once described as uninspired. But there was something relentless and propulsive about the way the woman wrote, a momentum that Irene found she couldn't argue with once she was inside it. You simply kept going. You told yourself another chapter and then found you'd read four more.

She set the book face-down on the blanket and rubbed her eyes. The bedroom lamp was the warm amber-tinted one she'd replaced the original with three years ago, after she'd started to find the overhead light too much by evening. The apartment was otherwise quiet. Outside, Monument Avenue was just as quiet, its traffic reduced to occasional intervals.

She took a moment to let the quiet and calm sink in. And in doing that, she thought of Neil. He had finally, thankfully, let it go. The last proper argument about assisted living had been weeks ago now, and since then he'd switched to a different mode — groceries twice a week, brief check-ins, a question or two about her appointments. He had his own life to worry about, and she thought he might be finally starting to remember that. It wouldn't kill him to finally find a girlfriend…or, more to the point, and if her instincts were correct, a boyfriend.

But giving up on trying to convince her to move had been the right call on his part. She would not have gone. She wouldn’t have argued about it any longer either, because she'd already said everything there was to say on the subject. Repeating herself further would have been beneath both of them.