Page 28 of Her Last Doubt

She had lived in this apartment for twenty-one years. She'd moved in the year her husband Martin had retired, when they'd sold the house in Henrico. It had been too big, and they’d wanted something simpler—and with a sense of community. And lo and behold, there had been an opening at the Hargrove. The ease of a building with a doorman and no yard maintenance was a reasonable trade for a bit of space. Martin had been gone for nine years now, but she still felt his presence every now and then. She still refused to sit on the left side of the love seat because that was his spot.

She wasn't ready to leave it. She didn't intend to be.

The three deaths in the building had unsettled her, of course. She'd told herself that the two FBI agents making their rounds downstairs were evidence that someone was actually taking it seriously, and that had helped a little. She'd declined to speak with the detective's people weeks ago because she hadn't felt she had anything to offer, and because she was still privately unconvinced that anything criminal had occurred.

Now she was less certain about that second part.

She picked the book back up, read half a page, and put it on the nightstand. Her body was deciding for her that it was time to wind down, regardless of what the story was doing. It was time to get to sleep. She pushed the blanket back and swung her feet to the floor.

She washed her face at the bathroom sink with cold water. She took the two medications that needed to be taken with food and the one that needed to be taken without, which still struck her as a deliberately inconvenient arrangement. She refilled the glass on her nightstand and turned out the bathroom light.

She'd started setting up the coffee maker the night before rather than in the morning, which was a concession she'd made to herself sometime last year. It saved five minutes in the morning, and five minutes mattered more at seventy-eight than it had at fifty. She filled the carafe at the kitchen sink and poured it into the reservoir, then measured out the grounds and fitted the basket into place.

Just as she finished this little act, a sound came from the wall near the doorway to the bedroom.

It was a low, brief shift, the kind of sound that registered more as a change in the room's atmosphere than as anything specific. Irene set the lid on the coffee maker and stood still for a moment, listening.

She'd heard it before. A few times over the past two months, she’d heard the same thing near that same section of wall between the bedroom and the kitchen, sometimes lower and sometimes a bit further along toward the baseboard. She'd mentioned it to Hale twice. He had nodded both times with the thoughtful expression of a man who fully intended to forget the conversation the moment she was out of his office. Hale was a good-looking man who kept the common areas immaculate, but seemed to have very little interest in what happened on the other side of residents' actual doors. She suspected the building had a rodent problem it was not advertising.

She reached for her phone on the kitchen counter, already composing the call in her head. She'd ring down to the front desk, leave a message, and this time she'd follow it up in writing because apparently that was what it took with Conrad Hale if you expected him to do anything.

She had the phone in her hand when she looked up.

A figure stood in the doorway between the kitchen and the bedroom. A man. He was not quite in the light, and not quite out of it, and for the half-second before she understood what she was seeing, her brain reached for a rational explanation that simply wasn't there.

She opened her mouth.

His fist caught her in the ribs before the sound could form—a short, deliberate blow that drove the air out of her and bent her forward over the counter. The phone dropped. Her hand shot out for something to grip and found the vase on the counter's edge, the one she kept with the small bunch of dahlias. Dahlias, because Martin had always gotten them for her. It went down with her as she fell sideways, shattering on the floor.

She was on her hands and knees and still trying to drag in a breath. She reached blindly for the broken glass, for anything, and got one arm up before he was on her, his weight coming down on her back and driving her flat to the kitchen floor. She fought. Her elbow caught something, she thought his jaw, and she pushed and twisted with everything she had left, which was not enough.

The linoleum was cold against her cheek. He was above her, and his hands were at her shoulders, and she got one more look at his face before the weight of him pressed down fully, his eyes close to hers and flat with something that had no name she could reach for.

She knew him. She had known him for years.

And that was the last thought she had before the darkness came.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The kitchen was warm even as the cold temperature of morning pressed against the windows. It smelled of coffee, which was good, and Paige sat across from Rachel at the table eating a bowl of cereal. She'd come downstairs in her school clothes with her hair half done. She’d finished it at the table, which was something Rachel had given up trying to redirect about two months ago.

Jack stood at the counter with his cup of coffee, reading something on his phone. He had an early meeting at the field office and was already in his jacket. It was the one he wore when he wanted to look like he'd made an effort without actually thinking too hard about it. And he looked very handsome in it. He'd been up before either of them. He’d made the coffee and emptied the dishwasher, which were the twin pillars of his morning contribution.

"Did you know," Paige said to no one in particular, "that apartment buildings statistically have a much higher rate of undetected homicides than single-family homes? Because of the proximity to other residents and the assumptions people make about sounds they hear?"

"Where did you get that?" Rachel asked.

"One of my podcasts. But I looked it up separately." She gave Rachel a look that seemed to say: You know…because of your current case.

Rachel looked at Jack, who had lowered his phone by about two inches. He raised it again when he felt her looking at him.

"Is that relevant to something?" Rachel asked.

"I mean, isn't it relevant to your current case?" There it was, spoken out loud.

"We don't talk about active cases at breakfast." She sighed and added, “Or at all, if it can be helped.”

"You talked about the Hendricks case at dinner once. I remember because it was Thanksgiving and I was nine and I had to ask you what 'ligature' meant."