Page 32 of Her Last Doubt

She let a moment pass before she spoke. "Thank you for agreeing to talk to us in here."

"You didn’t exactly make it seem like I had a choice," he said.

She looked at him steadily, trying to prepare herself for how thing might escalate if he got defiant. But past experience had told her that when men were this scared, they usually didn’t act out; they’d do whatever they could to wriggle out from under the eye of suspicion—both the guilty and the innocent.

"How are you doing?" she finally asked.

He made a short sound that was not quite a laugh. "I've been better." He looked at the framed photographs of the Hargrove on the wall behind her, the building across its decades, and then looked back down at his hands. "She was the only family I had left in any real sense. My parents are both gone. I have cousins I haven't spoken to in years. It was just Irene and…well, I’m an idiot. I’m pretty sure she didn’t exactly love me, you know?" He pressed his lips together briefly. "We'd been arguing for months and I finally let it go because I could see it was driving us apart. And now she's dead and I'm sitting in my building manager's office with two FBI agents looking at me like I'm the one who did it." The last few questions came out partially strangled as he tried his best not to break down in tears.

"We're looking at everyone, Mr. Baxter," Novak said. “And regrettably, yes…you are at the top of the list.”

"I understand why you're looking at me more than most." He said it without anger, just a flat, tired acknowledgment. "I argued with her publicly. People in this building heard me. I know how it looks. I'm a behavioral therapist and I know that the optics are terrible and I can't do anything about them." He unfolded his hands and sat back, finally allowing a few tears to run down his cheeks. "What do you need to know?"

"Where you were last night," Rachel said. "Starting around eight o'clock."

He reached for his phone without hesitation. It seemed he’d been expecting this question, and had an answer at the ready. "I had a work dinner. Not a social thing, a scheduled thing. It had been on my calendar for nearly a month.”

“How many were involved?” Novak asked.

“There were seven of us, six colleagues and me. We went to a place called The Magpie on Patterson Avenue. I can give you all six names right now if you want them." He held the phone toward Rachel and she saw a text thread between seven people, dated from yesterday. She photographed the screen, making sure to let him know she would take whatever he was giving. "We finished around nine thirty and then three of us went to a cocktail bar nearby. It's called Cosmo's. We were there until a little after ten. A colleague named Dan Hurst paid for the drinks, so I don't have a receipt, but I was there."

"How did you get home?" Novak asked.

"Uber." He tapped back through his phone and turned it toward them again. Hus Uber app showed a pickup on Patterson Avenue at 10:14 and a drop-off at the Hargrove's front address at 10:48. Rachel photographed it. "I came through the lobby around eleven, maybe a little after. I'd assume the security cameras have me on there."

Rachel noted this in her head, knowing that if he was giving such detailed information, it would all prove to be true. "Did you go to your aunt's floor at any point last night?"

"No. I went straight to my apartment." He looked at her carefully as more tears came pouring over his cheeks and added, "You can check."

"We will," she said, and the flatness of it landed without cruelty. He seemed to understand that it was procedural rather than pointed. "Is there anything else you think we should know? Anything about your aunt, her routines, whether she'd mentioned anything unusual to you recently?"

He thought about it with a careful attention she’d not seen in him yesterday, which Rachel noted. Even in grief and under the implicit pressure of the conversation, he was precise. "She called me on Tuesday to tell me she'd heard something in the wall of her apartment again. She thought the building had rodents. God, she was always griping about that. She'd apparently told Hale about it twice and nothing had been done." He shook his head slightly. "I told her to document it and keep calling. She said she'd been planning to call down to the front desk about it again that evening." He looked at the desk. "That was the last time I spoke with her."

Rachel thought about this for a moment and though there was nothing special about it on its face, she thought of the sound of rats in the walls and then she pictured that broken vase in Irene’s apartment. For some reason, she felt there could be a connection there, as absurd as it might seem.

"We appreciate you being cooperative, Mr. Baxter. We're going to ask that you don't leave the building for the next twenty-four hours while we look over your alibis. Is that something you can agree to?"

"Yes," he said, immediately and without condition. "Without question. I assure you…anything you need, I’ll do what I can to help."

At this, he began to weep, but he got to his feet right away as if he didn’t want them to see. They walked him out of the office and when they parted, he crossed the lobby toward the elevator with his hands in his jacket pockets and his shoulders drawn in slightly, the posture of a man holding himself together by just a few threads. Rachel watched until the brass gate of the elevator closed behind him before either of them spoke.

"The Uber history may very well save him," Novak said quietly.

"Maybe. But I’d still like to run a check on these people he was out with last night.” She looked at Hale, who still stood at his station at the front desk—either reviewing something on his laptop or doing a very good job of pretending. "Hey, do you think you can start on the security footage?” she asked. “Last night, lobby camera, eleven o'clock and after. I want to confirm Baxter's arrival time and I want to see whether Shelf came in at any point."

"Yeah, I can hop on that. I should still have access from yesterday. What about you? What are you up to? I know that look.”

"I want to go back up to the apartment. The ME should be done by now. I want to just check out a few things.”

“I’ll be back at our old spot,” he said, pointing to the two chairs where they’d sat the day before.

She went to the elevator and rode it up to the sixth floor. The hallway was quieter than it had been half an hour ago. One single uniformed officer remained, along with detective Purcell. They were comparing notes about something at the kitchen counter. Rachel gave a small wave and a nod, keeping quiet as to not disturb them.

Trevors had indeed cleared out. The floor where Irene Baxter had lain was marked with numbered placards and the outline left by the body's position. She and Novak had missed seeing the body wheeled out while speaking to Neil in Hale’s office. The dahlias were still scattered near the base of the counter, bagged now, the ceramic shards collected and documented. The phone had been taken into evidence. What remained was the kitchen in its ordinary state, or as close to it as it could come.

Rachel stood in the center of the room and looked at it slowly. There was a version of this apartment that had existed before last night and she wanted to understand it the same way she'd stood in Sylvia Marsh's apartment and tried to read the life that had been lived there.

She went to the bathroom first. The medicine cabinet held four prescription bottles, a box of bandaging strips, and a tube of hand cream with the cap cracked from being opened too many times. She photographed them without touching anything. A small electric toothbrush sat beside the sink, along with a travel-sized mouthwash.