Page 33 of Her Last Doubt

She went to the bedroom next. The Colleen Hoover novel was still on the side table, which surprised her briefly, and then she remembered that the paperback wouldn't have been tagged as evidence unless someone had thought to look at it. She looked at the bookmark, the grocery receipt tucked two thirds of the way through, and thought about what it meant that Irene Baxter had been close to finishing it. She thought about Eleanor's book list and a small chill ran up her spine. She looked away quickly, again reminding herself that she wanted to speak to the friend who had come by to speak about books only to find Irene dead..

The dresser drawers held the ordinary contents of a woman's bedroom, nothing that told her anything. The closet was organized with the same no-fuss practicality as the rest of the apartment, coats arranged by weight, shoes paired and placed, a shelf of sweaters in descending order by color from dark to light. On the top shelf, behind a stack of spare blankets, she found a shoebox that held old letters, rubber-banded in groups, and a pair of small photographs. She looked at them without removing them and put the box back.

She returned to the kitchen and started on the lower cabinets. The cabinet left of the sink held cleaning products and a backup box of dish soap and a pair of rubber gloves folded over the cabinet's interior edge. The cabinet right of the sink held a bag of charcoal filters for the tap and two rolls of paper towels. Then, in the back corner, a small plastic mousetrap. It was the standard spring-loaded kind, baited with what looked like a bit of dried peanut butter. She instantly thought about how Neil had claimed that his aunt was sure there were rats in the walls.

If there were, they were staying in the walls because there was no dead rat attached to the trap, and it hadn't been triggered. Rachel crouched and looked at it without touching it. It was positioned with care, angled into the corner with the bait pad facing the wall.

Irene had at least thought she'd heard something in the walls. She'd told Hale about it twice. She thought about the comment she'd been carrying since their conversation with Baxter the first time, the one about Irene having been in the building for twenty-one years and knowing every system and every sound it made.

She'd heard something in the wall that she hadn’t heard in all that time and assumed it had been rodents.

Rachel stood up slowly and looked at the wall between the kitchen and the bedroom, the section just above the cabinet she'd been crouching in front of. She looked at it for a long time.

Then she took out her phone and called Novak.

He picked up on the second ring. "I'm in with Hale now. We've got Baxter on camera at 11:07. I'm still looking for Shelf."

"Good. Keep him there, please. I think I might have a question for him.”

CHAPTER TWENTY

The lobby was quiet when Rachel got off the elevator, just the low murmur of Novak's voice and the click of Hale's mouse from the front desk. Rachel assumed they were still working their way through some of the security footage on the desktop monitor. Pruitt stood off to one side, his hands shoved into the pockets of his work jacket, watching the screen with the mild interest of someone who expected to be told he could leave soon. He always looked uncomfortable but he was watching the screen as Novak worked his way through the footage as if he were expecting to see a monster jump out from the shadows.

"Anything yet?" Rachel asked, coming around the desk.

"Baxter at 11:07, like I said," Novak said, not looking up. "Still working backward through the rest of the night, but I’m now pretty certain we can take him off of the suspect list, too."

Rachel looked at Hale, trying to gauge his response. When he saw that she was looking, he gave her a perplexed expression. “I…I honestly have no idea what else we can do.”

“Well, Detective Purcell told us you’ve turned down a police presence outside of the building.”

“That’s true. The last thing I want is to draw unnecessary worries from our residents. And if you want complete and total honesty…well, I don’t know that I care for the sort of things that would be said about the Hargrove if word gets out that we have to keep police stationed outside.”

She hated the answer and it made her angry, but she kept her cool. Instead of pushing the topic, she switched to the main topic on her mind.

“Mr. Hale, has the Hargrove ever had a rodent problem?"

He blinked at her, his expression shifting into something close to offense. He’d clearly not been expecting such a question. He nearly looked offended at the mere idea of such a thing. "No. Never. This building's maintained to a higher standard than that."

"Irene Baxter thought she heard mice in her walls. She told Pruitt and from what I understand, she told you as well at some point. More than once.”

"We had a little bug situation a few years back," Hale said. "Around 2020. Nothing serious. Some ants in the laundry room, a couple of complaints about silverfish on the third floor. We had it handled inside a week. But rats…no. Never."

"So why would Mrs. Baxter think she had mice?"

Hale shrugged, a quick, irritated motion. "No idea. She complained about it a couple times, sure. But nobody ever found anything. I had asked Dale to maybe contact an exterminator just to say we’d done something. But we’ve never even seen droppings or chew marks anywhere in this building since I’ve been running the place.”

"So her complaints just sat there," Rachel said. "Nobody really followed up."

"There wasn't anything to follow up on," Hale said, starting to grow exasperated. "You can't chase a sound. People hear pipes, they hear the building settle, they decide it's mice. It happens everywhere."

"Did you tell her that?"

"I told her we'd keep an eye out." He said it flatly, like the matter was closed and had been closed for some time.

Rachel let that sit for a second, combing through the unclosed loops of the case and deciding where to go next. She brought forward what they’d learned about the service entrance in the back the day before and how she and Novak had planned to ask to see it and the adjoining corridors. She had the question on the tip of her tongue, intending to ask him to take her down to the service entrance, to show them the corridors—particularly the one he’d told them ran along a significant stretch without a security camera present.

The question was right there, half-formed, when something else surfaced instead, something that had been sitting under the investigation since the first day without quite breaking the surface.