Page 34 of Her Last Doubt

She looked across the lobby toward the elevator bank, then toward the door that led down to the basement units. Dale Pruitt's apartment was down there, off a separate hallway behind the laundry room and the boiler. She'd seen inside it and had been struck by the weird isolation of it. It had struck her as a strange layout then, though she hadn't been able to say why, and she hadn't had time to think about it before the case had pulled her toward other things.

The basement had its own elevator and set of stairs, which she’d used once, on her only trip down there. It was separate from the standard elevator and stairwells that served the residential floors. To get from his apartment to any of the units above, Pruitt would have to ride that elevator up to the lobby, walk across the lobby floor itself, and then take the main elevator the rest of the way up. There was no other route between the two halves of the building…at least not one that anyone had mentioned to her. It was an odd way to house a building superintendent, separating him from the residents he served by an entire public floor he had to cross every single time something needed fixing. She supposed most of the reasoning for it came from the old design of the building.

She wasn't sure yet what bothered her about it. Maybe it was just the inefficiency, the idea that a man who was supposed to respond quickly to leaks and stuck doors and broken locks had to walk through the most visible, most watched part of the building to do his job. A building this old, this carefully maintained, usually had its service routes worked out so the staff stayed out of sight as much as possible. The Hargrove prided itself on that kind of discretion. Residents weren't supposed to see deliveries in progress, weren't supposed to be reminded that the building required constant, unglamorous upkeep behind the scenes.

And yet the man responsible for most of that upkeep had no way to move through his own building without crossing the most public room in it, every single time. Or maybe it was something else, something she hadn't put a name to yet. Either way, the thought had a definite shape to it now, and she didn't want to let it go before she understood it.

"Agent Novak," she said. "Can you pull up the footage from the night Sylvia Marsh was killed?"

He glanced at her, then back at the screen. "Sure. What time?"

"Start around six and run it forward."

Novak typed something in, doing it with the slow caution that showed he wasn’t yet familiar with the Hargrove’s system. After a few seconds, the footage shifted and the night of Marsh’s murder appeared; the timestamp reset in the corner of the frame. The lobby on the monitor looked almost identical to the one Rachel was standing in now: the same chandelier, the same dark wood paneling, the same brass mail cubbies along the far wall. A resident crossed from the elevator to the front door, paused to check the weather through the glass, and went out. A few minutes later someone came in with a grocery bag and rode the elevator up. The image had the slightly washed-out quality of a camera that had been recording the same square footage for years. The color was a little flat, the edges of the frame darker than the center.

Rachel knew, without saying it out loud, that Pruitt's alibi for that night placed him on the fourth floor, helping two tenants with a leaking bathtub. The tenants had already confirmed it, separately and without prompting. Novak had checked. It had never been in question, not once, in a day and a half of looking at everyone else.

But to get to the fourth floor from his basement apartment, Pruitt would have had to come up that back elevator and cross this exact stretch of lobby floor. In doing so, he would have to be in full view of this exact camera. There was no way around it. The known layout of the building didn't allow for anything else.

They watched the footage in real time, the timestamp ticking forward in the corner. 6:15 turned to 6:40, then 7:00 came and went. A couple came through with a small dog, the dog stopping to sniff at the base of a planter before being tugged along. By 7:20, nothing else had happened.

They kept watching as the night progressed in an uneventful haze. The lobby sat mostly still on the screen, the occasional resident passing through on their way somewhere else, none of them Pruitt. The front desk in the footage was empty; Hale must have stepped away from it at some point that evening. A delivery driver came through with a stack of boxes around 8:20 and left less than a minute later. At 9:06, an elderly man Rachel didn't recognize crossed slowly from the elevator to the mail cubbies, checked an empty box, and shuffled back. Otherwise, the room held still, the chandelier throwing the same pool of light with nothing of note happening.

When it came to be 11:25 on the screen, Rachel’s growing theory evolved just a bit further. "He's not here," she said.

"Maybe he came up before six," Hale offered, leaning in to look at the timestamp. "He'd been working in the building most of the day."

"Yes, but he claims the call on the bathtub on the fourth floor was around eight or so. And you saw the same thing we did: he never came across the lobby. He'd still have had to cross this lobby to get from his apartment to the fourth floor. There's only the one way up from down there. Unless I'm wrong about that." She looked at him squarely as she said this.

"You're not wrong," Hale said. "The basement elevator only goes to the lobby. Always has, far as I know. It's an old building, built that way long before any of us were here." A gravely thoughtful look came across his face and he added, “But…well, I’m not exactly sure what you’re getting at here.”

Rachel kept her eyes on the monitor, watching the empty stretch of lobby floor cycle through another few minutes of nothing. The camera confirmed that Dale Pruitt hadn't crossed the lobby to get to the fourth floor, but the fourth floor residents confirmed he had showed up.

Both of those things couldn't be true at the same time, not unless there was a way between the basement and the upper floors that didn't run through the spot where she was currently standing. And that sudden clarity pulled at her like a puppeteer’s strings.

"Excuse me a second," she said.

And before either Novak or Hale had time to ask what she was thinking, Rachel had already turned away and headed for the basement elevator.

CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

The basement elevator was slower than the main one, and it groaned faintly as it descended past the lobby level. The noise of the cable was audible through the brass gate, and it legitimately sounded like some long-sleeping beast waking up. Rachel stood alone inside it, watching the floor numbers tick down on the small panel above the buttons. The car smelled faintly of motor oil, vastly different from the cedar-and-polish scent of the elevator the residents used upstairs. When the doors opened, she stepped out into a corridor lit by bare overhead bulbs spaced too far apart, leaving stretches of dim gray concrete between each pool of light.

Her phone buzzed in her hand. A text from Novak, already: You okay?

She typed back quickly. Yeah sorry. Just checking something. BRB.

She put the phone in her jacket pocket and kept walking.

Though she had been down here yesterday, it still felt strange—almost alien—when coming directly from the fine furnishings above. The hallway walls were unpainted block, and the row of pipes she noticed yesterday still ran along the ceiling, insulated in places and bare in others, with a faint hiss coming from somewhere she couldn't pinpoint. She had forgotten, though, just how much cooler it was down here as compared to upstairs.

Pruitt's apartment was past the laundry room, the door unremarkable. Rachel knocked twice and waited. There was no answer at the door, but the faint hum from the electrical panel back down the hall seemed to ask her: hmmmm? She knocked again, harder, and called his name once.

“Mr. Pruitt?”

Again, there was no answer. Taking a bit of a risk, she tried the handle and found it locked. No surprise there.

She stood there for a moment, looking at the door, then turned and kept moving deeper into the basement. The hallway narrowed slightly past the apartment, the concrete giving way to a section of exposed pipe and conduit that ran along both walls, bundled and labeled in faded yellow tape. All of this was new to her, as she’d not explored the basement any further than Pruitt’s apartment yesterday. A water heater the size of a small car sat in an alcove to her right, ticking quietly as it worked. A thin film of rust spread from one of its seams down the side of the tank. She stepped around a folded hand truck someone had left leaning against the wall, along with a stack of empty plastic buckets, a beat-up step ladder, and a coiled length of garden hose. She studied it all, not quite sure what she was looking for, and kept going.