Page 7 of Her Last Doubt

"We'll be respectful," Rachel said. "But just be prepared for the likelihood that we may need to speak with them."

"I'll make it known that you're here." He said it carefully, emphasizing the gap between making it known and guaranteeing anything. "I can't force anyone to open their door."

"We don't expect you to," Novak said. "We'd also like to see the most recent crime scene. Sylvia Marsh's apartment."

Hale's jaw tightened slightly. "It's been released by Detective Purcell's office. I was going to have it cleaned this week."

"We'd ask you to hold off on that," Rachel said.

There was another pause, which Hale ended with an abrupt sigh. "Fine." He reached into his desk drawer and produced a key card; he set it on the desk without quite handing it over. "Seventh floor. 7-C. I'll take you up."

The elevator was slow and the brass gate made a sound when it closed—a metallic clang that rang out through the lobby and probably through several floors above. Hale stood facing the doors with his hands clasped behind his back. Nobody spoke as the numbers climbed slowly above the gate: three, four, five.

"How long had Sylvia Marsh lived here?" Rachel asked, finally breaking the silence.

"Eleven years."

"Did you know her well?"

"I know all of my residents." He said it with the weight of a policy rather than affection...like knowing them was a task to be checked off a list. "She was pleasant. Quiet. She'd had some health issues in recent months but was managing."

"Did she have family nearby?"

"A son. He lives in Charlotte, I believe. He was here last week."

The elevator reached the seventh floor with a slight lurch and Hale pulled the gate back. The hallway was carpeted in a deep burgundy runner, and the walls were papered in a pattern that probably hadn't been updated since the eighties. But it had all been kept immaculate enough that it didn't matter much. 7-C was the third door on the right. Hale used his master key and pushed it open, then stepped back.

"I'll be downstairs if you need me," he said.

Rachel watched Hale walk away for a moment before she and Novak stepped inside.

Almost instantly, the apartment showed clear signs of a life managed with care and increasing difficulty. The living room furniture was good quality and had been for a long time — a rolled-arm sofa in ivory, a mahogany side table, a floor lamp with a silk shade that had developed a slight lean. Several framed photos sat on the bookshelf beside the television, including a row of Reader's Digest condensed books that no one had touched in probably twenty years.

The bedroom was off to the left. They both naturally headed in that direction without discussing it. The bed had been stripped by the forensics team and the bare mattress had the stark, slightly indecent look of something that had never meant to be seen.

Rachel turned back into the hallway and entered the bathroom. The medicine cabinet was closed but a side table next to the toilet held an overflow of what wouldn't fit inside: a blood pressure cuff, a digital thermometer, a small notebook with what appeared to be blood pressure readings logged by hand in neat columns. She opened the cabinet shelf above the sink and counted five prescription bottles arranged in a neat row. She took out her phone and photographed them without touching anything. One was a sleep aid, and another was a stool softener. There was also a cholesterol supplement whose label had been refilled so many times the original print had worn through. Five bottles, two of which were for fairly regular causes, made Rachel think Sylvia Marsh had been in decent health for her age.

She stood in the bathroom doorway for a moment, looking back toward the bedroom. Novak was photographing the nightstand.

"Five prescription bottles," she said. "She seemed to be in decent health, all things considered."

Novak glanced up, nodded, and went back to his inspection of the bedroom.

Rachel went back to the living room. A folded walker stood against the wall near the front door, the kind with the hand brakes and a small basket mounted between the front legs. There was a pair of slip-resistant slippers tucked beneath the console table, and a small sewing kit sitting perfectly in the center. Everything here had been adapted to accommodate old age. The furniture was pushed back slightly, and a rubber-backed mat had been placed in front of the kitchen sink.

Sylvia Marsh had been making this apartment work for her body. She'd been doing it thoughtfully and without apparent help, and from the look of the place, she'd intended to keep doing it.

Rachel moved to the kitchen window and looked down at Monument Avenue seven floors below. Two people were walking a dog along the far sidewalk, bundled against the cold. A delivery truck idled at the corner. From up here, Monument Avenue opened up in both directions, the trees lining the median stripped to their branches.

She thought about Eleanor, lying in her room on the ground floor of a Victorian a few miles north of here, working through a list of books she intended to finish. She then thought of Sylvia’s blood pressure readings logged in the little notebook by the toilet, the prescription bottles lined up carefully. Rachel looked to the walker by the door with its basket and its hand brakes and a phrase popped up into her mind that made her feel sick for a moment.

Angel of mercy.

She’d read up on angel of mercy cases before—cases where someone killed elderly people under the guise of ending their suffering. As she stood in Sylvia’s apartment, she couldn’t help but wonder if that’s what they were looking at. All three victims had been in their late seventies or early eighties. But based on what she’d gathered from the bathroom, Sylvia Marsh had been in decent health.

Still, it was possible. It was the first thing that fit, really. They had an elderly resident with significant medical needs, living alone, the death ruled natural causes until someone looked more carefully. She'd seen two angel of mercy cases during her career, both involving a caregiver with access, both with a logic to them that the perpetrator believed was kindness. The five bottles on the shelf and the walker by the door could, in that reading, look like evidence of a suffering worth ending. Of course, the so-called “suffering” would be defined by the killer, which then boiled the entire thing down to guesswork on her end.

Rachel still believed that there was no sense in this apartment of someone waiting to die. There was the sense, instead, of someone who had made an arrangement with her own aging, had worked out the terms of it, and had been keeping to it without complaint.