Page 8 of Her Last Refuge

“Thanks for that,” she said.

“Oh, no worries. Did you want to see the cafeteria? The dining area's actually pretty nice. We do a decent job with the food around here." He offered it lightly, already half turning that direction, like the tour had a natural next stop built into it.

"No, that's alright. I think I've seen what I came for." Rachel offered him a small, grateful smile. "Thank you for taking the time, Brian. I really appreciate it."

He nodded to her and she did see it, then. He wasn’t uncomfortable, but somewhere along the line, during his tour, he had grown suspicious of her. But as they made their way back to the lobby, he said nothing about it.

CHAPTER SIX

The Brandermill police station sat in a squat brick building off the main road, positioned beside another brick building that was clearly open but made no point to proclaim what it was. It wasn’t quite an industrial park, but it was far from the central hub of things. Rachel parked in the small lot out front and sat for a moment before going in, running through what she planned to say the same way she'd run through it on the drive out to Ashford Glen just half an hour ago. There had only been one moment when she’d feared the folks at Ashford Glen had gotten suspicious, but she knew cops would have a better nose for such things.

The front desk officer was a heavyset man in his fifties who looked up from his computer with mild curiosity when she approached. She gave him the same version of herself she'd given Miriam Colt: a family friend, worried, trying to do right by someone who was grieving. It came out just as easily the second time. She kept her voice soft, apologetic, like she felt bad for even asking.

"He's having a really hard time with it,” she said as she came to the end of her spiel. “I told him I'd come by and just ask a few questions, if that's alright. Nothing official. I just want to be able to tell him someone actually looked into it so he’ll finally accept the facts, you know?"

It struck her, standing there giving her name without the rest of it, how strange it felt not to reach for her badge out of habit. There had been a stretch of time, a few years back, when her name alone might have meant something to a stranger behind a desk at a police station. After her diagnosis and the capture and permanent resolution of Alex Lynch, she’d been in the local news quite a bit. She still wasn’t sure what had been heroic or newsworthy about it all. She supposed her cancer diagnosis had wrapped it all up in a little bow.

But if this officer had ever seen her face on television a few years ago, he showed no signs of remembering. He only nodded, unbothered, already reaching for the phone to page someone back.

Nobody here read the same papers she used to make. Or maybe enough years had passed that even the people who once might have remembered had stopped connecting the name to the face. Either way, it was almost a relief.

"Let me see if Detective Warrick's around. He caught that call, I think." The officer disappeared through a door behind the desk, leaving Rachel to look around the sparse police station. He returned a few minutes later with a tall man in his forties. He looked a little worn down, an expression that was highlighted by his thinning hair and his loosened tie which allowed his collar to hang open.

"Ms. Gift? I'm Ray Warrick." He extended a hand, his grip firm but unhurried. "Come on back."

She followed him through a small bullpen area and down a narrow hallway. They entered into his office, the third door on the left. The space was small and cluttered, with a few case folders stacked on one corner of the desk, a coffee mug bearing a Nationals logo with pens sticking out of it, and a calendar tacked to the wall with nothing written on most of the squares. He gestured for her to sit and lowered himself into his own chair with the particular weariness of a man near the end of a long week.

"So you're a friend of the Durst family," he said, more statement than question.

"Of Caleb's, yes. He's taking it hard. I think part of it is that nobody's really explained anything to him beyond the basics, and he's the kind of person who needs the details to feel settled. He’s just…he’s in denial." She let a small, apologetic smile touch her mouth. "I know that's probably not something you have time for, going back over a closed case for a family friend. I appreciate you even seeing me."

"It's alright. It’s been a slow week. I actually just lost my mother a few months back a complete out-of-nowhere thing. Car accident. So I get the denial thing.”

“I’m so sorry for your loss.”

“I appreciate that.” Warrick leaned back, the chair creaking under him. "Look, I'll be straight with you. There's not much of a case here to go back over—an elderly woman with dementia, in a residential care facility. When it was discovered that she had passed, the doctor on-site called it likely cardiac, and I suspect ME's office is going to confirm that once the tox screen and the rest come back. Nobody's expecting a surprise. We came out, we looked around, and there wasn't anything that raised a flag."

"I understand that. I really do." Rachel nodded, keeping her posture easy, unthreatening. "I just told Caleb I'd ask if there was anything more you could tell me. Even just walking me through it a little would help. He keeps circling the same questions, and I think if he heard it laid out plainly, from someone who was actually there, it might finally put it to rest for him. He wanted to come himself but I told him it was a bad idea."

Jeez, she thought to herself. Laying it on thick…

Warrick studied her for a second, and she could see him weighing it. She thought he also seemed just mildly irritated, having his slow afternoon interrupted by what did truly seem like a non-issue. Still, she just wanted a bit more. And she thought he might give it—just a little more than he was probably supposed to give a stranger off the street, but not so much that it would ever come back on him.

"I don't usually do this," he said, more to himself than to her, already turning to the filing cabinet behind his desk. He pulled a thin folder and set it on the desk between them, flipping it open without quite handing it over. "There's not a lot here. The facility called it in around six that morning; a night nurse found her when she came to check vitals. There were no signs of forced entry, nothing disturbed in the room. No marks on the body, no indication of a struggle."

"Can I see?"

He hesitated, just briefly, then turned the folder so it faced her.

The photographs were clinical, taken by whoever had responded that morning. There were a handful of shots of the room, the bed, the body itself. Rachel made herself look at them slowly, the way she would have if this were actually hers to look at, cataloguing details out of habit even as some part of her tried to hold back from the reflex.

Ruth lay on her back in the photographs. Her blanket was pulled up to her chest, her head resting evenly on the pillow. Her expression, what little of it the photographs captured, looked unnervingly peaceful, the kind of stillness Rachel associated more with a funeral home than with a body found in the ordinary chaos of an early morning check. And her hands. They were folded neatly on top of the blanket, fingers laced together, resting just below her collarbone, composed in a way that looked almost staged.

"Was she like this when they found her? Just as she is in the photo?"

"That's what the responding officer's notes say. Nurse said she found her exactly like that." Warrick shrugged, flipping to another page in the file. "I know some people find comfort in that. Peaceful passing, all of that."

"Can I ask you something? Was there anything in her file about restlessness? Sleep issues, agitation at night, that kind of thing?"