Page 22 of Her Last Doubt

"I'm sitting on a bench outside. I'm extremely careful."

“Dude, it’s cold. Get back in there and catch some bad guys.”

“Ah, if only I were that easy.” Despite the cold, Rachel felt a flush of warmth. It was indeed great to hear Paige speaking with such passion and humor about something.

Paige made a sound that managed to convey both skepticism and affection. "Okay. Are you coming home tonight?"

"I don't know yet. Probably. It depends on how the day goes."

"Okay." There was another pause, shorter this time. "I started a new organizational system for my case notes. For the podcasts. I have them sorted by crime type and then by jurisdiction and then by investigative outcome."

Rachel closed her eyes briefly, not sure if this was something she should applaud or warn against. "That's very thorough," was all she said.

"I thought so, too." She could hear the small satisfaction in it. "Okay, I'll let you go. Love you."

"Love you too. Put Dad back on, would you?" She nearly grimaced when she referred to Jack as dad. Paige had started doing it about six months ago, out of nowhere. They’d always made it known to her that she didn’t have to call Jack dad. Her own dad had died when she was so young and she never wanted to confuse her. But this had been Paige’s decision and every now and then, she’d switch back and forth. Rachel never knew why, and they’d never had the discussion.

Jack came back on the line, yanking her out of her thoughts. "Still here."

"She's sorted her podcast notes by crime type and jurisdiction. Did you hear?”

"I know. She showed me the spreadsheet. It’s color-coded.” He chuckled, but the quiet that followed told her that he was also trying to be serious. "She's fine, Rach. She's just thorough and happens to be interested in something that has caught on in certain age groups."

"I know she's fine. That's almost the problem." Rachel looked at the trees along the median again, feeling the chill creep back in. "I imagine I’ll be home tonight. Not sure when."

"Well, if you do, I’ll see you then. Love you.”

“Love you, too.”

She ended the call and sat for another minute, the phone loose in her hand. The Hargrove was visible from where she sat, its limestone trim pale against the night sky, the green canopy lit from below. The street was empty in both directions, with the exception of a young couple walking their dog.

For Rachel, the feeling was still there—that teasing sense of something almost in reach. She turned it over a few more times and it stayed just where it was, present but not yet clear. It was being stubborn and it made her feel almost like a failure that she wasn’t able to identify it yet.

She stood from the bench, deciding that more time on the case itself was more likely to shake it loose than sitting in the cold trying to force it. She pocketed her phone and started back toward the Hargrove. She’d told Paige and Jack she’d probably be home tonight and unless something dramatic presented itself in the next hour or so, she was starting to think she might be home sooner rather than later.

***

The security footage from the night of Sylvia Marsh's death was running on Novak's laptop for the third time. He'd pulled his chair closer to the screen and was working through it at half speed, watching the hallway outside 7-C from the timestamp that Purcell's team had established as the outer edge of the window of death. The hallway was empty. The camera angle covered the elevator and the first four doors on the right side of the hall, and for the relevant two-hour window nothing moved except the slight flicker of the overhead light at 11:42, which happened again at 11:58—and that was probably an electrical issue rather than anything worth logging.

He switched to the lobby camera for the same window. The lobby had more movement — a resident returning home at 10:15, another leaving at 11:30 with a dog on a leash. But there was nothing that placed anyone near the seventh floor stairwell entrance in a way that meant anything.

The gaps Purcell had mentioned were real. The freight entrance at the back of the building had a camera that covered the exterior door but nothing beyond the first three feet of the interior corridor. The stairwells had no cameras at all. The basement hallway had one camera at the far end, near the storage cages, but the angle was narrow and covered less than a third of the corridor's length.

He wasn't seeing anything that suggested the footage had been edited or selectively packaged. The timestamps ran continuously, the file metadata looked clean, and the gaps were architectural rather than manufactured. He couldn't rule out that something had been removed, but he also couldn't find evidence of it. What he had was a building with a surveillance system that covered the places that were easy to cover and left everything else to chance.

He closed the laptop and looked across the lobby to where Pruitt was restacking the paper cups near the credenza. He did it with the bored detachment of someone who was simply looking for things to do. And as he watched the man at his half-hearted work, an idea came to him. Novak got up out of his chair and walked over to him.

"Can I ask you something?"

Pruitt turned, surprised to see Novak standing there. "Sure."

"Who else in this building knows it the way you do? The layout, the systems, the parts of it that don't show up on a floor plan?"

Pruitt looked at him for a moment, and something in his expression shifted in a way that gave Novak pause. It wasn’t evasion, exactly, but a pulling back. He looked at the credenza and straightened the cups that didn't need straightening. "That's a hard question to answer."

"Take your time," Novak said.

Pruitt was quiet for long enough that Novak was about to ask again. Then he set the cups down and turned to face him fully. "There's a name that's been coming to me…I have to admit. And I want to say upfront that it makes no sense to me, because this is genuinely a good person we're talking about. I don't want to throw someone under a bus."