Page 30 of Her Last Doubt

"The ME isn't there yet, but Hale said she was cold when he found her."

She was moving through the kitchen, reaching for her jacket on the hook by the door. "Have you called Purcell?"

"She's on her way. She’s the one who called me. I'm leaving now."

"I'll meet you there."

She ended the call and stood for a second in the kitchen, jacket in hand. Irene Baxter. Seventy-eight years old, apartment 6-A, twenty-one years in the building. More importantly, though, Neil Baxter had spent a year trying to move to assisted living. In response, Irene had thrown a brochure at him.

Paige appeared at the top of the stairs with her bag over one shoulder, hair finished, earbuds popped in. She looked at Rachel's face and the mood shift in the room seemed to reach her before Rachel said a word.

"What happened?"

"I have to get to work," Rachel said. "Come on."

She held the door open and Paige came down the stairs and went through it without argument. Rachel followed her out into the cold morning air. “Is everything okay?” Paige asked. “Is there a break in the case?”

“Nice try,” she said, patting her on the back.

When they piled into the car, Rachel realized that she had caught a bit of Paige’s excitement. While it was obviously a tragedy that there was another victim, she knew that it also meant the chances of finding a new lead or clue were much more likely. All the same, when she quickly backed out of the driveway, she found that she was more eager than she’d expected to return to the Hargrove.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The vase, which had been shattered in the space between Irene Baxter’s kitchen and living area, had held dahlias. Rachel could tell by the few that hadn't been crushed when it hit the floor, their stems bent and the blooms gone rust-colored at the edges from sitting in spilled water overnight. The vase itself was in four large pieces, surrounded by smaller chips of white ceramic and a dark stain where the water had spread on the hardwood. The flowers were scattered around it in a rough arc, which told her the vase had come off something at height and gone wide when it fell.

The rest of the kitchen was orderly, though. The coffee maker on the counter had been set up for the morning, grounds measured, the carafe in place. A phone lay on the floor near the stove, face up, screen dark.

Irene Baxter was on the floor between the counter and the doorway to the bedroom. She was on her back, her left arm extended and her right drawn in close to her side. The ME had arrived just before Rachel and Novak. He was a compact man named Trevorswhom Rachel had worked with twice before. He was crouched beside the body with his kit open. Rachel’s first glimpse of Irene over Trevors’ shoulder showed a clear suggestion that she had been strangled. The bruising at her neck was unmistakable.

Rachel stood in the kitchen doorway and took it in. Novak was behind her, looking over her shoulder toward the bedroom. She followed his gaze and saw that the door had been pushed back against the wall, but the handle plate had a fresh gouge in the paint near the latch. She didn’t think it was a forced entry mark, more like something had caught it hard in passing. Rachel looked at the arc of the dahlias again, at the dried stain, at the phone on the floor.

She'd fought back. That was the first clear read on the room. The previous scenes had been tidy in the horrible, deliberate way of attacks that had gone entirely according to plan. But this one had not gone according to plan. Something had been interrupted or misjudged, and Irene Baxter had done her very best to put up a fight.

Rachel pulled out her phone and photographed the floor, the counter, the vase, the phone. She stepped carefully around the edge of the stain and crouched near the doorway, looking at the angle from there. She could see a faint scuff on the lower cabinet below the counter, a rubber-soled mark at about knee height.

"She went down here first," Rachel said, more to herself than to Novak. "Then moved, or was moved."

Trevors looked up briefly. "There's bruising on her abdomen inconsistent with a fall. Something struck her there, I'd say, before she went down. I won't know the specifics until I get her on the table, but she didn't just slip. I imagine she was punched." He looked back at Irene and said, "Time of death, preliminary and loose, is somewhere between nine and eleven last night. Lividity is consistent with her position, meaning she's been here since it happened."

"No one moved her?" Rachel said.

"Doesn't look like it."

Rachel stood and went back to the living room. It was as undisturbed as the kitchen had been before the doorway, the kind of room that had been maintained without much sentiment — furniture positioned for ease of movement rather than appearance, a television with the remote on the arm of the chair, a reading lamp angled toward the couch. A novel was on the side table, a Colleen Hoover paperback with a grocery receipt tucked in as a bookmark about two thirds of the way through.

Rachel looked at the book for a moment, then looked away. “Has anyone spoken to the neighbor that found her?”

“Not sure,” the ME said.

Rachel made a note to find out who it was and speak with them.

She knew the approximate shape of Irene Baxter's life in this apartment from what Novak had read out from Purcell's notes and from what they’d garnered yesterday in speaking with Irene and Neil. This was a woman who knew everyone in the building and had refused every attempt to be moved out of it. A woman who had, as recently as a few weeks ago, been the subject of documented, public conflict with her nephew over exactly that refusal.

And that nephew, Neil Baxter, was in the hallway outside. They’d seen him when they’d come in but had said nothing to him, as he’d been giving a statement to a policeman. He’d been standing near the wall opposite 6-A with his arms crossed and his face the color of old plaster. He was still in the clothes he'd apparently slept in. When Neil had seen Rachel he'd straightened up and started toward her and the officer had put a hand out, gently but clearly, and Neil had stopped.

Rachel considered the years’ worth of documented pressure on his aunt to vacate this apartment. Arguments in the elevator, in the lobby, in the hallways, overheard by enough residents that his name had come up unsolicited in four separate conversations. And now Irene Baxter was on her kitchen floor and Neil Baxter was thirty feet away in the hallway, and the optics of that were about as bad as optics got.

Rachel had not allowed herself to run ahead of the evidence on Baxter. She'd made the call yesterday, standing in the elevator with Novak, that he was too anxious to have pulled off three murders without someone noticing. She still believed the reasoning. But this scene was not the same as the previous three. This scene came with a broken vase, scuff marks, a door thrown wide, and a woman who had fought. Whoever had done it had not been clean or controlled or invisible. The profile was shifting and Baxter was sitting directly inside the shift.