Page 36 of Her Last Doubt

Novak was leaning against the car, his hands in his coat pockets, watching the entrance. "What's going on?" he asked as she approached.

"I wanted to talk out here," Rachel said. "I found something, and I don’t think Hale would be in on it, but I’m not certain. So…just you and me for now."

"Okay, so what is it?"

She glanced back at the building once, then focused on Novak. "I think Pruitt's been moving through the walls. Listening in on residents. That's how he's been choosing who to kill."

Novak's expression didn't change much, but his eyes sharpened. She applauded him for that because he was fully aware of how insane her comment had sounded. After a beat, he said: "Can you walk me through it?"

"There's a passage behind the boiler room,” she said, taking out her phone to show him the photos. “A panel in the wall that doesn't look like a door at all, easy to miss completely unless you know exactly where to look. Behind it, there's a shaft with an old iron ladder bolted into the wall, original to the building from what I could tell. It goes up farther than my flashlight could reach, and there are breakaway points along the way. Openings that lead somewhere else."

"Into the apartments."

"That's my read.” As she started flicking through the photos for him, she continued to lay out her theory. “There's no other reason to build access points at intervals like that unless they were meant to lead somewhere specific." She crossed her arms against the cold after coming to the end of the photos. "Irene Baxter heard something in her walls for weeks before she died. She thought it was rodents. Hale told us himself there'd never been a rodent problem, just a small bug issue years ago. If she wasn't hearing rats, I guarantee you it was Pruitt that she was hearing."

“And you think Hale might be in on it?”

“No clue. Nothing points to it, really. But…I guess we’ll have to find out.”

Novak looked back toward the building. "What do you think Pruitt was listening for when he was in those walls?"

"Conversations. Routines. Who's alone, who's not, who's got family checking in and who doesn't. He's the super. He already knows which residents are aging in place, which ones have refused assisted living, which ones keep fighting their families about it. If he's got ears in the walls on top of that, he doesn't need to guess. He can hear it straight from them."

"That's a hell of a theory," Novak said, though there wasn't any real doubt in his voice, more the sound of a man testing the weight of something before he picked it up. "How's he getting in, though? You said the panel leads up. Doesn't mean it leads into a locked apartment."

"I don't know yet. There has to be some kind of access point inside the walls themselves, something he can open from his side. Maybe it's behind a vent, maybe it's a panel like the one downstairs. I don't know how many apartments it reaches. Could be a few. Could be all of them, for all I know right now. "Maybe he gets in through the wall, does what he's going to do, and before he leaves through the same way he came in, he unlocks the apartment door from the inside. Makes it look like however he got in, it wasn't through some hidden passage nobody's supposed to know about. It would throw everyone toward thinking about service entrances and stolen keys and anything but the truth." She looked almost regretful when she added: “I figured the smarter move was to fill you in before I started climbing that deathtrap of a ladder.”

He chuckled softly and said, “Good call. And I have to say…it does sort of fit. The lack of forced entry, the locked doors, no one ever seeing anybody on the cameras. It all fits."

"But fitting isn't evidence,” Rachel said. “We've got no prints down there as of right now, no confirmation he's ever actually used that passage. He could say he's never been in that shaft in his life. He could say he didn't even know it was there."

"Could he get away with that?"

"Maybe. It's tucked behind a section of wall that doesn't look like anything. If I hadn't found the scuff marks on the floor, I wouldn't have looked twice at it either." She shook her head. "We need to catch him using it. Or at least find where it lets out inside one of these apartments and prove the connection that way."

Novak nodded slowly. "Where do we start?"

"Irene Baxter's unit. It's the most recent place the killer has struck, and it’s the least likely place he'd be in right now, with the scene still fresh and attracting so much attention. He'd have to be a special kind of stupid to go anywhere near it today.”

"And Hale?"

"We keep him out of this for now," Rachel said. "I'm not ready to assume he doesn't know anything about those passages himself. Maybe he doesn't. Maybe this whole thing has been happening right under him without his knowledge. But I'm not willing to bet the element of surprise on that yet."

Novak glanced toward the building's front doors. "So we go up to six, quietly, and we look. Make no announcement of any kind to Hale."

"Exactly. And I think we wait a while. Hale surely saw us come out and I don’t want him to think there’s been some huge breakthrough. I saw we grab a coffee and circle back in an hour when he won’t be so suspicious.”

“Yeah, I could go for a coffee,” he said, opening the passenger side door of the car for her. “And honestly…I think I’d like to see those photos again. I think the little boy in me is a bit obsessed with the idea of a legitimate secret passage.”

She nodded but said nothing. She was glad he was excited about the discovery of a hidden passage, but for her, she was still sitting with a cold feeling in her stomach and still saw just how dark that passage had been when she'd peered up into it.

CHAPTER TWENTY THREE

Dale Pruitt let himself into his basement apartment a little after 2:00 that afternoon, dropping his toolbox by the door and rolling his shoulder where he'd wrenched it loose under the kitchen sink on the fifth floor. The garbage disposal had taken longer than it should have, a jammed coin wedged sideways against the blades. But it was fixed now, and the tenant on five had thanked him twice on his way out, the second time almost apologetically, as if she'd been afraid of imposing.

He liked that about this building. People here still said thank you like they meant it.

He was also quite pleased that the agents were gone for the day. He'd watched them leave from the front window three hours ago, the male agent driving, the female partner in the passenger seat. Pruitt had stood near the window in the mail room, with its copy machine and several printers, a moment longer than necessary while watching the car pull out onto the street. He’d felt something settle in him that he could only describe as relief. He knew he’d been as helpful as possible yesterday without accidentally revealing his truth. He'd answered every question, and had even taken a risk and told them most of the truth about the service entrance. He thought he'd handled himself well. He thought, if he was being honest with himself, that he'd handled himself better than well. He’d been professional and eager to please.