Page 5 of Her Last Doubt

There was no response…just her breathing, slow and steady.

Rachel touched the back of her hand once, lightly, and left.

In the car, driving home to grab her go-bag, she ran through what Novak had told her. Elderly residents. Same building. Two confirmed. It was thin, but it was enough to feel like something substantial. And with that feeling, she allowed herself some honesty: there was a stirring excitement in her chest, the kind that always came with news of a new, active case—a proper one with geography and crime scenes and a problem that needed solving from the ground up. It had been a long time since she'd had one that felt like more than paperwork with occasional travel. The terrorism arrest had given her about four minutes of genuine adrenaline before resolving into forms and records. Before that, the cases had been solid but contained, the kind that got worked and closed and filed without leaving much of a mark.

This felt different already, and she didn't even have the file yet.

She walked to her car and sat for a moment before starting the engine. She thought about Paige and her composition notebook, the true crime podcast playing through her earbuds, and the study she'd looked up and critiqued on her own time. And now here she was, about to take on a real homicide case with multiple victims. She’d call Jack and fill him in (though he’d know soon enough thanks to his position within the bureau) and Paige would find out, too. Rachel had no idea whether that would unsettle her daughter or simply give her something new to think about. That uncertainty was almost enough to make Rachel doubt her place in this new case and what it might mean for her career and her family.

But this was her job and so far, it had never really failed her. It had been there for her after Peter’s death, it had been there when she’d battled with the tumor. And through it all, as she’d grown, Paige had never resented it. And for now, maybe that was enough.

Rachel started the car and pulled out onto the avenue, the golden oak trees shrinking in her rearview mirror.

CHAPTER THREE

Novak drove with one hand on the wheel, his coffee wedged between his thigh and the center console as he merged onto I-95. He was thirty-eight now, lean and dark-haired, with the evolved confidence of an agent who had stopped needing to prove anything. Rachel had watched that subtle evolution happen over the past few years. It had started with the gradual shedding of eagerness that had occasionally made him exhausting in the early days. What was left was better and more well-rounded. He was thorough, he was calm under pressure, and he had good instincts. Perhaps most importantly, he’d learned to trust those instincts without second-guessing them.

Director Anderson typically called him first now when there was a case he wanted them on. Rachel had noticed it happening and had made her peace with it. Novak was in the field more consistently than she was, and the Bureau ran on consistency. She wasn’t angry about it at all, but it did have her looking to her future and eyeballing how many years she had left with the bureau.

"Three residents," Novak said, as he merged into a flow of traffic that was surprisingly light for this time of the morning. "Six weeks have passed between the first and the third. Margaret Osley, eighty-three, was the first. She was found unresponsive in her apartment five weeks ago. Natural causes, no flag. Then Frank Deluca, eighty, three weeks after that. Same finding. It wasn't until the third one came in—the most recent one—that anything changed."

"Who was the third?"

"Sylvia Marsh, seventy-eight." He reached into the back seat without looking and retrieved a folder, dropping it in Rachel's lap. "The ME on the first two was covering for two jurisdictions and moving fast. There was a different ME on Osley's case. A woman named Farrar, and she found bruising around the nose and mouth. It was faint but definitely there. There was also light petechial hemorrhaging."

Rachel opened the folder. Margaret Osley looked back at her from a driver's license photo, white-haired and composed. "Did Farrar flag the first two?"

"She requested the files. She's not ready to say anything definitive about Deluca and Marsh yet, but she's not ruling it out either."

Rachel turned to the crime scene photographs from the Osley scene. The bedroom was tidy, almost aggressively so. She was quite certain it was the kind of room that had been kept that way for decades. Margaret Osley was in bed, the blankets still pulled up, which meant whoever had done it hadn't needed to move her far.

"Is there anything specific about the apartment building that stands out?" she asked.

"It’s called the Hargrove." Novak said the name with a slight shift in tone that told her he'd already developed a view of the place. "Built in 1924, originally as luxury apartments. And I guess it still is, more or less. It’s right on Monument Avenue with a doorman and everything. It's got forty-two units and a waiting list.”

"Is management being cooperative?"

"Not really. They’re already pushing back. I got a call from their lawyer at eight this morning, before we even had a formal case number. They're calling it a tragic coincidence and making noise about the impact on their reputation."

"Three deaths in six weeks."

"Tragic coincidence," Novak repeated, with no particular inflection as he shook his head. “As for the building manager, he’s been there for years. There are also two part-time maintenance workers, and a custodian.”

Rachel closed the folder and looked out the window. The highway was opening up south of the city, the morning traffic thinning. Fields and tree lines replaced the sprawl of the northern suburbs, the sky wide and pale above them.

"What do we know about the residents?" she asked. "The ones who died."

"Older, all living alone. Deluca had a son in Seattle, Marsh had a kid in Charlotte. Osley's daughter is in Greensboro, North Carolina. None of them were in assisted living or memory care, all three were managing independently." He picked up his coffee, sipped it, and put it back down. "I pulled what I could on the other residents last night. The building skews toward the elderly. There seem to be a lot of long-term tenants, people who've been there twenty years or more."

"No active, promising leads from local PD?" she asked.

"Doesn’t seem that way, though they’re being very cooperative. The lead detective is a woman named Purcell. She's the one who pushed for the second ME review on Osley, so she's not looking to sweep it. But she's also got limited resources and the building's lawyer has already been in her ear. She'll be glad to see us, I think."

Rachel nodded. She turned the folder over in her hands without opening it again. "Anderson's thinking homicide from the jump?"

"Anderson's thinking Farrar's findings are enough to warrant it. Three elderly residents in the same building, over a period of six weeks. He didn't want to wait for Farrar to finish her review of the first two before sending someone."

"Good call."