Page 9 of Her Last Doubt

He didn’t look surprised but he sat forward, nodding his head. “Can you walk me through that?”

She smiled, glad that even now, as he was becoming a more well-rounded agent, he was always eager to learn more whenever he could.

"It fits Deluca almost exactly,” she said. “Terminal patient, weeks from death, no family present, and he was actively declining. Someone with access decides to move things along. The logic is coherent, even if it's monstrous." She looked back at her phone. "But it doesn't hold for Osley. She wasn't dying, at all. She was eighty-three with bad knees and fading eyesight and her doctor had just given her a clean enough report. There was no mercy argument for Margaret Osley. She had time left. Maybe a good amount…and she wasn’t suffering.”

"And Marsh lands in the middle."

"Right. She was dealing with a lot and the managed care conversation had happened, but she'd pushed back on it firmly. She wasn't terminal. She wasn't in hospice, wasn't on a formal countdown. So I don’t believe whoever did this was selecting for proximity to death. That's not the criteria."

Novak leaned back in the chair, which gave a quiet creak. "Then what is?"

"Maybe what they share is this building. Maybe the age range, and the fact that all three had made a deliberate choice to stay here. Osley told her daughter. Marsh told her doctor. Deluca was setting up home hospice rather than going into a facility. All three had drawn a line and said this is where I'm staying."

Hale's door moved again. A chair shifted on the other side of it, the small sounds of a man trying to hear a conversation from across a considerable distance.

"He's been doing that ever since we sat down," Novak said, quietly enough that it didn't carry.

"I know."

"You want to go poke him a little?"

"In a minute." She pulled the resident roster Purcell had included in the folder. All forty-two apartments were occupied. She scanned the ages Purcell had noted next to each name. "Two thirds of the occupied units are residents over sixty-five. Purcell's flagged fourteen who are over seventy-five." She looked up, not realizing just how odd that seemed until she’d said it out loud. "This building is full of people who fit the general profile of the three victims."

"But if there's a selection process," Novak said, "we don't know what it is yet."

"No, not definitively." Rachel looked around the lobby at the framed photographs, the polished brass, the elevator with its accordion gate. The Hargrove had a quality she'd been trying to name since they'd walked in. It felt proprietary — as though it had long since formed opinions about how things ought to be conducted inside its walls, as if the place itself could think and have feelings. It just had that feeling. But now, with three deaths in six weeks…well, that was a disruption to the building’s usual, quiet elegance.

Hale came out of his office, apparently done with trying to be subtle and sneaky. He walked to the credenza near the elevator, opened the lower cabinet, took out a bag of coffee, and stood with his back to them while he fussed with the machine on top. He did all of this with the focused attention of a man who absolutely was not listening to what they were saying. Then he went back into the office without glancing over, which was a worse performance than if he had simply looked over openly.

Rachel stood and straightened her jacket. "Let's go tell him we want to start talking to residents."

Novak closed his laptop and got to his feet. “This should be fun.”

"And I want to watch his face when we ask him which residents were closest to the three victims."

"What are you expecting?"

"I don't know yet," she said. "I still don’t think he’s responsible for any of this, but I also think he loves this building very much. And he looks like a man that sits on secrets, you know?”

Novak nodded and said, “I thought so, too. But hey…this was your idea. I’ll give you the honor of asking.”

And with that, they walked over to Hale to take the next step in a triple homicide case that seemed to be confined to these very regal walls.

CHAPTER SIX

Hale was at his desk when they came in, and he looked up without surprise. “Is the lobby comfortable enough for you?” he asked, with a bit of bite in his tone.

“Yes, it is,” Rachel said. “Thanks.”

“Is there something else I can do for you?”

“Yes, actually,” Rachel said, matching his fake tone of pleasantness. “We need you to go ahead and let your residents know that we will need to speak to some of them.”

"Oh, I've already spoken with several residents. I was doing that while you were in the lobby. I made a few calls, and even knocked on a few doors while you were in Mrs. Marsh’s apartment. I let people know the situation, gave them the option of speaking with you or not." He folded his hands on the desk. "You’ll be pleased to know that everyone I reached was agreeable."

Rachel looked at him for a moment. "How many is several?"

"Eight units. The ones I felt were most likely to be uncomfortable with an unannounced visit from federal agents." He said it without apology. "I was trying to make this easier, not harder. As for the others—for those who are here, and not at work or out of town—I expect they’ll all be okay speaking with you." He paused and sighed and then, for the first time since they’d arrived, he looked genuinely sad. “The deaths have really brought everyone in the building together.”