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.”
"We appreciate your help with it all," Novak said, and Rachel could tell he mostly meant it.
"I also gave them each my word that this was voluntary." Hale's eyes moved to Rachel. "I want to be clear that I told them that."
"It is voluntary," Rachel said. "Which residents were you thinking we'd start with?"
He slid a handwritten list across the desk. There were eight names, unit numbers beside each one, floor noted in a third column. Rachel picked it up and looked at it, then passed it to Novak.
"Is there anything we should know going in?" she asked. "Anyone who was close to the victims, anyone who had issues with any of them?"
Hale considered this with a care that told her he'd already been considering it. "This is a building where people have lived alongside each other for a long time. There are friendships and little communities. But there are also…histories."
"We'll keep that in mind," Rachel said. “Thanks again.”
Hale only nodded solemnly as Rachel and Novak turned for the door.
***
They started on the fourth floor, with a woman named Val Dixon.
Val answered her door in a cardigan and reading glasses.
She looked at their credentials for approximately one second before waving them in.
She was seventy-four years old and had lived in 4-D for nineteen years.
She invited them in warmly, and they found her apartment the textbook illustration of an elderly woman living by herself.
There were small bookshelves on every wall, a writing desk near the window buried under correspondence, and the smell of tea coming from the kitchen.
As soon as they entered, a cat appeared from behind the couch and assessed them briefly before going back to its business.
"I've been expecting someone," Val said, settling into the chair across from them with her hands in her lap. "After Sylvia, I thought…well, I thought there'd be questions."
"Did you know Sylvia Marsh well?" Rachel asked.
"Well enough. We had coffee on Thursdays, most weeks.
She was a librarian for thirty years, so she had opinions about books, which I appreciated.
" She paused, and her eyes went distant, as if she was trying to gaze back into the past. "We'd had a falling out, actually, about four months ago.
Nothing dramatic. A misunderstanding over something she felt I'd said to another resident.
We were in the process of getting past it. "
"What was the misunderstanding about?" Novak asked.
"It doesn't matter now, does it?" It wasn't quite a question, and her tone remained polite. She smoothed the front of her cardigan. "I feel guilty about it. I'd rather not say."
Rachel let it go for the moment. "Did you know Frank Deluca or Margaret Osley?"
"Frank I knew to say hello to, but that’s about it.
He kept to himself after his wife passed.
But yes, I did know Margaret reasonably well.
She was on the floor committee for the building's centennial event last year.
Very organized woman." She looked at the cat, who had gone to sleep on a patch of sunlight that had come through the window and slanted on the hardwood floor.
"They were good people. All three of them were good people. "
"Is there anyone in the building you're aware of who had problems with any of them? Any ongoing disputes?"
Val tilted her head slightly. "There's always something in a building like this.
People get territorial about storage units and parking and whether someone's dog is too loud in the hallway.
" She hesitated here, and Rachel could see her carefully choosing her words.
"But if you're asking about anything more significant — the only name that comes to mind is Neil Baxter.
And that's not really about any of your three victims."
"What's it about?" Rachel asked.
"His aunt, Irene Baxter. She lives in 6-A.
She's been here almost as long as I have.
Neil has been after her for the better part of a year to move into assisted living.
He lives here, too, you know. He swings by her place from time to time and argues with her about it.
From what I hear through the Hargrove grapevine, he's written to Hale about it twice.
Last month he brought a brochure, and she apparently threw it back at him.
" A small, satisfied look crossed her face.
"Irene is not a woman who responds well to being managed. "
"Has it stayed between them?" Novak asked.
"Mostly. But in a building this size, nothing stays entirely between anyone for long. Rumors and gossip get hurled around quite frequently."
They spoke with her for a bit longer, and the entire time Rachel came back to the disagreement that Val had not wanted to talk about.
She pinned it mentally, knowing that to press a woman like Val on such a thing would not be fruitful.
Besides, if rumors truly did move quickly around the building, surely someone else would have heard about it.
They excused themselves, and Val walked them to the door with a smile. She even rested her hand on Novak's forearm as they left. They then made their way up to the seventh floor, where they stopped by apartment 3-A.
There, they were greeted by a man named Bernard Coles.
He answered the door in a pressed shirt and told them he had forty-five minutes before a doctor's appointment and that they were welcome to use all of it.
He was seventy-eight and had the straight-backed posture of someone who had played a sport seriously at some point in his life.
His apartment was spare and orderly, and it smelled of light perfume.
“Do you live alone?” Rachel asked when she noted the perfume.
"No. It's my wife and me. But she's been having migraines lately." He hitched a thumb back toward a hallway off of the living room and said, "She sleeps them off, and she's good for about a day or so, but they keep coming back."
“Anything serious?” Novak asked.
“Not really. The doctors say it’s some sort of gluten allergy. But she refuses to even think about going gluten-free."
From there, Rachel and Novak dove into the meat of the matter.
They asked the same questions and other similar ones that they had asked Val Dixon.
As it turned out, Bernard had known Frank Deluca from the building's informal chess group, which met in the second-floor common room on Tuesday afternoons.
"Frank was a decent player," he said. "He didn't talk much during the game, which I respect.
He was also watching, always studying. Some men want to have a conversation when they play chess and it ruins the whole thing. "
"When did you last see him?"
"About two weeks before he died. He wasn't well by then. You could see it. But he came down and played anyway." Coles looked at the window thoughtfully. "I think he needed to get out of the apartment. You can understand that."
Rachel asked him about Margaret Osley and Sylvia Marsh, and he knew both by name and by sight.
He said he had exchanged pleasantries with each of them over the years, but hadn't been close to either—not people he’d specifically call a friend.
His demeanor throughout was measured and forthcoming, and he answered each question directly without volunteering anything she hadn't asked for.
Then, as she was closing out the questions, he said: "Can I ask…do you think there are more people in this building in danger?"
"We don't have enough information yet to answer that," Rachel said. “But we’re here to make sure that is very much not the case. We want to understand what happened to Mr. Deluca and the others, and right now that's what we're focused on."
He nodded, and though Rachel could sense their conversation ending, she asked one more question. “I’m curious…so you happen to know anything about the gossip around the building concerning Neil Baxter and his aunt?”
He shrugged and a look passed over his face that made Rachel certain that Bernard didn’t give much attention to the rumor mill.
He sighed and nodded slowly. "Unfortunately, yes.
Neil Baxter was in the lobby last week telling anyone who'd listen that the building's management was negligent.
I saw that for myself because I just happened to be passing through, coming back from the pharmacy.
He was saying that Mr. Hale should have flagged something sooner.
" He didn't seem to be offering this as gossip, just as fact.
"A few of the older residents heard him. It frightened some people."
"Do you know Baxter well?"
"Not well. He visits his aunt regularly, I'll give him that. But he's loud about it, and this isn't a building where people are loud about things. Even the rumors stay quiet.”
“Thank you,” Rachel said. “We appreciate your time.”
Bernard nodded and escorted them to the door. “Feel free to come by anytime,” he said. “I’d love to know just what the hell has been going on around here.”
***
After leaving Bernard Coles, they worked through the rest of the list over the next two hours.
Rachel summarized the visits on her phone as they went: a woman on the ninth floor who had been close to Margaret Osley and cried quietly through most of the conversation; an eighty-year-old retired judge on the third floor who told them the building had been going downhill since they'd changed the lobby furniture in 2019 and appeared to consider this relevant; a couple in their mid-seventies on the sixth floor who had lived across the hall from Frank Deluca and confirmed he had grown visibly weaker in his final weeks.
During it all, Neil Baxter's name came up twice more without Rachel prompting it.
The woman on the ninth floor had mentioned him, describing him as aggressive.
She said that on one occasion, he'd cornered her in the elevator to ask if she thought Irene Baxter was "all there.
" He was referred to once again when speaking to the retired judge, who said flatly that Baxter had no business pressuring a woman of Irene's age, and that someone ought to say so to his face.
Rachel noted the name each time. The pattern of it was clear enough — he was generating friction in the building.
People had not only noticed, but they had been bothered by it.
But friction wasn't connection, and they both knew that.
Nothing in what anyone had told them placed Baxter near any of the three victims or gave him a reason to be.
When they went by apartment 6-A to speak to Irene Baxter, it appeared that no one was home. They knocked several times and even called out, but she wasn’t there. They then tried the same in Apartment 2-C, where Neil Baxter lived, but he wasn’t home, either.
By 2:30, they were back in the lobby. The light through the front windows had brightened and changed angles. Rachel stood at the window for a moment, going back over her notes.
"Baxter's name keeps coming up," Novak said.
"For the wrong reasons, though. He's annoying people. That's not the same thing."
"Not yet."
"Not yet," she agreed. "But his aunt is in 6-A and she's in her seventies, and she's being pressured to leave. There’s at least some relevance there.”
Novak looked down at his phone. "Yeah, maybe.
But until we can speak to Irene or Neil Baxter, I want to know who's looked at the security footage from this building and what they actually found.
Purcell mentioned it in her notes but didn't go into specifics.
" He was already pulling up the number. "I'll call her. "
"Good." Rachel glanced down the hallway toward Hale's office. “You do that and I’ll start talking to the other employees.”
The door to Hale’s office was fully closed now, which was a change from the morning.
She thought about the building's layout — ten floors, forty-two units, a basement, a freight entrance somewhere in the back, staff who moved through it daily without anyone paying particular attention to them.
She wanted to know who else moved through it.
She wanted to know the building's circulatory system, the parts of it that kept functioning invisibly while the residents went about their lives.
And she intended to find any secrets that might be hidden away in those hidden places.