CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Though they had returned to speak to Hale to end their day, the sight of Dale Pruitt behind the front desk caught her attention.
He looked a bit out of place behind the low mahogany console near the mailboxes.
He was bent over a clipboard, writing something out slowly.
He looked up when he heard the door and raised a hand in a brief acknowledgment.
Rachel thought she could just be imagining it, but there was the briefest flicker of an expression on his face that made her think he was getting just about as tired of seeing them as Conrad Hale was.
"Agents. How'd the rest of the evening go?"
"We're still working on it," Rachel said. She and Novak crossed the lobby toward him. "What are you doing up here at the front of the place?"
He gave a slightly comical sigh and rolled his eyes. "Just signing off on a parts order for the boiler. Hale wants it on file before the end of the week." He set the clipboard down and leaned against the console. "Anything I can do to help? Do you two always work this deep into the night?"
“Only when it’s necessary,” Novak said.
Rachel looked at him for a moment. She felt a small pull of reluctance about what she needed to ask next. "Actually," she said, "there is something you can help us with, and I want to apologize in advance because I've already asked you a version of this."
He folded his arms loosely, waiting. “It’s fine. Anything you need, really.”
"You have keys to every unit in the building, correct?”
“Yes.”
“And that includes the apartments of all three victims." She spoke it as a statement rather than a question.
The slight shift in Pruitt's expression was controlled but visible. Not quite offense, but something adjacent to it. "Yes," he said. "That's part of the job. I'm the custodian. I've always had that access."
"I understand that," Rachel said. "And I want to be clear that this is a box we need to check. It's nothing more than that."
He held her gaze for a second, then let it go. "All right. Yes. I have a master key that opens every unit. It's standard for anyone in my position in a building like this."
"And can you walk me through how you'd get from your apartment in the basement to, say, the seventh floor?"
He uncrossed his arms and seemed to take the question at face value.
"The basement opens onto the main hallway, but to get to the elevator I have to come through the staff door at the end of the corridor.
From there, you cross the lobby, and take the elevator or the stairs.
There's no direct route from the basement to the upper floors that bypasses this room.
" He gestured toward the lobby floor, the front desk, the elevator at the far wall.
"Anyone coming up from my apartment has to walk through here.
That's just how the building is laid out. "
"And the cameras in the lobby," Novak said, "would pick that up."
"They would have. I wasn't on the footage during any of those windows because I wasn't in this lobby during those times.
" His tone remained even, but the slight emphasis on the word wasn't was unmistakable.
"The detective already looked at this. She was satisfied." He then lowered his voice a bit and asked,” Did you talk to Warren Shelf?”
“We did,” Rachel said. “He’s not cleared yet, but we don’t see him as an immediate concern.” Though in the back of her head, she wondered just how quickly he would be able to deliver his list and his keys. “I just have one more question and then I'll leave you alone."
He gave a small nod. “Okay.”
"Is it possible that someone could have accessed your keys? Borrowed them, copied them, anything like that?"
Pruitt shook his head without hesitation.
"I keep the master key ring on me during the day and locked in a box in my apartment at night.
I've never lent them to anyone and I've never left them somewhere they could be stolen. I truly do protect them at all costs. I’m very careful about it, and I always have been.”
"Thank you," Rachel said. She had no reason not to believe him and the fact that he hadn’t gotten angry about being asked the same thing a second time—only a bit differently this time—spoke volumes in her eyes.
"Sure," he said. He picked up the clipboard again, signaling that he was done with the conversation, and Rachel and Novak moved toward Hale's office.
The door was opened about halfway as they approached it, then pulled wide from the inside before either of them could knock. Conrad Hale had his jacket on and his bag over one shoulder. He stopped short when he saw them in the doorway. He didn’t even pretend to hide the annoyed look on his face.
"I was heading out," he said. "It's been a long day."
"It has," Rachel said. "But we'll be quick. We certainly don’t want to keep you. Can we come in for a minute?"
He didn’t answer right away, and Rachel thought he might be on the verge of challenging them. After about three seconds, though, he stepped back into his office. He set his bag down on the desk chair with a bit of dramatic flair, visibly resigning himself to it.
“We appreciate it,” Novak said.
Rachel started off by telling him about their conversation with Warren Shelf, filling him in on the situation with the keys he still had in his possession.
Hale listened with his hands in his jacket pockets.
His expression didn't change much, but he glanced at the corner of the room when she mentioned that residents had been handing Shelf their spare keys directly without going through building management.
It wasn't an involuntary look; it was brief and deliberate, the glance of a man that was trying to pretend that he wasn’t bothered by this information.
"I was aware that Warren helped out occasionally," Hale said. "In an informal capacity. I didn't think it warranted anything formal from my part."
“Did you know he had the keys of some of the residents?”
“I did not. But in hindsight, I should have kept better track of it." He said it evenly and without much guilt.
Rachel watched him closely. His cooperation throughout what had been, as he’d put it, a long day, had been real and helpful.
He had answered everything asked of him even though he clearly didn’t want to, and had not obstructed them in any way.
But there was a quality to the answers, a kind of pre-measured quality, that she'd been noticing over the last of the day. It was in the slight pause before certain responses, the way he tracked their questions before answering rather than just answering. He wasn't lying. She was quite sure of that. But there was something that didn’t quite fit, and she wasn’t sure what it was.
"One more thing," she said. "Access to the building. We've talked about the lobby entrance and the elevator. What else is there?"
Hale shifted his weight, as if wanting to reach for his bag again and get out of there, but then thought better of it.
"There's a rear service entrance off the alley.
It connects to the freight corridor that runs along the back of the building.
" He said it as though it were an afterthought, something he rarely ever thought of.
"It's used for deliveries and maintenance.
The exterminators use it, the linen service, anyone who's bringing in equipment or taking out bulk trash.
It's nothing unusual for a building this size. "
"Does it show up on the camera system?"
"There's a camera on the exterior door, yes. It covers the alley-side entrance."
"But not the interior corridor."
"No," he said. "Not the interior. There would really be no need for that."
Rachel nodded and let that sit. She looked to Novak and waited for him to give a brief nod before she said, “Well, that’s it. Thanks again for your time, Mr. Hale. We'll be back in the morning."
Hale picked his bag back up and looked as if all the weight in the world had been removed from his shoulders. "I'll be here."
They left him to his exit and crossed back through the lobby. Pruitt had stepped away from the front desk and headed elsewhere into the building. The clipboard he’d been handling was left neatly on the front desk. The lobby was empty now, the elevator sitting open and unoccupied at the far wall.
"The service entrance," Novak said as they made their way to the front doors. "That's a direct path into the building that doesn't cross the lobby."
"And the camera only covers the exterior door," Rachel said. "Not what happens on the other side of it."
"Someone who knew the building well enough would know exactly what that camera did and didn't catch. And that brings us to the same two men we’ve been sort of eyeing already: Hale and Pruitt. And quite frankly…”
“It doesn’t seem like either of them did it,” she finished for him.
She thought about Pruitt, his certainty about the lobby route, and the precise way he'd described it.
There was no basement shortcut to the upper floors that bypassed the lobby.
She believed him on that point. But the service entrance was a different approach entirely, and she'd need to look at where it connected to the rest of the building's layout before she could say whether it changed anything.
She decided that she’d ask him in the morning. And while she had him, she'd ask something else that had been forming quietly at the back of her thinking all evening.
"In the morning," she said, "I want to ask Pruitt about that service entrance. I want to have a look.” She frowned and said, “maybe we should push for it tonight.”
“If you want. But I think it’d be better served to wait until morning. After a small break from us, maybe Hale will be a little more hospitable.”
She nodded because while it pushed things off a bit, it did make a good deal of sense.
On top of that, though, she knew they were going to have to look at other possibilities, too.
Maybe the killer was someone outside of the building, someone with a grievance against the place or the management.
Honestly, it wasn’t too big of a stretch to think Hale had maybe crossed someone at some point.
“Well, I guess we call it a day, then,” Novak said, though he took a moment to turn and look at the grandeur of the lobby. But the look on his face indicated that he was taking it in as if it were a crypt rather thana well-to-do apartment building.
Outside, the cold was sharp and the avenue was nearly empty.
They walked the half block to Novak's car without talking, their breath showing briefly in the chill air.
Rachel got in and the door shut behind her with a solid sound, and Novak started the engine.
As they pulled away, Rachel looked into the sideview mirror at the Hargrove shrinking into the distance and found that, as she squinted just right, it did look a bit like a haunted house, just waiting and filled with secrets in the dark.