CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The vase, which had been shattered in the space between Irene Baxter’s kitchen and living area, had held dahlias.
Rachel could tell by the few that hadn't been crushed when it hit the floor, their stems bent and the blooms gone rust-colored at the edges from sitting in spilled water overnight.
The vase itself was in four large pieces, surrounded by smaller chips of white ceramic and a dark stain where the water had spread on the hardwood.
The flowers were scattered around it in a rough arc, which told her the vase had come off something at height and gone wide when it fell.
The rest of the kitchen was orderly, though. The coffee maker on the counter had been set up for the morning, grounds measured, the carafe in place. A phone lay on the floor near the stove, face up, screen dark.
Irene Baxter was on the floor between the counter and the doorway to the bedroom.
She was on her back, her left arm extended and her right drawn in close to her side.
The ME had arrived just before Rachel and Novak.
He was a compact man named Trevorswhom Rachel had worked with twice before.
He was crouched beside the body with his kit open.
Rachel’s first glimpse of Irene over Trevors’ shoulder showed a clear suggestion that she had been strangled.
The bruising at her neck was unmistakable.
Rachel stood in the kitchen doorway and took it in.
Novak was behind her, looking over her shoulder toward the bedroom.
She followed his gaze and saw that the door had been pushed back against the wall, but the handle plate had a fresh gouge in the paint near the latch.
She didn’t think it was a forced entry mark, more like something had caught it hard in passing.
Rachel looked at the arc of the dahlias again, at the dried stain, at the phone on the floor.
She'd fought back. That was the first clear read on the room.
The previous scenes had been tidy in the horrible, deliberate way of attacks that had gone entirely according to plan.
But this one had not gone according to plan.
Something had been interrupted or misjudged, and Irene Baxter had done her very best to put up a fight.
Rachel pulled out her phone and photographed the floor, the counter, the vase, the phone.
She stepped carefully around the edge of the stain and crouched near the doorway, looking at the angle from there.
She could see a faint scuff on the lower cabinet below the counter, a rubber-soled mark at about knee height.
"She went down here first," Rachel said, more to herself than to Novak. "Then moved, or was moved."
Trevors looked up briefly. "There's bruising on her abdomen inconsistent with a fall.
Something struck her there, I'd say, before she went down.
I won't know the specifics until I get her on the table, but she didn't just slip.
I imagine she was punched." He looked back at Irene and said, "Time of death, preliminary and loose, is somewhere between nine and eleven last night.
Lividity is consistent with her position, meaning she's been here since it happened. "
"No one moved her?" Rachel said.
"Doesn't look like it."
Rachel stood and went back to the living room.
It was as undisturbed as the kitchen had been before the doorway, the kind of room that had been maintained without much sentiment — furniture positioned for ease of movement rather than appearance, a television with the remote on the arm of the chair, a reading lamp angled toward the couch.
A novel was on the side table, a Colleen Hoover paperback with a grocery receipt tucked in as a bookmark about two thirds of the way through.
Rachel looked at the book for a moment, then looked away. “Has anyone spoken to the neighbor that found her?”
“Not sure,” the ME said.
Rachel made a note to find out who it was and speak with them.
She knew the approximate shape of Irene Baxter's life in this apartment from what Novak had read out from Purcell's notes and from what they’d garnered yesterday in speaking with Irene and Neil.
This was a woman who knew everyone in the building and had refused every attempt to be moved out of it.
A woman who had, as recently as a few weeks ago, been the subject of documented, public conflict with her nephew over exactly that refusal.
And that nephew, Neil Baxter, was in the hallway outside.
They’d seen him when they’d come in but had said nothing to him, as he’d been giving a statement to a policeman.
He’d been standing near the wall opposite 6-A with his arms crossed and his face the color of old plaster.
He was still in the clothes he'd apparently slept in.
When Neil had seen Rachel he'd straightened up and started toward her and the officer had put a hand out, gently but clearly, and Neil had stopped.
Rachel considered the years’ worth of documented pressure on his aunt to vacate this apartment.
Arguments in the elevator, in the lobby, in the hallways, overheard by enough residents that his name had come up unsolicited in four separate conversations.
And now Irene Baxter was on her kitchen floor and Neil Baxter was thirty feet away in the hallway, and the optics of that were about as bad as optics got.
Rachel had not allowed herself to run ahead of the evidence on Baxter.
She'd made the call yesterday, standing in the elevator with Novak, that he was too anxious to have pulled off three murders without someone noticing.
She still believed the reasoning. But this scene was not the same as the previous three.
This scene came with a broken vase, scuff marks, a door thrown wide, and a woman who had fought.
Whoever had done it had not been clean or controlled or invisible.
The profile was shifting and Baxter was sitting directly inside the shift.
She heard the elevator open in the hallway and then voices.
A moment later, another cop appeared in the living room doorway with a woman behind him.
She was in her early forties, medium height, with a dark coat still buttoned from outside.
Her eyes were clear and took in the scene with the watchful stillness that came from spending years showing up to scenes like this one.
Her hair was pulled back simply and she had a face that was direct without being hard.
She looked at the room with a single, practiced sweep before her eyes settled on Rachel.
"Agent Gift?" she said, extending her hand. "I'm Detective Purcell."
Rachel shook it. "I've been reading your work all week," she said, and meant it. "Your notes on this case are some of the most thorough I've seen from a local PD handoff. You kept this from going completely cold."
“Yeah,” Novak agreed, appearing behind Rachel. “We can’t thank you enough.”
Purcell gave a small nod, accepting the acknowledgment without deflecting it.
"I wasn't going to let it sit. Three elderly residents in six weeks in the same building, all initially ruled natural causes.
That's not a coincidence pattern." She looked toward the kitchen doorway, taking in what she could see of Trevors and the floor.
"This one's different, from what I understand? "
"Yes," Rachel said. "She fought."
Purcell moved closer to the kitchen doorway and stood where Rachel had stood earlier, reading the room in the same methodical way.
"I want you to know I've been pushing for more overnight presence in this building since the third victim.
I was told resources didn't support it. And building management seemed to think it was an unnecessary measure. "
"That's not on you," Novak said, from his position near the bookshelf. "You flagged it and you pushed. What you did with the ME review on the Osley case, requesting those files, making Farrar look again — that's what got us here before there were six victims instead of three."
Purcell looked at him steadily. It was the look of someone receiving a genuine thing and deciding how to hold it. "I appreciate that," she said. "Though right now I'd rather there were zero."
"So would we," Rachel said.
They spent another twenty minutes working through the apartment together, the three of them moving without overlap.
Purcell asked Trevors a series of precise questions about the bruising pattern and received answers she noted on her phone without visible reaction.
Rachel watched her work and felt the much-sought-after relief of being on a case where the local counterpart was actually good at the job.
It didn't always go that way. Purcell was thorough and confident, and while it was clear she meant business, she didn’t throw her weight around or try to intimidate anyone.
When they came back into the hallway, Neil Baxter was still against the wall. The cop he’d been speaking to was gone, but Neil remained simply sagged against the wall. He looked at them as they emerged and Rachel could see the effort it took him not to come forward again.
Rachel stepped slightly away from the apartment door and kept her voice low as Novak joined her. "We know Shelf was working late last night," she said to Novak. "And we have two other workers that can back that up as well. So I think we can eliminate him from our list of suspects.”
“Yeah, if the time of death holds at nine to eleven, he's covered," Novak agreed, equally quiet.
"Most likely, yes. Which leaves...."
Novak glanced toward Neil Baxter and then back at her. "Baxter."
"He fits the changed profile,” Rachel said. “If the first three were controlled and planned, something shifted last night. Either this one went wrong or the approach has changed. And either way, Baxter's name is written all over the circumstantial side of this."
"The argument for him is obvious," Novak said. "The argument against him was that he was too wound up to pull something off quietly. But this wasn't quiet. Also…I mean, there’s no way to know for sure if all four of these murders are connected."
Rachel looked at the closed door to 6-A, thinking about this.
Her gut told her they were indeed all connected, though there was no hard evidence of it.
Not yet, anyway. She looked back to where Neil Baxter stood.
He was watching them with his arms still crossed and his jaw tight.
His eyes moved between them like a man waiting for a verdict he already knew was coming.
"We need to bring him in," she said. "Not a formal arrest. But we need to talk to him somewhere that isn't a hallway. In private and with the understanding that if necessary, the next step is a formal interrogation room."
"No time like the present."
They walked toward him together, and he straightened considerably when they were close.
"Mr. Baxter," Rachel said. "We need to ask you to come with us."
"You think I did it, right?" His voice was flat and rough in the way of someone who had been crying and had stopped some time ago. "You can’t possibly…you can’t…"
Rachel held his gaze. "We'll talk about everything when we’re sitting down, in private. But we need you to come with us now. This isn’t an arrest, but it can lead there pretty quickly without your cooperation."
He looked past her at the closed apartment door for a moment, then looked back. Whatever he saw in her face, he didn't argue. Maybe, she thought, he could see just how much she was really starting to despise this building.
He uncrossed his arms, pushed off the wall, and said, "Okay, so lead the way.”