CHAPTER THREE
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."
Novak glanced at her briefly. "You sound surprised."
"I'm not surprised. I'm just saying."
He smiled, eyes back on the road. It was a small smile, self-contained.
That was another thing that had changed — early on, he'd wanted her approval in a way that had occasionally been awkward for both of them. He’d tried to remain stoic and serious, sometimes even at the risk of coming off as off-putting.
He didn't need it now, which paradoxically made her more willing to give it.
She'd been resistant to him at first, which she could admit in retrospect was unfair.
He wasn't Jack, and she'd spent the first year of their partnership holding that against him in ways she hadn't fully acknowledged at the time.
Jack was behind a desk now, and that was a better situation for the Bureau and probably for her marriage, even if she'd never quite stopped missing having him in the passenger seat.
Novak had earned his place. It had taken time, but he'd earned it. And as an agent herself, she was very proud of him. She looked out the window again. Richmond was still forty minutes south. She thought about the Hargrove, built in 1924, with a much desired address.
"Is there a management lawyer attached to the Hargrove?" she said.
"Yes. A firm called Ashworth and Vance. I've got a name, a man called Geller. He left me a voicemail that was extremely polite and extremely clear."
"Clear about what?"
"That the Hargrove has been a pillar of the Richmond community for a century and that any suggestion of negligence or wrongdoing would be taken very seriously." Novak's voice was neutral throughout this, though he seemed annoyed. "And yes…he did actually use the word pillar. Twice."
Rachel allowed herself a small laugh. Outside, a sign indicated Richmond was thirty-eight miles ahead. She opened the folder again and looked at Margaret Osley's license photo, then at the crime scene image of the tidy bedroom, the blankets pulled up.
Whoever had done this had likely not been in a hurry; the mostly-made bed with the body inside of it said as much.
There was no sign of struggle, no disturbance, nothing to suggest Margaret Osley had seen it coming in time to fight back.
Someone had come into that room and done what they came to do and left it looking almost peaceful.
She looked over the ME’s notes, taking it all in as Novak checked his mirror and moved into the left lane to pass a slower truck. The ME noted that there had been a bruising pattern around Osley's nose and mouth consistent with suffocation by a soft object. A pillow, most likely.
Rachel thought about this for a moment, hoping the notes from the other crime scenes might help to paint a better picture. And if it did, she just hoped it was clear enough to lead them in the right direction because she did not like the pattern that was starting to present itself at the Hargrove.