CHAPTER TWENTY
The lobby was quiet when Rachel got off the elevator, just the low murmur of Novak's voice and the click of Hale's mouse from the front desk.
Rachel assumed they were still working their way through some of the security footage on the desktop monitor.
Pruitt stood off to one side, his hands shoved into the pockets of his work jacket, watching the screen with the mild interest of someone who expected to be told he could leave soon.
He always looked uncomfortable but he was watching the screen as Novak worked his way through the footage as if he were expecting to see a monster jump out from the shadows.
"Anything yet?" Rachel asked, coming around the desk.
Rachel looked at Hale, trying to gauge his response. When he saw that she was looking, he gave her a perplexed expression. “I…I honestly have no idea what else we can do.”
“Well, Detective Purcell told us you’ve turned down a police presence outside of the building.”
“That’s true. The last thing I want is to draw unnecessary worries from our residents. And if you want complete and total honesty…well, I don’t know that I care for the sort of things that would be said about the Hargrove if word gets out that we have to keep police stationed outside.”
She hated the answer and it made her angry, but she kept her cool. Instead of pushing the topic, she switched to the main topic on her mind.
“Mr. Hale, has the Hargrove ever had a rodent problem?"
He blinked at her, his expression shifting into something close to offense. He’d clearly not been expecting such a question. He nearly looked offended at the mere idea of such a thing. "No. Never. This building's maintained to a higher standard than that."
"Irene Baxter thought she heard mice in her walls. She told Pruitt and from what I understand, she told you as well at some point. More than once.”
"We had a little bug situation a few years back," Hale said. "Around 2020. Nothing serious. Some ants in the laundry room, a couple of complaints about silverfish on the third floor. We had it handled inside a week. But rats…no. Never."
"So why would Mrs. Baxter think she had mice?"
Hale shrugged, a quick, irritated motion.
"No idea. She complained about it a couple times, sure. But nobody ever found anything. I had asked Dale to maybe contact an exterminator just to say we’d done something.
But we’ve never even seen droppings or chew marks anywhere in this building since I’ve been running the place. ”
"So her complaints just sat there," Rachel said. "Nobody really followed up."
"There wasn't anything to follow up on," Hale said, starting to grow exasperated. "You can't chase a sound. People hear pipes, they hear the building settle, they decide it's mice. It happens everywhere."
"Did you tell her that?"
"I told her we'd keep an eye out." He said it flatly, like the matter was closed and had been closed for some time.
Rachel let that sit for a second, combing through the unclosed loops of the case and deciding where to go next.
She brought forward what they’d learned about the service entrance in the back the day before and how she and Novak had planned to ask to see it and the adjoining corridors.
She had the question on the tip of her tongue, intending to ask him to take her down to the service entrance, to show them the corridors—particularly the one he’d told them ran along a significant stretch without a security camera present.
The question was right there, half-formed, when something else surfaced instead, something that had been sitting under the investigation since the first day without quite breaking the surface.
She looked across the lobby toward the elevator bank, then toward the door that led down to the basement units.
Dale Pruitt's apartment was down there, off a separate hallway behind the laundry room and the boiler.
She'd seen inside it and had been struck by the weird isolation of it.
It had struck her as a strange layout then, though she hadn't been able to say why, and she hadn't had time to think about it before the case had pulled her toward other things.
The basement had its own elevator and set of stairs, which she’d used once, on her only trip down there.
It was separate from the standard elevator and stairwells that served the residential floors.
To get from his apartment to any of the units above, Pruitt would have to ride that elevator up to the lobby, walk across the lobby floor itself, and then take the main elevator the rest of the way up.
There was no other route between the two halves of the building…
at least not one that anyone had mentioned to her.
It was an odd way to house a building superintendent, separating him from the residents he served by an entire public floor he had to cross every single time something needed fixing.
She supposed most of the reasoning for it came from the old design of the building.
She wasn't sure yet what bothered her about it.
Maybe it was just the inefficiency, the idea that a man who was supposed to respond quickly to leaks and stuck doors and broken locks had to walk through the most visible, most watched part of the building to do his job.
A building this old, this carefully maintained, usually had its service routes worked out so the staff stayed out of sight as much as possible.
The Hargrove prided itself on that kind of discretion.
Residents weren't supposed to see deliveries in progress, weren't supposed to be reminded that the building required constant, unglamorous upkeep behind the scenes.
And yet the man responsible for most of that upkeep had no way to move through his own building without crossing the most public room in it, every single time.
Or maybe it was something else, something she hadn't put a name to yet.
Either way, the thought had a definite shape to it now, and she didn't want to let it go before she understood it.
"Agent Novak," she said. "Can you pull up the footage from the night Sylvia Marsh was killed?"
He glanced at her, then back at the screen. "Sure. What time?"
"Start around six and run it forward."
Novak typed something in, doing it with the slow caution that showed he wasn’t yet familiar with the Hargrove’s system.
After a few seconds, the footage shifted and the night of Marsh’s murder appeared; the timestamp reset in the corner of the frame.
The lobby on the monitor looked almost identical to the one Rachel was standing in now: the same chandelier, the same dark wood paneling, the same brass mail cubbies along the far wall.
A resident crossed from the elevator to the front door, paused to check the weather through the glass, and went out.
A few minutes later someone came in with a grocery bag and rode the elevator up.
The image had the slightly washed-out quality of a camera that had been recording the same square footage for years.
The color was a little flat, the edges of the frame darker than the center.
Rachel knew, without saying it out loud, that Pruitt's alibi for that night placed him on the fourth floor, helping two tenants with a leaking bathtub.
The tenants had already confirmed it, separately and without prompting.
Novak had checked. It had never been in question, not once, in a day and a half of looking at everyone else.
But to get to the fourth floor from his basement apartment, Pruitt would have had to come up that back elevator and cross this exact stretch of lobby floor.
In doing so, he would have to be in full view of this exact camera.
There was no way around it. The known layout of the building didn't allow for anything else.
They watched the footage in real time, the timestamp ticking forward in the corner. 6:15 turned to 6:40, then 7:00 came and went. A couple came through with a small dog, the dog stopping to sniff at the base of a planter before being tugged along. By 7:20, nothing else had happened.
They kept watching as the night progressed in an uneventful haze.
The lobby sat mostly still on the screen, the occasional resident passing through on their way somewhere else, none of them Pruitt.
The front desk in the footage was empty; Hale must have stepped away from it at some point that evening.
A delivery driver came through with a stack of boxes around 8:20 and left less than a minute later.
At 9:06, an elderly man Rachel didn't recognize crossed slowly from the elevator to the mail cubbies, checked an empty box, and shuffled back.
Otherwise, the room held still, the chandelier throwing the same pool of light with nothing of note happening.
When it came to be 11:25 on the screen, Rachel’s growing theory evolved just a bit further. "He's not here," she said.
"Maybe he came up before six," Hale offered, leaning in to look at the timestamp. "He'd been working in the building most of the day."
"Yes, but he claims the call on the bathtub on the fourth floor was around eight or so.
And you saw the same thing we did: he never came across the lobby.
He'd still have had to cross this lobby to get from his apartment to the fourth floor.
There's only the one way up from down there.
Unless I'm wrong about that." She looked at him squarely as she said this.
"You're not wrong," Hale said. "The basement elevator only goes to the lobby. Always has, far as I know. It's an old building, built that way long before any of us were here." A gravely thoughtful look came across his face and he added, “But…well, I’m not exactly sure what you’re getting at here.”
Rachel kept her eyes on the monitor, watching the empty stretch of lobby floor cycle through another few minutes of nothing. The camera confirmed that Dale Pruitt hadn't crossed the lobby to get to the fourth floor, but the fourth floor residents confirmed he had showed up.
Both of those things couldn't be true at the same time, not unless there was a way between the basement and the upper floors that didn't run through the spot where she was currently standing. And that sudden clarity pulled at her like a puppeteer’s strings.
"Excuse me a second," she said.
And before either Novak or Hale had time to ask what she was thinking, Rachel had already turned away and headed for the basement elevator.