CHAPTER FIVE
Finding Paul Garrett took the better part of an hour.
Carol's phone was still in evidence processing, but the officer who had catalogued it that morning was able to pull the contact they needed without releasing the device.
There was indeed a Paul Garrett in Carol's recent calls.
There had been three exchanges over the past two weeks, the most recent one from four days ago.
A reverse lookup on the number returned a residential address in a neighborhood about twelve minutes west of Carol's.
Kate called ahead. She identified herself, kept it brief, and told him only that they needed to speak with him in person regarding Carol Paige.
There was a long silence on the other end before Garrett said he was home and they could come now.
As Sloane drove to the address, Kate watched the neighborhood change as they moved west, the streets widening slightly and the houses gaining an extra ten or fifteen years of age—but in a good way, with bigger trees and deeper yards.
She was thinking of what might be the best way to tell a man that the woman he'd had dinner with the night before was dead.
Garrett answered the door before they had finished coming up the porch steps.
He was in his late fifties, with a lean build and gray at the temples.
He was dressed like a man who had been home all morning without plans: dark jeans, a flannel shirt, and reading glasses pushed up on top of his head.
He looked at their credentials with the careful attention of someone who wanted to make absolutely sure he wasn’t being scammed in some way, and then let them in.
The living room was comfortable and clean, with full bookshelves along one wall and a muted news program on the television that he crossed the room to turn off before they sat.
He took the chair across from them and sat forward with his elbows on his knees.
He looked curious, but there was a deep worry settled beneath it.
"What happened?" he asked. His voice was level but his jaw was tight. “Is she okay?”
"Mr. Garrett, Carol Paige was found dead in her home early this morning," Kate said. "We're very sorry."
The color left his face. He sat back in the chair slowly, as though something had gone out of him, and he looked at the middle distance between himself and Kate for several seconds without speaking. She saw the chance to slip right into denial come and go as he then decided to settle on shock.
"Dead?" he said, finally.
"Yes. I'm sorry."
He pressed one hand over his mouth briefly and looked at the floor. When he looked back up, his eyes were glassy but he was holding himself together. "How?"
"We're not able to share the details of the investigation yet, but we can tell you that it seems to be a murder," Sloane said. "But we do need to ask you some questions about last night, if you're up to it."
He nodded. He laced his fingers together in his lap and nodded again, more firmly, as if giving himself permission to do this. "Yeah. Okay. Go ahead."
"Walk us through the evening as soon as you saw her," Kate said. "From the beginning."
"We met at Clementine's… that restaurant over on Broad.
" He said it with a precision that suggested he was anchoring himself in facts, trying to cling to them rather than obsessed over the terrible news he’d just received.
"We met at seven. We'd been talking on the app for a few weeks and this was the first time we'd actually met in person.
" He exhaled, shaking his head in disbelief.
"It went well. Really well, I thought. We were there for almost two and a half hours.
It didn't feel like two and a half hours, though.
I thought about asking her to go somewhere else…
maybe a bar for a drink to cap the night off. "
"What time did you leave the restaurant?"
"Around 9:15 or so. We walked out together and stood in the parking lot for a few minutes talking. Then she got in her car and I got in mine. I uh… I asked if I could call her in a few days. She said yes. That was the last thing we said to each other."
"Did you follow her? Drive behind her at any point?"
"No." He said it without offense. I noted that she went east down Broad… the exact opposite direction I needed to go. She turned left out of the lot. I turned right. I came straight home."
"What time did you get in?"
"I don’t know, exactly. 9:50 maybe. Somewhere around there.
I remember I came in and looked at the game for a little while, texted my son, and went to bed around eleven.
" He stopped and looked at Kate with a directness that wasn't defensive so much as earnest. "I know what you need to establish.
That's fine. I want to help. Just tell me what you need. "
Sloane had her phone out, making notes. "Is there anyone who can confirm you were home from roughly 10:00 onward?"
Garrett stood without a word and gestured for them to follow.
He led them through the living room and into a short hallway near the front door, where he pulled out his own phone and opened an app Kate recognized as a doorbell camera system.
He scrolled back through the previous night's clip history and turned the screen toward them.
The footage was clear enough. A timestamp in the upper corner read 9:52 PM as Garrett's car pulled into the driveway.
The exterior light tripped on automatically as he got out, and he walked to the front door and went in.
The camera logged no further motion at the front of the house until 10:10, when Kate and Sloane had arrived.
"The back of the house has one too," he said, scrolling to a second feed. "Nothing on it after about eight yesterday morning when I took the recycling out." He looked up from the phone, his eyes still slightly glassy. "I didn't go anywhere after I came home. I was here all night."
Kate looked at the timestamps carefully. Sloane leaned in beside her, doing the same. The footage was straightforward and unedited as far as Kate could tell. Coming directly from the app itself, she was quite sure it couldn’t be manipulated, anyway.
"We may need to request that footage formally," Kate said.
"Take it," Garrett said. "I'll send you whatever you need right now if you tell me how.
" He was not performing cooperation. He was a man with nothing to hide who had just been told that a woman he’d genuinely liked was dead.
Kate thought he was doing an admirable job of trying to fill both of those roles at the same time.
They went back to the living room and sat again. Kate asked for specifics of their conversation at dinner in detail. She asked if Carol had mentioned anyone she was concerned about, whether she had seemed distressed or preoccupied at any point in the evening.
"Not at all. In fact, she seemed very happy," he said.
It came out quietly as it was becoming clear that he was now trying to understand how something like this could have happened.
"She seemed really happy. She talked about her job, about a reading program she runs for kids at the library.
And she was funny… even when she briefly mentioned the divorce.
Just briefly, not in a heavy way. She said she'd been on her own for a while and that this was the first time in a long time that she'd actually been looking forward to something. "
Kate let that sit for a moment before she continued. "Did she mention anyone from her personal life? Family, friends, anyone she was having difficulty with?"
"She talked about her neighbor. Deb. She said Deb was one of her closest friends. She mentioned her daughter too. but not much." He shook his head. "Nothing that sounded like a problem. It was a good evening. It was a normal, good evening."
They stayed another ten minutes, covering the timeline once more from a different angle, asking whether he had noticed anyone else in the restaurant parking lot when they left, and if Carol had seemed to notice anything or anyone at dinner or in the parking lot.
They got negative responses in both cases.
Before they left, Garrett sent the doorbell footage from both cameras to Sloane's Bureau email directly from the app.
On the porch, Garrett held the door and looked at Kate with the expression of a man who wanted to ask something and wasn't sure he had the right. "Did she suffer?" he asked.
"I can't speak to that," Kate said. "I'm sorry."
He nodded once and sadly watched them as they made their way back to the car.
They walked back without hurrying. The street was quiet, being mid-morning on a Tuesday. The only sound worth noting was a dog barking somewhere behind a fence on the other side of the street.
"That camera footage looks solid," Sloane said once they were inside the car with the doors closed.
"It does."
"So does he, generally." She pulled up the footage on her phone again, scrolling through the timestamps with her thumb. "But I'm not ready to close it out on him yet."
"Neither am I," Kate said. "He was almost certainly the last person to see her alive.
That matters regardless of how clean the alibi looks.
" She thought about the parking lot outside Clementine's, the two of them standing there around 9:30, saying goodnight while Carol still had an hour or so of her life remaining.
"We need to pull the restaurant's exterior camera.
See if the lot looks the way he described it. "
Sloane was already typing a note into her phone. "I'll get someone on that." She set the phone down and looked up through the windshield. "He seemed genuinely shaken."
"He was," Kate said. "But that doesn't tell us much either way."
Sloane started the car. "So, we've got a victim with no apparent enemies, a neighbor who discovered the body and has no useful information about the night itself, and a date with a doorbell camera and what appears to be a clean alibi.
" She pulled away from the curb, lost deep in thought.
"The back door is still the most interesting thing we have. "
Kate agreed, but she was also thinking about something else.
She was thinking about the way Carol Paige's house had looked when they walked through it that morning.
The tidiness of it, the wine glass, the lamp left on.
Someone had come through that back door with the specific knowledge that it would be unlocked, and Carol had likely just been expecting her friend to come through it.
That detail had been bothering Kate since the moment, she'd stood in that living room, and it was bothering her still. And it got her to thinking: who else knew she left that door unlocked?