Notorious

by Allison Brennan

  She desperately wanted to talk to William, but since he’d been arrested late Friday night, there was no way she’d get to him until tomorrow. He might be in jail until Monday.

  She hoped not. Jail wasn’t a fun place to spend the weekend.

  Max finished searching Caitlin’s office, but it wasn’t until the second time through that she saw something just a little off about her wedding portrait.

  She took it off the wall. Behind the portrait was a slight lump, like a second picture was behind it. She carefully removed it.

  It was an ultrasound picture, faded by time. Dated thirteen years ago.

  And the name on the photo was C. Voss.

  Max stared at the image that was unmistakably a tiny baby. Carrie had been pregnant when she was killed.

  Could William have done this? Killed Carrie because she was pregnant? Is that the secret Lindy had found out? That William had gotten Carrie pregnant … Max counted backwards. It would have happened during spring break. While William was not only dating Caitlin, but sleeping with Lindy.

  “Oh, William,” Max whispered.

  But if William had done it, would he have kept the ultrasound behind his wedding portrait? Hardly. Would Caitlin?

  What kind of sick psychological reason would Caitlin have for keeping the ultrasound? As some sort of proof of William’s infidelity? Could Caitlin justify her actions by looking at this?

  Caitlin was just as privileged as William. Carrie wasn’t. Had Carrie threatened William with a paternity suit?

  But William wouldn’t have cared. He’d have gotten a good lawyer and fought it or paid whatever the court said. It wasn’t like he didn’t have the money, and he’d never been so obsessed with his money that he’d have thought twice about paying child support.

  But someone like Caitlin would have hated the idea that William had gotten another girl pregnant. It would have been proof, in her twisted head, that William didn’t love her best. Her competitiveness, her obsession with William—it all now made sense.

  Max might never know why she kept the ultrasound, unless she could get Caitlin to talk about it. Could she even prove that Caitlin was the killer? The gun in William’s den would point to William as Jason’s killer. There would be no way of proving he killed Lindy, but enough circumstantial evidence might convict him.

  Less had nearly convicted Kevin.

  If she laid it out to Nick, he would call Caitlin in to interview, she would get a nine-hundred-dollar-an-hour criminal defense lawyer and he’d shoot holes in Max’s theory. Worse, Caitlin had a way to frame William. It’s why the gun was in his office. Why the victims were his ex-lovers. He had no alibi for Lindy’s murder because he’d been there that night. And he lied, by omission. But if Kevin could find evidence of the parking ticket, someone else knew about it as well. Caitlin? And then there was Andy—the icing on the cake, unwittingly both saving and condemning William.

  But one thing was clear. Carrie Voss was already dead and buried when someone copied her handwriting and sent those postcards to her sister Faith.

  Max had to get Caitlin to confess. William might try to save her, because he’d always felt guilty for cheating on her.

  Max thought back to his secretary. Not guilty enough to stop.

  She called Nick again; again his cell phone went to voice mail. She said, “Nick, it’s Max again. You said I don’t know how to ask for help, but you’re wrong. I’m asking. I’m also asking you to trust me. I have a plan to prove who killed Lindy.” At least, she hoped to have a plan by the time Nick called her back. “Call me.”

  Her phone vibrated and she hoped it was her grandmother with word from William’s lawyer, or Nick returning her call.

  It wasn’t. It was the handwriting expert with a text message.

  I would need to see both originals to make an official determination, but I will give you a qualified yes. Both samples came from the same person. Don’t quote me on it, until I examine the originals.

  Max was right.

  Caitlin Talbot Revere was a killer. How could she prove it?

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Max sat in the great room, drinking a mimosa, the French doors open, bringing in a cool, fresh spring breeze. It was just after eight in the morning, and if Max had set this up right, Caitlin Revere would be walking through the door any minute.

  She only had one chance. If she messed this up, it would be next to impossible for the police to prove Caitlin killed three people. According to William’s lawyer, the police now had their warrant to search the house. The search team would be here soon.

  Max had asked her grandmother to call Caitlin and tell her about the warrant. She told Eleanor that Caitlin was a murderer, and if she didn’t want her great-grandsons to grow up in a house with a cold-blooded killer while their father rotted in jail, she had to trust Max.

  Eleanor said she’d do it. But now, Max feared her grandmother had cold feet. Because it was eight ten and Caitlin hadn’t come home.

  Just as Max was about to call her grandmother and make sure she’d talked to Caitlin, the front door opened and Caitlin rushed into the house. She stopped midstride and stared at Max.

  “What are you doing here?” she demanded. Her eyes darted down the hall. Toward her study? Toward William’s study? What would she do first? Make sure the gun was where she’d left it to frame him, or destroy the ultrasound picture she had stolen from a dead woman thirteen years ago?

  Max figured she was here to destroy the picture. In fact, she was betting her life—and William’s—on it.

  “You’re a lot smarter than I ever gave you credit for.”

  “I’m calling the police. You’re harassing me and my family!”

  “It’s my family,” Max said. “And please, call the police. I’m not letting you out of my sight until they arrive.”

  Caitlin glanced back down the hall, but she obviously wanted to know what Max knew. “What are you talking about?”

  “I know you killed Carrie Voss. I know you killed Jason Hoffman. Lindy? I’m not certain about. I haven’t figured out the logistics of how you killed Lindy and Carrie on the same night.”

  “You’re insane.”

  “I’ve been called worse.” Max sipped her mimosa. She’d only put a dollop of champagne in the glass, needing her full wits about her, but she wanted Caitlin to feel like she had the upper hand. That Max was sitting here drinking as she often did, casually. Chitchat. The Taser was accessible, but that was only if absolutely necessary. She needed Caitlin to confess. She wanted to believe in the system, that there wasn’t enough evidence to convict William, but sometimes the system failed. And sometimes the system hiccupped. And there were some people, like Kevin, who would die in limbo, neither guilty nor innocent.

  Max didn’t want William to live in limbo. She had to settle this now.

  “You broke into my house, you’re drinking my champagne, and you’re making awful accusations.”

  Max tilted the flute in Caitlin’s direction. “Thank you for your hospitality. As for the accusations, they are truly awful. Awful crimes committed by an awful person.”

  Tears welled in Caitlin’s eyes. “How can you say that about William?”

  William? What the hell was she thinking? Max began to see that Caitlin had not only been rewriting history for the past thirteen years, she was rewriting the history of the last thirteen minutes, as if Max hadn’t already accused her of murder.

  Caitlin said, “Do you know how many times he’s told me you’re like a sister to him? How often he’s defended you to the family when you go off and do embarrassing things?”

  “William is flawed, like most of us, but he’s not a killer.”

  “Get out of my house!”

  Max didn’t budge. She took another sip, to steady her nerves. She hadn’t realized how difficult this was going to be. If she blew it, she wouldn’t blame Nick Santini for being angry with her for destroying his case. She’d never forgive herself, either.

  �
�I have a theory about what happened the night Lindy was killed. I’m a little sketchy on the details, but it’s the only thing that makes sense. You followed William over to Lindy’s. Or you saw him leave. Whatever reason, you were so mad because you didn’t know that your best friend was sleeping with your boyfriend. At the time, your ex-boyfriend, but you and I both know you’d been obsessed with William for years. And honestly, I don’t blame you for being mad. William couldn’t keep it in his pants. He was rich, he was good-looking, he was charming. And a horny eighteen-year-old boy. And it’s not like he had a good role model. We all knew Brooks was cheating on Aunt Joanne long before I exposed him. Or, maybe, like you, she knew, but chose to look the other way.”

  “William has always been faithful to me.”

  “No.” Max stretched and put down the champagne flute. She rested her arms casually in her lap. “So you went over to confront Lindy. You could easily walk from your house. I don’t know what she said to you that set you off, or maybe it was nothing, because she was strangled from behind. Maybe you planned it all, heard William and Lindy fighting, and intentionally killed her hoping William would go to jail for it.

  “Then, this is where I’m not sure, but the time line works. Carrie had lunch with Lindy earlier in the week. I’m thinking it was after Carrie’s appointment with the baby doctor. Carrie told Lindy she was pregnant and William was the father. She asked her for advice, why Lindy I don’t know except they’d been on the swim team together, so maybe they were sort of friends. Carrie didn’t know Lindy and William were screwing around behind your back.

  “At some point, Carrie went home and fought with her mother, then said she was leaving for Europe. That bugged me because why would she say that if she didn’t have any money? Either she thought William would pay her off, or maybe Lindy said she’d give her money to leave. Because Lindy, for all her flaws and all her secrets, cared about you, she cared about me, she cared about William. And she knew William would marry Carrie because it would be the right thing to do. If not marry her, then he would support the baby. I know that in my heart because that is the person William is.”

  Caitlin laughed. “God, you should write fiction, you’re so good at it. Or maybe you’re projecting on William what you wish your own father would have done. Oh, wait, you don’t even know who your father is.”

  Max let it go. This wasn’t about her.

  “For some reason—maybe for money or just a place to stay—Carrie goes to Lindy’s house. And she sees you standing over Lindy’s body. She runs and you kill her too. Maybe it’s an accident, maybe she hits her head, I don’t know because the police only found parts of her body.”

  “What? What body?”

  The fear was palpable in the room. Good. Caitlin was getting scared.

  “You left Lindy because chances were, the police would think William killed her and you could have your revenge on the man who betrayed you. At least ruin his life—the same way that Kevin’s ended up ruined.

  “You didn’t count on Andy listening to William pour his guts out about the fight, deciding to go over to the house to console a distraught Lindy. Except, she was dead. Based on the time line, Andy was there ninety minutes after William left. He moved her body, put it in the pool to destroy any evidence, and then two days later, called in an anonymous tip to the police identifying Kevin’s car as being at the school that night. Brilliantly stupid on his part.”

  Caitlin gave out a dramatic sigh and half collapsed on the couch. “They did it together, I knew it, I can’t believe it—I’m sure it was an accident, William shouldn’t go to jail over an accident, should he?”

  “You were never in the drama club, were you? Now I know why.” Max crossed her legs, as if she were having a chat with a friend. “See, Lindy kept a diary. A secret diary, in code. She wrote in her last entry that Hester had returned.”

  “Lindy didn’t keep a diary after her mother burned it when we were freshmen.”

  “You’re wrong,” Max said bluntly. “Andy hired someone to steal it from me when I found it, because he thought it implicated William. It’s only a matter of time before the police find it. Hopefully when Andy starts talking. He’s stubborn that way, but he’ll talk if it keeps him out of jail. You know,” she added conversationally, her eyes never leaving Caitlin’s, “sometimes I wondered if they’re the ones having an affair because what Andy is willing to do for his best friend is over and beyond what most of us would do. William never told him he killed Lindy. Andy simply made the assumption. But it was you. You did it.”

  “Get out!” Caitlin jumped up.

  Max stayed her ground. “Carrie was Hester, sleeping with another girl’s boyfriend. Lindy was furious at first, but I think because Carrie was pregnant, she wanted to help her. And that’s why she picked the fight with William.

  “He told me yesterday, before he was arrested, that Lindy was angry about a girl he’d dated over spring break. I checked with Carrie’s sister—she’d come home from college for spring break. Ten weeks later, she’s back and pregnant. Easy for me to put two and two together; easy for Lindy.”

  “Lindy’s one to talk,” Caitlin said.

  “She had an ultrasound taken when she was ten weeks pregnant, a little peanut of a baby, but obvious, dated May thirty-first.” As Max spoke, Caitlin’s eyes looked toward the left—the direction of her study.

  Caitlin was too stunned to talk, so Max kept going. “What I don’t know is if you knew Carrie was pregnant when you killed her. I don’t think so. I think you killed her because she saw you kill Lindy, and when you were cleaning up your mess, you went through her car and found the ultrasound picture. Maybe you didn’t even know it was William’s baby.”

  “She was a slut. If she was pregnant, it could have been anyone’s baby.”

  “When Andy arrived at Lindy’s, he saw a car he didn’t recognize. That’s why he moved Lindy’s body to the pool house and not her own pool. But when the police arrived the next day, the car was gone. It was Carrie’s car. And you moved it. I called Faith and asked her about the car. She said it had been left at the train station, and they got a call from the police a few days later about an abandoned vehicle. They weren’t worried initially that she was missing because she’d told them she was leaving town. You killed her, left her car at the train station, and waited.”

  “I didn’t kill anyone.”

  Her eyes, again, darted toward her study.

  “Then, when the sports complex was approved, you panicked. What if someone found the bones? What if they were traced back to you? Which made me think you killed her with something you owned and buried it with her in her grave. So you went back to find it. And Jason Hoffman wondered what all those holes were, because you couldn’t remember exactly where you’d buried her. He surprised you that Saturday night, you shot him, and used William’s car to move Carrie’s remains.”

  “No.”

  “Do you know how long I’ve been here this morning? Nearly an hour. That’s a long time. Do you think the police will find the gun that killed Jason in William’s study … or in yours?”

  Her eyes widened. “You bitch! You planted evidence! You moved the gun! You—” Then she realized what she’d said. Caitlin forced herself to calm down. “Nice theory, but William is going to pay for his crimes.”

  “His crime of cheating on you?”

  “All his crimes.”

  “The thing is, I can prove he didn’t kill Jason Hoffman.”

  “No, you can’t.”

  “I called his secretary, Minnie—nice girl, very pretty, very smart, but no common sense, a lot like William—and asked about his car. She said that your Range Rover had been in the shop after a fender bender the day before Thanksgiving, so you were driving William’s BMW for the week. Why? Because he flew to New York Sunday for a business trip.”

  “That’s the day after that man was killed.”

  “His name was Jason,” Max snapped. “Jason Hoffman. He was twenty-three and had a grea
t life and a family who loved him.” She paused, got herself back on track. “Minnie also had a hotel receipt for Saturday night because William was flying out early Sunday morning and stayed near the airport. Why? Because he wanted one last night with Minnie before he left.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “It’s ironic, isn’t it, that William’s mistress is going to be his alibi.”

  She was watching Caitlin closely. Because Max had made all that up. Not the business trip—that was true—but the hotel. According to Minnie, William had taken the 6:00 A.M. flight out of SFO, which meant he likely left his house at four in the morning.

  Max was counting on Caitlin not having seen William that morning and there was a chance he could have left earlier than he needed to.

  “Then she’s lying,” Caitlin said. “Now, I’m calling the police.”

  She strode down the hall toward her study.

  Max grabbed her purse and followed.

  Caitlin burst into her study and went right for her wedding picture. Instead she stared at a blank wall.

  She turned around and shouted, “Where is it? Where’s my picture?”

  “Why?”

  “You bitch! You don’t know anything!”

  Caitlin lunged for her, but Max sidestepped away.

  “What don’t I know?” Max said. “Did I get something wrong?”

  “Do you know what it’s like loving someone who doesn’t love you? I’ve done everything for William. Everything. I love him so much and he hurts me again and again. Why am I not enough for him?”

  Max wanted to say something cutting, but she needed Caitlin to go on. Because Max knew she had a lot of holes in her theory, and hoped Caitlin would fill them in. She needed Caitlin to confess. Right now it was all circumstantial.