The young woman behind the high-gloss white desk in the lobby had piercings on the left side of her nose and through her right eyebrow. Nicole resisted the temptation to ask if her face felt crooked.
“Nicole Hunter, here to see Mr. Cook. I have an appointment.” For the first time in nearly eighteen years, she had used her maiden name when she had called. Even then, she hadn’t been certain that Dwight would remember her.
Nicole knew other people who still kept up with their college friends. Her neighbor Jenny had gone to school in New York but organized Bay Area mini-reunions once a year. And she knew from other friends that their Facebook pages were filled with shared photographs and remember-whens.
Of course, Nicole couldn’t even have a Facebook page. It would undermine the very purpose of having a clean slate with a new last name in a new city.
But even without her special circumstances, Nicole wouldn’t have stayed in touch with her college crowd. She never really had friends at UCLA, other than Susan. How lucky she had been to get paired with someone like her—someone who looked after her. She had won the roommate lottery.
It had been just the two of them freshman year. Then sophomore year, Susan had brought in Madison—a fellow actress from the theater department—because they could get a better suite if they took a triple.
It was also through Susan that Nicole had first met Dwight Cook, who would go on to launch REACH the summer after his sophomore year in college.
“Nicole!”
She looked up at the sound of her name. The lobby was designed as an atrium, open from the floor to the glass ceiling three floors up. Dwight was looking down at her from the top of a circular staircase.
Once he had descended to the ground floor, he smiled awkwardly. “You look the same.”
“As do you,” she said, even though it stretched the truth. His face was different—paler, fuller. His hairline was beginning to recede.
But his attire seemed like a retread of her memories: high-waisted blue jeans and an ill-fitting Atari T-shirt that had already been retro when they were college freshmen. Even more startlingly familiar were his mannerisms. The jittery gaze and excessive blinking had been noticeable in an awkward teenager but were even more so in a grown man who was probably close to being a billionaire.
He led the way past the pierced receptionist, down a long hallway of offices. Most of the workers appeared to be in their twenties, many of them perched on top of giant fitness balls instead of traditional office chairs. At the end of the hall, he opened a door, and they walked into a courtyard behind the building. Four people were shooting hoops on a nearby court.
He didn’t wait for her to sit before taking a spot on a cushioned chaise. She did the same, knowing he hadn’t meant to be rude.
“You said you wanted to talk about Susan.”
Again, she wasn’t offended by the lack of small talk. He might have been considered a king of Silicon Valley, but she could already tell he was still the same uncomfortable kid who had worked in the campus computer-science lab with Susan.
He sat affectless as Nicole told him about the show, Under Suspicion, and the possibility that they would be featuring Susan’s case. “Did you get a letter from the producer?” she asked.
He shook his head. “Once Susan’s murder became a story about Hollywood, no one seemed to care that she was also a brilliant programmer. I doubt the producer even realizes we knew each other.”
Back in college, it had taken Nicole a few outings as a trio—her, Susan, Dwight—to realize that Susan had been hoping to play Cupid between her lab partner and freshman dorm-mate. On one level, the pairing made sense: both Dwight and Nicole were off the charts in raw intelligence. And now that Nicole saw it for what it was, they were both—let’s face it—peculiar. They were both projects for Susan, who tried her best to coax them from their shells. Dwight found comfort in computers. Nicole eventually found it in—well, she didn’t like to think about that part of her past.
But after only two dates, Nicole had realized the fundamental difference between Dwight and her. Her oddness was short-lived. She had been young, sheltered, and so busy succeeding that she’d never learned how to exercise independent thought. She just had to find her way. Dwight’s “issues” ran deeper. Nowadays, they’d probably say he was somewhere “on the spectrum.”
At the time, Nicole thought that made her the better catch. But she hadn’t learned the hard way—not yet—how dangerous a young, brilliant woman’s desire to find her own way could be.
“Well, that’s why I came here, Dwight. I’d like to tell the show about your friendship with Susan. How she had another side to her.”
Dwight was looking in the direction of her face, as he had probably learned people expected him to do during a conversation, but he wasn’t really connecting to her. “Of course. Susan was always so kind to me. She looked after me. I was lucky we happened to work for the same professor, or I never would have met her.”
In other words, he felt the way she did about winning the roommate lottery.
“So I can tell Laurie Moran you’ll help with the show? Appear on camera?”
He nodded again. “Anything to help. Anything for Susan. Should I ask Hathaway, too?”
“Hathaway?”
“Richard Hathaway. Our professor. That’s how Susan and I met.”
“Oh, I hadn’t thought of him. Is he still at UCLA? Have you kept in touch?”
“He’s retired from the university, but we’re definitely in touch. He works right here at REACH.”
“How funny to have your former professor in your employ.”
“More like a partner, really. He’s helped me from day one. I’m sure he’d be willing to help with the show, too.”
Nicole wondered whether Dwight found comfort in keeping his college mentor close, someone who knew him before he was a twenty-year-old millionaire on the cover of Wired magazine. “Sure,” she said. “That would be great.”
She almost felt guilty for pulling Dwight Cook into this. He was the head of REACH, a tech company that had become a household name in the 1990s by changing the way people searched for information on the Internet. She had no idea what they worked on now, but from the looks of these grounds, Dwight was still a major player in the tech world.
But that was exactly why Nicole had come to Palo Alto. Frank Parker had become a famous director, but Dwight was a kind of celebrity in his own right. The more high-profile people who were involved in the production, the less screen time the show would devote to the roommate who dropped out after her sophomore year, changed her name, and never went back to Los Angeles again.
• • •
Once Nicole was in her car, she pulled Laurie Moran’s letter from her purse and dialed her office number on her cell phone.
“Ms. Moran, it’s Nicole Melling. You contacted me about my college roommate, Susan Dempsey?”
“Yes.” Nicole heard the rustling of a plastic bag in the background and wondered if she had caught the producer midlunch. “Please, call me Laurie. I’m so happy to hear from you. Are you familiar with Under Suspicion?”
“I am,” Nicole confirmed.
“As you probably know, the name of our show indicates that we go back and talk to the people who have remained literally under suspicion in cold cases. Obviously you don’t fit that bill, but you and Susan’s mother will remind viewers that Susan was a real person. She wasn’t just the pretty girl with an aspiring actress’s headshot. She wasn’t Cinderella.”
Nicole understood why Susan’s mother put so much stock into this producer.
“If you think your show can help bring attention back to Susan’s case, I’m happy to help.”
“That’s fantastic.”
“And I hope you don’t mind, but I took the liberty of contacting another college friend of Susan.” She briefly described Dwight Cook’s working relationship with Susan in the computer lab, followed by the news that Dwight was willing to participate in the show. The
producer sounded thrilled, just as Nicole expected.
As Nicole pulled out of the office park’s lot, she looked in the rearview mirror and felt incredibly proud of Dwight Cook. Susan’s death had presented a gigantic challenge to the lives of everyone she knew. Both Nicole and Keith Ratner had quit college. Rosemary had told her she barely left her bed for a full year.
But somehow Dwight had managed to create something transformative in the aftermath. She wondered if whatever made him different from other people had enabled him to channel his grief in a way the rest of them could not.
She was so wrapped up in her own thoughts that she never saw the off-white pickup truck pull out of the parking lot behind her.
15
Dwight Cook closed and locked the door to his office, located far from most of REACH’s employees. That was the way he liked it.
Dwight constantly felt all these kids looking at him, wanting to know the tall, lanky billionaire who still dressed like a teenage nerd but was nevertheless pursued by several well-known supermodels. His employees assumed that Dwight’s office was isolated because he did not want to be disturbed. The truth was that Dwight could not possibly run this business the way it needed to be run if he made too many connections to the people who worked for him.
Dwight had realized in middle school that he wasn’t like other people. It wasn’t that his own behavior was so unusual, at least not that he could determine. Instead, he was different in his reactions to other people. It was as if he heard voices more loudly, perceived movements to be bigger and faster, and felt every single handshake and hug more intensely. Some people—too many of them—were simply too much for him.
For one year, in ninth grade, his school placed him on a “special” education track, suspecting that he suffered from some form of “autism-related disorder,” despite the absence of an official diagnosis. He remained in regular classes and still dominated the grading curves. But the teachers treated him differently. They stood a little farther from him, spoke more slowly. He had been labeled.
On the last day of school, he told his parents that he would run away unless he could start tenth grade in a new school. No special treatment, no labels. Because although Dwight was different from other people, he’d read enough books about autism, Asperger’s, ADD, and ADHD to know that those labels didn’t apply to him. Each of those conditions was supposedly accompanied by a lack of emotional connection. Dwight, in his view, was the opposite. He had the ability to feel so connected to a person that the sensation was overwhelming.
Take today’s reunion with Nicole, for example. He had forced himself to sit still in his seat across from her, to not touch her. He had a hard time maintaining eye contact because to hold her gaze too long would have brought him to tears. She was a living, breathing, vivid memory of Susan. He couldn’t look at her without remembering the searing pain he had felt at Susan’s kindhearted attempts to play matchmaker between him and Nicole. How could Susan have been blind to the fact that he loved her?
He hit the space bar of his computer’s keyboard to wake up the screen. Every once in a while, misperceptions about him came in handy. Right now, for instance, the physical separation between him and his employees would ensure that nothing interrupted his activities.
He opened the Internet browser and Googled “Cinderella Murder Susan Dempsey.” He suppressed a bite of anger at the fact that even he used Google most of the time as his search engine. REACH was a pioneer in changing the way people searched for information on the Internet. But then Google came along, extended the idea a step or two, and added some cool graphics and a name that was fun to say. The rest was high-tech history.
Still, Dwight couldn’t complain about his success. He’d made enough money to live comfortably for ten lifetimes.
He clicked through the search results. He found nothing new since the last time—probably a year ago—that he had checked for any developments about his friend’s unsolved murder.
He remembered sitting at his computer twenty years earlier, knowing that he was probably among the top twenty people in the world when it came to maneuvering his way around the quickly changing online world. Back then, people still used telephones and in-person conversations to convey information. The police department produced hard copies of reports and faxed them to prosecutors. He had wanted to know the truth about the investigation into Susan’s death so desperately—who knew what? What did the police know?—but his skills could only get him so far at the time. The information simply wasn’t digitized.
Now every private thought had a way of casting a technological footprint that he could track. But he was the founder, chairman, and CEO of a Fortune 500 company, and hacking into private servers and e-mail accounts was a serious crime.
He closed his eyes and pictured Susan. How many times had he sat outside her dorm, hoping to catch a glimpse of her as she led an entirely separate life from the one they had together at the lab? This television show would be a onetime opportunity—every suspect on camera, questioned anew. Frank Parker, the man who seemed to care more about the success of his movie than Susan’s death. Madison Meyer, who always seemed resentful of Nicole and Susan. Keith Ratner, who never realized how lucky he was to have a girl like Susan.
Being on this television show would be a small price to pay. He would know far more than even the show’s producers. Dwight spun his office chair in a circle and cracked his knuckles.
It was time to get to work.
16
Laurie checked the time on her computer screen once again. Two forty-five P.M. Surely Brett Young was back from lunch by now. She had called him yesterday from Los Angeles and left a voice mail with an update. This morning, she had e-mailed him a more complete summary of the Susan Dempsey case. Still no response.
She closed her office door and allowed herself to kick off her pumps and lie down on the white sofa beneath her windows. Flying out to Los Angeles, just to catch Madison Meyer unguarded, had taken its toll. The coast-to-coast red-eye was unbearable, but not so much as being away from Timmy any longer than necessary. She was feeling the sleep deprivation now. She shut her eyes and took a deep breath. She just needed a little rest.
Before she knew it, she was no longer in her office above Rockefeller Center. She was in another place, in a different time. She recognized the playground on Fifteenth Street, back when they still lived downtown.
Timmy is so tiny, only three years old. His legs are straight in front of him, like pins, as he squeals from the swing. “Whheeeee! Higher, Daddy, higher!”
She knows precisely what day this is. She knows what will happen next, even though she was not there to see it with her own eyes. She has replayed this scene countless times.
As Greg pushes his son once more on the swing, he lets out a grunt, feigning physical exertion, even as he is careful not to let his toddler sail too high. As an emergency room doctor, he has seen more than his fair share of children injured during overly exuberant play. “This is the last one,” he announces. “Time to go home and see Mommy. One-minute warning.”
“Doctor!” a voice calls out.
In the last of countless selfless demonstrations of his love for his son, Greg sees the gun and steps away from Timmy in an attempt to pull this stranger’s attention from the boy.
A gunshot.
“DADDY!!!”
• • •
Laurie bolted upright at the sound of her son’s scream.
Grace was staring at her from the doorway, her hand still on the office doorknob.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to surprise you. I knocked but you didn’t answer.”
“It’s okay,” Laurie assured her, even though she knew she wasn’t really okay. Would the nightmares ever end? “I must have dozed off. That red-eye was a killer.” She felt a pang in her chest as the last word left her mouth.
“Really? I slept the whole way and feel fine,” she said.
Laurie resisted the temptation to throw a pillow at Grace’s s
ky-high upsweep. “And that’s the difference between being twenty-six and thirty-seven. Anyway, what’s up?”
“Brett called. He wants to see you in his office.”
Laurie ran her fingers through her hair. Nothing like seeing your boss for an important meeting straight from a nap.
“You look fine,” Grace said. “Good luck, Laurie. I know how much you want this.”
17
Brett’s secretary, Jennifer, waved Laurie past her guard station into the inner sanctum. But when Laurie opened Brett’s office door, she didn’t find Brett alone. A second man was in one of his guest chairs, his back to the door.
“Excellent timing,” Brett declared, rising from his desk. “Look who we have here.”
The second man also stood, and then turned to greet her. It was Alex Buckley. A former college basketball player, he rose at least four inches taller than Brett. She hadn’t seen him for at least a month, but he was as gorgeous as she remembered. No wonder juries and television cameras loved him. She took in his dark, wavy hair; firm chin; and blue-green eyes behind black-rimmed glasses. Everything about his appearance made him seem strong and trustworthy.
She was glad that Brett was now positioned behind Alex so her boss could not see the way Alex was looking at her. It was the way he always looked at her when she walked into a room. Though he was clearly happy to see her, there was a tinge of sadness—almost longing—in his eyes. That look made her feel like she needed to apologize—both to Greg for somehow making another man feel that way about her, and to Alex for not being able to return the feelings he so obviously had for her (at least, not yet).
She looked away before either Alex or Brett could sense her thoughts. “What a nice surprise,” she said with a smile. She held out her hand for a shake, and he leaned in for a quick hug.
She pulled her pencil skirt to her knees before taking the unoccupied chair across from Brett’s desk.
The Cinderella Murder Page 6