The website thanked her for her review. It was her seventy-eighth entry. Lydia believed in giving businesses feedback, for good or for bad. How else could they know what consumers valued and be able to improve? Not to mention, writing the reviews gave her something to do. Lydia loved to stay busy.
It wasn’t just the delicious food and beautiful patio that had made yesterday so enjoyable. She was excited to have found a new friend in Rosemary Dempsey. Lydia had lived at Castle Crossings for twelve years now, and the entire time, she had been older than almost everyone else in the neighborhood. These kinds of planned communities tended to attract young couples, eager for a safe, predictable, homogeneous place to raise their children.
For the most part, Lydia had found company among the self-named “Castle Crossings grandparents,” the parents of the young couples, living nearby to either help with child care or facilitate grandparent time.
But Lydia hadn’t met anyone quite like Rosemary at Castle Crossings. Rosemary struck her as adventurous. Interesting. And, maybe because of the terrible loss she’d suffered, she seemed a bit haunted.
Even so, Lydia could tell that Rosemary had been shocked at lunch when Lydia mentioned her wild-child days in the late sixties. If their meal had not been cut short by the phone call Rosemary had received from that television producer, Lydia might have found a way to fully explain the connection between that part of her life and her current identity as the rule-follower of Castle Crossings. Lydia had seen what life was like when everybody did whatever he or she felt like doing, willy-nilly. After she saw friends overdose, or lose their families to alcoholism, or get their hearts broken because one person’s idea of live-and-let-live is another person’s definition of betrayal, she saw the value in playing by the rules.
Lydia set her laptop on the coffee table and walked to the front window, parting the gray linen drapes with her fingertips. Rosemary’s driveway was empty. Shoot. She was looking forward to another visit.
She was just about to let the drapes close when she noticed a cream-colored pickup truck parked in front of the house next door to Rosemary’s. The driver exited, wearing cargo pants and a black windbreaker. He was probably close to forty years old, with a shaved head. He looked tough and lean, like a boxer.
He was walking toward Rosemary’s yard.
She let the drapes fall but kept a tiny slit open to peer out. Oh, how Don teased her when she did this. They both knew that everyone called her “the nosy neighbor.”
“What else am I supposed to do with myself all day?” she would ask Don. “I’m bored, bored, bored.” Spying on the Castle Crossings crowd, like posting online reviews of restaurants, kept her busy. She found such pleasure in conjuring up imaginary tales from the humdrum comings and goings around these quiet cul-de-sacs. In her alternate version of this neighborhood, Trevor Wolf’s band of teenage after-school buddies was plotting a series of bank robberies. Mr. and Mrs. Miller were cooking methamphetamine in the basement. Ally Simpson’s new rescue dog was actually a trained drug K9, working undercover to expose the Millers’ nefarious activities. And, of course, affairs abounded.
“You’ve got such an imagination,” Don liked to say. “You should write a mystery novel one day.”
Well, Don was at the health club, so he wasn’t around to catch her spying today.
She peered through the crack in the drapes as the pickup-truck man first knocked on Rosemary’s door, then leaned over to check out the view through her living room window. When he turned away and began retracing his steps through the yard, she assumed he was returning to his car. Instead, he turned left, facing away from her, and headed toward the side of Rosemary’s house.
Now, that was interesting. She began conjuring explanations: a burglar who had somehow slipped past security at the front gate; someone affiliated with that television show Rosemary had mentioned yesterday; a door-to-door proselytizer, out to introduce Rosemary to a new religion.
That’s it! Her church. She remembered Rosemary mentioning an upcoming flea market at Saint Patrick’s. She said she was grateful that she didn’t have to lug all of her giveaways to the church herself. A volunteer was supposed to come by to haul them for her. A pickup truck would be just the right vehicle for the job. Maybe Rosemary had arranged to leave the donations behind her house in the event she wasn’t home to meet him.
Lydia pulled on a fleece from the coatrack by the front door. She could help load the truck, or at least say hello on Rosemary’s behalf.
She crossed the street and then followed the same path the man had taken, walking to the right side of Rosemary’s house to her backyard. She found him trying the sliding glass door, unsuccessfully. She remembered how Rosemary had unlocked her front door when Lydia helped her with the groceries earlier that week.
“I told her she really doesn’t need to keep her doors locked,” Lydia called out. “That’s basically the reason most people live here.”
When the man turned, his face was expressionless.
“I’m Lydia,” she said, waving as she approached. “The neighbor across the street. You’re from Rosemary’s church?”
No change in expression. Only silence. Maybe he was deaf?
She stepped closer and noticed now that he was wearing black gloves. It didn’t seem quite that cold to her, but she always seemed to run a little warmer than other people. He finally spoke, only one word. “Church?”
“Yes, I thought you were from Saint Patrick’s. For the flea market? Did she tell you where she left everything? I got the impression she had a bunch.”
“A bunch of what?” he asked.
Now that she was right next to him, she noticed the insignia on the breast of his windbreaker.
“Oh, you’re from Keepsafe?” She knew about the company from Don’s days in the security industry. They were one of the most common providers of home alarms in the country.
At the mention of the company, the man appeared to wake from his daze. His smile was somehow even stranger than his previously blank expression. “Yes, I’m from Keepsafe. Your neighbor’s alarm sent an alert to our local station. She hasn’t cleared it and didn’t answer when we called. We automatically do a home visit to be sure. Probably just a misunderstanding—a dog knocking over a vase, that kind of thing.”
“Rosemary doesn’t have a dog.”
Another weird smile. “I meant that as an example,” he said. “These things happen all the time. Nothing to worry about.”
“Are you sure you even have the right house? Rosemary doesn’t have an alarm system.” That was the kind of thing Lydia would have immediately noticed when she walked into Rosemary’s house.
The man said nothing, but the smile was still there. For the first time in her life, Lydia believed that the danger she sensed was anything but imaginary.
27
After a ritualistic postdinner game of Clue and a nighttime snack of peanut butter on apple slices, Laurie tucked Timmy into bed to the sounds of running water and clanking dishes from the kitchen.
She found her father loading the dishwasher.
“Dad, you don’t need to do that. You already do so much for Timmy when I’m at work.”
“Used to be that cleaning up after dinner was an hour-long chore. I think I can handle throwing away takeout containers and tossing a few plates into a machine. I know how hard you’ve been working.”
She took a sponge from the sink and began to wipe down the granite counters. “Unfortunately, I’m not even done for the day.”
“It’s nine o’clock, Laurie. You’re going to burn yourself out.”
“I’m fine, Dad. Just one more phone call.” Producing the show in California was going to be a bear, but at least the time zone differences made it easier for her to contact the West Coast long after normal people would have stopped working. “Jerry is scheduling interviews with the other participants, but I owe it to Susan’s mother to contact her personally.”
Rosemary Dempsey picked up after two rings. “M
s. Moran?”
“Hi again. And, please, call me Laurie. I was calling to confirm some dates. We’d like to come next week for some one-on-one time with you. And then the following week, we’d like to have each person do a sit-down with Alex Buckley. That will be down in Southern California. Is that going to be possible for you?”
“Um, sure. Whatever you need.”
Rosemary’s voice sounded different—soft and hesitant. “Is everything all right?” Laurie asked. “If you’re having second thoughts—”
“No, not at all. It’s just . . .”
Laurie thought she heard a sniffle on the other end of the line. “I think I’ve caught you at a bad time. It can wait until tomorrow.”
Rosemary cleared her throat. “Now is fine. I could use the distraction. Something awful has happened here. One of my neighbors was found murdered. Police think she was beaten to death.”
Laurie didn’t know what to say. “Oh, Rosemary. That’s terrible. I’m so sorry.” She realized the words were as unhelpful as any that were spoken to her when people learned about Greg’s death.
“Her name was Lydia. She was very nice. She was—well, she was my friend. And they found her in my backyard.”
“In your yard?”
“Yes. I don’t know why she would have been there. They think it’s possible she interrupted someone trying to break in.”
“That’s absolutely terrifying. This just happened today?”
“A few hours ago,” Rosemary confirmed. “Police only just now let me back in my house, but my yard is still off-limits.”
“So it was in broad daylight?” Just like Greg, she couldn’t help thinking.
“The whole neighborhood is in shock. Things like this never happen here. So, honestly, getting out of the house for the show will be good for me.”
It did not take them long to mark off a full day to film in the Bay Area, and for Rosemary to clear the three days they had planned to gather everyone in Southern California. Laurie promised to be in touch about location details for the latter once Jerry had located a rental house for what they were calling the “summit session.”
“Again, I’m so sorry about your friend,” Laurie said once more before wishing her good night. When she hung up, her father was lingering in the doorway.
“Something bad happened?” he asked.
“I’d certainly say so. One of Rosemary’s friends, a neighbor, was killed in Rosemary’s backyard. Police think she may have interrupted a burglar.”
“Was Rosemary’s house broken into? Anything missing?”
“I don’t know,” Laurie said. “The police had just let her back in. It sounded like she was still processing it all.”
Her father was working his hands, thumbs against index fingers, the way he always did when something was bothering him. “Someone tries to break into her house and kills her neighbor, just as you’re looking into her daughter’s murder?”
“Dad, that’s a stretch. You know as well as anyone that good people get hurt for all kinds of absurd reasons that only a sociopath could understand. And the victim here wasn’t Rosemary Dempsey. It was a neighbor. This isn’t even the same neighborhood that Susan grew up in. There’s no connection.”
“I don’t like coincidences.”
“Please don’t worry about this, okay?”
She walked him to the front door as he pulled on his coat. He gave her a hug and kiss before leaving, but as she watched him walk to the elevator, she could still see him deep in thought, working those hands.
28
Leo’s short walk to his apartment, a mere block from Laurie’s, was filled with troubled thoughts. First he saw a woman hunched in the open door of a Mercedes—her back to the sidewalk, keys dangling from the driver’s-side lock, completely focused on reaching for something in the passenger seat. One quick shove—maybe a blow to the back of the shoulder—and a carjacker could make off with her car before she could yell for help. Twenty feet later was a bag of garbage at the curb, a discarded bank statement clearly visible through the thin plastic. A half-decent identity thief could clean out the account before morning.
Then, right in front of his own building, a man was picking up scattered pills from the sidewalk and placing them into a prescription pill container. The guy was probably twenty-five years old. A tattoo on the back of his shaved head read FEARLESS.
Anyone else would assume the man had been a little clumsy, but not Leo. He’d bet the contents of his own wallet that the pills were aspirin, and that Mr. Tattoo Head had just scammed some poor pedestrian and was now reloading for the next round.
It was one of the oldest sidewalk shakedowns around. Sometimes the “dropped” item was an already-broken bottle. Sometimes a pair of preshattered sunglasses. Tonight, it was an open prescription container filled with baby aspirin. The con was to bump into a patsy, “drop” the item to the sidewalk, and then pretend it was the other person’s fault. I can’t afford to replace it. Generous people offered compensation.
Where other people would look down this block and see a woman at her car, a bag of garbage, and a guy picking up his dropped package, Leo saw the potential for crime. The response was completely involuntary, like seeing letters on a page and reading them automatically. Like hearing two plus two and thinking four. He thought like a cop at a basic cellular level.
Inside his apartment, he fired up the computer in the room that doubled as a home office and bedroom for Timmy. It wasn’t as fast or sleek as the equipment Laurie had, but it was good enough for Leo.
He started by Googling Rosemary Dempsey. He skimmed the blog entry that had originally drawn his daughter to the Cinderella Murder case. Laurie had shown it to him when she was first considering the case. The author mentioned that Rosemary had moved out of the home where she’d lived with Susan and her husband before their deaths. Rosemary now lived in a gated community outside of Oakland. Bingo.
He Googled “Oakland murder gated community” and then limited his search to the last twenty-four hours. He found two news entries, both posted in the last hour by local media outlets in Northern California. Lydia Levitt, seventy-one years old, killed that afternoon in her neighborhood of Castle Crossings.
He searched for Castle Crossings and located the zip code for the area, and then entered it into the website CrimeReports. Only thirteen reported incidents in the last thirty days, almost all of them shoplifting. In the map function, he zoomed into the area directly around the gated community where the victim had lived. Zero incidents. He expanded the search to the last year. Ten incidents, nothing violent. Only one residential burglary in an entire year.
And yet today, just as Under Suspicion was getting ready to feature Susan Dempsey’s murder, a seventy-one-year-old woman was murdered outside the home of Susan Dempsey’s mother.
Leo knew that he had a tendency to worry about his daughter, not just as any father would, but as a cop. And the buzzing he felt right now was coming from the cop part of his brain. It was as primal as a lizard on an algae-covered rock, sensing the impending crack of a sledgehammer.
Leo wasn’t being a paranoid parent. He was certain that Lydia Levitt’s murder had something to do with Under Suspicion.
• • •
When sunlight broke through his bedroom blinds the next morning, Leo realized that he had not slept, but he had made a decision. He reached for the phone on his nightstand and called Laurie.
“Dad? Is everything okay?”
It was always the first thing she asked if he called too late at night, too early in the morning, or too many times in a row.
“You said you were worried about Timmy given the production schedule in California.”
“Of course I’m worried. I’ll figure something out, though. I always do. I can fly home on weekends. Maybe we can set up a Skype schedule, though I know that videoconferencing isn’t the same as really being together.”
He could tell he was not the only one who had spent the night worrying.
&
nbsp; “That won’t be necessary,” he said. “We’ll go with you. Timmy and me, both.”
“Dad—”
“Don’t argue with me on this. We’re a family. I’ll talk to his school. It’s only a couple of weeks. We’ll hire a tutor if necessary. He needs to be close to his mother.”
“Okay,” Laurie said after a small pause. Leo could hear the gratitude in his daughter’s voice. “That’s amazing. Thank you, Dad.”
He felt a pang of guilt for not mentioning an ulterior motive for tagging along to California, but there was nothing to gain from discussing his worries. Laurie was not going to pull the plug on the Cinderella Murder at this point. At least he would be there to protect her if something went wrong.
He prayed that, for once, the cop part of his brain was misfiring.
29
Laurie and Grace pulled into the lot in front of REACH’s Palo Alto headquarters shortly after ten A.M. The drive from their hotel in San Francisco had made New York City traffic seem hypersonic by comparison. They had only arrived in California yesterday, but Laurie was already homesick.
Today’s interview with Susan’s former classmate at the UCLA computer lab was the first of the preparatory interviews prior to next week’s summit session in Los Angeles. It had made sense for them to start in the Bay Area, gathering background information before moving closer to both the scene of the crime and the likely suspects. While Laurie and Grace were meeting with Dwight Cook, Jerry would be scouting locations in Susan’s old neighborhood. The plan was to open the episode with a montage of photographs of Susan, interspersed with footage of her high school and childhood home.
The Cinderella Murder Page 10