The Cinderella Murder

by Mary Higgins Clark

  Laurie shivered as she stepped from the passenger seat of their rental car. She was wearing a lightweight cashmere sweater and black pants, with no jacket. “I always forget how chilly the Bay Area can be.”

  “How do you think I feel?” Grace wore a jade-green silk blouse with a deep V-neck and a black skirt that was short even for her. “I was picturing Los Angeles sunshine and mojitos when I packed.”

  “We’re only here three days. Then you’ll get your time in Hollywood.”

  • • •

  Dwight Cook greeted them in the lobby, dressed in an expensive suit and solid red tie. Based on the photographs Laurie had seen, she had expected his uniform of jeans, T-shirts, zip-up hoodies, and canvas sneakers. She might ask Jerry to suggest that he wear whatever made him “most comfortable” to the summit taping. Looking at him today, he came across as an older version of a child in his first suit at confirmation.

  Dwight led the way through the building, a labyrinth of brightly colored hallways and oddly shaped nooks and crannies. When they finally reached his office, it was absolutely serene by comparison, with cool gray walls, slate floors, and clean, modern furniture. The only personal touch in the office was a single photograph of him in a wet suit and flippers, preparing to scuba dive from the edge of a yacht into sparkling turquoise water.

  “You’re a diver?” she asked.

  “It’s probably the only thing I enjoy more than work,” he said. “Can I offer you something to drink? Water? Coffee?”

  She declined, but Grace took him up on the offer of water. Laurie was surprised when Dwight retrieved a bottle from a minifridge with a Nespresso coffeemaker on top of it.

  “I half expected a remote-controlled robot to roll in,” Laurie said with a smile.

  “You have no idea how many times my own mother asked me to invent Rosie the Maid from The Jetsons. These days, Silicon Valley’s all about phones and tablets. We’ve got data-compression projects, social networking apps, location interfacing technology, you name it—if it interacts with a gadget, I’ve probably got someone in this building working on it. The least I can do is grab my own water and coffee. Nicole tells me that your show has been successful in solving cold cases.”

  The abrupt change in subject was jarring, but Laurie could understand that someone as successful as Dwight Cook operated at maximum efficiency at all times.

  “No guarantees,” she said cautiously, “but Under Suspicion’s primary purpose is to revive investigations, shedding new light on old facts.”

  “Laurie’s being too modest,” Grace said, flipping a long lock of black hair behind her shoulder. “Our first episode led to the case being solved while we were still filming.”

  Laurie interrupted Grace’s hard sell. “I think what Grace is saying is that we’re devoted to doing our very best for Susan’s case.”

  “Is it hard for you, Laurie, to work on these cases given that you lost your own husband to a violent crime?”

  Laurie found herself blinking. Nicole had warned her that Dwight could be socially “awkward.” However, she could not recall anyone ever asking her so directly about the personal impact of Greg’s murder.

  “No,” she finally said. “If anything, I hope my experience makes me the right person to tell these stories. I think of our show as a voice for victims who would otherwise be forgotten.”

  He looked away from her direct gaze. “I’m sorry. I’ve been told that I can be overly blunt.”

  “If we’re being blunt, Dwight, I may as well tell you that there are rumors that you and Susan were rivals at the lab. You were competitors for Professor Hathaway’s approval.”

  “Someone suggested that I would have hurt Susan? Because of Hathaway?”

  She saw no need to tell him that it was Keith Ratner who mentioned the theory during a phone call in which he also condemned Susan’s mother for her long-standing suspicion of him and named everyone Susan had ever met as an equally viable suspect, including Dwight Cook. While Ratner’s theories had all sounded pretty desperate to Laurie, these initial interviews were her opportunity to float every possible theory when cameras weren’t rolling. It was good practice for when Alex Buckley grilled them more closely.

  “It wasn’t just about your mentor,” she explained, “but your actual work. You were working at the school’s lab and then formed REACH just two months after Susan died, quickly raising millions of dollars in investment capital to support your search-capacity innovation. That kind of money could be a powerful motive to get her out of the picture.”

  “You don’t understand at all,” Dwight said wistfully. Laurie had expected him to be defensive, to lash out at her with facts to demonstrate his superiority in programming skills over Susan. But instead, he sounded genuinely hurt. “I, of all people, would never have hurt Susan. I would never hurt anyone over money or anything else, but certainly not Susan. She was . . . she was my friend.”

  Laurie could hear the change in Dwight’s voice every time he spoke Susan’s name. “It seems like you were fond of her.”

  “Very.”

  “Did you know her boyfriend, Keith Ratner?”

  “Unfortunately,” he said. “He never took much of an interest in me, but he’d drop by the lab to meet Susan—when he wasn’t late or standing her up. Let me guess: he was the one who suggested that I stole REACH from Susan?”

  “I can’t say.”

  “You don’t need to. It’s further proof that he never paid attention to Susan’s work. He was clueless as to what she was doing at the lab. Susan never worked on search functioning, which is all REACH was when it started. She was developing voice-to-text software.”

  It took Laurie a moment to understand the phrase. “Like automated dictation?” she asked. “I use that on my phone to dictate e-mails.”

  “Exactly. If you have any doubts, we can clear them up right now.” He picked up his telephone and dialed a number. “The Under Suspicion folks are here. Can you pop up?”

  A minute later, a handsome man in his late fifties walked into Dwight’s office. He was dressed casually in a lightweight madras shirt and khaki pants, but the look suited him well, with his tan and a full head of dark waves. He introduced himself as Richard Hathaway.

  “We were just talking about Susan’s work with you at UCLA,” Laurie said.

  “Such a waste. That sounds cold, I know. Any loss of a young life is a waste. But Susan was bright. She wasn’t twenty-four/seven at the keyboard, the way some programmers are.” He gave Dwight a smile. “But she was creative. Her ability to connect socially—in a way some of us computer types struggle with—helped her connect technology to real life.”

  “I’ll step out for a moment,” Dwight offered. “Mrs. Moran has something she needs to ask you.”

  Once she was alone with the former professor, Laurie asked if Susan had been working on a particular project.

  “It might help to understand how I ran my lab. Computer work can be solitary, so my research assistants acted primarily as teaching assistants for my intro classes. They might also help on isolated portions of my own work, which at the time was in software pipelining—a technique for overlapping loop iterations. And of course you have no idea what any of that means, right?”

  “Nope.”

  “Nor should you. It’s a method of program optimization, interesting only to people who write code. Anyway, I selected students whose own independent projects during freshman year showed promise. Susan’s was speech-to-text, what most of us would call dictation. It was all pretty rudimentary in the nineties, but Steve Jobs could never have given us Siri without basic speech-recognition function. If she had lived—well, who knows?”

  “Did she work with Dwight on REACH?”

  “REACH didn’t exist yet. But she and Dwight worked in proximity to each other, if that’s what you mean. But Dwight’s work was quite different. As you probably know, REACH launched a new way to locate information on the Internet, back when people were still calling it the World
Wide Web. No, that wasn’t anything like Susan’s area of interest.”

  “Professor—”

  “Please, ‘Richard’ is fine. I retired from the academy long ago, and even then, I didn’t particularly care for the titles.”

  “You seem young to be retired.”

  “And I’ve been retired a long time. I left UCLA to help Dwight build REACH. Imagine being a sophomore in college and having captains of industry fighting to get a meeting with you. I recognize brilliance when I see it, and I was willing to support him full-time while he insisted on finishing up at UCLA—to make his parents proud, if you can believe it. I thought it would be a pit stop for me as I transitioned to the private sector, and yet here I am, twenty years later.”

  “That’s nice that the two of you are so close.”

  “It may sound corny, but I don’t have any kids of my own. Dwight—well, yes, we are indeed close.”

  “I get the impression that Dwight might be more comfortable speaking with our host, Alex Buckley, if he has an old friend like you around.” What she meant was that Hathaway would present far better on television than the unpolished Dwight Cook. “Is it possible you could join us for filming in Los Angeles? The current plan is to locate a house somewhere near the university.”

  “Absolutely,” he said. “Whatever you need.”

  Keith Ratner’s accusation of a professional rivalry between Susan and Dwight seemed far-fetched when first offered. Now both Dwight and Professor Hathaway had debunked it. Laurie would confirm with Rosemary and Nicole that Susan had never had run-ins with Dwight, because it was essential that she follow every possible lead.

  But every fiber of Laurie’s being told her that the real answers to Susan’s death could only be found in Los Angeles.

  30

  Dwight was alone again in his office once Hathaway offered to escort the TV people out of their maze of a building.

  He could tell from the look Hathaway gave him as he walked out that he wasn’t pleased with the producer’s questions about REACH, but at least they hadn’t wandered into thorny territory. The notion that Susan had anything to do with the technology was completely off base.

  Still, he wished he could rewind the clock and start the morning over again. He planned to bring up the subject of Laurie’s late husband as a way to make his contact with her more personal. But the overture had gone over like a ton of bricks. When Dwight and Hathaway first started meeting with venture capitalists, Hathaway had told him, You’re just so blunt! I’m talking blunt like a ten-pound mallet. That’s fine when you’re talking to me, but when it comes to money, you’ve got to learn some nuance.

  Their relationship was blunt by design. Dwight’s mind wandered to that Friday night of his sophomore year when Hathaway had stumbled upon him in the lab, catching Dwight hacking into the registrar’s office’s database. Though he wasn’t cheating or changing grades, Dwight wanted to prove to himself that he could slip through the virtual walls of his own university. It was illegal, and a violation of the school’s code of conduct, plus Dwight had been stupid enough to do it on the computer lab’s equipment, which the university often monitored. Hathaway said he believed that Dwight had no ill motives and would defend him to the university, but he felt obligated to notify the administration to protect his own lab.

  Dwight was so upset about disappointing his mentor that he came to the lab late the following night, intending to clean out his workstation and leave a letter of resignation. Instead of finding the lab empty, Dwight found a female student he recognized from the Intro to Computer Science class for which he was a teaching assistant. She was leaving Hathaway’s office. Dwight couldn’t help but think of the campus whispers about the most “crush-worthy” teacher.

  He might have slipped out of the lab, resigning as intended, if the soles of his tennis shoes hadn’t squeaked against the tile floors. Hathaway emerged from his office and explained that he saw no reason to report Dwight’s hacking to the university after all. The administration would only blow the activities out of proportion, failing to understand the natural curiosity of someone with Dwight’s blossoming talents. He forced Dwight to promise, however, that he would channel those skills into legitimate work—the kind that could earn a young man a fortune in Silicon Valley.

  That conversation eventually gave rise to a strange kind of friendship. The student-teacher, mentor-mentee relationship became more peer-to-peer, marked by utter mutual honesty. Hathaway was the first adult to ever treat Dwight like a real person, not like a broken child who needed to be fixed or isolated. In return, Dwight accepted Hathaway, even if he was a little shady. How else would REACH have ever started if he and Hathaway had not trusted each other completely?

  If only Dwight had Hathaway’s knack for schmoozing. Maybe he could have mentioned Laurie’s husband without sticking his foot in his mouth. He hoped he hadn’t offended her so much that she would cut him from the production.

  Once everyone was gathered in Los Angeles, all he’d need was a few seconds of access to each person’s cell phone, and all their texts, e-mails, and phone calls would be downloaded automatically to Dwight’s computer. The problem was, he didn’t know whether they’d all show up for filming at once or if their appointments would be back-to-back.

  Thinking about the Los Angeles shoot gave him an idea. He pulled up the last e-mail he had received from Jerry, the assistant producer who Laurie mentioned was scouting locations near campus. He opened a new message and began to type.

  After hitting the SEND key, he leaned back in his chair and looked at the photograph next to his computer. Hathaway had snapped it three years ago on a dive trip during REACH’s annual corporate retreat to Anguilla. The company had flown every single employee—down to the student interns—for a four-day stay at the luxurious Viceroy. Everyone had gushed over the sprawling resort property and the pillow-soft white sand of Meads Bay, but for Dwight, those trips were always about traveling beneath the water. The picture on his desk was from a wall dive at the keys of Dog Island with a sheer one-hundred-foot drop. He swam with tuna, turtles, yellowtail snapper, even a reef shark and two southern stingrays. Deep in the sea is where his thoughts found calm.

  He stared into the water in the photograph, wishing he could jump through the frame. He needed calm right now. This television show had him feeling all the pain of losing Susan again. And when he wasn’t reliving the pain, he was wired with anticipation about the possibility of finally learning who had killed the only woman he had ever loved.

  31

  Rosemary Dempsey ran her fingertips along the dark gray granite countertop as she paced the length of the kitchen. “It feels so strange to be back here. I cooked in this room almost every day for nearly forty years.”

  Rosemary had put together a collection of her daughter’s childhood photographs and mementos—a blue ribbon won in a science fair, the banner she’d worn as her high school’s homecoming queen. She had even given Laurie and her crew the guest book from Susan’s memorial service.

  Now they were inside the Dempsey family’s former home, where Jerry had arranged for them to shoot today’s interview. This was the kitchen where Rosemary first learned that her daughter’s body had been found in Laurel Canyon Park.

  “I thought it would be traumatic to come back here,” Rosemary said. “But after what happened in my backyard last week, it’s nice to get away from my ‘new’ neighborhood.”

  “Have the police made any progress in your friend’s investigation?”

  “Apparently not. You might have found another case for your show,” she said with a sad smile.

  Laurie could tell that Rosemary needed to ease into a conversation about that horrible morning when she learned of Susan’s death. Laurie shot a look to Jerry, who was lingering next to the cameramen stationed near the sliding glass doors at the edge of the kitchen. He gave her an okay sign. Though they were keeping their distance, they could capture what they needed to get on video.

  “Has the h
ouse changed much since you lived here?” Laurie asked.

  Rosemary stopped pacing and looked around her. “No, not in any obvious way. But it feels completely different. Their furniture—it’s much more modern than ours. And our art is gone. The photographs. All of the things that made this house our home are either with me at the new place or in storage.”

  “If it wouldn’t be too painful,” Laurie said, “maybe you can point out a few details in the house that were significant to your daughter. Perhaps we can start with her room?”

  Laurie wouldn’t need footage from other parts of the house, but a tour through the home was a way to get Rosemary to loosen up and start talking about Susan. The show only worked when they could portray the victim not as a piece of evidence in a mystery to be solved but as a living human being.

  Rosemary led the way up the mission-style staircase to a bedroom at the end of the upstairs hallway. Her hand trembled as she turned the doorknob. The room was set up now as a nursery, with lavender-colored walls hand-stenciled with yellow tulips.

  She walked to the window and fingered the latch. “See how the overhang above the front porch is just beneath the window here? I used to check this lock every single night because I had a fear that someone would sneak in and grab my baby.”

  Next she walked to the closet and ran her fingers along the inside of the door frame. “This is where we used to chart her growth, drawing a new line for every birthday. They’ve painted it over since then, but I swear, you can still seem them. See? Faint little lines.”

  Laurie looked over Rosemary’s shoulder and smiled, even though all she saw was clean white paint.

  When they were back in the kitchen and in front of the cameras, Laurie felt like Rosemary was ready. “Please,” Laurie encouraged gently, “tell us how you learned about your daughter’s murder.”

  Rosemary nodded slowly. “It was the weekend of Jack’s sixtieth birthday. We had a big party here on Saturday, outside. It was a beautiful night. Everything was so perfect, except Susan couldn’t be there. She called that afternoon to wish Jack a happy birthday, but he was at the club for a round of golf. He worked so hard. Always. She was in good spirits, excited about school, and very excited about the audition she had that night.”