“Fine.” She already regretted her decision.
Lucy smiled, though it didn’t reach her eyes. “I’d like to see your visual timeline. I … I have a theory.”
“About what? I already laid out the theory.”
“Theory is the wrong word. I should say profile. Tentative profile. I want to look at the autopsy reports before I say anything. You have the two, Porter and Donovan, correct?”
“Yes.”
“And the transcript from Donovan’s trial?”
“Yes.”
“Great—Andrew, when can you get Justin’s autopsy?”
“Tonight or first thing in the morning.”
“Good. And you know how to contact the lead detective on Justin’s case?”
“Yes, he’ll talk to you if I ask him to. We’ve kept in touch, though he’s been retired for seven years.”
Max had completely lost control of the investigation. She needed to regroup and figure out how to take charge again. “I’m in room one-four-oh-oh if you’d like to see the timeline.”
“I have to get back to my office, but I need a minute with Lucy.”
“I’ll meet you up there, Agent Kincaid,” Max said and walked away.
This was not supposed to happen. How in the world was she going to work with a federal agent? Every time she and Marco crossed paths, it had been a disaster … this was going to be worse. She’d been sleeping with Marco, she knew exactly how to push his buttons or calm him down. She could usually get him to do exactly what she wanted … and even then, they ended up with an intense on-again, off-again love affair that had been firmly off for nearly a year.
She had no idea what Lucy Kincaid’s story was.
She called Ben from the elevator. “I need information. Now.”
* * *
“I don’t like her,” Sean said. He drained his beer. “Arrogant. Privileged. Know-it-all.”
Lucy almost laughed. “Some have called you similar names.”
He narrowed his eyes. “Touché.”
“You’re perfect.”
“I know.” He took her hand and kissed it.
Lucy ran her fingers over Sean’s palm. He was still tense, but he was trying to keep his calm. She appreciated it. “I don’t know quite what to make of Max Revere. Her book was emotional on one level—raw and honest, I’d say—and also straightforward, like a good police procedural. Personally, she’s more brusque and—” She searched for the word.
“Bitchy?” Sean suggested.
“I wouldn’t say that.”
“Because you’re too nice.”
“I have to get to my office, and I want to pull the reports now, not tomorrow,” Andrew said.
“It’s already after four—tomorrow is fine. They’re not going anywhere.”
“Don’t be so sure of that,” Andrew said.
“What do you mean?”
“I think you should hold off talking to your family.”
“I know you mean well,” Lucy said, “but they’ll understand. Once they see the pattern, they’ll want to help. We’re not just talking about Justin. If an innocent man is in prison—unlikely as that may be—we need to help him. I’ll be delicate. But Carina is a detective, Connor used to be a cop, they’re going to understand and see the same things I do.”
“It was a difficult time for your family. You were young, Lucy.”
“They tried to shelter me. Do you think I didn’t know what had happened? Sometimes, not knowing is worse because I thought some pretty awful things before I learned the truth. Andrew, I know my family. They’ll want to protect Nelia, I get that, we don’t have to involve her.” She didn’t completely believe that, but she would cross that bridge later. “Isn’t it better if I’m here with some control over what the reporter does and says without her stirring the pot?”
“She’s not going to be easy to control,” Sean said.
“We got what we wanted,” Lucy said. “Equal involvement.”
“She won’t stick to it.”
“Maybe not,” Lucy concurred. “I’ll keep close tabs on her.”
“Tell me the truth,” Andrew said, “do you think that Justin’s killer is still out there? That he has killed more than one child?”
“If the evidence she claims to have holds up? Yes, I do. And I think the killer—” she stopped herself. “Give me tonight. I’m going to write up an informal profile. I might want to talk to Dillon. Be prepared to answer the hard questions, Andrew.”
“I always have been, Lucy.” He closed his eyes and sighed. “I’ve never felt this was over. Justin’s murder has been an open wound for nineteen and a half years. It sits there, festering. I wanted so desperately to believe Max, but I knew I wasn’t objective, not when it comes to Justin. That’s why I called you, Lucy. Truth be told—I called you to make sure I wasn’t grasping at a fantasy, or a reporter bent on digging up dirt on me because of the rumors.”
“What rumors?”
“I may be up for a bench—California Supreme Court. It’s a long shot, but the vultures are circling. I’m too conservative on these issues, too liberal on those issues.” He shook his head. “All I can say with complete honesty is that I have always upheld the law.”
“You’d make a good judge, Andrew,” she said.
“Thank you, but I would give up the opportunity if I can put Justin to rest. If I can just know why someone took him from us. It’s senseless. Completely senseless.”
“Senseless to us,” Lucy said, “but not to the killer.”
“I know this is hard on you, too. I sincerely appreciate your help.”
“I want to do this,” Lucy said. “Believe that. Honestly, I’m not doing this for you. I’m doing this for Justin.”
He nodded, his eyes damp with emotion. But he gathered himself together quickly. “Tread carefully with your family, Lucy. I wish you luck.”
“I don’t need luck. This is my family, Andrew. They want closure as much as you and I do.”
Chapter Eleven
Lucy stepped into Max’s suite—an amazing and elegant space with high ceilings and a wall of windows in the main room. Stairs led to the bedroom. Sean had said Max Revere was independently wealthy, but this was beyond Lucy’s idea of how even a wealthy reporter would travel.
Sean was right behind her. Sean was still angry and had made it clear he didn’t like or trust Max, but Lucy had calmed him down in the elevator.
“So I get both of you to help me,” Max said with a fake smile. “Terrific.”
“Just me,” Lucy said. “Sean’s leaving in the morning.”
He didn’t want to. He offered to back out of the RCK annual meeting to stay with her and “keep an eye” on Maxine Revere; Lucy told him no. She was confident she could handle the reporter, especially now that she’d met her. Max was surprisingly easy to read. She had a straightforward manner that Lucy respected. Lucy recognized that part of her profile of the reporter was because of the book she’d read. It was clear from the moment Lucy walked in that Max expected to get exactly what she wanted. She had definitely thrown the woman a curveball when she insisted on working with her.
But Justin was her family. Lucy wasn’t backing down.
“I’ll be back Sunday,” Sean said pointedly.
“Wonderful,” Max said without hiding the sarcasm. “May I offer you something to drink? Coffee? Water? Another Samuel Adams?” she offered Sean.
“No, thank you,” Sean said brusquely.
“I have a dinner at my parents shortly,” Lucy said, trying to diffuse the tension between Max and Sean. “I’m interested in your board and timeline. I think it’ll help me explain how the cases connect if I see it all laid out.”
“I can talk to your family. If you introduce me—”
“Not right now.” Lucy wasn’t going to let Max near her parents. “My father had a heart attack last year, I don’t want anything to upset him. My goal is to get Carina and Connor to have a sit-down with you at some point—after I read
the police reports and confirm my suspicion.”
It was clear that Max understood exactly what Lucy had said. “You have a suspect in mind? How?”
“Not an individual, a profile. But if I’m right, asking specific questions to each witness, in particular Andrew”—and Nelia, but Lucy didn’t say that—“will yield a suspect.”
Max walked over to the bar and poured herself a glass of white wine. “This way,” she said, gesturing to a wall in the living room. She’d removed the picture that hung on the wall and put up a horizontal timeline starting with Justin’s murder—twenty years ago this June.
“It’s clear that we’ll never solve these murders without knowing the motive,” Lucy said. “We need to find out why Justin was targeted. Why these other boys were targeted. What was the motive for Adam Donovan?”
“He had none.”
“In the trial, what did the prosecution say that convinced the jury that he was guilty? You said he didn’t take the stand, correct?”
Max nodded. “In closing statements, the prosecutor said that while the world may never know why Adam killed his son, it’s clear that he wanted out of his marriage. His wife had made it clear that she didn’t want a divorce because she had a miserable childhood with divorced parents who fought all the time, so Adam may have killed his son so he could leave his wife.”
“It would be more likely he’d kill his wife, if that was his mind-set,” Lucy said. “But I’d have to read his statement, talk to him.”
“My associate spoke to him this morning.”
Lucy wanted more information about that, but first she focused on the timeline.
Max had divided the timeline into twenty columns, starting with the year Justin was murdered. The columns between murders were narrower. Then she’d listed the facts of each case under the name of the victim.
The similarities among all four murders were even more obvious when they were laid out in the grid.
The boys were all between the ages of seven and nine.
They’d all been kidnapped from their bedroom within two hours of midnight.
They’d all had a sedative in their systems—now that Andrew had confirmed that Justin had a narcotic in his system.
They’d all been suffocated and buried in shallow graves, wrapped in a blanket from their own bed.
Sedative … it seemed so obvious to her, but maybe she was jumping the gun. She wished her brother Dillon was here. Someone to bounce the idea off of, someone to work the back-and-forth.
She acutely felt Sean watching her. His fear for her—that she would get so emotionally involved in the case it would physically hurt—was clouding her judgment. She walked over to him and kissed him. “Do you think you can get our bags and meet me in the room in thirty minutes? That’ll give us enough time to change before dinner.”
He stared at her intently, concern in his eyes. “Are you sure?”
“Your concern for me is clouding my perception. I just need a few minutes without worrying about you worrying about me.” She smiled, touched his lips. “I love you.”
He rubbed her chin, kissed her, and left without a word to Max.
“What was that?” Max asked.
Lucy didn’t know how much she’d heard, but she didn’t feel the need to explain herself. “Sean’s going to get our bags from the car. We didn’t check in before the meeting.”
Sean was everything she could have hoped for in a lover, a friend, a husband. And he got that she needed to sometimes look at crimes alone. She was sensitive to his emotions, and sometimes that clouded her ability to get inside the killer’s mind-set. But knowing he would be there for her tonight made all the difference.
Lucy turned around and faced the board, looking at each case. “The Porters also had an affair?”
“Yes. The husband was with his mistress. It was a short-term thing, but it wasn’t his first affair. Tommy’s parents separated for a while after his death, but got back together and now have twin daughters, age six.”
Lucy nodded. So often, when a child was killed, the parents couldn’t withstand the pain, guilt, and grief. Divorce was all too common.
“You mentioned that Adam Donovan’s mistress had been discredited. Do you have a sense as to why?”
“I wasn’t on the jury, and reading the transcript is different than hearing and seeing the testimony.”
Max was perceptive, though Lucy had already noted that from her writing.
“However,” Max continued, “I suspect it was more to do with her image. Young, impressionable, attractive. She became flustered at questions about her sex life, about where they had sex—and at first the defense attorney didn’t object, which I thought was odd. Her sex life wasn’t material as to whether Adam Donovan was with her or not with her during the time in question. Then the prosecutor got her to contradict herself on the time frame. When she clarified in the recross, she was consistent with her original statement. Yet he still hammered home the fact that she was asleep during part of the time-of-death window—which for the jury was enough to think that Donovan snuck out on his mistress, drove thirty minutes home, kidnapped and killed his son, and snuck back in. There was no physical evidence that he left her apartment and no witnesses.” She shook her head. “It’s a stretch. Like I said, the defense was pathetic.”
“I’ll read the transcript tonight.”
“I thought you were meeting your family.”
“I’ll come back after dinner, if that’s okay. I want to be caught up to speed before tomorrow.”
“And what is tomorrow?”
“We’ll talk to the detective in charge.”
“That was my plan. I just intended to do it alone.”
“Sometimes, having a partner is not a bad thing.”
Max clearly didn’t agree. Lucy focused again on the timeline in front of her. She came back to the sedative. Was that solely to make the child compliant? Or because the killer didn’t want to make the victim suffer?
No sexual assault. Sedative. Wrapped in a blanket. Comfort. An easy death …
“The killer is a woman,” Lucy said.
Max almost spit out her wine. She swallowed and stared at Lucy. “That’s a leap.”
“It’s the manner of death. The care given to the bodies. The personal touch—the blanket. And I’ll bet my badge that there was one more thing in the graves. Likely a stuffed animal or toy that the child slept with. I would have to look at the autopsy reports to be certain, but I also think that the killer suffocated the boys after they were unconscious. That should be easy to determine based on the tox screen and physical evidence on the victim—whether they fought back or struggled. The killer didn’t want the child to know he was dying. That’s a mercy killing. Mercy killers are almost exclusively female.” She wrote a few notes on her cell phone so she’d remember to look at some specifics on these type of crimes and what she needed to learn from the reports. “We need to find out exactly what kind of sedative was used and how easy it is to purchase and administer. Why drug them? So they’re quiet, compliant, and don’t feel pain. They won’t know they’ll never wake up. She didn’t want them to be scared.”
For a minute, she almost felt Sean’s presence and it was comforting. Maybe she shouldn’t have sent him away. But she had to be sure. She had to focus on the clinical, the psychology, the forensics … not her emotions or Sean’s or the fact that Justin had been her best friend.
To solve his murder, she had to keep her emotions in check.
“With this evidence, I really think I can convince my family to help.”
“That would be ideal,” Max said, “but I already don’t like the fact that you’re jumping in. I can’t have a half-dozen people messing around with my investigation, my evidence, my organization. I simply want to talk to them. They might know something they don’t realize is important.”
It was clear Max was still angry that Lucy had insisted on being involved. Lucy continued. “You’re missing something.”
&nbs
p; “I’m missing a lot of things. I have no proof that either John or Blair were having an affair—though I’m working on it. That’s another common thread—each of the fathers of the first three victims had been with their mistress during the murder. I know for a fact that John couldn’t have been because he had a solid alibi during his son’s death, and numerous witnesses at the party. I’m also missing details from the crime scene, because the police notoriously hold back, but I’m good at getting information. With Stanton on board, we can get that intel.”
“You’re missing the most important piece of the puzzle.”
“What?”
“I’ll tell you if you agree to keep nothing from me. I have a sense that you’re already trying to figure out how to lose me, and that won’t go over well—trust me on that. We’re full partners in this, Maxine.”
Lucy watched the reporter wage an internal battle. She didn’t want to work with Lucy, but she would … her curiosity and need for answers was greater than her lone wolf approach.
“I said I’d work with you, I keep my word,” Max said with a sigh. “What am I missing?”
She stared at her timeline. Lucy had to admit she liked the format—she usually put index cards into a vertical timeline, but this approach was more linear and everything far easier to see in one big picture.
“First, you were right to think there may be another victim between Chris Donovan and Tommy Porter.” She walked over to the desk and wrote on a Post-It note.
Unknown victim.
She stuck it between Donovan and Porter. “A serial killer can wait long stretches—even years—between murders. But there is a distinct pattern here, and I suspect five years is the longest she can go. Why five? I don’t know.” Yet.
She then wrote on another Post-it note, and stuck it at the beginning of the timeline.
Victim—0
Unknown male under ten
Max stared. “You think there’s another victim.”
“Victim might be the wrong word. But—”
“How the hell can you make that statement? You’re guessing.”
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