MARY CLARK - The Cinderella Murder

“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.”