The Sleeping Beauty Killer Read online

  Casey, if you’re reading, you might think a television show can help you turn over a new leaf, but you better think twice. Do you really think Gabrielle and Jason will change their stories? You could be playing with fire.

  The Chatter suggests you stay home, and stay silent.

  Laurie clicked the button at the bottom of the tablet to blacken the screen, then handed the device back to her son.

  “Mom, how does that website know so much about your show? Is all of that information true?”

  Every word of it, Laurie thought. She already knew—or at least, strongly suspected—that Gabrielle had a habit of feeding infor­­mation to Mindy Sampson, but this column contained more information than Gabrielle could provide on her own. Gabrielle knew that Laurie was planning to cover Casey’s case for their next special. And she could probably make an educated guess that any responsible television producer would speak to the ex-boyfriend who wrote a tell-all hatchet job. But to know how many times Laurie had met with Casey, and where? Anyone who could guess that accurately should be playing the ponies.

  She was replaying the entire column in her mind, thinking she had no idea who could have given Mindy Sampson the inside track on her production. And then suddenly, she thought of a moment that had passed a few hours earlier. You may be a good lawyer in the courtroom, but you’ve now chosen a job that you seem to have little interest in learning about.

  Ryan Nichols. Was he trying to teach her a lesson? She immediately tried to shake the possibility, telling herself she was being paranoid. But Grace, Jerry, and Ryan were the only people who could have leaked all this information. She trusted Grace and Jerry with her life, but knew nothing about her new host, other than that he was so hungry for time in front of a camera that he’d been willing to leave behind a promising legal career to pursue television full-time. Was he leaking inside information to create gossip that was certain to generate plenty of interest in the show? Was this his first step in trying to undercut me and push me out of the picture? His uncle’s best pal, Brett, rewarded those whose ideas resulted in better ratings.

  As they say, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean someone’s not out to get you.

  •••

  She was still wondering whether she should trust Ryan when her cell phone rang on the counter. It was Alex. For the first time since she’d known him, she hesitated before accepting the call.

  Finally, after three and a half rings, she answered with a hey there.

  “Hey there, yourself.”

  “How did your talk at NYU go?” She hadn’t spoken to him since she’d shown up at his office asking questions about his prior dealings with the Raleigh family.

  “Fine. My friend was beaming ear to ear over his induction as an endowed chair. Sounds like nothing but a title to me, but it was good to see him honored. You would have been more impressed with the food, I think. They had those Baked by Melissa tiny cupcakes you love so much.”

  “They’re both delicious and adorable. What’s not to love?” She could hear him smiling over the phone. Before she knew it, twenty minutes passed as they fell into a comfortable rhythm talking about a local political story in today’s Post, a new client who’d retained Alex the previous day, and nothing in particular.

  Just when she was beginning to feel silly for being so paranoid—about Ryan, about Alex—he suddenly asked about Casey. “So you made a final decision to cover her case.”

  It sounded like an observation, not a question. To her knowledge, only The Chatter blog had reported the news. She couldn’t imagine that Alex was a regular follower of Mindy Sampson’s posts. She knew Timmy had set up a Google alert of her name, but had Alex? Or had Alex made a special effort to stay up-to-date with any news about Casey? Or was all of this in her head?

  There was only one way to find out. “I take it you saw the story?”

  He paused. Or at least, she thought he did. “What story?”

  “On a website called The Chatter,” she said. Only after she spoke did she realize that his response hadn’t been a direct answer to her question, just as when she’d asked him the other night whether there was a reason he didn’t want her working on the case. “I don’t know how Mindy found out about the show,” Laurie explained. “And she also knew about two of my witnesses.”

  The other end of the line was silent.

  “Are you there, Alex?”

  “Sorry, just thinking.”

  “I guess with a case that high-profile, it’s not surprising that word got out that I was asking around,” she said, wondering out loud. “And the witnesses she mentioned by name would be obvious guesses.”

  “Or someone inside the production is feeding her information,” Alex said. His tone was serious.

  “It did cross my mind that Ryan Nichols could have ulterior motives.”

  “Or someone wants to make sure you have a hard time flipping the public’s opinion about Casey. Is your decision absolutely final, Laurie? Maybe I can help you find another case that would satisfy Brett.”

  She could not ignore this feeling that he was holding something back, something vitally important. “Alex, please, if you have information—”

  “I don’t.”

  “You don’t, or you can’t?”

  He was silent again.

  “Alex, what aren’t you telling me?”

  “You’re smart, Laurie. You know you’re dealing with some very powerful people.”

  “Alex—”

  “Just promise me you’ll be careful.”

  He hung up before she could ask why.

  • • •

  Six hours later, Laurie woke up in the middle of the night, her thoughts racing. She reached for the cell phone on her nightstand and opened her email. There was a new message from Jason Gardner, saying he had decided to tell his story to Under Suspicion. “The more truth, the better,” according to him, but Laurie had a feeling that his first phone call had been to his publisher. She pictured a reprint of his book in the imminent future.

  But Casey’s ex-boyfriend was not the reason she had logged onto her account. She drafted an email to the head of information technology at Fisher Blake Studios. Remember those old online messages I asked about re the Hunter Raleigh case? Posted by RIP_Hunter? Please send me what you have ASAP.

  The RIP_Hunter posts. Mindy Sampson’s insider knowledge. Alex’s guardedness. Somewhere in her dreams, they felt connected. Tomorrow, she thought. Tomorrow, it might make sense.

  35

  Casey’s mother was pacing in circles around the living room. Sometimes Casey wondered if her mother arranged her furniture with walking routes in mind.

  “I knew it,” Paula huffed under her breath. “Casey, you kicked the hornet’s nest, talking to this television lady. You haven’t even been out of prison two weeks, and already you’re all over the news.”

  Casey was sitting cross-legged in a chair across from her cousin Angela and Angela’s friend Charlotte. Angela had been with Charlotte in the city when Casey called her in a panic about Mindy Sampson’s latest post. Charlotte had insisted on driving Angela to Connecticut. Now that she was here, Charlotte looked as though she wanted to shrink into an invisible speck on the sofa, away from Paula’s judgmental glare.

  It’s a good thing my mother doesn’t gamble, Casey thought. She wouldn’t have a roof over her head, that’s how readable her expressions are. Her mother didn’t trust Laurie Moran, which meant she didn’t trust her friend Charlotte.

  “How do you know you can trust that producer, Casey?” her mother protested. “She doesn’t care about you. All she wants are ratings. It’s a conflict of interest. She’s probably feeding these little teasers to the tabloids to generate buzz.”

  “We don’t know that, Mom.”

  Paula’s pacing halted abruptly. “Shut UP, Casey!” Casey could not remember her mother ever u
sing that phrase with her. “What is WRONG with you? It’s like you’re addicted to drama. You invite this kind of chaos into your life, and you don’t listen to another soul. That’s what got you into this mess in the first place!”

  The room fell silent as Casey glared at her mother. “Go ahead and say it, Mom. You think I did it. You always thought I did it.”

  Her mother shook her head, but did not deny the allegation.

  Angela reached for her aunt’s hand. “This is all too much,” she said gently. “It’s late, and you’re both upset. Why don’t you both sleep on it and talk again tomorrow?”

  “Why bother?” Paula threw up her hands futilely. “She’s going to do whatever she wants.”

  Casey didn’t stop Paula from going to her room. Once the door closed and her mother was out of earshot, she felt a weight lift from her body and allowed herself to sprawl in her chair. “I don’t know how much longer I can take it. One of us is going to end up dead.”

  “Don’t even kid about that,” Charlotte said.

  Casey wanted to tell Angela’s friend to mind her own business, but then she stopped herself. Other than Laurie Moran, Charlotte was the only new person in her life who had been kind to her since she was released. And here I am, resenting her very presence, she thought. Was I always this mean? Or did prison make me like this?

  “You don’t know what it’s like,” she complained, reserving her bitterness for her mother. “My parents stuck by me, but they never believed that I was framed. Did you know that she even prays for me at church? She’s always telling me that I’ve paid my debt to society, as if I ever owed one. I swear, sometimes I wish I was back in that cell.”

  Angela sounded sheepish when she spoke again. “Don’t get mad at me for saying this, Casey, but she might have a point. About kicking the hornet’s nest, so to speak. RIP_Hunter is posting ugly comments about you. And somehow the Chatter website got the inside track on your plans for the show—”

  “It wasn’t Laurie,” Charlotte said, unprompted.

  “Whether it was Laurie or not doesn’t matter,” Angela said. “My only point is that you wanted to do this show to clear your name, and now it might be backfiring. I thought Jason or Gabrielle might be alternative suspects, but without new evidence, they’ll repeat all the horrible things they said about you at trial. Do you really want every negative thing about your past thrown in front of cameras again?”

  “What are you saying?” Casey asked.

  “That maybe you should rethink this, Casey. Your mother might be right—”

  “That I’m guilty?” Casey could hear the anger in her own voice. She could feel Charlotte’s eyes boring into her.

  “No,” Angela said gently. “About lying low for a while. Give yourself time to get settled into a new life.”

  “Absolutely not,” Casey snapped. “I know you’re looking out for me, but you don’t understand. I’m not doing this to clear my name. This is for Hunter. I owe him.”

  “You can’t blame yourself—”

  “But I do. Don’t you get it? Someone drugged me and killed him. But if I hadn’t been drinking that night, we would have known earlier that something was desperately wrong. We would have left the gala and gone to the emergency room. I wouldn’t have passed out. He wouldn’t have been home. But instead I thought maybe I’d had a little too much wine. He’d still be alive if it weren’t for me.”

  Angela held Casey when she broke out into sobs. After Casey recovered her ability to speak, she looked directly at Charlotte Pierce. “You tell me, Charlotte: Can I trust Laurie Moran?”

  Charlotte answered immediately. “Unequivocally.”

  “Then it’s settled. I don’t want to hear another word about backing out of the show. I’m done being silent.”

  •••

  That night in bed, Casey listened for sounds of her mother roaming around the house, but heard nothing. She thought about going to her room to apologize for the dustup, but didn’t want to start another round. They could clear the air in the morning.

  She picked up her iPad and re-read Mindy Sampson’s blog post. Do you really think Gabrielle and Jason will change their stories? You could be playing with fire.

  As Casey stared at the airbrushed, Photoshopped image of Gabrielle Lawson’s face, she felt her blood pressure rise. She might be willing to spend another fifteen years in prison to see that horrible woman meet a deserving fate.

  Mindy Sampson’s reporting wasn’t always accurate, but she sure was right about Casey’s feelings toward Gabrielle Lawson. Rage didn’t begin to describe how she’d felt when she saw the Chatter column about Hunter and that horrible woman. Didn’t he realize how it would look? The women at work would all be talking about me like I’m a fool!

  What people often described as her temper was simply passion for ideas and arguments. But that day? She’d been truly angry.

  As she fell asleep, she spoke the words aloud, hoping that the intended listener could somehow hear her. “I’m sorry, Hunter. I’m so very, very sorry.”

  36

  A week later, every surface of Laurie’s usually tidy office was blanketed with paper. Three whiteboards, covered with colored ink, framed her conference table.

  Jerry was raking his fingers through his hair so intensely that Laurie was worried about premature baldness. When they first started on this special, it had felt like everything was falling into place. Hunter’s family agreed to participate. Location scouting was a cinch: the principal sites were Cipriani and the country home that Hunter’s brother now owned. The trial transcripts had given Laurie a tremendous head start on the facts. But now, they were flooded in paper—three days from production—and Laurie was regretting ceding to Brett’s ridiculous demand for speed.

  Most of the disorder in her office was attributable to Laurie’s obsession with identifying the Internet user who called himself RIP_Hunter.

  “Privacy, schmivacy,” Jerry cried, every syllable marking his frustration. “There has to be some way to know who posted all of these messages.”

  Monica from Information Technology tried for the sixteenth time to lower expectations. She was twenty-nine years old with a slight frame and barely five feet tall. Other members of the IT Department had more years of experience under their belts, but Laurie trusted Monica as to computer matters implicitly. She was hardworking, thorough, and most importantly, able to explain technical details in a straightforward way.

  “You’re forgetting,” Monica explained, “that fifteen years ago the Internet was treated by most people as a computerized bulletin board. To use it at all was fairly cutting edge, but for the most part, the information flowed in one direction. You’d pull up a page and read it. The idea of responding, let alone engaging in a conversation, was groundbreaking. News providers posted content online, but there was no way to respond.”

  “Oh, how I miss those days,” Laurie sighed. As far as she could tell, only the most extreme viewpoints were expressed on the Web. Her own show’s social media pages were filled with praise from viewers, but Laurie always felt the sting of the harshest comments.

  Monica was tapping away at the keyboard excitedly. “The desire to engage was out there,” she explained, “but the mainstream media pages weren’t creating a forum. The early adopters found their own cohorts through message boards. Fortunately, I’ve found shadow sites where the content is archived. It took days to print out all the buried conversations about Hunter’s murder and Casey’s trial. If the sites were still operational, I could try to find a company willing to share IP addresses with us. But these sites are no longer active.”

  “Can you break that down to regular English?” Grace asked.

  “What we’re looking at,” Monica explained, “are just words, as if tapped on a keyboard; the underlying data can’t be accessed. In short, I’d have to be psychic to tell you who actually wrote this stuff.�
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  Hunter’s murder had made national news. In the public eye, Casey quickly went from grieving girlfriend to “presumed guilty.” With Monica’s help, they had also sifted through thousands of online comments written by followers of the trial, who found one another on message boards and debated the case intensely.

  The first step had been to identify all comments authored under the name “RIP_Hunter.” When they were able to read all of these posts together, they noticed two trends. The author tended to speak with authority, as if he or she had inside information about both Casey and Hunter. All of Casey’s friends know, for example, or Casey has always had a raging temper, was a phony, and and also had the easy route handed to her. Throughout the entire case, it seemed as if someone with inside information was “trolling” Casey and feeding gossip to Mindy Sampson.

  It was Jerry who noticed another, more subtle characteristic. The author had a tendency to introduce additional points with the phrase “and also.” Anyone who knows Casey will tell you that she has to have the last word, and also has to be the center of attention.

  On the chance that whoever authored the RIP_Hunter notes had posted other comments, Monica had found another fifty-seven comments that appeared to suggest firsthand knowledge of the case, and another twenty using the phrase “and also,” with some overlap between the two groups.

  “Bravo for our organizational skills,” Laurie said, “but what in the world are we supposed to do with all of this now?” She collapsed onto her office sofa, her head beginning to hurt from reading so many printouts.

  She grabbed a notepad and made a list of all of her unanswered questions. Who is RIP_Hunter? Who tipped off Mindy Sampson about her show? Why did Alex warn her to be careful, and did it have something to do with the fact that Alex had met General James Raleigh as a law student? Did Hunter audit the foundation’s books, and was that related to Mark Templeton’s departure from the foundation four years later?

  Laurie thought about the principle of Occam’s Razor: the simplest explanation is usually correct. Was there any one thing that could tie together all of these loose threads?