Four and a half miles away in Westwood, Dwight Cook was pacing at the foot of his bed.
He flashed back to a long-forgotten memory of his father screaming at him in what must have been the eighth grade. Stop pacing. Just stop. You’re driving me crazy. And it’s weird. Maggie, tell your son how nervous he makes people when he acts that way.
His mother grabbed his father’s arm and whispered: Stop yelling, David. You know loud noises make Dwight jumpy. He paces when he’s jumpy. And don’t call your son weird.
Dwight had trained himself to control the obsessive pacing in high school by sitting on his hands instead. He learned that remaining still, focusing on the feeling of his weight on the back of his hands, didn’t make people nervous the way his pacing had. But he was alone in his bungalow now, so he didn’t need to worry about affecting anyone else. And he had tried and tried to sit on his hands, but the racing in his head—the jumpiness—wouldn’t stop.
He momentarily paused at the center of his bed to hit REWIND and then PLAY once again on his laptop.
Dwight had been speed-watching footage of the empty house when the man first appeared on the screen, walking directly through the unlocked front door with a ski mask over his face. Twenty-three minutes. That was the amount of time Jerry had been gone, returning to the house with a bag from In-N-Out Burger. Had he eaten his fast food in the kitchen, maybe the masked man would have snuck out through the front door undetected.
But Jerry hadn’t taken his lunch to the kitchen. He walked directly into the den, where the masked man was rifling through the documents Jerry had left scattered across the coffee table.
Dwight continued to pace, clenching his eyes shut as each blow found its target. The weapon was the engraved crystal plaque Dwight had received from UCLA when he donated his first hundred thousand dollars upon graduation.
Dwight watched as the assault ended and the masked man turned to run out of the den, his arms filled with two banker boxes.
He had to make a decision.
If Dwight did not turn over this video, the people investigating the attack would not have it as evidence. If he did, he would reveal the fact that he’d been monitoring the activities of Under Suspicion. He could be ruined professionally, not to mention the possibility of criminal charges. More important, he would lose all access to the production team and be cut out of the case.
It was a cost-benefit analysis, a matter of statistics. What had a higher likelihood of being helpful: the videotape of this assault or his continued surveillance of the Bel Air house?
He hit REWIND and then paused on the clearest still image of the masked man. Dwight stared once again at the insignia on the left side of the man’s white polo shirt. Even with Dwight’s ability to manipulate computer images and search for information on the Internet, the quality of the video simply wasn’t detailed enough to make out the logo. The attacker was lean, muscular, obviously very strong, but there was no way to identify him.
This video was useless. But if he kept monitoring the television show’s production, he still had a chance of figuring out who killed Susan.
He flipped the laptop closed and stopped pacing. He had made his decision. Now he had to make sure that the gamble paid off.