Laurie looked at her watch. It was a quarter after noon, and the conference room at Wakeling Development was filled with lighting and cameras, ready for the arrival of their star witness.
Ryan stood when the door opened, but it was Jerry, returning from his venture to search for Carter Wakeling.
“Any sign of him?” Laurie asked.
They had spent the early hours of the morning gathering footage of the Long Island City neighborhood that originally put Robert Wakeling on the map as one of New York City’s most successful real estate developers. They had arrived at the Wakeling offices nearly two hours earlier to set up for the interview in this room with sweeping views of Manhattan and the East River. Carter’s secretary, Emma, had shown them into the conference room, but they hadn’t spotted any of the Wakeling family as of yet, and now Carter was ten minutes late for what Laurie had come to believe was the most important interview of the production. He was supposed to have arrived twenty minutes early for makeup.
Jerry shook his head. “I made a new friend in Emma, though. She says Carter was here earlier, when we first arrived, but then left to go into Manhattan to try to find his sister and Peter. Apparently Anna and Peter both called in, first thing this morning, to cancel their office meetings for the entire day. They hadn’t been answering their phones when Carter had tried calling.”
Laurie wasn’t at all surprised that Jerry had found a way to learn the inside details of Carter’s whereabouts. He had a knack for becoming gossip partners with perfect strangers.
“So he went all the way to their apartment to look for them?” Laurie asked. “That seems unusual.”
“Emma thought so, too,” Jerry said. “Apparently she tried reassuring him that their secretaries had just spoken to Anna and Peter personally a few hours ago, but she said she’d never seen Carter so concerned.”
“Concerned for himself,” Ryan said, swinging his chair to prop his feet at the edge of the conference table. “He’s probably eager to find out what Anna and Peter said yesterday during their interview in Greenwich.”
Laurie agreed. She had seen the flash of fear in Anna’s eyes yesterday afternoon when she realized that her brother had an objective reason to believe that their mother was going to reduce their inheritance soon. Laurie said, “In my opinion once Anna found out about what Penny Rawling had been communicating to Carter, she finally allowed herself to entertain the possibility that her older brother had killed their mother. If I had to guess, Anna and Peter canceled their meetings today to avoid seeing Carter before his interview.”
They were leaving him to fend for himself in front of the cameras.
Laurie paused, turned to the lead cameraman, and said, “Nick, go ahead and get us started with a shot of the door from that camera back there,” gesturing to the camera next to Nick at the far end of the room. “That should get most of the room, correct?”
He took a look at the digital screen and gave her a thumbs-up.
“Good. I want to be rolling from the second Carter shows up. This could get interesting.”