Laurie arrived at her office to find a chocolate croissant on her desk beside an envelope with her name on it. It was an anniversary card signed by her assistant, Grace Garcia, and assistant producer, Jerry Klein. The handwritten note inside read, Some workplace romances lead to H.R. but some bring a lifetime of happiness. Glad you and Alex found the latter.
Classic Grace and Jerry.
She heard the familiar sound of laughter from Jerry’s neighboring office and made her way next door. Grace was wearing a jade-green mini dress, black stilettos, and gold hoop earrings that nearly touched her shoulders. Her thick black hair was pulled into a tight I Dream of Jeannie topknot. Jerry sported a green turtleneck, black pants, and a plaid blazer.
“No fair,” Laurie said, joining them in Jerry’s office. “You didn’t send me the wardrobe memo.”
“No advance planning,” Jerry said, posing beside Grace. “We obviously both have excellent taste.”
“And can a rock a jewel tone,” Grace added. “How long have you been here? Sorry, I didn’t hear you arrive.”
“Because I’m a little ninja, but I just got in. I can’t believe you guys got me an anniversary card. How did you even remember?”
“I wish we could take credit,” Grace said. “Your son texted a reminder.”
Laurie smiled and shook her head. “He should not be texting you about that. Or bothering you at all, in fact.”
“Girl, you don’t know we text all the time? He sends me music he thinks I’ll like, and I send him funny dog videos.”
She was going to have to get used to the fact that she might not know every single thing about her son now that he was getting older. It suddenly dawned on her that Tim might have a specific reason to be texting Grace.
“Oh my gosh. I guess he’s old enough that he might have a little crush? I hope that hasn’t put you in a bad spot.”
“Timmy and a crush? No, he’s still such an innocent little boy.”
“And he texts both of us,” Jerry said. “Just last week, he asked for wardrobe advice for his trumpet recital.”
“The two of us are like his really fun auntie and uncle,” Grace said, holding up a hand for a high five from Jerry.
It made sense. Grace and Jerry were her coworkers, but they were also two of her closest friends at this point, and Tim loved them like family.
“What were you two laughing about before I interrupted?”
“Grace’s latest dating escapades,” Jerry said, his face lighting up. “You arrived just in time for the good stuff.”
Grace chimed in, her laughter still evident in her voice. “Okay, so like I already told Jerry, I finally linked up with a guy I’d been talking to on Bumble.” Grace was an active participant on multiple dating apps, treating the search for love like a competitive sport. “Everything seemed great at first. He looked like his photos. Hadn’t lied about his height. Picked a really nice French bistro, and you know I love me some escargot. Then he starts complimenting my outfit, and I’m thinking, yes, this man is nice to be around. But then he starts asking me what brand is my dress? Where did I buy my shoes? Suddenly I felt like I was being interrogated by the fashion police. When he asked me point-blank how much money I spent on everything I was wearing, I finally asked him why he had so many questions. Do you know what he said?” She waited the requisite beat for perfect comedic timing. “Because he could never be with a woman who made more money than him.”
“I don’t even know how you can laugh about that,” Laurie said. “I would have given him an earful.”
“Oh, I laughed directly in his face, right before I told him he was a ridiculous human and dropped cash on the table for my half of the check. At least the escargot was good.”
Laurie was more than grateful that she’d never have to date again. She didn’t know how Grace managed to keep a sense of humor about her notoriously bad dating luck, joking that she’d keep kissing frogs until she found her prince.
With the levity of the moment lingering, Grace’s expression grew more serious. “Speaking of ridiculous men, we should probably tell you that Ryan was here a few minutes ago looking for you.”
Ryan Nichols was the host of Under Suspicion, and he and Laurie had gotten off to a bumpy start when he joined the team about a year and a half earlier. It didn’t help that Alex had been the show’s original host, and in Laurie’s eyes, no one could possibly fill his shoes. But Laurie’s boss, Brett, had hired Ryan without her input, not even bothering to consider other candidates she suggested—all because Ryan was the nephew of Brett’s best friend and former college roommate, a famous historian named Jed Nichols.
Ryan was certainly smart enough for the job, having graduated magna cum laude from Harvard and completing a Supreme Court clerkship before working as a federal prosecutor on white-collar cases. But unlike Alex, who had years of trial experience, Ryan had left the U.S. Attorney’s Office while he was still green to become a part-time talking head on a cable news network, and it was clear to Laurie he cared more about being a celebrity than the actual work.
After months of butting heads when he first joined the show, they had finally reached a détente about a year ago, but the old Ryan had been rearing his annoying head in recent months, and Laurie could tell from Grace and Jerry’s expressions that something about his visit to her office that morning had bothered them.
“Did he say what it was about?” Laurie asked.
“No, but he seemed frustrated that you weren’t at work yet,” Grace said.
Jerry barely disguised an eye roll. “Which is rich given the fact that he routinely saunters in late the morning after whatever high-profile event landed him on Page Six again the previous night.”
“I just saw him going into Brett’s office. I’ll track him down.”
“That’s not all, though,” Grace said. “When he stopped by, he looked in your office and saw the card we’d propped up on your desk. He asked about it, so I told him it was your six-month anniversary and maybe that’s why you were running a little late. He sighed beneath his breath and said something snarky, like Guess she has different priorities now that she’s married. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have even said anything to him. I wasn’t sure whether to tell you, but Jerry said you’d want to know.”
“You didn’t do anything wrong,” Laurie said. “I’ll take care of it. You guys ready to go over case possibilities?”
She had been researching cold cases for their next special but didn’t feel any of them pulling at her strongly enough to commit. An intriguing unsolved case wasn’t enough. The case needed at least one identifiable suspect—someone who had been living for years “under suspicion,” even though never officially charged. And the suspect or suspects had to be willing to go on camera to proclaim their innocence. Laurie had a practice of not reaching out to possible suspects until she was confident that her show could find new evidence. She had asked Grace and Jerry to review the three cases she was considering so they could brainstorm possible avenues for re-investigation this morning.
“Absolutely,” Jerry said, “but we’ve got a fourth case to add to the mix. You tell her, Grace. You answered the phone.”
Grace rubbed her palms together in anticipation. “A call came in this morning, nine a.m. on the dot. Does the name Frankie Harrington ring a bell?”
Laurie bit her lip. Something about the name tugged at a corner of her memory, but she couldn’t quite place it.
Grace added another hint. “You spoke to her and a woman named Betsy Ward a couple of years ago when you were looking for a case for our second special.”
Laurie remembered the pressure she’d been under at the time. The first special had been a huge success, solving the high-profile murder of a wealthy socialite who was smothered in her bed after a luxurious gala to celebrate the graduation of her daughter and three friends. But the production had taken an emotional toll on Laurie personally. Five years earlier, a man had shot and killed her husband, Greg, in front of Timmy when he still a toddler, leaving her son with a terrifying threat—“Tell your mother she’s next, then it’s your turn.” By the time she had gone back to work, in charge of her own show, she had started to believe that the killer Timmy had dubbed Blue Eyes wouldn’t actually come back for them. How wrong she had been. While they were filming, Blue Eyes returned, and he came not for Laurie first, but for Timmy. Her son had escaped, and Blue Eyes would never hurt anyone again, but the trauma of seeing her son in danger made her wonder how she could ever focus on work again.
Reflecting back on that period of her life helped her remember the case Grace was referencing.
“The Deadly Duo,” she said.
“Bingo!” Jerry said.
“The sister actually called?”
Laurie had thought at the time that the case would be a perfect follow-up to her first special. Like the wealthy socialite, Richard and Sarah Harrington were also killed in their home after celebrating a graduation—the college graduations of their identical twin sons.
The Harringtons’ Cape Cod vacation home had a gate at the driveway entrance that could be opened in one of two ways: a keypad code or from inside the house. A recent storm had dislodged the gate’s camera, and the family’s handyman had not yet remounted it. As a result, the camera footage showed only the exterior of vehicles coming and going rather than the occupants’ faces. Richard Harrington’s black BMW returned from the party at 9:12 p.m and the key code was entered to open the gate. Four minutes later, at 9:16 p.m., the code was used again, this time by someone driving the family’s white Range Rover, which they kept at the Cape and which the twins had used that night to take their girlfriends to the party. Another ten minutes later, the dislodged camera captured the sounds of two gunshots, only moments apart. And seven minutes after that, the Range Rover departed. Shortly thereafter, one of the twins—unclear which—was seen walking away from the Range Rover, left on the outskirts of an overflow parking lot, and walking back toward the party. The car keys were subsequently found left in the ignition.
Based on the evidence, the police believed that one of the brothers snuck out of the party after their parents went home, shot them both, and then snuck back to the beach club, while the other twin remained at the party, switching roles as necessary to make it appear as though neither of them had left. The twins, in contrast, each insisted that they’d remained at the party that night, until the police arrived to tell them that something terrible had happened at their house. It was at that point, they claimed, that they realized their car was no longer in the valet-parking lot. The Range Rover was not located until the police found it the following day.
It was a perfect case for Under Suspicion.
Before approaching the sons, Laurie had contacted Sarah Harrington’s best friend, Betsy Ward. Betsy and her husband, Walter, had taken in the Harringtons’ daughter, Frankie, after the murders. She was an innocent girl who found herself orphaned at the hands of at least one of her brothers. Whether she chose to appear on screen or not, Laurie could not imagine doing the show without her blessing.
Frankie was an adult by the time Laurie contacted her through Betsy, but barely past her eighteenth birthday. Betsy and Frankie had both given Laurie a chance to make her pitch, but after a week of consideration, Betsy notified her that Frankie did not want to renew attention to the case. She was focused on her studies at Chapman College in California and didn’t want to revisit the gruesome night that had changed her life forever.
“I guess she kept your number all this time,” Grace said.
“And she changed her mind about the show?” Laurie asked.
“I’m not sure. I didn’t know why she was calling. I simply said you were out of the office and asked to take a message. But when she told me she was calling about her parents, I got a chill up my spine, realizing it must be about a case. I didn’t want to press her for details, but I Googled the name afterward and figured it out.”
Laurie was at her desk, about to dial Frankie Harrington’s phone number, when another call came in from an internal number. It was Dana Licameli, Brett’s secretary. Brett, who had welcomed Ryan into his office with an open door. Ryan, who had made the snarky comment to Grace about Laurie’s priorities.
She picked up the call. “Good morning, Dana.”
“Oh good. You’re in.” Her voice was low with an apologetic tone. “Brett wants to see you. As in, right now.”
“Sure thing. Let me guess: He’s not alone?”
“Nope.”
“Okay. Thanks for the heads-up.”