By the time Jerry and Grace joined them downstairs, Laurie and Ryan had transformed the new whiteboards into an exact replica of the plans they’d been working from in New York.
“We have local contact information for everyone, right?” Laurie asked.
Jerry and Grace both nodded. After the murders, the Harringtons’ closest friends, Betsy and Walter Ward, had found themselves spending less and less time on the Cape, until a local real estate agent convinced them to treat the property as an investment rental. Their house was vacant during the offseason, so they would be staying there during the shoot, along with Simon, Michelle, and Frankie. Meanwhile, Ethan and Annabeth were staying with Annabeth’s parents.
“Did the storage unit move go okay?” Jerry asked.
Given Frankie’s discovery of the hidden camera footage, Laurie had not wanted to halt her progress of sorting through her family’s belongings in Boston. Frankie had taken Laurie up on her offer to pay to have everything moved temporarily to a storage facility off Route 6 so it would be available while they worked on the production. She had sounded especially relieved when Laurie said that she and her team could provide extra hands for the work if it was not too intrusive.
“All good. The movers met Frankie there this morning. She’s already back at work on it and said she’d call if she found anything interesting.”
It did not take Laurie’s team long to review the flow of the scenes they had mapped out. Usually, by the time they filmed, Laurie had a gut feeling about where the evidence was likely to lead. But because Brett had rushed them into production, she now had more unanswered questions than when Frankie first called her only a week earlier.
It was impossible to know what, if any, fresh information they might glean from the new interviews, but they at least had the physical locations and production agreements in place.
“I want to make sure we have a clear list of suspects,” Laurie said. “First up, of course, is the predominant theory: the twins planned this together. One was the shooter while one remained at the party.”
Jerry chimed in next. “Or, it’s like the twins say. Either Simon or Ethan acted alone, but we don’t know which.”
Laurie had assumed when she first got involved in the case that those would be the only theories worth exploring, but she was no longer willing to confine the list of suspects to Simon and Ethan. She added two other names to the board: Richard Harrington’s other law partner, Howard Carver, and Annabeth’s father, Jimmy Connolly.
“Have you tried calling Howard again?” Jerry asked.
“Too many times to count,” Laurie said. “Straight to voicemail, on repeat. I’m pretty sure he blocked me.”
Of everyone she had contacted about the case, Howard Carver had been the only person to refuse to speak to her. Without even mentioning the law firm, Laurie had told Howard that Under Suspicion was reinvestigating the Harringtons’ murders and wanted to discuss what he had seen at the yacht club the night of the graduation party. He declared that he “wasn’t interested,” abruptly hung up, and had not answered any of Laurie’s calls since.
The violence Richard Harrington unleashed upon Sarah in the video Frankie had found in the storage unit had been a landmine, and they still did not know how the abuse related to the couple’s murder. But the video had also provided concrete proof that Richard had been deeply disturbed by something going on at work.
Laurie spelled out the evidence suggesting that the something had to do with Howard Carver. “When Richard was so furious with Sarah in that video, he said they could lose everything. That we—plural—could even be disbarred, meaning the problem involved at least one other lawyer. Michelle and Dennis were both uncomfortable when I asked about Howard, and that was before Ryan found the flurry of settlements Howard handled before the Harringtons were killed and he suddenly retired from the bar. We definitely need to lock this down, especially since Howard is the witness who supposedly saw one of the twins by the Range Rover.”
If Laurie had read Michelle and Dennis correctly, they both knew the circumstances surrounding Howard’s retirement, which meant Simon and Walter probably did, too.
It had been Ryan who persuaded Laurie to wait until cameras were rolling to press any of them further on the subject. If Richard had really been worried about the risk of being disbarred, the matter had been serious. She didn’t want to risk losing their participation if they realized the questions would be moving in that direction.
Grace was tapping her pen against a notepad. “What about that kid who bribed Simon about writing his term paper? Should he be on the list of possible suspects?”
“Tom Keenan,” Laurie said. She realized she had not told them that she’d eliminated Keenan from consideration shortly after Simon first told her about the blackmail attempt. Keenan had been easy to locate. He was a history teacher now at a private boarding school in New Hampshire, and Laurie had confirmed for herself that he was in Nashville when the Harringtons were killed. “He still had the travel receipts and everything.”
Jerry squinted skeptically. “After a decade? Maybe I’m getting jaded, but that almost seems suspicious.”
“He said he was so freaked out when the police contacted him,” Laurie said, “he vowed to retain the evidence forever in case the subject ever came up again. He also swore up and down that he never blackmailed Simon, which we can’t confirm one way or the other without tracing anonymous emails from ten years ago. Regardless, he’s definitely not our shooter.”
Laurie was about to move on to the subject of Annabeth’s father but realized that something about Tom Keenan was still nagging at her.
“I know that look,” Grace said. “Her wheels are turning.”
Laurie held up a finger, buying time while she tried to put her thoughts together. “When I spoke with Tom, I promised to keep it completely off the record if he’d admit he was the one who sent those emails to Simon, but he insisted he knew nothing about it. At the time, I assumed that a reputable teacher at an elite school didn’t want to admit he’d done something so underhanded as a student.”
“And now?” Jerry asked.
“We know a lot more about the Harrington family than we used to. Everyone said they were so perfect. Both brothers have said it repeatedly—Richard and Sarah cared about appearances. But no family is perfect. Simon was under so much pressure that he cheated at school, and then his father assaulted him when he found out. We also know that Richard was violent toward his wife—so much so that Sarah hid cameras in both houses, probably so she could prove that this picture-perfect father was abusing her and keeping her from leaving the marriage.”
“But what does that have to do with Tom Keenan and the blackmail?” Grace asked.
Laurie looked again at the whiteboards and found the list of subjects they were calling “rabbit holes.” She circled five words as she read them aloud. This Family is a Lie.
“After the murders, Simon told the police about this spray-paint incident. The former deputy chief admitted to Ryan and me that the police never bothered to ask whether there might be a connection.”
She began checking off other topics on the board. Howard Carver’s retirement. The hidden nanny cams. Richard’s violence.
“Secrets,” she said. “The image of the perfect family was actually a perfect facade for a mountain of secrets.”
Ryan, who had been silent until now, was staring at her, expressionless.
“Do you see it?” she asked.
He nodded. “The family was a lie. And whoever left that graffiti knew it.”
“Exactly. This whole time, we’ve had a list of all these loose ends, not knowing which might lead to a breakthrough. But what if all the ends meet in the same place? What if one person knew about all the secrets and all the lies? An anger that began with blackmail messages to Simon and a spray-painted insult may have eventually boiled over into a double homicide with the beloved twin sons as the lead suspects.”
Jerry and Grace were both writing notes furiously. “Our suspects stay the same, right?” Jerry asked.
Laurie quickly ran through the list. “That seems right. Simon wouldn’t blackmail himself but I suppose it’s possible he made the whole thing up to try to get money from his father. If the killer was behind the spray-paint incident and the blackmail messages, it gives us a better sense of the motive. This resentment was building for some time, and it was personal.”
Ryan looked determined. “I’ll go over my notes for interviewing Simon and Ethan. The bones are already there, but we’ll lean more into long-term resentments. And once we get someone to come clean about what happened with Howard Carver, he might change his mind about offering his side of the story.”
She nodded. “That leaves Annabeth’s dad. If it weren’t for the fact that Jimmy Connolly was close friends with the police chief, I would probably let it go. I’m still working to get someone from the police department or DA’s Office to give us access to the evidence. Maybe that would allow us to check him off our list. I don’t want to approach him directly yet because that might scare off Ethan and Annabeth.”
“At the very least,” Ryan said, “once we get everything we need from them, I can start asking how much Jimmy knew about the pressure Richard was placing on Ethan to end the relationship.”
“And ask about the money,” Jerry added. “Whether Ethan bailed out his business.”
“Oh, I know,” Ryan said, confidently tapping his temple with an index finger. He looked to Laurie expectantly. “Coach Old School, what do you think? Are we ready?”
She snapped the cap onto her marker with satisfaction. “So who’s calling for the pizza?”