Honestly, Laurie never noticed Ryan’s absence. As far as she was concerned, he didn’t need to be here at all until it was time to turn on the cameras.
“Oh, are we talking about Ryan’s double standards for office hours?” The voice belonged to Laurie’s assistant producer, Jerry Klein, who had stepped from the office adjacent to hers to linger near her door. As much as Laurie pretended to disapprove of the constant flow of gossip between Jerry and Grace, the truth was that the two of them provided some of her most enjoyable moments at work. “Did Grace tell you that he kept dropping by here, looking for you?”
Grace shook her head. “I was trying not to ruin her morning. She’ll see that guy soon enough. Tell me, Laurie, has anyone told him you’re the boss? He’s like a clone of Brett running all over this place.”
Technically, Grace was right. Brett Young was the head of Fisher Blake Studios. He’d had an enduring, successful television career. He was as tough as a boss could be, but he had earned the right to run his own ship, as tightly as he wanted.
Ryan Nichols, on the other hand, was an entirely different story. To be sure, before he turned up at Fisher Blake less than four months ago, he was an up-and-coming star in the legal world. Magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, followed by a Supreme Court clerkship. In just a few years as a federal prosecutor, he had already won the kinds of cases that were covered by the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. But instead of continuing to develop his skills as a practicing lawyer, he left the U.S. Attorney’s Office so he could become a part-time talking head on cable news stations, offering instantaneous analysis about legal issues and trial coverage. These days, everyone wanted to be a celebrity, Laurie thought.
The next thing she knew, Brett Young had hired Ryan as the new host of the series without consulting her. Laurie had found a perfect host in Alex and working with him had been a pleasure. He was a brilliant lawyer, but he recognized that Laurie’s programming instincts were what made the series successful. The fact that he was a skilled cross-examiner made him the ideal questioner for show participants who thought they could get through production repeating the same lies they’d told during the original investigation.
Ryan had only appeared in one special so far. He had neither Alex’s experience nor his natural skills, but he had not been nearly as disastrous as Laurie had feared. What bothered Laurie most about Ryan was the fact that he clearly saw his role at the studio differently than Alex had ever seen his. He was constantly finding ways to undermine Laurie’s ideas. He also served as a legal consultant to other shows at the studio. There was even talk about his developing his own programming. And it was certainly no coincidence that Ryan’s uncle was one of Brett’s closest friends.
So to get back to what Grace had intended as a rhetorical question: Did Ryan know Laurie was his boss? Laurie was starting to wonder.
She took her time getting settled at her desk, and then asked Grace to call Ryan and let him know she was ready to see him.
Maybe it was petty, but if he wanted to see her, he could be the one to walk down the hall.
3
Ryan stood in her office, with his hands on his hips. Looking at him objectively, she understood why one of the raging debates among fans of her show was “Who’s cuter? Alex or Ryan?” She had an obvious preference for one, of course, but Ryan was undoubtedly handsome, with sandy blond hair, bright green eyes, and a perfect smile.
“This view is amazing, Laurie. And your taste in furniture is impeccable.” Laurie was on the sixteenth floor, overlooking the Rockefeller Center ice skating rink. She had decorated the office herself with modern, but welcoming, furnishings. “If this were my office, I might never leave.”
She took a small amount of pleasure in the hint of jealousy she detected in his voice, but she didn’t need his small talk.
“What’s up?” Laurie asked.
“Brett seemed eager to get started on the next special.”
“If it were up to him, we’d have two specials a week as long as the ratings held. He forgets how much work it takes to completely reinvestigate a cold case from scratch,” she said.
“I get it. Anyway, I have the perfect case for our next episode.”
She could not ignore the use of the word our. She had spent years developing the idea for this show.
As many unsolved murders as there were in this country, only so many of them met the unwritten criteria for the cases explored by Under Suspicion. Some cases were too unsolved—no suspects, the equivalent of random guesses. Some were essentially solved, and the police were simply waiting for the evidence to fall into place.
A very narrow category in between—an unsolved mystery, but with an identifiable world of viable suspects—was Laurie’s specialty. She spent most of her time scouring true-crime websites, reading local news coverage all around the country, and sifting through tips that came in online. And always there was that intangible instinct that told her that this case was the one she should pursue. And now here was Ryan, certain that he had a novel idea for them to work on.
She was confident that she would already be familiar with any case Ryan mentioned, soup to nuts, but did her best to appear appreciative that he had a suggestion. “Let’s hear it,” she said.
“Virginia Wakeling.”
Laurie recognized the name immediately. This wasn’t a homicide from the other side of the country. It had occurred just a couple of miles from here, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. And it wasn’t especially cold, either. Virginia Wakeling was a member of the museum’s board of trustees and one of its most generous donors. She had been found in the snow behind the museum on the night of the institution’s most celebrated fundraiser, the Met Gala. It was one of the most star-studded, high-profile events in all of Manhattan. She had died after a fall—either a jump or a push—from the museum’s roof.
Wakeling was a big enough presence in the art world that there were murmurs the museum might even suspend the annual gala the following year when there was still no explanation for her death. But the party continued on, despite the absence of a solution to the ongoing mystery.
Laurie remembered enough of the facts to offer an initial opinion. “It seemed pretty clear that her boyfriend did it.”
“As in ‘Under Suspicion,’?” Ryan said, wriggling his fingers in quotes.
“It looks like a closed case to me. He was considerably younger than Mrs. Wakeling. It seems as if the police are sure that he was the killer even if they can’t prove it. Wasn’t he a model or something?”
“No,” Ryan said. “A personal trainer. His name is Ivan Gray, and he’s innocent.”