“Just me,” Lucy said. “Sean’s leaving in the morning.”
He didn’t want to. He offered to back out of the RCK annual meeting to stay with her and “keep an eye” on Maxine Revere; Lucy told him no. She was confident she could handle the reporter, especially now that she’d met her. Max was surprisingly easy to read. She had a straightforward manner that Lucy respected. Lucy recognized that part of her profile of the reporter was because of the book she’d read. It was clear from the moment Lucy walked in that Max expected to get exactly what she wanted. She had definitely thrown the woman a curveball when she insisted on working with her.
But Justin was her family. Lucy wasn’t backing down.
“I’ll be back Sunday,” Sean said pointedly.
“Wonderful,” Max said without hiding the sarcasm. “May I offer you something to drink? Coffee? Water? Another Samuel Adams?” she offered Sean.
“No, thank you,” Sean said brusquely.
“I have a dinner at my parents shortly,” Lucy said, trying to diffuse the tension between Max and Sean. “I’m interested in your board and timeline. I think it’ll help me explain how the cases connect if I see it all laid out.”
“I can talk to your family. If you introduce me—”
“Not right now.” Lucy wasn’t going to let Max near her parents. “My father had a heart attack last year, I don’t want anything to upset him. My goal is to get Carina and Connor to have a sit-down with you at some point—after I read the police reports and confirm my suspicion.”
It was clear that Max understood exactly what Lucy had said. “You have a suspect in mind? How?”
“Not an individual, a profile. But if I’m right, asking specific questions to each witness, in particular Andrew”—and Nelia, but Lucy didn’t say that—“will yield a suspect.”
Max walked over to the bar and poured herself a glass of white wine. “This way,” she said, gesturing to a wall in the living room. She’d removed the picture that hung on the wall and put up a horizontal timeline starting with Justin’s murder—twenty years ago this June.
“It’s clear that we’ll never solve these murders without knowing the motive,” Lucy said. “We need to find out why Justin was targeted. Why these other boys were targeted. What was the motive for Adam Donovan?”
“He had none.”
“In the trial, what did the prosecution say that convinced the jury that he was guilty? You said he didn’t take the stand, correct?”
Max nodded. “In closing statements, the prosecutor said that while the world may never know why Adam killed his son, it’s clear that he wanted out of his marriage. His wife had made it clear that she didn’t want a divorce because she had a miserable childhood with divorced parents who fought all the time, so Adam may have killed his son so he could leave his wife.”
“It would be more likely he’d kill his wife, if that was his mind-set,” Lucy said. “But I’d have to read his statement, talk to him.”
“My associate spoke to him this morning.”
Lucy wanted more information about that, but first she focused on the timeline.
Max had divided the timeline into twenty columns, starting with the year Justin was murdered. The columns between murders were narrower. Then she’d listed the facts of each case under the name of the victim.
The similarities among all four murders were even more obvious when they were laid out in the grid.
The boys were all between the ages of seven and nine.
They’d all been kidnapped from their bedroom within two hours of midnight.
They’d all had a sedative in their systems—now that Andrew had confirmed that Justin had a narcotic in his system.
They’d all been suffocated and buried in shallow graves, wrapped in a blanket from their own bed.
Sedative … it seemed so obvious to her, but maybe she was jumping the gun. She wished her brother Dillon was here. Someone to bounce the idea off of, someone to work the back-and-forth.
She acutely felt Sean watching her. His fear for her—that she would get so emotionally involved in the case it would physically hurt—was clouding her judgment. She walked over to him and kissed him. “Do you think you can get our bags and meet me in the room in thirty minutes? That’ll give us enough time to change before dinner.”
He stared at her intently, concern in his eyes. “Are you sure?”
“Your concern for me is clouding my perception. I just need a few minutes without worrying about you worrying about me.” She smiled, touched his lips. “I love you.”
He rubbed her chin, kissed her, and left without a word to Max.
“What was that?” Max asked.
Lucy didn’t know how much she’d heard, but she didn’t feel the need to explain herself. “Sean’s going to get our bags from the car. We didn’t check in before the meeting.”
Sean was everything she could have hoped for in a lover, a friend, a husband. And he got that she needed to sometimes look at crimes alone. She was sensitive to his emotions, and sometimes that clouded her ability to get inside the killer’s mind-set. But knowing he would be there for her tonight made all the difference.
Lucy turned around and faced the board, looking at each case. “The Porters also had an affair?”
“Yes. The husband was with his mistress. It was a short-term thing, but it wasn’t his first affair. Tommy’s parents separated for a while after his death, but got back together and now have twin daughters, age six.”
Lucy nodded. So often, when a child was killed, the parents couldn’t withstand the pain, guilt, and grief. Divorce was all too common.
“You mentioned that Adam Donovan’s mistress had been discredited. Do you have a sense as to why?”
“I wasn’t on the jury, and reading the transcript is different than hearing and seeing the testimony.”
Max was perceptive, though Lucy had already noted that from her writing.
“However,” Max continued, “I suspect it was more to do with her image. Young, impressionable, attractive. She became flustered at questions about her sex life, about where they had sex—and at first the defense attorney didn’t object, which I thought was odd. Her sex life wasn’t material as to whether Adam Donovan was with her or not with her during the time in question. Then the prosecutor got her to contradict herself on the time frame. When she clarified in the recross, she was consistent with her original statement. Yet he still hammered home the fact that she was asleep during part of the time-of-death window—which for the jury was enough to think that Donovan snuck out on his mistress, drove thirty minutes home, kidnapped and killed his son, and snuck back in. There was no physical evidence that he left her apartment and no witnesses.” She shook her head. “It’s a stretch. Like I said, the defense was pathetic.”
“I’ll read the transcript tonight.”
“I thought you were meeting your family.”
“I’ll come back after dinner, if that’s okay. I want to be caught up to speed before tomorrow.”
“And what is tomorrow?”
“We’ll talk to the detective in charge.”