As if their possessions were more important than their son.
Danielle drove home. She lived in a quaint older house in Glendale with a long narrow driveway that led to the detached garage. She didn’t park in the garage—she used it for other things.
She went inside her house and poured a glass of wine, then stopped herself. She needed to be clear this week. To plan. She put the glass down but didn’t pour it out. She might need just one small glass to go to sleep. To keep the nightmares at bay.
It’ll take the whole bottle. You know that.
She did. But she could control herself. She had to.
She walked to the second bedroom she used as an office. It was functional, with a computer and printer and bookshelf filled with books she hadn’t read.
She hadn’t read a book in a long, long time.
But on the top shelf was a photo album. She took it down, sat at her desk, and opened it.
She ran her fingers over the first photo. Matthew, only hours after he’d been born. So perfect. So sweet.
Danielle couldn’t do this. She flipped to the last page and pulled out the large envelope she kept there. She opened it, dumped out the contents. Keys, mostly. A few photos. Notes. Things she didn’t dare leave behind, just in case.
She grabbed the key chain marked F. Fieldstone. It wasn’t their chain—it wasn’t even their key. She’d made a copy last month when Nina gave her her keys to go to the archive room to retrieve files on a case that was going to appeal.
As if subconsciously Danielle had known this was the only way.
She put everything back in the folder, including the Fieldstone security code, which she had long memorized. She’d watched Nina months ago type it in when they’d gone over to the house to prepare for a partner dinner.
Before Danielle found out the truth about Tony and Lana.
Maybe she’d always known. Maybe she had a sixth sense about cheating husbands.
You didn’t know your own husband was screwing his secretary. So cliché. So disgusting.
Her hand itched to call that bastard and give him a tongue-lashing.
She put the photo album back and walked down the short hall to the kitchen. Drank half the glass of wine. Retrieved her cell phone. Dialed Richard.
He didn’t answer. Was he intentionally avoiding her calls?
“Are you cheating on your wife, Richard? Does she know? Or is she as clueless as I was?”
She went off on him, going from calm to angry, long after the phone beeped to tell her the recording time was up.
She stared at the phone and almost called him back, but something tickled in the back of her mind. Something she didn’t quite remember … but it was there.
Danielle grabbed her new car keys and went back out into the night. It was after eleven. Nina should be home by now. Danielle lived only a few minutes from La Cresenta. She turned down the Fieldstones’ street and slowed when she neared their house.
Nina’s SUV still wasn’t there.
On a whim, because of that tickle in the back of her mind, Danielle drove to Grace’s house. She lived in the Burbank Hills, in a beautiful home bought and paid for by Grace’s wealthy ex-husband. Money obviously didn’t buy happiness since Grace had divorced. Had he cheated on her? Probably, Grace never said. But isn’t that what men did? They wanted to screw anything that moved.
At least, that’s what Danielle’s mom always said, and had been proven right again and again and again.
Nina’s shiny Escalade was in the driveway … but no one else was at Grace’s. Bunco would have long been over … and Nina was the last one here by hours?
The lights were off.
Had she been drinking? Decided not to drive?
Danielle parked on the street and closed her eyes. She was missing something. But her instincts—well-formed instincts from years of research and following cheating husbands—told her to grab her camera.
She quietly exited the car and walked up the steep slope of Grace’s driveway.
She’d been to Grace’s house before. Her daughter had a room upstairs, on the south; Grace’s suite was on the northern ground floor. Spacious, as big as Danielle’s entire house.
Why did she even work when she had made so much money on her divorce?
Danielle shook off the thought. She walked around the side of the house; there was a gate. Dammit.
She tried the latch. It wasn’t locked. She quietly went down the walkway to the back of the house, then stopped.
Two sets of sliding-glass doors opened into the backyard. This was Grace’s bedroom. Danielle had to tread carefully here. She walked to the far corner of the yard, on the other side of the pool, where palm trees grew up against the Verdugo Mountains. They didn’t belong here; they seemed so out of place. She stood against one thick tree, aimed her camera at the bedroom, hidden by the night.
She had bought this camera years ago, but it still had some of the best features on the market. She adjusted the lens for the low-light conditions and zoomed into Grace’s bedroom.
Maybe she wasn’t surprised, but she involuntarily gasped.
Tony was not the only Fieldstone having an affair.
Chapter Twenty-four
SATURDAY
Lucy dropped Max off at Andrew’s office Saturday morning, then borrowed Max’s rental car to drive to Carina’s house. She had to pass her parents’ to get there.
She slowed to a stop and sat idling across the street from the small two-story house where she’d been raised. Dillon, Jack, and Nelia had all moved out of the house before Lucy was born—Nelia married to Andrew, Jack in the army, and Dillon in college and living in the room he and their dad had built above the garage. He’d received a full scholarship to UC San Diego where he planned to study sports medicine. He’d almost finished medical school when Justin was killed. He changed his focus to psychiatry, took an extra year of school, and did his residency in a facility for the criminally insane.
Justin’s murder had touched everyone in her family, not only herself and Dillon. Connor had already been a cop when Justin was killed. Patrick was in his first year of college—a full scholarship to play baseball. While he continued to play, his heart wasn’t in it. He studied computer science and found he had a knack. Graduated, went to the police academy, and created what was now the modern-day cybersquad at SDPD.
Lucy couldn’t remember what Carina had been studying in college when Justin was murdered. All she remembered was that she’d never gone back and instead joined the police academy. She became a cop, quickly rose in the ranks and earned her detective shield before she was thirty.