“Being selfish like that. He’d have to have known Jodi or I would be the one to find him. He didn’t have a lot of friends, but Jodi, dear girl, came by at least once a week, and he helped me around this place, fixing this and that.”
Max didn’t know what kind of person Kevin was recently, but he’d always been considerate as a teenager. He was the type of guy who’d mow the lawn for his neighbors if they were sick, or the one who would stand up for a kid who was being picked on. He baby-sat Jodi all the time, as an infant and toddler, without complaint. He was also the type of guy who used his fists. He’d decked her cousin once, in eighth grade, because William had made a crude remark about Jenny Foster’s breasts. Max always suspected that’s why William never particularly liked Kevin. That, and Kevin was a scholarship kid at Atherton Prep, not really one of them.
“You told the police that his alarm clock was ringing and a neighbor complained.”
Ms. Gonzales nodded. “He was usually very thoughtful. Most of my tenants are retired folks. The walls are thin, and his alarm was beeping for over an hour. Mrs. Dempsey was very upset about it.”
“What time did the alarm go off?”
“It was set for six thirty. He had to be at the coffee shop by seven thirty on Sundays. I went up at seven thirty thinking he’d made a mistake and reset it or something, and gone off to work.”
“How long had he lived here?”
“Three years.”
“Do you know where he was before that?”
“San Francisco. I don’t know much about it.”
“Did he ever talk to you about his past?”
“Do you mean did I know that he was accused of killing that poor girl thirteen years ago? Of course. I’ve lived in Menlo Park my entire life. Back then, my husband was still alive and we had a small house over off Santa Cruz. We followed the news. I knew who he was when he applied.”
“Jodi gave me the apartment key—would you mind if I went up there?”
“Go right ahead. It’s been cleaned because of…” her voice trailed off. “Rent is paid through the month, and I told Jodi she could have whatever time she needed to pack up Kevin’s things.” She sighed. “He didn’t have much.”
Max thanked Mrs. Gonzales for the refreshments, then went upstairs to Kevin’s corner unit.
The one-bedroom apartment had been sanitized. The cloying scent of bleach and Lysol irritated her nose. She opened all the windows in the living room and kitchen before she looked around.
Kevin had set up the small dining nook to be his office, and in it there was a desk, printer, filing cabinet, but no computer. She went through his desk and found the usual—pay stubs, tax returns, receipts, mints, pens. The two-drawer filing cabinet had a lock, but it was easy to pick.
Inside were several empty hanging files, stretched and worn as if they’d once held extensive paperwork.
Each folder was labeled: Investigation, Atherton PD; Investigation, MPPD; DA; Autopsy; Ames; Revere; Talbot; Media; Transcripts.
Jodi had said that Kevin was obsessed with Lindy Ames’s murder and this proved it. Except there were no documents in any of the folders.
The Talbots were a large, extended family in Atherton, as established as the Reveres. Why was Kevin researching the Talbots? Which Talbot? All, or just those who’d been in high school with them, like Andy? When he listed Revere, did he mean her or William? Or any of the others in her family?
Everyone who’d seen Lindy the twenty-four hours before she’d been killed had been interviewed by the police thirteen years ago. Including Max and William and Andy.
Missing computer, missing files.
Could mean absolutely nothing. Could be a logical explanation.
Max walked through the rest of the apartment, looking through the cabinets and drawers. In Kevin’s sparse bedroom was a bed, dresser, and a bookshelf filled with mostly fantasy and science fiction, but also a shelf of nonfiction—history, biographies, and two of her true crime books. It felt odd to know that even though she hadn’t spoken to him, he still bought her books.
A tinge of regret scratched Max until she had to acknowledge, at least to herself, that she’d lost more than her faith in people when Kevin lied to her. She’d lost her best friend. Kevin made her laugh. He knew everything about her—about never hearing from her mom except through sporadic postcards—which stopped when she turned sixteen—about not knowing who her dad was, about feeling like she was being punished by her grandparents because of her mother’s failures and her own drive to find her father against their wishes. They didn’t have a problem with Max because she was born out of wedlock, but because she didn’t act like a Revere.
Ironically, scandal was part of being one of the privileged in Atherton. It was how one responded and behaved during the disgrace that meant one belonged, and Max never behaved the way she was supposed to. When she learned Uncle Brooks was having an affair, she called him on it. Apparently, that was a big no-no—especially considering she’d been fifteen at the time. But from the minute her mother left her with her grandparents shortly before her tenth birthday, she’d felt the disdain coming from William’s father. Now, with maturity and experience on her side, she accepted that it was because of something her mother had done that made Brooks take it out on her; then she’d just felt the animosity and had no idea how to address it, except through disobedience.
She turned her attention from Kevin’s books to his closet. It was cluttered, stacked with boxes of papers and clothes, and she realized she would likely need to go through the papers to find out if there was anything important and if the missing files had been boxed up. She would task Jodi with helping.