The Cinderella Murder (16 page)

The abrupt change in subject was jarring, but Laurie could understand that someone as successful as Dwight Cook operated at maximum efficiency at all times.

“No guarantees,” she said cautiously, “but
Under Suspicion
’s primary purpose is to revive investigations, shedding new light on old facts.”

“Laurie’s being too modest,” Grace said, flipping a long lock of black hair behind her shoulder. “Our first episode led to the case being solved while we were still filming.”

Laurie interrupted Grace’s hard sell. “I think what Grace is saying is that we’re devoted to doing our very best for Susan’s case.”

“Is it hard for you, Laurie, to work on these cases given that you lost your own husband to a violent crime?”

Laurie found herself blinking. Nicole had warned her that Dwight could be socially “awkward.” However, she could not recall anyone ever asking her so directly about the personal impact of Greg’s murder.

“No,” she finally said. “If anything, I hope my experience makes me the right person to tell these stories. I think of our show as a voice for victims who would otherwise be forgotten.”

He looked away from her direct gaze. “I’m sorry. I’ve been told that I can be overly blunt.”

“If we’re being blunt, Dwight, I may as well tell you that there are rumors that you and Susan were rivals at the lab. You were competitors for Professor Hathaway’s approval.”

“Someone suggested that I would have hurt Susan? Because of Hathaway?”

She saw no need to tell him that it was Keith Ratner who mentioned the theory during a phone call in which he also condemned Susan’s mother for her long-standing suspicion of him and named
everyone Susan had ever met as an equally viable suspect, including Dwight Cook. While Ratner’s theories had all sounded pretty desperate to Laurie, these initial interviews were her opportunity to float every possible theory when cameras weren’t rolling. It was good practice for when Alex Buckley grilled them more closely.

“It wasn’t just about your mentor,” she explained, “but your actual work. You were working at the school’s lab and then formed REACH just two months after Susan died, quickly raising millions of dollars in investment capital to support your search-capacity innovation. That kind of money could be a powerful motive to get her out of the picture.”

“You don’t understand at all,” Dwight said wistfully. Laurie had expected him to be defensive, to lash out at her with facts to demonstrate his superiority in programming skills over Susan. But instead, he sounded genuinely hurt. “I, of all people, would never have hurt Susan. I would never hurt anyone over money or anything else, but certainly not Susan. She was . . . she was my friend.”

Laurie could hear the change in Dwight’s voice every time he spoke Susan’s name. “It seems like you were fond of her.”

“Very.”

“Did you know her boyfriend, Keith Ratner?”

“Unfortunately,” he said. “He never took much of an interest in me, but he’d drop by the lab to meet Susan—when he wasn’t late or standing her up. Let me guess: he was the one who suggested that I stole REACH from Susan?”

“I can’t say.”

“You don’t need to. It’s further proof that he never paid attention to Susan’s work. He was clueless as to what she was doing at the lab. Susan never worked on search functioning, which is all REACH was when it started. She was developing voice-to-text software.”

It took Laurie a moment to understand the phrase. “Like automated dictation?” she asked. “I use that on my phone to dictate e-mails.”

“Exactly. If you have any doubts, we can clear them up right now.” He picked up his telephone and dialed a number. “The
Under Suspicion
folks are here. Can you pop up?”

A minute later, a handsome man in his late fifties walked into Dwight’s office. He was dressed casually in a lightweight madras shirt and khaki pants, but the look suited him well, with his tan and a full head of dark waves. He introduced himself as Richard Hathaway.

“We were just talking about Susan’s work with you at UCLA,” Laurie said.

“Such a waste. That sounds cold, I know. Any loss of a young life is a waste. But Susan was bright. She wasn’t twenty-four/seven at the keyboard, the way some programmers are.” He gave Dwight a smile. “But she was creative. Her ability to connect socially—in a way some of us computer types struggle with—helped her connect technology to real life.”

“I’ll step out for a moment,” Dwight offered. “Mrs. Moran has something she needs to ask you.”

Once she was alone with the former professor, Laurie asked if Susan had been working on a particular project.

“It might help to understand how I ran my lab. Computer work can be solitary, so my research assistants acted primarily as teaching assistants for my intro classes. They might also help on isolated portions of my own work, which at the time was in software pipelining—a technique for overlapping loop iterations. And of course you have no idea what any of that means, right?”

“Nope.”

“Nor should you. It’s a method of program optimization, interesting only to people who write code. Anyway, I selected students whose own independent projects during freshman year showed promise. Susan’s was speech-to-text, what most of us would call dictation. It was all pretty rudimentary in the nineties, but Steve Jobs
could never have given us Siri without basic speech-recognition function. If she had lived—well, who knows?”

“Did she work with Dwight on REACH?”

“REACH didn’t exist yet. But she and Dwight worked in proximity to each other, if that’s what you mean. But Dwight’s work was quite different. As you probably know, REACH launched a new way to locate information on the Internet, back when people were still calling it the World Wide Web. No, that wasn’t anything like Susan’s area of interest.”

“Professor—”

“Please, ‘Richard’ is fine. I retired from the academy long ago, and even then, I didn’t particularly care for the titles.”

“You seem young to be retired.”

“And I’ve been retired a long time. I left UCLA to help Dwight build REACH. Imagine being a sophomore in college and having captains of industry fighting to get a meeting with you. I recognize brilliance when I see it, and I was willing to support him full-time while he insisted on finishing up at UCLA—to make his parents proud, if you can believe it. I thought it would be a pit stop for me as I transitioned to the private sector, and yet here I am, twenty years later.”

“That’s nice that the two of you are so close.”

“It may sound corny, but I don’t have any kids of my own. Dwight—well, yes, we are indeed close.”

“I get the impression that Dwight might be more comfortable speaking with our host, Alex Buckley, if he has an old friend like you around.” What she meant was that Hathaway would present far better on television than the unpolished Dwight Cook. “Is it possible you could join us for filming in Los Angeles? The current plan is to locate a house somewhere near the university.”

“Absolutely,” he said. “Whatever you need.”

Keith Ratner’s accusation of a professional rivalry between Susan
and Dwight seemed far-fetched when first offered. Now both Dwight and Professor Hathaway had debunked it. Laurie would confirm with Rosemary and Nicole that Susan had never had run-ins with Dwight, because it was essential that she follow every possible lead.

But every fiber of Laurie’s being told her that the real answers to Susan’s death could only be found in Los Angeles.

30

D
wight was alone again in his office once Hathaway offered to escort the TV people out of their maze of a building.

He could tell from the look Hathaway gave him as he walked out that he wasn’t pleased with the producer’s questions about REACH, but at least they hadn’t wandered into thorny territory. The notion that Susan had anything to do with the technology was completely off base.

Still, he wished he could rewind the clock and start the morning over again. He planned to bring up the subject of Laurie’s late husband as a way to make his contact with her more personal. But the overture had gone over like a ton of bricks. When Dwight and Hathaway first started meeting with venture capitalists, Hathaway had told him,
You’re just so
blunt
! I’m talking blunt like a ten-pound mallet. That’s fine when you’re talking to me, but when it comes to money, you’ve got to learn some nuance.

Their relationship was blunt by design. Dwight’s mind wandered to that Friday night of his sophomore year when Hathaway had stumbled upon him in the lab, catching Dwight hacking into the registrar’s office’s database. Though he wasn’t cheating or changing grades, Dwight wanted to prove to himself that he could slip through the virtual walls of his own university. It was illegal, and a violation of the school’s code of conduct, plus Dwight had been
stupid enough to do it on the computer lab’s equipment, which the university often monitored. Hathaway said he believed that Dwight had no ill motives and would defend him to the university, but he felt obligated to notify the administration to protect his own lab.

Dwight was so upset about disappointing his mentor that he came to the lab late the following night, intending to clean out his workstation and leave a letter of resignation. Instead of finding the lab empty, Dwight found a female student he recognized from the Intro to Computer Science class for which he was a teaching assistant. She was leaving Hathaway’s office. Dwight couldn’t help but think of the campus whispers about the most “crush-worthy” teacher.

He might have slipped out of the lab, resigning as intended, if the soles of his tennis shoes hadn’t squeaked against the tile floors. Hathaway emerged from his office and explained that he saw no reason to report Dwight’s hacking to the university after all. The administration would only blow the activities out of proportion, failing to understand the natural curiosity of someone with Dwight’s blossoming talents. He forced Dwight to promise, however, that he would channel those skills into legitimate work—the kind that could earn a young man a fortune in Silicon Valley.

That conversation eventually gave rise to a strange kind of friendship. The student-teacher, mentor-mentee relationship became more peer-to-peer, marked by utter mutual honesty. Hathaway was the first adult to ever treat Dwight like a real person, not like a broken child who needed to be fixed or isolated. In return, Dwight accepted Hathaway, even if he was a little shady. How else would REACH have ever started if he and Hathaway had not trusted each other completely?

If only Dwight had Hathaway’s knack for schmoozing. Maybe he could have mentioned Laurie’s husband without sticking his foot in his mouth. He hoped he hadn’t offended her so much that she would cut him from the production.

Once everyone was gathered in Los Angeles, all he’d need was a few seconds of access to each person’s cell phone, and all their texts, e-mails, and phone calls would be downloaded automatically to Dwight’s computer. The problem was, he didn’t know whether they’d all show up for filming at once or if their appointments would be back-to-back.

Thinking about the Los Angeles shoot gave him an idea. He pulled up the last e-mail he had received from Jerry, the assistant producer who Laurie mentioned was scouting locations near campus. He opened a new message and began to type.

After hitting the
SEND
key, he leaned back in his chair and looked at the photograph next to his computer. Hathaway had snapped it three years ago on a dive trip during REACH’s annual corporate retreat to Anguilla. The company had flown every single employee—down to the student interns—for a four-day stay at the luxurious Viceroy. Everyone had gushed over the sprawling resort property and the pillow-soft white sand of Meads Bay, but for Dwight, those trips were always about traveling beneath the water. The picture on his desk was from a wall dive at the keys of Dog Island with a sheer one-hundred-foot drop. He swam with tuna, turtles, yellowtail snapper, even a reef shark and two southern stingrays. Deep in the sea is where his thoughts found calm.

He stared into the water in the photograph, wishing he could jump through the frame. He needed calm right now. This television show had him feeling all the pain of losing Susan again. And when he wasn’t reliving the pain, he was wired with anticipation about the possibility of finally learning who had killed the only woman he had ever loved.

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