The Cinderella Murder

29

Laurie and Grace pulled into the lot in front of REACH’s Palo Alto headquarters shortly after ten A.M. The drive from their hotel in San Francisco had made New York City traffic seem hypersonic by comparison. They had only arrived in California yesterday, but Laurie was already homesick.

Today’s interview with Susan’s former classmate at the UCLA computer lab was the first of the preparatory interviews prior to next week’s summit session in Los Angeles. It had made sense for them to start in the Bay Area, gathering background information before moving closer to both the scene of the crime and the likely suspects. While Laurie and Grace were meeting with Dwight Cook, Jerry would be scouting locations in Susan’s old neighborhood. The plan was to open the episode with a montage of photographs of Susan, interspersed with footage of her high school and childhood home.

Laurie shivered as she stepped from the passenger seat of their rental car. She was wearing a lightweight cashmere sweater and black pants, with no jacket. “I always forget how chilly the Bay Area can be.”

“How do you think I feel?” Grace wore a jade-green silk blouse with a deep V-neck and a black skirt that was short even for her. “I was picturing Los Angeles sunshine and mojitos when I packed.”

“We’re only here three days. Then you’ll get your time in Hollywood.”

Dwight Cook greeted them in the lobby, dressed in an expensive suit and solid red tie. Based on the photographs Laurie had seen, she had expected his uniform of jeans, T-shirts, zip-up hoodies, and canvas sneakers. She might ask Jerry to suggest that he wear whatever made him “most comfortable” to the summit taping. Looking at him today, he came across as an older version of a child in his first suit at confirmation.

Dwight led the way through the building, a labyrinth of brightly colored hallways and oddly shaped nooks and crannies. When they finally reached his office, it was absolutely serene by comparison, with cool gray walls, slate floors, and clean, modern furniture. The only personal touch in the office was a single photograph of him in a wet suit and flippers, preparing to scuba dive from the edge of a yacht into sparkling turquoise water.

“You’re a diver?” she asked.

“It’s probably the only thing I enjoy more than work,” he said. “Can I offer you something to drink? Water? Coffee?”

She declined, but Grace took him up on the offer of water. Laurie was surprised when Dwight retrieved a bottle from a minifridge with a Nespresso coffeemaker on top of it.

“I half expected a remote-controlled robot to roll in,” Laurie said with a smile.

“You have no idea how many times my own mother asked me to invent Rosie the Maid from The Jetsons. These days, Silicon Valley’s all about phones and tablets. We’ve got data-compression projects, social networking apps, location interfacing technology, you name it-if it interacts with a gadget, I’ve probably got someone in this building working on it. The least I can do is grab my own water and coffee. Nicole tells me that your show has been successful in solving cold cases.”

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.