The Sleeping Beauty Killer

36

A week later, every surface of Laurie’s usually tidy office was blanketed with paper. Three whiteboards, covered with colored ink, framed her conference table.

Jerry was raking his fingers through his hair so intensely that Laurie was worried about premature baldness. When they first started on this special, it had felt like everything was falling into place. Hunter’s family agreed to participate. Location scouting was a cinch: the principal sites were Cipriani and the country home that Hunter’s brother now owned. The trial transcripts had given Laurie a tremendous head start on the facts. But now, they were flooded in paper-three days from production-and Laurie was regretting ceding to Brett’s ridiculous demand for speed.

Most of the disorder in her office was attributable to Laurie’s obsession with identifying the Internet user who called himself RIP_Hunter.

“Privacy, schmivacy,” Jerry cried, every syllable marking his frustration. “There has to be some way to know who posted all of these messages.”

Monica from Information Technology tried for the sixteenth time to lower expectations. She was twenty-nine years old with a slight frame and barely five feet tall. Other members of the IT Department had more years of experience under their belts, but Laurie trusted Monica as to computer matters implicitly. She was hardworking, thorough, and most importantly, able to explain technical details in a straightforward way.

“You’re forgetting,” Monica explained, “that fifteen years ago the Internet was treated by most people as a computerized bulletin board. To use it at all was fairly cutting edge, but for the most part, the information flowed in one direction. You’d pull up a page and read it. The idea of responding, let alone engaging in a conversation, was groundbreaking. News providers posted content online, but there was no way to respond.”

“Oh, how I miss those days,” Laurie sighed. As far as she could tell, only the most extreme viewpoints were expressed on the Web. Her own show’s social media pages were filled with praise from viewers, but Laurie always felt the sting of the harshest comments.

Monica was tapping away at the keyboard excitedly. “The desire to engage was out there,” she explained, “but the mainstream media pages weren’t creating a forum. The early adopters found their own cohorts through message boards. Fortunately, I’ve found shadow sites where the content is archived. It took days to print out all the buried conversations about Hunter’s murder and Casey’s trial. If the sites were still operational, I could try to find a company willing to share IP addresses with us. But these sites are no longer active.”

“Can you break that down to regular English?” Grace asked.

“What we’re looking at,” Monica explained, “are just words, as if tapped on a keyboard; the underlying data can’t be accessed. In short, I’d have to be psychic to tell you who actually wrote this stuff.”

Hunter’s murder had made national news. In the public eye, Casey quickly went from grieving girlfriend to “presumed guilty.” With Monica’s help, they had also sifted through thousands of online comments written by followers of the trial, who found one another on message boards and debated the case intensely.

The first step had been to identify all comments authored under the name “RIP_Hunter.” When they were able to read all of these posts together, they noticed two trends. The author tended to speak with authority, as if he or she had inside information about both Casey and Hunter. All of Casey’s friends know, for example, or Casey has always had a raging temper, was a phony, and and also had the easy route handed to her. Throughout the entire case, it seemed as if someone with inside information was “trolling” Casey and feeding gossip to Mindy Sampson.

It was Jerry who noticed another, more subtle characteristic. The author had a tendency to introduce additional points with the phrase “and also.” Anyone who knows Casey will tell you that she has to have the last word, and also has to be the center of attention.

On the chance that whoever authored the RIP_Hunter notes had posted other comments, Monica had found another fifty-seven comments that appeared to suggest firsthand knowledge of the case, and another twenty using the phrase “and also,” with some overlap between the two groups.

“Bravo for our organizational skills,” Laurie said, “but what in the world are we supposed to do with all of this now?” She collapsed onto her office sofa, her head beginning to hurt from reading so many printouts.

She grabbed a notepad and made a list of all of her unanswered questions. Who is RIP_Hunter? Who tipped off Mindy Sampson about her show? Why did Alex warn her to be careful, and did it have something to do with the fact that Alex had met General James Raleigh as a law student? Did Hunter audit the foundation’s books, and was that related to Mark Templeton’s departure from the foundation four years later?

Laurie thought about the principle of Occam’s Razor: the simplest explanation is usually correct. Was there any one thing that could tie together all of these loose threads?

She barely noticed the sound of her phone ringing and Grace picking it up, until Grace told her that General Raleigh’s assistant, Mary Jane, was on hold. “She wants to know how much time she should allot for the General’s interview as well as hers. I offered to juggle the schedule if they had somewhere else to be, but she said his time is tight every day of the year. She said Arden’s pushing him for pages, whatever that means.”

“He’s working on his memoirs,” Laurie said. Something about Grace’s question was bothering her, but she couldn’t quite put her finger on it. Most likely, it was that she had no idea how long Ryan would take to conduct his interviews. Was she ever going to get used to working with Ryan instead of Alex? “See if he can give us an hour. I assume she’ll be more flexible.”

Of the suspects Casey had identified, Mary Jane seemed the least likely. Hunter may have worried about the assistant’s motives, but fifteen years later, she appeared to still be working as a dutiful servant. And General Raleigh did not seem like a man who would be taken advantage of easily.

While Grace returned to the phone, Laurie went back to her list of questions, but Mary Jane’s phone call was still nagging at her. Arden. Where had she heard that name recently? Who else had been talking about a book publisher? And then she remembered her conversation with Casey’s ex-boyfriend Jason. I’ll admit that calling her Crazy Casey in the book title was a little unfair. Frankly, Arden Publishing insisted. Could it possibly be a coincidence that General Raleigh’s and Jason’s books shared a publisher?

“Jerry, when you talked to Mark Templeton, did you ask him about the gap between his employment at the Raleigh Foundation and his new job at Holly’s Kids?”

“No. As I said, I wanted it to seem like we only wanted to talk to him about seeing Casey and Hunter at the gala. I thought you should be the one to decide whether to push him on the rumors about the foundation’s assets.”

Laurie walked to her computer, typed Holly’s Kids into the search engine, and pulled up the website for the nonprofit that currently employed Mark Templeton as its director. She clicked on the list of the board of directors. Her eye immediately moved to one name in particular: Holly Bloom, as in Holly’s Kids, listed as both board member and founder. She clicked through to Holly’s bio and then tilted the computer screen toward Jerry. “The Holly of Holly’s Kids is the president of Arden Publishing, also known as the publisher of Jason Gardner’s book and General Raleigh’s forthcoming memoir.”

Jerry was staring at the screen. “Whoa. I think I just felt the room tilt.”

Laurie still didn’t know who killed Hunter Raleigh, or even whether Casey Carter was innocent. But she was putting certain pieces of the puzzle together. If she was right, then Casey never had a fair shot at trial.

She picked up the phone and called her father. “Dad, I have a favor to ask. Do you know anyone with the Connecticut State Police?”

“Of course. I may be off the job, but my old Rolodex still comes in handy.”

“Can you see if anyone who worked on the Hunter Raleigh murder case would be willing to talk to me off the record?” She remembered his wistfulness last week when he seemed to miss being in the middle of an investigation. “Maybe you can come with me.”