Notorious (6 page)

Lindy drowned.

Why had Kevin written that on the death certificate? Did it have anything to do with his suicide? Had he planned to drown himself, a difficult way to commit suicide unless there was a contributing cause like unconsciousness from an overdose of drugs. It could his funeral today.”tt like have been an accident. He could have been in the bathtub, high, and passed out.

Why get into the bath with his shorts on?

If it was suicide, he wouldn’t want to be found naked. It made sense. Or he was so stoned that he didn’t know he was wearing clothes.

Max rubbed her forehead. She wished she could be surprised, but Kevin had been going down this path ever since his trial. She could only imagine the stress and humiliation of having a murder charge hanging over his head. She’d told him twelve years ago when the DA declined to retry Kevin until additional evidence surfaced that he should leave the Bay Area, go far away where no one knew who he was. Only then would he find peace.

He opted to stay. He was desperate to clear his name. But thirteen years after Lindy was killed, he had a drug addiction, no college degree, a menial job, and few friends.

The officers hadn’t made note of the missing laptop, and Max wondered if they’d interviewed Jodi before or after she’d gone into the apartment. Jodi’s grief had interfered with her logic, which was common in these types of interviews. Jodi wanted to believe Kevin hadn’t done it, so she looked for every possible proof that someone had killed him. There could be a logical explanation for the missing laptop. Someone could have stolen it before he died. He could have loaned it to a friend. Left it at work. Sold it. Drug addicts would sell anything of value to get their next fix.

But that didn’t explain why Kevin sent Jodi Lindy’s death certificate. Why he thought she’d drowned. Or why he’d sent Jodi a text message to call Max.

Call Max. I love you, J.

It was his good-bye note. His suicide note to his sister. Of that, Max was certain. But would Jodi believe it?

Maybe Kevin had reached a dead end in his own private investigation and in frustration and despair, killed himself.

Then why tell Jodi to call Max? In an attempt to make Max feel guilty because she wouldn’t help him in his pursuit of Lindy’s killer?

It was too late to go to the DA’s office and find out what, if anything, was going on with Kevin’s trial. If he thought he’d be facing another trial—that new evidence had been uncovered—that might have tipped him over the edge. Instead, she drove to his apartment. She needed answers—namely, Kevin’s state of mind when he OD’d.

The apartment complex on Roble was tired but clean with trimmed hedges and blossoming rosebushes along the front walk. There were twelve units in Kevin’s white, L-shaped building, six on the top and six on the bottom, an open staircase leading to the long second-story balcony. The building next door mirrored Kevin’s, connected by a small courtyard with benches framing an old oak tree.

Jodi had given her a key, but Max decided to first talk to the apartment manager, Anita Gonzales.

Ms. Gonzales opened the door quickly, her smile warm and genuine. The older woman was short and plump with naturally gray hair in unnaturally tight curls. Her home smelled like cinnamon and vanilla. The muted television in the background showed a game show. Her dark eyes assessed Max quickly. “I saw you walking up. You must be Jodi’s friend.”

“Maxine Revere,” she said. “I didn’t want to go up to Kevin’s apartment without talking to you first.”

“Please, come in,” she said and are you staying?” anyone like opened the door. She straightened her apron and brushed a loose curl away from her face. “I’m sorry for the mess.”

The apartment was cluttered and hot, but immaculate. Gonzales had hundreds of small glass animals in a cabinet along one wall, a light above illuminating the menagerie.

“I love your figurines,” Max said, eyeing in particular the section of birds.

She beamed. “My husband used to travel for business and would bring me back one every time. After he died, my son started buying them for me for my birthday and Christmas. Sit, please—I just made snickerdoodle cookies. Fresh out of the oven.”

Max wasn’t hungry, but she accepted the offer. “Thank you.”

“Coffee? Milk? Kevin always liked milk with my cookies.”

“Water, if that’s not a problem.”

Max understood people pleasers like Anita Gonzales. By the pictures on the wall, she had only the one son. She’d stayed home and raised her son, took care of the house, enjoyed doing for others. She’d have been the first person to bake a casserole for someone who lost a loved one, and would be the person organizing the prayer group when someone was sick. Max wasn’t surprised that after her husband died and her son moved out she found the apartment management job. It gave her the opportunity to take care of others. Max would bet she knew the personal business of everyone who lived here.

Anita brought the water and plate of cookies to the table. Max took a bite. They were delicious. “I’ll bet Kevin ate a lot of your cookies.”

“When I could get him to eat,” she said, shaking her head. “Poor boy. So lost.” Tears welled in her eyes. “It wasn’t like him.”

“Taking his own life?”

“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?”“How?”ou>

“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 privilege“How?”ou>d 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.

Max stood at the end of the bed and looked around, suddenly sad. Kevin had once had a future, as bright as any middle-class teenager. Better, really, because he had dreams unencumbered by family legacy or expectations—he’d wanted to work in genetics, the research end of medicine, to find cures for deadly childhood illnesses. His older sister had died of a rare genetic disorder when Kevin was six.

She’d stood by Kevin because the Kevin O’Neal she’d grown up with could not have raped anyone, nor strangled Lindy. In her gut, she knew he hadn’t done it. Which made lying about his alibi hard to understand. Though the police were certainly responsible for not pursuing other lines of inquiry, Kevin was just as responsible for not clearing himself immediately.

She looked back at Kevin’s bookshelf where her books were displayed on the bottom shelf, with his other nonfiction titles, in alphabetical order. He only had two.

Her eye skirted along the rest of the shelves and she noticed a familiar spine in the middle of Kevin’s complete Terry Brooks collection.

It was her first book.

She’d started the book as a journal when her college roommate Karen Richardson had disappeared during spring break, when they’d gone to Miami to have fun. Max had spent a year in Florida trying to find out what happened to Karen. That was when she’d met FBI Agent Marco Lopez, a new recruit eager to make a name for himself. But neither of them had found Karen’s killer. Or her body.

Or, rather, they knew who the killer was but couldn’t prove it. Ten years later, it was considered a cold case, even though it wasn’t cold. It was solved—without justice. It still angered Max when she dwelled on it. Writing the book had helped, but it hadn’t purged all her pain and rage at the injustice of that year.

She pulled the book from the shelf to put it with the other two, or maybe just to see it again, reminding her of who she’d been and who she was now. Kevin’s trial had set her on a path of doubt and distrust. Karen’s disappearance had given Max her calling.

An envelope was sticking out a mere quarter-inch, noticeable only now that she’d removed the book. She took it out. It was addressed to her, stamped and dated last December. That was when Kevin had e-mailed her asking for help in solving Lindy’s murder.

The seal had been broken. She took out a sheet of lined paper. A key fell to the carpet. She picked it up. It was unremarkable, a standard key, but there was a number on it—110. Another apartment? A are you staying?” anyone like storage unit?

She read the note.

Max—

I can only ask for forgiveness once. You rejected it, and I guess I understand. You’re still hurt and angry. I get that. And I understand that I should have, from the beginning, told the police I’d been with Olivia. At the time, I thought I was doing the right thing because I didn’t kill Lindy and there was no evidence that I did. I was so naïve about the system.

Even when you left, angry, you told me you believed me. For years, I tried to put it all behind me. I moved to San Francisco, but then I got into drugs and drank too much and nearly died. I finally woke up and knew what I had to do: find the truth.