“You said you wanted to talk about Susan.”
Again, she wasn’t offended by the lack of small talk. He might have been considered a king of Silicon Valley, but she could already tell he was still the same uncomfortable kid who had worked in the campus computer-science lab with Susan.
He sat affectless as Nicole told him about the show, Under Suspicion, and the possibility that they would be featuring Susan’s case. “Did you get a letter from the producer?” she asked.
He shook his head. “Once Susan’s murder became a story about Hollywood, no one seemed to care that she was also a brilliant programmer. I doubt the producer even realizes we knew each other.”
Back in college, it had taken Nicole a few outings as a trio-her, Susan, Dwight-to realize that Susan had been hoping to play Cupid between her lab partner and freshman dorm-mate. On one level, the pairing made sense: both Dwight and Nicole were off the charts in raw intelligence. And now that Nicole saw it for what it was, they were both-let’s face it-peculiar. They were both projects for Susan, who tried her best to coax them from their shells. Dwight found comfort in computers. Nicole eventually found it in-well, she didn’t like to think about that part of her past.
But after only two dates, Nicole had realized the fundamental difference between Dwight and her. Her oddness was short-lived. She had been young, sheltered, and so busy succeeding that she’d never learned how to exercise independent thought. She just had to find her way. Dwight’s “issues” ran deeper. Nowadays, they’d probably say he was somewhere “on the spectrum.”
At the time, Nicole thought that made her the better catch. But she hadn’t learned the hard way-not yet-how dangerous a young, brilliant woman’s desire to find her own way could be.
“Well, that’s why I came here, Dwight. I’d like to tell the show about your friendship with Susan. How she had another side to her.”
Dwight was looking in the direction of her face, as he had probably learned people expected him to do during a conversation, but he wasn’t really connecting to her. “Of course. Susan was always so kind to me. She looked after me. I was lucky we happened to work for the same professor, or I never would have met her.”
In other words, he felt the way she did about winning the roommate lottery.
“So I can tell Laurie Moran you’ll help with the show? Appear on camera?”
He nodded again. “Anything to help. Anything for Susan. Should I ask Hathaway, too?”
“Hathaway?”
“Richard Hathaway. Our professor. That’s how Susan and I met.”
“Oh, I hadn’t thought of him. Is he still at UCLA? Have you kept in touch?”
“He’s retired from the university, but we’re definitely in touch. He works right here at REACH.”
“How funny to have your former professor in your employ.”
“More like a partner, really. He’s helped me from day one. I’m sure he’d be willing to help with the show, too.”
Nicole wondered whether Dwight found comfort in keeping his college mentor close, someone who knew him before he was a twenty-year-old millionaire on the cover of Wired magazine. “Sure,” she said. “That would be great.”
She almost felt guilty for pulling Dwight Cook into this. He was the head of REACH, a tech company that had become a household name in the 1990s by changing the way people searched for information on the Internet. She had no idea what they worked on now, but from the looks of these grounds, Dwight was still a major player in the tech world.
But that was exactly why Nicole had come to Palo Alto. Frank Parker had become a famous director, but Dwight was a kind of celebrity in his own right. The more high-profile people who were involved in the production, the less screen time the show would devote to the roommate who dropped out after her sophomore year, changed her name, and never went back to Los Angeles again.
Once Nicole was in her car, she pulled Laurie Moran’s letter from her purse and dialed her office number on her cell phone.
“Ms. Moran, it’s Nicole Melling. You contacted me about my college roommate, Susan Dempsey?”
“Yes.” Nicole heard the rustling of a plastic bag in the background and wondered if she had caught the producer midlunch. “Please, call me Laurie. I’m so happy to hear from you. Are you familiar with Under Suspicion?”
“I am,” Nicole confirmed.
“As you probably know, the name of our show indicates that we go back and talk to the people who have remained literally under suspicion in cold cases. Obviously you don’t fit that bill, but you and Susan’s mother will remind viewers that Susan was a real person. She wasn’t just the pretty girl with an aspiring actress’s headshot. She wasn’t Cinderella.”
Nicole understood why Susan’s mother put so much stock into this producer.
“If you think your show can help bring attention back to Susan’s case, I’m happy to help.”
“That’s fantastic.”
“And I hope you don’t mind, but I took the liberty of contacting another college friend of Susan.” She briefly described Dwight Cook’s working relationship with Susan in the computer lab, followed by the news that Dwight was willing to participate in the show. The producer sounded thrilled, just as Nicole expected.
As Nicole pulled out of the office park’s lot, she looked in the rearview mirror and felt incredibly proud of Dwight Cook. Susan’s death had presented a gigantic challenge to the lives of everyone she knew. Both Nicole and Keith Ratner had quit college. Rosemary had told her she barely left her bed for a full year.
But somehow Dwight had managed to create something transformative in the aftermath. She wondered if whatever made him different from other people had enabled him to channel his grief in a way the rest of them could not.
She was so wrapped up in her own thoughts that she never saw the off-white pickup truck pull out of the parking lot behind her.
15
Dwight Cook closed and locked the door to his office, located far from most of REACH’s employees. That was the way he liked it.
Dwight constantly felt all these kids looking at him, wanting to know the tall, lanky billionaire who still dressed like a teenage nerd but was nevertheless pursued by several well-known supermodels. His employees assumed that Dwight’s office was isolated because he did not want to be disturbed. The truth was that Dwight could not possibly run this business the way it needed to be run if he made too many connections to the people who worked for him.
Dwight had realized in middle school that he wasn’t like other people. It wasn’t that his own behavior was so unusual, at least not that he could determine. Instead, he was different in his reactions to other people. It was as if he heard voices more loudly, perceived movements to be bigger and faster, and felt every single handshake and hug more intensely. Some people-too many of them-were simply too much for him.
For one year, in ninth grade, his school placed him on a “special” education track, suspecting that he suffered from some form of “autism-related disorder,” despite the absence of an official diagnosis. He remained in regular classes and still dominated the grading curves. But the teachers treated him differently. They stood a little farther from him, spoke more slowly. He had been labeled.
On the last day of school, he told his parents that he would run away unless he could start tenth grade in a new school. No special treatment, no labels. Because although Dwight was different from other people, he’d read enough books about autism, Asperger’s, ADD, and ADHD to know that those labels didn’t apply to him. Each of those conditions was supposedly accompanied by a lack of emotional connection. Dwight, in his view, was the opposite. He had the ability to feel so connected to a person that the sensation was overwhelming.