He began in the master bedroom, rifled through the lawyer’s top dresser drawer, and removed the porn DVDs. There were three of them—higher-end, more “conceptual” fare made in the early 2000s starring no one he’d ever heard of. Then again, he hadn’t seen a porno since college. The only DVDs on his shelf were from the Criterion Collection, a film distribution company that released “important classic and contemporary films” to cinema buffs. Markham didn’t consider himself a cinema buff by any stretch, but nonetheless most often gravitated toward movies with a more intellectual bent. One of his few indulgences outside of work; one of the few hobbies that he allowed himself to get excited about since the death of his wife.
The cases for the Criterion DVDs were numbered on the spine, which made cataloguing and collecting them quite simple—that is, if you could find them. Some had gone out of print, which made them quite valuable to collectors. Indeed, Markham’s latest acquisition had been an out-of-print copy of John Woo’s The Killer, number eight on the Criterion list. He’d paid a pretty penny for it from a dealer, too, but it was worth it—not because The Killer was anything to write home about, but simply because it filled the space on his shelf between number seven and number nine.
Markham stared down at the porn flicks and suddenly wished he was back at his town house unpacking his DVDs. He’d found the lawyer’s stash the week before, but thought it best at the time not to mention to Tracy Donovan that he’d already been snooping around her house.
He opened the cases and checked the labels; traced his fingers over the discs and wondered if Donovan could have switched out the movies for some gay porn instead. Then he returned the DVDs to the drawer and left the bedroom feeling foolish. He wandered through the children’s bedrooms, through the big bonus room where Tracy Donovan kept her treadmill, and in and out of the upstairs bathrooms. He didn’t bother with the family photos in the living room as he’d done the week before; didn’t shine his flashlight into the kitchen cupboards or behind the boxes in the attic.
He ended up in Randall Donovan’s office and sat down in the lawyer’s big leather chair—propped his feet up on the desk and listened to the rain for a long time in the dark. The air hung cold about his wet clothes; the empty rooms above his head like a guilty conscience. The books, the lawyer’s papers had already been searched by the FBI; the safe in the wall, empty. Anything of note had been removed and shipped off to Quantico. He’d already printed out the updated inventory list from Sentinel, so what was there left for him to find?
Markham flicked on the desk lamp and removed the Donovan file from his briefcase. He scanned the evidence inventory and saw that Donovan’s hard drive was still being analyzed at Quantico. He would have to tell them what to look for now—perhaps something the FBI missed on their initial sweep; something subtle that might stand out in light of his new theory about the connection to Leo. The same went for the Rodriguezes’ computer. That had been shipped off to Quantico, too.
If they don’t find anything, Markham thought, I’ll bring back Marla Rodriguez’s computer myself. Don’t forget the beautiful lion’s little sister.
The beautiful lion …
Markham found himself staring down at the Donovan file—a flash of an image, vague, unclear, colored with something Alan Gates had said last week at his town house. He flipped through the file, found his copy of the initial police report and read the description of the crime scene—the results of the fingerprint analysis of Randall Donovan’s car. Forensics had found nothing, but it wasn’t the killer’s fingerprints that Markham was interested in.
“Donovan’s car,” he read out loud. “A red, 2004 Peugeot 307 coupé convertible.”
Import, expensive and hard to find. Just like your Criterion DVDs.
Peugeot … Peugeot …
Markham ran from the office, quickly negotiated his way in the dark to the opposite end of the house, and was out the kitchen door in less than ten seconds. He flicked on the garage light. Randall Donovan’s red Peugeot was at the far end, on the other side of a white BMW. Markham headed straight for it—leaped over a stack of boxes and stopped dead before the grille.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” he said to himself, panting.
The Peugeot logo seemed to sparkle back at him.
The answer had been on the hood of Randall Donovan’s car all along.
Chapter 29
Thursday, April 13
Cindy Smith arrived an hour before her six-thirty call to find the flowers from her mother already waiting for her in her dressing room—a dozen white roses and a note reading, “Break a leg, kiddo! Love, Mom.”
Cindy smiled. Too expensive, she shouldn’t have done that, blahdy-blahdy-blah—but oh God, how glad I am that she did!
Cindy felt on; felt ready and rested and relaxed. She had slept until noon that day and blew off her one o’clock biology class for the gym. Cindy hated biology—hated anything having to do with science and math in general—but would most likely be able to squeak out an A-minus if she buckled down for the final. Cindy hated A-minuses. She’d maintained a solid 3.8 for three years now and wasn’t quite sure how an A-minus would affect her GPA—suspected it would drop a point or two and felt a sudden wave of anxiety at seeing the 3.79 on her transcript.
You’re too much of a perfectionist, she heard her mother say in her head.
Right you are, M, Cindy replied, and arranged the flowers in the vase so she could see every one.
Cindy removed her script from her backpack and placed it directly in the center of her dressing table. Then she lined up everything parallel and at right angles around it: her makeup, her hair spray and hairbrush, her cough drops and her coffee mug. “Cluttered desk, cluttered mind,” she had heard someone say once. OCD kiss ass, she knew that two-faced slut Amy Pratt would call her behind her back. But Cindy didn’t care. After all, Amy Pratt had been called worse behind her own back.
Cindy changed into a Harriot T-shirt and sweats and turned on her iPod, scrolled to the folder titled PRESHOW, and ate her supermarket sushi in the green room. She’d splurged for opening night; felt sorry for not eating her mother’s leftover lasagna but didn’t want anything too heavy messing with her stomach.
The music pumping through her earphones was from the movie Amadeus. One of her professors had shown a clip from it in theatre history class, and for some reason Cindy had fallen in love with it. She downloaded the entire soundtrack that very afternoon and had since listened to it every day. The music grounded her—made her feel more like herself, she thought (whatever that meant)—and had even helped her nail her first big audition at Harriot. Now, Amadeus was a staple of her preshow ritual, part of a complex good luck charm, and Cindy was convinced her performance would suffer without it.
Superstitious? Beyond superstitious, Cindy thought. And although she wasn’t that hungry, she knew she’d also have to eat an orange later in the dressing room. Cindy had picked up that little habit the year before from a guest artist who swore it made him focus better onstage. Cindy wasn’t sure if the orange helped her or not, but nonetheless it had become part of her preshow ritual, too.