Triple Cross

She wrote, Frances is a queen any way you look at her. But she views herself as a female knight. Not a queen. Not a princess. A female knight.

Tapping her pen on the legal pad, Bree reread her note and thought about that. She was about to push on when it all clicked in her mind.

Bree scribbled, What does a female knight do? What all knights do. She goes out and slays dragons. When she’s back at the castle, she’s wooing fair maidens or handsome men. Think of all the fair maidens and handsome men in her business. They’re everywhere.

But she never forms a deep relationship with any of them. In a sense, Duchaine conquers her partners, beds them, and moves on. At some level, partners could be objects to her. Like mannequins to use and discard at will.

Bree again looked at the dismissed lawsuit before writing one last note to herself:

From that perspective, it is plausible that she might have done the things alleged in the lawsuit. The victims would not be humans to Duchaine. Just pretty dolls to be used and set aside when they’re broken.

CHAPTER 10

THOMAS TULL STEPPED BACK from a wall in one of the two bedrooms of a luxury town house in Georgetown he’d rented for the duration of his research and writing. This bedroom had already been transformed into an office for the bestselling author and his longtime researcher, Lisa Moore.

A sturdily built, fair-skinned woman with short black hair, Moore looked at the wall and said, “That’s a good visual representation, I think. Enough to get the imagination going.”

“It’s a start,” Tull agreed.

A few hours before, Tull and Moore had finished hanging custom-built pegboards and whiteboards that covered the entire wall, from the floor to the nine-foot-high ceiling. Since then, they’d been organizing the information from the three Family Man murders.

The Hodges family, the first to die, was on the left. In the middle of the crime scene photos and notes, they’d arranged recent pictures of the victims so they would not lose track of who was most important in the story they would tell in Tull’s next book.

Information about the Landau family, the second to die, was represented on the right side of the wall and arranged in a similar fashion. In the considerable free space between those two families, they’d put up that morning’s Washington Post articles about the Carpenter killings as well as the latest photographs of that family.

“I’m amazed you got the pictures that fast,” Tull said.

“The kids were on Instagram,” Moore said, sitting down at a new laptop computer. “The mom, dad, and grandmother were on Facebook. Password?”

“FamilyMan. One word. Capital F, capital M.”

His researcher typed the password.

Tull stepped forward to study the photo of seventy-eight-year-old Pearl Naylor; in it, she was standing on a tennis court, the picture of health. Then he trained his eyes on Roger Carpenter’s photo. He was in a suit and tie outside a courtroom. In her picture, his wife, Sue, was wearing a heavy pack and beaming atop a mountain. “Prime of their lives,” Tull said into his phone’s recording app and tried to feel whatever emotions the victims conjured up in him as he looked at their faces. “Tragic, yes, but more. These were shining lights, snuffed out. The world is a lesser place without them.”

This was all part of the writer’s method, part of the way he was able to bring characters alive on the pages of his books. Tull believed that if he understood the emotional center of a person and, in turn, the emotions that person stirred in other people, he would be able to depict him or her in a much more three-dimensional manner.

He moved a few feet and steeled himself to look at the children’s pictures. The twin twelve-year-old girls, Alice and Mary Carpenter, were on skis out west somewhere with their goggles up and their arms thrown high over their heads.

“The Carpenter girls, so privileged and yet so innocent,” he said into the recording app. “Their lives cut short. Buds before they could blossom. We need to hear from their teachers,” he told Moore. “Their friends too. And coaches if they had them.”