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During the trial, and still today, the American news media were desperate to find her, and not for any good or noble reasons. The media wanted to hunt Alexandra Quinlan down and burn her at the stake. Despite a mountain of evidence proving beyond a reasonable doubt that Alex had not killed her family, and had, in fact, narrowly escaped death herself, the vultures in the true-crime community refused to believe any of it. And ever since winning a massive settlement in her defamation case against the state of Virginia, making her a millionaire many times over, the true-crime nuts were frenzied to locate her, question her, expose her lies, and make sure the rest of her life was a living hell.
As if every detail of her life had not already been laid bare for the world to see, the press wanted more. They always wanted more, and Alex had nearly given it to them. The idea of granting a prominent reporter an exclusive had been floated early on as a way to put it all to rest. But the suggestion was quickly squashed. Granting a single interview would be like chumming the water. It would attract thousands of other reporters, podcasters, and true-crime fanatics hoping for the same access. Her only option had been to up and vanish. So she did.
* * *
Alex opened her eyes and watched the countryside blur past as the train rumbled from France to Switzerland. She passed through small towns with houses perched in the foothills and the snow-capped Alps in the distance. Just a couple of years ago she had never been out of the United States. She had barely been out of Virginia, save for a grade school trip across the Potomac to visit Washington, D.C., and a few family vacations to Florida. And here she was now, twenty years old and sitting on a train slicing through Europe. A lot had changed in two years. She’d come a long way from that frightened teenager who’d hid behind the grandfather clock after her family had been gunned down. Today, she was no longer hiding. Today, she had become the hunter.
She made a pledge to herself to spend every waking hour searching for answers to the night her family was killed. She made this her first priority because she knew no one else was looking. Only reluctantly, and with great pressure from Garrett Lancaster and his powerful law firm, had the McIntosh police and the Alleghany County district attorney dropped the charges against her. Despite everything—the charges being dismissed, the revelations about the sloppy investigation, the glaring evidence that pointed to a stranger in her home that night, her victory in court, the judge’s admonition of the McIntosh detectives and the district attorney, the multimillion-dollar judgment—still to this day many inside the McIntosh Police Department, as well as the entire district attorney’s office, believed that Alex had killed her family.
The official position of the McIntosh Police Department and the district attorney’s office was that the slaying of Dennis, Helen, and Raymond Quinlan was the result of a botched home invasion. The claim was that an intruder had entered the home to steal jewelry and other valuables but was startled by Mr. Quinlan. The prowler killed Dennis Quinlan, and then hastily shot his wife and son in a mad dash to escape the scene.
The theory was weak and ignored two key bits of evidence found inside the Quinlan home that pointed to something much more sinister than a burglary gone bad. First were the mysterious photos discovered in her parents’ bed the night they were killed. The photos held images of three unidentified women, and Alex knew they played a role in understanding why her parents were killed. But the photos did not fit the narrative put forth by the McIntosh police so they were dismissed and never revealed to the public. The other bit of evidence was a lone fingerprint lifted from Alex’s bedroom window—the window she had opened before aborting her idea of jumping two stories to safety. The fingerprint belonged to whoever was in her house that night, and painted a clear picture of a killer who was not startled by Dennis Quinlan, but who actively attempted to hunt down his daughter.
Put it all together and Alex knew relying on the authorities to find the truth would be like slipping an envelope into an abandoned mailbox and hoping it found its way to the address scrawled on it. The police were no longer looking for her family’s killer because they believed they’d already found her.
Alex looked away from the window and settled her gaze on the open folder and the documents resting on the table in front of her. She read through the pages again, even though Alex had long ago committed every detail to memory. The documents had sent her back to London, and now across Europe. She would arrive in Switzerland later that night. Then, first thing in the morning she would visit the Sparhafen Bank in Zürich to find answers.
As she stared at the pages, her mind drifted back to the night she’d found them. It was the night she’d snuck into her old home on Montgomery Lane, the first time she’d stepped foot inside the house since it all had happened. The first time she had returned since taking refuge behind the grandfather clock the night her family was killed. The first, and the last. That visit, meant for a different purpose altogether, had started her on her current journey. Now, as the train rocked its way into Switzerland and her eyes skimmed over the pages, snippets of the hot August night when she made that secret trek to her old home came back to her . . .
Besides the occasional news van parked at random times out front, the house was left to itself—quiet and dark and eerie. Detectives and forensic teams had long since stopped invading the home. They had determined nothing more was to be found inside—all clues had been uncovered and every speck of evidence collected. More than two years after yellow crime scene tape first roped off the property, bits of it still remained. Remnants wrapped around a few tree trunks twirled in the breeze. A few strips still crisscrossed the front and back entryways. The presence of the crime scene tape was not an indication of a formal or ongoing investigation. The police, Alex knew, no longer cared about 421 Montgomery Lane. The tape remained because, as the new owner of the property, Alex had yet to hire someone to clean the place.
She had used a portion of her settlement money to purchase the house out of foreclosure. Alex hadn’t purchased the home to live there. That would never be possible after the things she’d witnessed. She’d purchased it because she couldn’t watch the house fall into the hands of true-crime vagrants who might turn the place into some sort of morbid museum. It was because of those delinquents that Alex felt an urgency to get inside now. She needed to collect something near and dear to her heart before the fanatics who continued to trespass onto the property eventually found their way to the attic and pillaged what was there.
Alex’s worry as she tiptoed through the shadows of the yard and toward the back door was that there were true-crime junkies in the house now taking selfies in the master bedroom. She’d seen many such photos splashed around the Internet over the last few months—smiling idiots and self-proclaimed “citizen detectives” standing in front of her parents’ bed snapping photos of themselves with the blood-spattered wall behind them and promising to “find justice.” Such assholes, Alex thought. The dehumanizing of the event sickened her every time she saw one of those photos. How, she had always wondered, could people be so obsessed with the events of that night as to forget—or not care—that real people had died?
She twisted the handle to the back door, knowing from her previous attempts that the lock had been jimmied and broken by the lunatics who had invaded her home to have a look around like it was an abandoned museum. On earlier visits to the house, she had made it this far—to the threshold of the kitchen door—before retreating, unable to walk inside. But she was determined this time around. In the morning she was leaving for her second year at University of Cambridge and had no more time to waffle. She wouldn’t return until Christmas. It was now or never.
Alex pushed open the door and listened as it squeaked into the night. She allowed no time for her mind to flash back to the night her family was killed. No time for her brain to conjure up memories of the gunshots or the fear. No time for those memories to convince her to turn around and run, run, run back to Donna and Garrett’s house. Instead, she walked inside and closed the door.
The flashlight on her cell phone was all that fought against the blackness. The smell—although stale with mold and dormancy—reminded her of her old life. Through the damp odor of wood damage and the musty summer heat that had penetrated the walls, she smelled her mother and her father and her brother. Forcing herself forward, she walked through the kitchen and into the front foyer. The soft glow of the moon cast tarnished shadows of the window grids onto the floor. She paused at the spot where she remembered the shotgun lying. She looked up to the second story hallway that overlooked the foyer, and remembered staring through the spindles as she hid behind the grandfather clock. After a deep breath, she started up the steps. On each of her previous attempts, the image of the staircase had been what stopped her from entering the house because she knew that climbing the stairs would bring her to the exact location where it all had happened.
She pushed on and took the steps one at a time, closing her eyes as she came to the top. She was careful to keep the glow of her cell phone away from the master bedroom to her right. Alex had no interest in going near that room, or catching even a glimpse of the red-stained hardwood outside of it. She turned quickly at the landing and headed down the hallway toward her old bedroom, but she stopped nearly as soon as she started. In front of her, at the end of the hall, was the grandfather clock that had saved her life. It glowed eerily under the spell of her cell phone’s flashlight, reflecting a splinter of light back at her that came and went, came and went, came and went. It was then that Alex realized the clock was still ticking. In this house void of electricity and life, the grandfather clock was alive and well. She walked closer until she could hear the subtle click of the clock’s inner workings. The only explanation was that the vagrants who frequently trespassed had wound the clock.
She admired the clock for another second or two before raising her cell phone to the ceiling. She found a cord hanging above her head, reached up and pulled on it, unlocking the stairway to the attic. She fumbled with the sliding staircase and then pointed her cell phone into the dark hole in the ceiling before she started her ascent. Once she crested the opening and her torso was in the attic, a different smell struck her. It was another flavor of must and mold, and it brought back a whole other set of memories. This smell reminded her of Christmas. Every year, her parents lowered this door in the ceiling and, one by one, the Quinlans climbed into the attic to retrieve boxes and boxes of decorations.
Now, Alex was not after ornaments or knickknacks. On this night she was after something else. She shined her light past the decorations and into the corner of the attic. There she found boxes that she and Raymond had stashed years earlier. For as long as her brother had lived he had dreamed of being a Major League Baseball player. It was the only way Alex remembered him—in a baseball cap and dirty uniform. Alex had blocked those memories for the past year or so. It was too difficult to remember Raymond in his uniform and on the baseball diamond because those memories brought with them terrible bouts of guilt and remorse. Someday she hoped to be able to allow those images of her brother to flow freely through her mind. She missed him badly, and a deep ache came to her heart every time she pushed Raymond from her thoughts. But Raymond was the reason she had come to her old house.
From the time he was a little kid Raymond had collected baseball cards. Out of all the things Alex had left behind, for some reason she could not allow Raymond’s baseball card collection to fall into the hands of groupies who would eventually discover the attic, raid everything it held, and pawn it all on the dark web as relics belonging to the Quinlan crew who was mowed down by the oldest Quinlan child.
She found the box of baseball cards in the corner and pulled it out of the shadows. It was a balancing act to lug the box down the attic stairs. When she made it, she slid the staircase back into place and pushed the attic door closed. The house fell quiet again but for the soft ticking of the grandfather clock. Before she left, Alex reached to the top of the clock where the crank was kept. She stuck it into the fitting on the side and spun it several times, raising the weights until they were as high as they could go. It wouldn’t last a lifetime, but the clock would at least be ticking when Alex landed in London the following day.
It was only later that night, as she waited for the hours to pass, unable to sleep as she prepared for the flight back to England, that she discovered the box she had taken from the attic was not filled with her brother’s baseball card collection, but foreign bank statements instead. They became the first clue in figuring out who had killed her family.
CHAPTER 9
Wednesday, September 30, 2015 Zürich, Switzerland 9:35 a.m.
THE MORNING AFTER THE TRAIN DEPOSITED HER IN SWITZERLAND, Alex sat in a Zürich café, sipped espresso, and watched the bank across the street. She checked her phone. She had twenty-five minutes until her appointment and used twenty of them finishing her coffee and settling her nerves. At five minutes to the hour, she gathered the papers she had spent the morning reading, organized them in a leather-bound folder, and slipped them into her rucksack before walking across the street.
Despite that she had dressed in her nicest outfit—long skirt, silk blouse, and a blazer she hadn’t worn since the trial—Alex immediately felt out of place when she entered the bank. The eyes of every bank employee focused on her as she stepped into the sprawling lobby. For the past year in Cambridge, she was used to blending in and being invisible. But a twenty-year-old kid walking into this type of bank was uncommon. She was sure the typical client was middle-aged and carried an important title behind their name.
The woman behind the enormous reception counter—a block of marble that shined brightly—hesitated a moment before she asked, “Can I help you?”
“Alex Quinlan. I have an appointment with Samuel McEwen.”
The woman checked the ledger with a confused expression. Surely there was some mistake, Alex could sense the woman’s inner thoughts protesting. But after the woman pulled up the schedule of appointments and checked Alex’s ID, she offered a hesitant smile. “Have a seat. Mr. McEwen will be right with you.”
Alex sat on a stiff couch that looked like it belonged in a stuffy mansion and not in the middle of a bank. But this bank was like no other she’d seen, and she’d seen plenty over the last year as she’d met with money managers and financial advisors and attorneys who’d told her how to handle the fortune that came her way after the trial. But none of those American banks were like this one. Everything here was marble and granite that shined from the brilliant sunlight that rained down through vaulted glass from three stories above. This was a place where the wealthy stashed their treasure, and Alex guessed the couch and the granite and the marble and the dazzling sunlight were all carefully crafted to make the rich feel rich.
