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CHAPTER 10
Wednesday, September 30, 2015 Zürich, Switzerland 11:30 a.m.
DREW ESTES WATCHED FROM HIS CUBICLE AS THE GIRL WALKED OUT of the bank. He had recognized her immediately. It was the eyes that gave her away. He and his girlfriend had followed the story of Alexandra Quinlan closely. The previous year they had even driven past the infamous house in America where Empty Eyes had killed her family. Holidaying in the States, Drew and his girlfriend had taken two weeks to tour New York City and Washington, D.C. They finished the trip by spending a week hiking the Appalachian Trail. True-crime fanatics, neither Drew nor his girlfriend could pass up the opportunity to see the infamous house in McIntosh, Virginia, where Alexandra Quinlan had mowed down her family.
Now, a year later, Empty Eyes herself had walked into the bank in Switzerland where Drew temped. An hour earlier, he had assisted Mr. McEwen in pulling all the forms and running the checks necessary to establish a new account for Alex Quinlan in the amount of one million US dollars. The fortune Empty Eyes had gotten away with—at least a small fraction of it—was now parked in an account in the bank where Drew Estes worked. It was almost too surreal to believe. Drew had followed the Alexandra Quinlan case forward and backward, and paid close attention to the court case when she sued the police and the state prosecutor’s office. Drew knew she had gotten away with much more than a million dollars, and the world had frantically searched for her ever since. Somehow, miraculously, Drew Estes had found her.
After helping Mr. McEwen complete his morning, Drew took his lunch break. He walked outside and lit a cigarette, which hung from his lips as he swiped his cell phone.
“Hey, babe,” he said when his girlfriend answered. “You’ll never believe who just walked into the bank this morning.”
The call lasted five minutes. By the time his cigarette burned to the filter, Drew Estes had hatched his plan.
CHAPTER 11
Wednesday, September 30, 2015 Zürich, Switzerland 9:41 p.m.
Alex sat at the corner of the bar and sipped tonic water with lime. The language barrier had made it difficult to convince the bartender to fill her glass with only ice and tonic water, without adding gin or vodka. She would turn twenty-one in a short few months, making her of legal drinking age in the States. Here in Europe, she’d been free to purchase and consume alcohol since she first stepped foot on campus. But neither alcohol nor drugs had ever appealed to her. Probably because in high school, where many kids start to dabble in such things, her time had been cut short, and the friends with whom Alex might have done the dabbling had abandoned her after she was sent to juvenile detention. And despite the acceleration to independence the last two years had brought, deep inside she was still the girl whose mother would kill her if she smoked a joint or considered swallowing any of the many pills she watched fellow students ingest during her first year of higher education.
There was another reason, too, that Alex steered clear of alcohol. She could see a clear path where the numbing effects of booze could take away at least some of her angst and guilt. Perhaps that path would be easier than the one she had chosen. But the easy path led only to self-pity, not to answers or enlightenment—a place she was determined to find.
She stirred her drink and thought back on her day. Her attempt to discover the name of the person behind the numbered account her parents had presided over had failed. Alex was convinced it was the key to unlocking the rest of the mysteries about that night. All the unknowns swirled through her thoughts now, with the same two rising to the surface as they always did: the photos left on her parents’ bed the night they were killed, and the fingerprint discovered on her bedroom window.
Alex had learned of the photos only during her defamation case when Garrett presented them as further evidence of how badly mismanaged the investigation had been. At best, Garrett had argued, the McIntosh police had dismissed the photos as immaterial. More likely, though, the district attorney had attempted to suppress their presence because they did not fit into the narrative that Alex had been the one who killed her parents.
The pictures had always been a baffling piece of an already complex puzzle. But since discovering the foreign bank statements hidden in the attic, Alex had created a barely tangible theory that linked the photos to the lone fingerprint found on her bedroom window. Being present inside the home the night her family was killed had provided Alex with certain irrefutable truths about that night. One of them was that the shooter had entered her bedroom and pushed her window fully open. It didn’t take much to recall the sound of the window squeaking as she hid behind the grandfather clock. So the lone fingerprint sequestered from the windowpane undoubtedly belonged to the shooter. Neither the McIntosh Police Department nor Garrett Lancaster, during his own quest to prove Alex’s innocence, had been able to match the fingerprint to its owner. Garrett tapped his sources and had the print run through the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System inside the FBI. No hits. But ever since stumbling over the bank documents in her attic, Alex had begun to form a theory that perhaps the lone fingerprint sequestered from her bedroom window belonged to the person who owned the account. And perhaps discovering the identity of this man would shed light on the women in the photos.
Her visit to Sparhafen Bank, however, had failed badly. The dead end was frustrating by itself, without considering the other problem it created. The million dollars she transferred had surely sounded alarm bells back home. Before turning over the $8 million awarded to her in the verdict, the judge had put restrictions in place. The most obstructive was that a certified financial advisor had to look after the money and offer guidance until Alex turned the arbitrary age of twenty-seven. Then, the money was hers to invest, spend, or squander as she wished. Until that point, however, every dime she touched left a trail that found its way to Garrett Lancaster’s desk.
Garrett had always given Alex a wide berth, and despite him being a major part of her life, she never dealt with him directly on money matters. Instead, a financial advisor signed off on her spending. But despite this middleman arrangement, Alex was certain Garrett saw every dime she spent. It might take a little time to notice the transfer of a million dollars to a Swiss bank. It could be a day or a week. But eventually, her financial guy would see the transfer and pick up the phone to call Garrett, who would then pick up the phone to call Alex. This, unfortunately, was her life.
Alex withdrew a modest amount each month for living expenses, all of which came from interest. Garrett was adamant that Alex never touch the principle, but live only off interest the lump sum generated. As a twenty-year-old who owned nothing—other than a vacant single-family home in McIntosh, Virginia—living off interest was not difficult. Moving a million dollars to a bank in Zürich was bound to raise red flags back home.
She had a contingent plan prepared for when Garrett’s phone call came. Alex had written out her response and was still committing each detail to memory. The bottom line was that the money was hers, no matter what the judge told her or however many strings were attached to it, and she could do with it what she pleased. She wanted to open a Swiss bank account, she would tell Garrett, for tax purposes. Alex knew nothing about international tax laws other than what she had quickly researched online as she’d hatched her plan. But it was enough, she hoped, to sound convincing when Garrett called. She would ramble on about her reasoning, circuitously explaining her thought process, and would even go so far as to apologize for having the gall to touch her own money. What she would not do, however, was tell Garrett the truth: that she had moved a million dollars to the bank in Zürich because she hoped doing so would get her closer to the truth about what happened to her family. That quest was hers, and hers alone.
She took another sip of tonic water, opened her phone, and scrolled through the train schedules for the following day.
* * *
At the other end of the bar, a couple sat in a booth. Their focus shifted from Alex to the man’s phone and continued to go back and forth. Finally, Drew Estes zoomed in on the picture of Alexandra Quinlan. He smiled at his girlfriend as they continued to look from the phone to the girl at the bar.
“It’s her,” Drew said. “I can’t believe it, but it’s her.”
Laverne Parker nodded. “Fucking right it’s her. She ditched the glasses and cut her hair, but look at those eyes. You can’t miss ’em. How much did she deposit?”
“A million US. I saw it on my boss’s computer and helped create the paperwork.”
“A million bucks,” Verne said, her expression contemptuous as she stared across the bar. “Alexandra Quinlan, before our very eyes.”
Verne smiled to reveal crooked teeth as she broke into a whispered singsong.
“We know who you are.”
She placed the phone on the table. Alex’s image remained on the screen.
“They gave her, like, ten mil,” Verne said as she continued to stare at Alex. “Kill your family, pretend you’re a scared little twat, and disappear with a fortune.”
Verne went back to the singsong voice.
