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CHAPTER 25
Washington, D.C. Monday, March 6, 2023 8:36 p.m.
HER CONDO SAT ON THE TOP FLOOR OF A FIVE-STORY BUILDING THAT overlooked the Potomac. Never a city girl until her time in Cambridge, which by no stretch of the imagination could be considered a big city but was still a stark contrast to tiny McIntosh, Virginia, Alex could no longer imagine herself in a small town. She had grown up in a quiet suburban neighborhood where the closest city was a two-hour drive, but today the hustle and bustle of city life had grown on her. Perhaps the appeal was the dual sensation of feeling invisible while never being alone.
Despite that Donna and Garrett’s second home—where Alex had escaped to during her trial and where she stayed after her failed attempt at college—was hidden in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, Alex constantly feared being recognized when she was there. In the months following her return from Cambridge, Alex sensed that she stood out in the small town, with its empty streets and laid-back establishments. The relentless worry of being recognized as the empty-eyed girl who had once been accused of killing her family was yet another scar that slashed through her disfigured psyche, this one delivered by Drew Estes and Laverne Parker. Enough years had passed now, however, for the uneasiness to fade. She purchased her Georgetown condo when she was twenty-three and now felt like just another face in the crowd. No one gave her a second glance, and she felt at home on the crowded streets of Washington, D.C.
Some would count this as progress and maturity—a young woman making her way in the world. Others would count it as overcoming a difficult past that included a horrendous trauma, and making the most of a terrible situation. But Alex knew the truth. Her ability to cope with her past came from neatly organizing her life into three categories. Her anonymous self, Alex Armstrong, the spiked-hair rebel who moved invisibly through the world, worked as an investigator for Lancaster & Jordan, and lived a mostly normal existence. Her old self, Alexandra Quinlan, who the world knew only as the empty-eyed girl whose family had been killed. And her true self—some combination of those other personas, but with some additional ingredient mixed in. Although not easily defined, that ingredient kept Alex hungry for answers to what had happened to her family, and confident that no matter how much time passed she would eventually find the truth.
The circle of people who knew each of her personalities was small. It included Donna and Garrett Lancaster, as well as a handful of attorneys at Lancaster & Jordan who had worked her case. Then there were her friends from juvie, who knew just about everything since they met Alex inside Alleghany. And finally, there was her psychiatrist, who had, over the years of weekly sessions, pulled every detail of Alex’s past out of her subconscious. Dr. Moralis likely knew Alex better than she knew herself.
Although she was hesitant at first, the weekly sessions allowed Alex to understand what made up her DNA. Years of therapy had provided Alex with the tools needed to understand that her decade-long journey had been skewed from the beginning. There were others, she knew, who suffered similar loss or endured comparable tragedy. But they had likely gone through the grieving process in a more structured and traditional manner. Alex’s journey had been wrong-footed from the start. She had been granted no time to properly mourn the loss of her family, or even process their deaths. She’d gone from the trauma of that night to a ruthless juvenile detention center where the time needed to grieve was instead spent trying to survive and fend off the truly vile kids she was locked up with. After Donna and Garrett had secured her release, the safeguards put in place to avoid the media had overshadowed the work Alex needed to do to process what had happened that fateful night. Then came the defamation case against the state of Virginia. The first time Alex spoke about the night her family was killed had been on the witness stand with a packed courtroom staring at her while television cameras recorded her every word. Her journey had, indeed, been skewed, and her therapist continued to point out that correcting her trajectory through life was more important than arriving at some imagined utopia in the end.
So it was not unreasonable, or even unexpected, that ten years after her family was killed Alex’s sleeping hours continued to transport her back to the moment the first gunshot woke her. Over the years the dreams had become vivid to the point of lucidity. On rare nights, Alex became fully conscious while dreaming, aware that what was happening was taking place within a dream state. She grew courageous during those lucid dreams and would sneak from behind the grandfather clock and slowly creep toward her parents’ bedroom. But reality and fiction would collide then—two worlds that overlapped but could never fully merge—and stop her at the foot of her parents’ door frame. Occasionally she would try to fool her mind during those dreams, telling herself that she planned only to walk to her parents’ doorway and listen. Instead, though, she’d burst through the door hoping to see what her mind could only imagine. Hoping to see her brother standing in their parents’ bedroom, alive and waiting for her to save him. Hoping, too, to see the person holding the shotgun. To finally put a face to the figure she knew only as the shadow she’d seen from behind the grandfather clock. But as soon as she charged through the doorway in her dreams, she’d wake with a startle.
It was after one of those dreams, in her small Cambridge flat, that she started the construction of her board. When she woke, she wrote down every detail she could remember on a note card and pegged it to her board. Young and motivated people, Alex had read in a self-help book, created similar collections called vision boards. Those collages contained people’s life goals and things they hoped to accomplish in their careers. Those boards included promotions and cars and houses. Alex’s board contained evidence. Her board contained everything she had ever remembered—imagined or real—about the night her family was killed. It contained every bit of evidence that had ever been collected or assigned to the case. What started as a bulletin board that hung on the kitchen wall of her Cambridge flat had grown years later to a six-foot-by-eight-foot standing easel that took up a good portion of her dining room.
Although Alex had Drew Estes and Laverne Parker to blame for the constant habit of looking over her shoulder, they also were responsible for providing the biggest clue on her board. Years earlier, with help from Leo the Brit, Drew Estes was incentivized to provide the name of the man who had opened the numbered bank account her parents had presided over, the statements to which Alex found hidden in an abandoned box in her attic. That man was Roland Glazer. Over the years, Alex had meticulously researched the man to the point of obsession. The research wasn’t difficult. Roland Glazer had been all over the news. An American businessman convicted of sex trafficking of teenage girls, Glazer died in jail while awaiting trial in 2012, a couple of months before Alex’s family was killed.
Connected to the who’s who of the business, entertainment, political, and tech worlds, the news articles Alex had read—many of which were now pinned to her board—revealed that Roland Glazer owned an island off the coast of Miami, where he routinely held parties for the rich and famous. It was on this island, and at those parties, where teenage girls were passed around to the wealthy businessmen, celebrities, and tech moguls who attended. As the feds moved in and rumors of sex-trafficking charges leaked, three of those women went missing. The women were longtime employees of Glazer’s and resided on his private island. It was suspected that the women might have been able to provide key details about who had attended the clandestine parties, and specifics about the girls Glazer shuttled to and from the island. Speculation was high that Glazer had something to do with their disappearance. Images of the three women were included in the new articles and posted on websites. It was then, while researching Roland Glazer, that Alex had made the most substantial discovery in her quest to find answers to why her family was killed. The three women who had been linked to Glazer were the same women in the photos found on her parents’ bed the night they were killed.
The exposés and news articles Alex had read suggested that Roland Glazer had been a ticking time bomb that would have blown to bits some major careers and uncovered a clandestine underworld had his story gone mainstream and his case made it to trial. Instead, Glazer hanged himself in his jail cell the night before his trial was to start. What on earth her parents had to do with this man was the biggest unknown Alex had come across in her years of searching for the truth.
A red thumbtack pinned Roland Glazer’s photo to the middle of the board. Surrounding Glazer’s image and the photos of the women found on her parents’ bed were dozens of index cards and news articles. An image of the lone fingerprint sequestered from her bedroom window occupied its own section on the right side of the board, as big a mystery today as it was from the start. As Alex examined the board, she was unsure if she was any closer to finding the truth now than she had been when she created her board years earlier. Her lack of progress was an internal dialogue Alex constantly worked to mute.
Perhaps her shrink was correct. It’s not the destination, but the journey.
CHAPTER 26
Washington, D.C. Monday, March 6, 2023 8:36 p.m.
THE FREESTANDING EASEL THAT WAS HER EVIDENCE BOARD RESIDED IN the area of her condo where a dining table and chairs should be and was visible to Alex every day. When she had company, which was infrequent, she pulled an accordion-style room divider in front of the board to hide it from view.
Her doorbell rang and pulled Alex’s attention away from the board. She walked to the intercom by the front door and pressed the button.
“Hello?”
“Hey, Alex, it’s me,” Garrett said. “Can I come up? I’ve got to talk to you about some office business.”
“Sure.” Alex pressed the button to unlock the building’s front door.
She walked back to the board and pulled the accordion divider in front of it. The elevator chimed just as Alex opened her front door. Garrett emerged at the end of the hallway a moment later.
“Want a beer or something,” Alex asked after Garrett walked into her condo.
“Sure,” Garrett said.
Alex retrieved a bottle of Sam Adams from the fridge and handed it to him.
“So what’s the house call about? Something that couldn’t wait until morning?”
“It probably could have,” Garrett said, taking a sip of the beer. “But I didn’t want to have this conversation at the office.”
Garrett walked over to the window and looked out at the Potomac.
“I had an interesting development with the Byron Zell case.”
Alex swallowed hard and did her best to sound indifferent. “Oh yeah? I’m still working on that case. He’s been a hard nut to crack. I couldn’t find much online. The financial records he handed over looked clean. That’s as far as I’ve gotten.”
