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Melody added, “Felicity wasn’t a fast writer. She liked to edit as she went along, research some too.”
“We heard she did a lot of that,” Amanda admitted. “Do you know where she got the idea for the book? Even the original killer?”
“She didn’t share that with me.”
“Her agent told us Felicity often took her inspiration from real life,” Amanda began. “Do you know if she loosely based the plot for her latest project on a cold case?”
“I’m sorry, but I don’t.”
“That’s fine.” They could revisit Justine Livingston, tell her they had signed a confidentiality agreement, and see if she suddenly remembered Felicity’s source of inspiration. That’s if she hadn’t told them the truth before when she said she didn’t know. Regardless, Amanda had a feeling this was worth taking a closer look at—especially with Felicity’s insistence to change the killer’s identity just two weeks ago.
TWENTY-EIGHT
The call with Melody Schmitt had lasted shy of fifteen minutes, but it had topped up Amanda’s determination. While Sheldon Lowe wasn’t completely ruled out as a suspect, her mind was open to other possibilities. They owed it to the case—to Felicity—to follow through and get more information on the murdered intern book, starting with what had initially inspired Felicity. As a side note, Melody had searched Felicity’s manuscripts for the random words found on the scraps of paper and didn’t turn up anything for her trouble.
“Trent, why don’t you follow up and see if Felicity had cloud storage? While you’re doing that, I’m going to give Justine Livingston a call about this intern book. She might be able to tell us more than she originally let on knowing about.”
“You got it.” He left her cubicle, and she made the call.
The receptionist answered partway through the second ring. Amanda announced herself and was patched right through to Justine.
“Detective? Do you know any more?”
“We’re still working on the case, but there’s something you could probably help us with.”
“Anything. You name it.”
Her husky voice suggested she’d had a rough night though that was completely understandable considering a client had been murdered. “Garrison & Marrow shared some about Felicity’s latest project with us, the one she was working on before she died.” She paused there, but Justine inserted nothing. Amanda continued. “It was about a murdered intern at a publishing house.” That should prove they were privy to details about the book. “You had told my partner and I that Felicity often based her books on real life. I’m going to ask you again, but do you know what case inspired her current project?”
“No. As I told you before, I don’t. I really wish I could tell you, but Felicity kept that from me.”
“She normally didn’t?” Amanda pounced on something in the agent’s voice, a hesitance, leeriness… Just something was off.
“Usually she was very forthcoming about such things.”
“Any idea why that wasn’t the case this time?”
“Honestly, no, I don’t.”
One guess might be the case struck close to home for Felicity. The most personal thing would have been her sister’s murder, but it was solved and Eve hadn’t been in publishing. And as far as Amanda knew no one else in Felicity’s intimate world had been murdered. “All right, if anything occurs to you, please call.”
“You have my word.”
Amanda thanked her and ended the call. Trent was still in his cubicle and currently on the phone with a local internet provider. By the sound of it, he was caught in an automated purgatory.
Speaking of the internet… She brought up a browser window and searched murdered publishing intern. Twenty pages of results came back.
She added Prince William County Washington DC to the search tab, hoping to narrow down the results. It reduced them to three pages.
Not ideal, but better.
She scanned the titles of the articles, dismissing any that struck out the words intern or publishing. She was still left with several and started reading. Most covered a fatal home invasion that had taken place fifteen years ago. To this day it remained unsolved.
The victim was Naomi Chapman, twenty-one, resident of Woodbridge. Shot three times to the chest.
Felicity had lived only fifteen minutes down the road in Triangle. Did she have a personal tie to Chapman, or was it more about an unsolved murder in the world of publishing that had caught her attention?
Sympathy poured through the articles, lamenting Chapman’s age and that her future had been taken from her. She had just graduated from Harvard University and was on the fast track to advancement where she worked at a publishing house by the name of Between the Pages in Washington, DC. Apparently, the company had made an official announcement of Chapman’s promotion from unpaid intern to commissioning editor on the day she was killed.
