The courtroom whispered in unison, then fell deathly silent; you could’ve heard the proverbial pin drop. The media had been quite vocal about Claire’s complete absence from the trial, so the leaked news of her subpoena had lit the masses on fire. Everyone was dying to find out why she’d stayed away, to see the grieving cuckquean widow, and to sink their gossipy teeth into her and taste her pain.
The door creaked open, and the sound of steady high-heeled footfalls approached. It took some willpower for me to not turn my head and gawk at her. But when she came into my sight line, I gasped.
She didn’t look one bit like the woman I’d met.
Her long blond hair was now shorter and raven black, tied behind her back in a low, loose ponytail with a velvet ribbon. Her curved, round eyebrows were arched and thin. Every element of her appearance that I had copied, she had changed. Even the shade of her lipstick was different—no longer the bright red I remembered seeing her wear, now more of a dark plum. When her eyes found mine, a hint of a lopsided smirk fluttered across her lips.
Colton shot me a quick look, just as surprised as I was, and then walked over to the stand.
“First of all, Mrs. Donovan, please accept my deepest sympathies for your loss.”
She nodded, keeping her hands neatly folded in her lap. “Thank you.”
“I realize this can’t be easy for you, so I’ll try to keep things short.” Claire nodded again, her eyes keen. “Did you know your husband was cheating on you? Or was that revealed the day of his unfortunate demise?”
Claire looked at the judge as if confused. She wasn’t. As I’d learned the hard way, she was a perfect actress and a shrewd manipulator. Everything she did, she did for a reason.
“The witness will answer,” Justice Antunez said, encouraging her with a gesture.
She looked straight at Colton. “If, by that, you mean the day of his brutal murder,no. I knew he was having an affair before that day. And I knew this time it was serious.”
“How did you find out?”
She looked at me briefly, her dark eyes glinting eerily in the fluorescent lights. That look gave me goose bumps. Then I remembered Evelyn’s cryptic words.That cold-blooded wife of his,she’d said, speaking of Claire. Then she’d added,I can think of quite a few people who belong where you sit, my dear. You know some, too.What if Evelyn had been trying to tell me something? Just because, in her own words, she knew a murderer when she saw one? How many people were there who I knew, and who she also knew? Just the Donovans ... no one else.
She’d given me a clue, a lead to follow. I’d been going there anyway, but her validation meant something.
“It wasn’t the first time Winston was cheating,” Claire said coldly. “It was, however, the first time lawyers were getting involved.”
“And how did you feel about his intention to get divorced?”
A slight hesitation. “I was fine with it. We’d stopped being happy together a while ago. We had very few things left in common. He was the forever-young outdoorsy adventurer, while I had taken to the finer things in life.”
“Were you aware your late husband kept a suite at the Cosmopolitan?”
“Yes, I was.”
“Did you have a key card to that suite?”
She stiffened her back slightly and narrowed her eyes. Two of the jurors leaned forward.
“Yes, I did,” she eventually said, her voice a few degrees colder, cutting. She must’ve figured out where Colton was going with his line of questioning.
I drilled my eyes into her.Oh, honey, you have no idea what’s coming.
“Please tell the court, Mrs. Donovan, do you use eye drops?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Which product do you normally use?”
Her jaw clenched for a moment. “I useVisine.”
“They have many formulations,” Colton insisted. “Which one do you normally use?”
“The one for dry eyes.”
“Does it look anything like this bottle?” Colton clicked the remote, and the two large screens on the wall lit up with a photo of the murder weapon. It was a bottle ofVisineDry Eye Relief.
