Page 136 of Not a Word

Reece: But Holden didn’t make the connection.

McCabe: No. He had no idea. He never realized there was any connection until she went to your parents’ house and killed Leah Kennard and your father.

Diana: So that is what happened, then.

McCabe: That’s Holden’s theory.

Reece: You don’t think that’s what happened?

McCabe: There’s a problem.

Diana: What problem?

McCabe: I could see his thinking about her motive. She had plenty of reason to want to kill Catherine Chartwell, and given that she had never actually met her, it’s understandable that she might have mistaken Leah Kennard for her, and thinking she had shot her, it makes sense she would have to shoot your father, since he was right there and would have seen it happen. And maybe, just maybe, there’s some way she could have figured out how to make it look like a suicide. But as I said, there’s the problem of the gun.

Reece: The gun?

McCabe: The gun.

Diana: What’s the problem with the gun?

McCabe: We’d already determined that the gun used to kill Ms. Kennard and Mr. Chartwell was the same gun that had killed Evelyn Corby back in 1999.

Reece: Right.

McCabe: So how was Alicia Zane in possession of it?

(long silence)

Reece: I don’t know. What did Holden say when you asked him?

McCabe: He didn’t have an answer for that one.

Reece: He had no idea at all how she might have come to have it?

McCabe: No.

Reece: Does my brother know what happened to the gun on that night? When he saw my mother shoot Evelyn Corby?

McCabe: He says he just figures your parents kept it. Which makes sense, since it was there on the floor in your parents’ bedroom. But again, how did it get into the hands of Alicia Zane?

Diana: Maybe . . . Brent—Reece’s father—was forced to hand it over?

McCabe: How would that have worked, exactly? Alicia comes to the house with the intention of killing Catherine Chartwell. She’s been plotting this act of vengeance from the time she met Holden. But she goes to the house unarmed?

Reece: That does seem . . . unlikely.

McCabe: What happens when she walks into that bedroom and finds the two of them? She’s not exactly going to ask politely to borrow a gun to commit the murder.

Reece: If my father had the gun in a drawer next to the bed—

McCabe: —then he could have grabbed it, and the one who was shot would have been Alicia Zane.

Diana: So . . . what do you think happened?

McCabe: I do believe Alicia was working on a plan to get even. We found a burner phone on Mr. Crane we believe was hers. It had her fingerprints on it. It had been used to make several calls to your mother, Mr. Chartwell. We found the calls on her phone too. Alicia was blackmailing her, but I don’t see any evidence that she went to the house and killed her. We’re right back where we started. You know the principle of Occam’s razor?

Reece: The simplest explanation is often the right one.