A plea agreement was on the table and Diana refused to sign it until she talked to Will. He didn’t want to talk to her, but had no choice. The sheriff’s crime scene unit had re-created her deleted files. She kept a computer journal of two murders, other than Anna Clark. Dillon had been right-she had killed before. But he’d been wrong about the victims.
For all Diana’s talk about her father the biologist, he was dead. She’d killed him and his young lover-a teaching assistant-and staged it as a murder-suicide. It had been ruled that the teaching assistant killed him when he allegedly broke it off with her, then killed herself in a wave of remorse.
Diana’s journal admitted to both murders.
He hated leaving Robin vulnerable only to sit across from his warped former lover who had wanted Robin dead, but Will had no choice. This was his job, and he would do anything legal to put Diana Cresson behind bars for the rest of her life.
They sat in a room normally reserved for defense attorneys and their clients, Diana across from him, in jailhouse orange, and shackled. Her face was devoid of makeup and her blonde hair hung in a limp ponytail. Her eyes, however, glowed with an appeal for something. What, forgiveness? Understanding? She would get neither from Will.
“I knew you’d come,” she said, smiling brightly.
“I didn’t have a choice. You refused to sign the agreement unless I did.”
“We always have choices, Will.”
“What do you want from me?”
“Everything I did, I did for the right reasons.”
“You can’t believe that, Diana.”
She nodded vigorously, her eyes glistening. “I’m sorry about Jim. I’m really sorry about Jim. But he knew about me.”
“No, he didn’t.”
She blinked. “He was looking into the Anna Clark case. He told me to my face that no one was reviewing the evidence, but then he walks out of the building with all the case files? He never leaves early. I didn’t want to kill him, but I had to get those files back.”
“The FBI had copies of all those files. And nothing in the files incriminated you for Anna’s murder. What they did tell us was that someone other than Theodore Glenn killed Anna. Jim discovered that the cuts on Anna’s body were made postmortem.”
She frowned. “I didn’t want to kill Jim. I had to.”
“You didn’t have to kill Anna Clark.”
She waved her hand as if swatting a fly, her shackles rattling. “Who cares about her?”
“She had a mother who cared about her. Friends.”
“Friends like Robin McKenna?”
The viciousness that suddenly crossed Diana’s face surprised Will. “I wanted to kill that slut, not her lesbo roommate. Anna came in unexpectedly. I had no choice.”
“Why did you call me after you killed Anna?”
“I didn’t.”
“Someone paged me from the apartment.”
“When Anna came in, I was already there. I was getting ready for Robin, and I didn’t expect her for another thirty minutes. I told Anna that I was processing evidence in Robin’s closet. She didn’t believe me, walked over to the phone and paged you before I could stop her. I didn’t want it to go that far, I didn’t intend to kill her, but I had no choice. She paged you so I hit her with my gun. She was stunned, and I dragged her to the entry and slit her throat. Just like Glenn did to his victims. I had it all planned, except I didn’t expect Anna. Robin should have died, dammit!”
“Why did you want to kill Robin?”
“She took you away from your job. She was a whore, Will. She didn’t deserve a good man like you. If she were dead, you could focus again on your career. Your future. You could have been chief of police someday, Will.”
“I never wanted to be in charge, Diana. That was something you got in your head.”
“Why’d you do it, Will? Because she was easy? Because she would do anything you wanted? Men are so shallow, they’ll give up anything and everyone for a good fuck.”
Will refused to discuss his relationship. “The Sheriff’s Department found the journals you attempted to delete. You admitted to killing your father and his lover.”
“I did not kill anyone. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“The police in Massachusetts are going to reopen the case.”
She shrugged.
“You killed your own father. You never told me he was dead, Diana. You talked about him as if he were alive.”
She didn’t respond, playing instead with her fingernails. They’d been bitten to the quick. Still, she picked.
“You were furious that your father betrayed your mother. That he slept with another woman-”
Diana slapped her handcuffed hands on the table. “My mother? That stupid twit? She trapped my father into marriage. She got herself pregnant.”
The conversation from earlier came back to Will.
“So he married her and they had you.”
“My father loved me. He wanted me. We had a wonderful life, even with her around. Then came
“Fathers don’t leave daughters,” Will said.
“He spent more time with her than me! I watched them in bed. He was nearly fifty years old and fucking a twenty-three-year-old grad student! He spent all his free time with her. And then he cancelled our winter ski trip. We went every year for two weeks during winter break, and he cancelled it. He
Will could all too easily picture the young Diana feeling betrayed by her father, walking in, shooting him. Framing the girlfriend. Killing her. Even then, smart.
“Are you going to sign the plea agreement, Diana?”
“Do you want me to?”
“Yes.”
“Will you visit me in prison?”
The thought made him physically ill. “No.”
“Are you sleeping with Robin again?”
“That’s none of your business.”
“She’s going to suck the ambition right out of you.”
“Maybe I don’t have the same ambitions you have.”
“Then I should have killed you, too.” She said it with such calm assuredness that Will didn’t know how he could even respond.
He slid the papers over to Diana. “Sign it.”
She faltered, for just a moment, and Will saw the scared, vulnerable woman inside. Then her stone expression returned, she grabbed the pen, and signed. “Don’t think I’m done with you, Will.”
“Yes, you are.”
Will stood and walked out with the papers without another word to Diana Cresson. He tossed the agreement at Stanton and said, “Done.”
“Thanks for coming down, Detective,” D.A. Stanton said. “We are expediting the agreement to try to keep this mess under wraps, make sure her past cases aren’t put under any unwarranted scrutiny.”
“The reporter Trinity Lange knows all about the Anna Clark homicide,” Will reminded him. “She’s expecting an
