Page 78 of Stay Awake
“Zee’s an avant-garde artist who was accused of beating up his pregnant girlfriend,” Regan said. “He was outed on social media, and his career was basically over. He reinvented himself as a guerrilla performance artist known as Q. At least, that’s what a recent exposé inThe New York Timessuggests.”
“What does Zee have to do with Liv Reese?” she asked.
“She wrote a scathing review of Zee’s last exhibition before he went underground. Her review was the beginning of the end of his career,” Regan said. “Shortly before the Decker-Reggio murders, Liv was invited to a preview exhibition by Q. She found it violent and disturbing. She didn’t want to write about it, but her editor insisted. She was working on the article on the afternoon of the murders.”
“So you’re saying that if Zee and Q were one and the same person, then it’s possible he was trying to get back at her for ruining his career.”
“Yes,” said Regan. “I went through her notebook after the murders. The Q exhibition was creepy as hell. It was almost as if he brought her there to scare her.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because the exhibition that she described in her reporter’s notebook contained themes of violence, misogyny, and bondage that were completely different to the actual exhibition that ran months later.”
“Were there other suspects?”
“A photographer, George Yanis.”
“What’s his story?”
“He was fired after Liv Reese filed a sexual harassment complaint against him at the magazine where she worked. She wasn’t the first, but he blamed her. He told people he’d get even with her. Krause flatly refused to look into him as a possible suspect. Then there were the stalking complaints she made in the weeks before the murders.”
“Stalking? She was stalked?” Lavelle asked, snapping to attention.
“The police reports are in the files.” Regan flicked through the folders until he found several reports, which he handed to Halliday and Lavelle.
“You’re telling us that Krause didn’t look into the stalking when he was investigating the Decker-Reggio murders?” Halliday asked, surprised.
“He thought it was bogus. He thought she’d made up the stalking incidents because she’d intended to kill Amy and Marco and wanted to create an alternate suspect. He said it showed premeditation. He believed Liv knew Amy and Marco were sleeping together. According to some of the neighbors, they were hardly discreet.”
“What did you think?” Lavelle asked.
“I went with Krause to her apartment after one of her stalking complaints. This was a few days before the double murder. She was terrified. It wasn’t acting. Krause thought it was a big joke. When we left, he told me she was a nut job. Maybe he was right. But her fear, it was real.”
“Why did Krause think it was a joke?” Halliday asked.
“She claimed a stranger put a casserole in her oven and brought her dry cleaning back home. She said he left flowers next to her bed. A week or so earlier, she said someone had put a carton of milk in her fridge while she slept.”
“That all sounds… insane,” said Halliday.
“Yup, but some stalkers will do things that are bat-shit crazy,” said Regan. “You can’t imagine what these people will do to insert themselves into someone’s life. I had a case once where the stalker got a job as a window cleaner so he could see into his victim’s apartment. The night I was there I saw something that made me think Liv Reese was telling the truth.”
“What was it?”
“While I was in her bedroom on the night Krause and I were called over there, I had a prickly feeling we were being watched. When everyone left the room, I turned off the lights and stayed behind. I saw a man holding binoculars in an apartment across the street,” he said. “Liv Reese was definitely being watched. I know for sure because I saw him watching her.”
“You told Krause?”
“He dismissed it as a creepy neighbor. Maybe if he’d taken her stalking complaints seriously then the murders wouldn’t have happened.”
Regan said that he’d seen Liv throw the flowers and chocolates in a trash can on the street after they drove away from her apartment. He’d driven around the block and gone back to collect them.
“The box of chocolates sent with the roses was an exclusive Belgian brand. Eight bucks a chocolate. All handmade. I took the box to the store hoping they could tell me who’d bought them. They insisted that someone had replaced their truffles with cheap imitations.”
“Why would someone do that?”
Regan shrugged. “No idea, but Liv Reese claimed to have been drugged after eating one of the truffles. It was while she was drugged that she claimed someone came into her apartment. If the truffles delivered to her were laced with sedatives, then it would make sense for whoever sent them to switch them over when he was in the apartment to cover his tracks.”
Halliday skimmed the forensics report from the double murder two years earlier.
