Dead Hunt

has in store for her.’’
She seemed sincere. Ironic, thought Diane. From what they had discovered, that’s all Archer O’Riley wanted when he married Clymene—a little romance and companionship in his life. What he got was murder.

Chapter 4
    It was a civil visit, Diane thought as she left the interview room. Even Clymene’s side trip into ‘‘I’m just an innocent victim’’ was done with humor. It felt to Diane as though Clymene still saw herself in complete control of her destiny. The thought didn’t exactly worry Diane, but it did give her pause.
    She hadn’t for a moment believed Clymene was innocent. But she could see how other people might be persuaded by her. She knew Clymene had friends and supporters on the outside who believed her. Perhaps they were what the DA was worried about.
    It wasn’t the quality or the conclusiveness of the evidence collected by Diane’s forensic team that was cause for concern in Clymene’s conviction. It was the DA’s inserting information into the trial about the death of Clymene’s previous husband, Robert Carthwright. He’d died of an apparent accident while working on one of his cars. At the time, Clymene hadn’t even been named as a suspect. There was evidence that a local handyman may have been involved, if indeed it was anything but the accident that it had been ruled.
    But DA Riddmann’s strategy was to persuade the jury that the murder of Archer O’Riley was part of a larger pattern and that Clymene was more than just a onetime killer—that she was a serial black-widow killer. So he raised new suspicions about her culpability in the death of Robert Carthwright. He drove hard on the dark motives that lay behind her elaborate measures to hide and fabricate her past. And he coupled all that with extensive evidence of a sociopathic personality.
    The hard evidence connecting Clymene to Archer O’Riley’s murder was more than sufficient for a conviction, and bringing in information about her uncertain past and her previous husband’s death would only present grounds for an appeal. Diane had thought it was a bad move. But the prosecution strategy was the DA’s call.
    Be that as it may, the scrapbook link wasn’t as weak as Clymene liked to claim. Her lawyer had made much of it. If he could convince the jury of its absurdity, then the competence of the prosecution would be put in question and doubt cast on the validity of all the prosecution’s evidence.
    Clymene’s scrapbooks were certainly not the main evidence, but for Diane they provided a powerful insight into Clymene’s modus operandi. Ross Kingsley, the profiler, loved them.
    Diane knew about scrapbooks through classes taught at the museum. Today’s scrapbooks are far more elaborate than scrapbooks of the past. The philosophy behind the design of the pages is to have the viewer experience the content of the photographs at a deeper level than just looking at the pictures. The photographs themselves may be cropped, made into a mosaic, covered with velum, or treated in any number of creative ways to draw attention to them. A picture of kids building a snowman might be showcased amid drawings of snow-covered trees embossed with fine white glitter. A photograph of a beach scene might be shown on a page with tiny shadow boxes filled with sand and sea shells. Personal journaling on the pages can supply context and explanation for photos. But the idea always is to illustrate an underlying truth, because the pages are windows into personal history.
    Clymene’s pages were elaborately artistic and creative, but they were also fake. David, one of Diane’s crime scene crew and an expert in photographic analysis, noticed it first. Clymene had digitally edited herself into photographs, Photoshopping herself into the lives of strangers.
    One photograph alone might simply have been artistic licence, but her scrapbooks were built on dozens of photos in which she had systematically grafted herself into a false past. She had even created a fivegeneration photograph out of whole cloth. It was as if she might have scoured flea markets looking for discarded photographs to build herself a history. Clymene had created a family and experiences that weren’t real, weren’t hers.
    The scrapbooks in and of themselves weren’t conclusive of any wrongdoing. But added to the weight of the other evidence, they were more than suggestive. The fact that investigators were unable to find any family or history for Clymene