Laura nodded. ‘I was there when she took the test.’
Rachel took a deep breath. ‘Did she say who the father was?’
‘Maddie wasn’t promiscuous,’ Laura said fiercely.
‘But she was sleeping with Julian,’ said Rachel, almost scared to say it out loud.
The younger girl nodded again. ‘Your sister is Julian’s wife, right? Does she know about Maddie?’
‘Yes . . . no. Well, she saw the . . . No. It’s complicated.’
‘More than you think,’ said Laura quietly. ‘Maddie wasn’t a bad girl, a husband-stealer. It didn’t start out like that. She went to Julian Denver for help.’
‘Help?’
Laura chewed her lip, as if she were debating whether to say more.
‘She didn’t tell me everything, but it was to do with her brother,’ she said finally.
‘Billy. He died recently too, didn’t he?’
‘Heart attack,’ said Laura. ‘He was twenty and he had a heart attack, can you believe that?’
‘What was it? An undiagnosed heart defect or something?’
‘Maybe. But Madison didn’t believe that. Billy was an athlete, you see, on a football scholarship at Riverdale College. Anyway, his coach had told him he was getting too big, that he had to lose weight. Well, Billy didn’t want to spend six hours a day training – who does when they’re twenty, right? – so when someone told him there was a new drug he could take to control his weight, he jumped at it.’
‘A weight-loss drug? What was it?’
‘Rena-something. No, Rheladrex, that’s it. All I know is that it was new, maybe experimental. And nine months after starting on the pills, he was dead.’
‘And Madison thought there was a link?’
‘She was convinced it was the drugs. She got obsessed about it, researching stuff about chemicals, the drugs industry, everything. She majored in chemistry, so it wasn’t tough for her to process it all.’
Despite herself, Rachel was beginning to feel the old instincts stirring. It was probably just coincidence, a grieving woman looking for answers that weren’t there, just like Diana. But even so, could there be something in it?
‘Did she discover anything?’
‘The drug was pretty new to the market. Maddie found that at least three other people who had been taking it had died suddenly. When she heard that, well, she started planning all this crazy stuff.’
‘Crazy?’
Laura looked at Rachel, her eyes wary. ‘She decided to track down Julian Denver.’
Rachel’s mind raced ahead. ‘So you’re saying this drug was manufactured by the Denver Group?’
Laura nodded. ‘Their pharmaceuticals division.’
‘And that’s why she contacted Julian – because he was CEO? What did she want? Money? Compensation for Billy’s death?’
Laura looked doubtful. ‘I think by then it had gone beyond that. Maddie was convinced the drug was bad and all she wanted was for it to be taken off the market. It was like a crusade for her. She’d lodged a complaint with the FDA, but very little happened. She’d spoken to some fancy lawyer in DC who said it was expensive to take on the drugs companies and there weren’t enough people to start a class action.’
‘So she thought she’d go straight to the top. Ballsy girl. Did she write him a letter?’ asked Rachel, thinking of the boxes of correspondence that Anne-Marie Carr had shown her. Had Julian himself picked Madison’s letter out of the mountain of mail?
Laura smiled sadly. ‘Jeez, no. She wasn’t going to wait around for that. No, she wanted to speak to Julian Denver directly. She’d read a lot of interviews with him, heard how much he did for charity, thought he might be a decent guy who would listen to what she had to say. She found out he was coming to a conference in DC, which wasn’t far from college. Found out he was staying at the Four Seasons, so she hung around the bar there. And she was beautiful. She got talking to him, and I think one thing just led to another.’
‘She seduced him?’ Rachel said, with reluctant admiration that Maddie could have done something so brazen. It was the classic honey-pot sting. Gorgeous woman tricks powerful businessman into her confidence.