Chapter 1 #2
Pulling open the folder, I looked down at the picture of the wife, her beauty was striking.
Eyes that almost looked right through you, and a sharp cut to her jaw that screamed wealth and probably a good cosmetic surgeon.
She was fucking gorgeous, almost annoyingly so.
It was the first thing I had noticed when I’d seen her earlier.
She was probably in her forties but didn’t look a day older than early thirties, well groomed, and used to having money.
I knew the type. I flicked through Stan’s notes until I came to a page that caught my eye for the simple fact that it was written out rather than scribbled junk like the rest of it.
Maurelle Picquet was born in Lyon, France to an unwed mother known only as Marcelle.
Father is unknown. Not much is known of her childhood, but what I could find is she wed an American millionaire in 1995 and came to the US.
Several hospital visits in the year of 1996, leading to a miscarriage and several more hospital visits but no charges laid against her husband.
It looks as if this was the start of her break and the last time she was the victim.
Her name when she married Randall Pope in 1995 was Maurelle Picquet, she then changed her name to Maurelle Pope. Randall appears to have passed from an accident from falling down the stairs in 2000.
Maurelle changed her name to Maude Pope, possibly to escape from Randall’s family who wanted to come after the money she stole from his estate upon learning she didn’t inherit anything from his death.
She married Carmine Doherty in 2001 and moved to Chicago.
Not much is known about the marriage until his death by drowning in 2004.
She changed her name to Marcella Pickett.
I think it’s here that she becomes the black widow officially, realising what she can achieve, and that she can get away with it.
She married tech giant Basil White in New York in 2008, four years after Carmine passed, not sure what she was doing in this time.
There’s no record of her. Basil passed away from suspected poisoning, but no charges were laid, in 2011.
We don’t see her again in the records until she marries Stewart Purnell, the head of a pharmacology business, in 2014 as Maureen Pickett.
He dies by apparent suicide. She was out of town when it happened, clearly seen on CCTV in another state, so I feel like this may be caused by her, but not directly.
Cosmetic Surgeon Robert Thomas was next to fall victim to her when he married her in 2019.
Her name here is Moira Picquet, reverting back to her maiden name.
It’s not clear why she does this, but possibly because she’s getting older.
Robert was found hanging in his garage in 2022.
Again, Moira was seen in the Hamptons this weekend, and no connection was found to her.
Maurelle has changed her name to Maura Picquette around this time and married billionaire Oliver Benoit-Clayton in Texas. They are still married, and are still seen together everywhere.
Jesus. That couldn’t be right. Six husbands?
The rest of the folder was filled with Stan’s notes, ramblings, and vaguely pieced together facts to make his narrative that she was a black widow.
From what I could see, she’d had a tough first marriage and possibly a poor upbringing and had escaped by marrying to get out of a bad situation.
I didn’t see any issue there, but the fact she had married so often and her husbands have all died in suspicious circumstances, and the fact that she changes her name so much, it’s concerning.
I put the folder down and turned my computer on.
The email icon blinked at me and I groaned when I opened it.
Damn it.
When was the last time I emptied this damn thing?
I worked through and archived everything in my inbox from the last month and kept everything from the last few days.
Sal had already documented what she’d gotten from the house in the database.
I pulled it open and took note of the regular things on the docket, but when I saw the picture of a diamond ring and wedding ring, I hesitated on the next arrow. Why would she leave her rings behind?
I took notes as I looked through the photos and opened up my search bar. I looked through her criminal record as Maura Benoit-Clayton.
Nothing.
I started to type in her other aliases and found generic certificates of marriage and insurances from her husbands’ deaths but that was it. Nothing criminal.
I found her immigration record from when she came to the States, but there was just nothing screaming out that she was someone to be wary of. How did she become a person of interest in Stan’s twisted little research? How did he know her?
Stan had once been a respected member of the reporters who covered crime in the city, until we started down a dark and dangerous path of sex slavery rings around the wealthy.
I’d warned him off, there’s not a damn thing one reporter was going to do about a problem the entire police force had been trying to fix for decades, but he was stubborn.
Just like I had been.
But he knew to stick with his gut instinct, just like I did. I had to give credence to what he was saying. I couldn’t blow it off, because I knew, somehow, I knew in these crazed ramblings, there was a fact I could unravel and discover a criminal in action.
There had to be a piece I was missing and that drove me wild.
I dialed Stan’s number.
“Stan here.”
“Stan, it’s Detective Kane Garrick.”
“Did you look through the folder yet?”
“Yeah, I’ve taken another look, but I don’t see anything suspicious.”
“Are you looking through it properly?” he asked, frustration mounting in his voice. “Have you seen the last page?”
I sighed, flipping through handwritten notes and then the last page had me almost dropping my phone.
Inside was a photo of a wall of photos, maps, and pins all over a large wall full of what appeared to be a crime board but it was men.
Stan’s notes depicted that it was a photo from inside one of her properties, after he’d broken in to take evidence. She was hunting.
My heart sank.
She was a black widow.