The Better Sister

by Alafair Burke

  I pulled up the map page I had bookmarked on my laptop. It was the area surrounding the spot in Queens where Adam had been dropped off and picked up the last two days of his life. I had already googled every individual street address within a mile walk of the train station he had used as his Uber location, and had still not figured out where Adam had spent those hours. I had even driven there a few times, walking around with his picture, not knowing who I might show it to.

  If the police had ever tried to nail down this part of the story about the ending of Adam’s life, they had never told me. My guess is that once they focused on Ethan, they stopped tracking down any leads that weren’t on the road to convicting my son.

  But now Jake’s bad dream about the pending criminal investigation of Gentry had me thinking again about what I’d written off as a dead end.

  I googled “FBI Kew Gardens” and knew immediately that I was right. Up popped a map with a red icon directly across from the train station. In addition to the map, I saw a photograph of the cube-shaped black glass office building I had personally walked into. It was home to a Duane Reade and a 24 Hour Fitness on the ground level, but there had been no way for me to know what was housed on the other eleven stories. When I googled the address, I had found a radiology practice, a leasing office, and a medical group.

  But now I knew what to look for. There, on the website for the FBI’s New York operations, was what I’d been searching for all along: “Along with our main office in Manhattan, we have five satellite offices, known as resident agencies, in the area.” The Queens office was on Kew Gardens Road.

  If midlevel company employees had been providing information to the government, maybe Gentry’s outside counsel had done the same—especially if that lawyer was a former federal prosecutor who was angry that his wife had pressured him to sell out by defending the types of people he used to put in prison. I thought about the unreturned email message I had sent to Carol and Roger Mercer, the Gentry Group’s in-house lawyer. I had written it off as a sign that they were either busy or had no information to provide, but now I wondered if my question about Adam’s nonexistent meeting with Gentry had struck a nerve.

  I heard the slapping sound of bare feet against tile behind me. “You look good half naked in my kitchen.”

  I leaned my head back to accept a kiss.

  “Is that your book?”

  I was still on the masthead as the EIC of Eve, but I was on a leave of absence while Ethan’s trial was pending. In retrospect, I should have forced myself to maintain a schedule at the office. After all, Olivia kept reminding me that it was her job, not mine, to prepare his defense. With him in custody, there was nothing I could do other than visit him twice a week and try to give him hope that this was all temporary.

  In the meantime, I had been trying to finish the memoir. The chapters about my career were done. Jake knew I had been struggling with the more personal sections. How could I sum up twenty years of feminist publishing without talking about the love I carried for the father who used to hit my mom when he drank too much, or the resentment I had for the mother who, in my view, had not done enough to protect herself or her daughters? And now that everyone knew the backstory to my marriage, I needed to write about my relationship with Nicky as well.

  “I’m starting to think the advance wasn’t enough,” I joked. “Hey, that thing you said about Gentry being investigated? Take a look at this.”

  I pushed my laptop over so he could see the map on the screen. “The FBI has an office in Queens, right next to that train station.” He knew I’d been trying to figure out where Adam had been those two days.

  “Are you sure? The field office is in Manhattan.”

  “Sorry, not the actual field office, but like a branch. I think it’s called a resident agency.”

  He shrugged. “Shows what I know about criminal law.”

  “Is it possible that’s the office that was investigating Gentry?”

  “I don’t think so. Our contacts have been with the Southern District.”

  I knew from Adam’s prior employment there that the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District covered Manhattan and the areas north, while Queens and Brooklyn fell into the Eastern District.

  “Can you find out?”

  “What’s this all about?”

  “Maybe Adam was providing information to the FBI about Gentry.”

  “That would be a blatant ethical violation. He would have been disbarred.”

  Would Adam have cared? I was probably the only person who knew just how much Adam had been struggling since he’d taken that job at Rives & Braddock. He didn’t feel like the good guy anymore. It’s like he’d become another person.

  “But let’s say he was willing to break all the rules. Was Gentry doing something that, in Adam’s mind, would have warranted it? Just how much of a threat was Adam to that company?”

  “I’m really sorry, Chloe, but I can’t have this conversation with you. I don’t break the rules, not even for you.”

  “So what should I do with this information?” I gestured toward my laptop. “This could be what got Adam killed. It proves that Ethan’s innocent.”

  He pulled me close and kissed the top of my head. “I can’t be the one you talk to about this.”

  I woke up in my own bed the following morning to the remote sound of Nicky yelling my name.

  I pulled on my pajama pants and found her heading in my direction in the hallway. Behind her, I could see mountains of bagged candy on the kitchen island. “Happy Halloween,” I groused, not remembering a time when Nicky had beaten me out of bed.

  “I don’t think so. There’s a guy on the front porch who said he’ll wait for you all day if he has to.”

  The guy was a process server, and he had a subpoena for me. I was on the prosecution’s witness list for Ethan’s trial.

  26

  The jury selection alone consumed four days. Some of the potential jurors had the usual excuses: babies to watch, jobs to work, too much to do to sit in a courtroom for what might be weeks. A few were probably looking to get thrown out, like the guy who said defendants should have to prove they’re innocent. But the biggest problem was finding people who didn’t already have an opinion about the case. Almost all of them had heard some of the pretrial news coverage, and most of them walked into the courthouse with at least a glimmer of a viewpoint. And from what I could tell, those preexisting views did not cut in Ethan’s favor. As one woman said, “I mean, his mom’s, like, famous. I don’t think they’d arrest him and put him on trial unless he really did it.”

  Olivia had tried to convince us that the negative first impressions were ultimately to Ethan’s advantage to get all those people tossed from the jury. The ones who were left were what she called either “low-information jurors” or “very open-minded.” It sounded to me like she thought only dumb people would vote to acquit, which was hardly encouraging.

  For the first day of the actual trial, after jurors had been selected and sworn, I wore slim black pants, an off-white silk blouse, and a dark green blazer. To my surprise, the internet had a lot to say about it that afternoon. Supporters wore dark green and posted photographs with the hashtags #StepmotherPower and #FreeEthan. Opponents . . . well, they were opposed.

  The judge’s name was Lydia Rivera. On first instinct, I was relieved it was a woman, thinking she’d be more sympathetic to a teenage defendant, but it turned out she was a former prosecutor. Olivia told us not to read into it one way or the other. “She’s middle-of-the-road. We could do better, but we could also do a lot worse.”

  The prosecutor was a man named Mike Nunzio. According to Olivia, he was less experienced than some of the ADAs who handled homicide cases in Suffolk County, but he was seen as an up-and-comer in the office, getting promoted through the ranks at record speed.

  Nunzio delivered his opening statement with elegance and confidence. His demeanor reminded me of Adam’s, the few times I’d seen him do his thing in court.
As a matter of professional ethics, prosecutors were forbidden from stating their personal belief in a defendant’s guilt. But Adam used to say that it shouldn’t be necessary to use the words “I believe the defendant did it.” He believed jurors could tell when a lawyer spoke with moral certainty. When Mike Nunzio spelled out the evidence he expected to introduce against Ethan, he sounded like a man who was absolutely convinced Ethan was a coldhearted killer.

  Olivia had told us to expect an objection to the fact that Nicky and I were sitting in the courtroom. I was expressly on the witness list, and Nicky could still potentially be called as well. Even though Nunzio could obviously see us as he paced the courtroom, he said nothing to object.

  After the first fifteen minutes, I had stopped worrying about him kicking us out of the room and was focused on the content of his statement. When he spoke about “the defendant,” it didn’t sound anything like Ethan. It was as if he were speaking about a fictional character on a television show. He described Ethan’s transformation from a little boy without a mother to a privileged young man attending private school, shuttling between a multimillion-dollar apartment in downtown Manhattan and a luxury beach house in East Hampton. He spoke of him as a coddled teenager who refused to accept even the slightest bit of discipline.

  “You’ve heard of affluenza? You’re going to learn that Ethan Macintosh suffered from that affliction, and that his father, Adam Macintosh, was killed because he was determined to set his son on another path.”

  Olivia’s objection was sustained, but I could tell that the depiction of my son as a pampered, entitled brat had taken hold. By my count, at least four of the jurors were visibly skeptical as Olivia portrayed Ethan as a naive, traumatized kid who got ensnared in a shoddy police investigation that had jumped to conclusions too quickly.

  The first witness, as Olivia had predicted, was Detective Guidry. She was the witness who established the basic facts about Adam’s murder: who he was, where he lived, how he died. I felt an entire courtroom of eyes follow me, including Ethan’s, as I walked out during Nunzio’s extensive PowerPoint display of Adam’s injuries. I had been the one to find him. I remembered pressing sofa cushions against the wounds, hoping I could somehow save him, even as I knew he was already gone. Before I let the door close behind me, I made a point of holding Ethan’s gaze, hoping he’d understand. It would not help his case to have the jury see me if I got sick again, like I had at the house that night.

  I drove to the nearby Hyatt where Nicky and I had rented a room to have a place to hide as necessary during the trial, since the courthouse was nearly an hour away from East Hampton. For the next two hours, Nicky texted me updates from the remainder of Guidry’s direct examination. The alarm evidence, the items found in Ethan’s closet, the window that appeared to have been broken after the house was ransacked. No surprises, at least.

  I returned to the courthouse for a quick recess before Olivia would have a chance to cross-examine Guidry.

  “Nunzio still hasn’t objected to us watching the trial?” I asked.

  She shook her head.

  “Is that unusual?”

  “He’s probably worried about the optics. You’re a public figure. You’re also a widow and the defendant’s mother—mothers, really. I wouldn’t read into it, for now.”

  It was hard to ignore the for now at the end of the sentence.

  Olivia used her cross-examination to establish all of the evidence that the police lacked in their case against Ethan. No murder weapon, no DNA evidence, no blood found on Ethan or his clothing, and no bloody clothing found discarded near our home.

  Olivia introduced a photograph of the block of knives on our kitchen counter. “Every slot here was occupied by a knife when you entered the house, correct?”

  Guidry agreed.

  “And the only other knives you found in the home were standard, silverware-style dinner knives?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “And certainly it wasn’t a standard dinner knife that inflicted the decedent’s injuries.”

  “Definitely not.”

  She repeated the same line of questioning with a photograph of the knife block in the city apartment.

  The implication was clear. There was no evidence that the knife that was used to kill Adam came from either of our homes.

  “In fact, Detective, you have no physical evidence whatsoever to tie Ethan to this crime, do you?”

  “No, but—”

  Olivia had nothing more for the witness. I thought I saw one of the jurors—the twenty-six-year-old woman who worked at the outlet mall—nod in my direction. Or maybe I imagined it because I needed something to hope for.

  The first non-law-enforcement witness was Margaret Carter, the headmaster of Casden, Ethan’s high school. Margaret has an intentionally formal demeanor, but she doesn’t fit the stereotype of a prep school principal. She’s more Upper East Side wife material than English boarding school matron. Nunzio began by having Margaret summarize her own elite credentials (Phillips Exeter, Yale, then a master’s degree in education from Columbia), followed by what sounded like an advertisement for Casden itself. For ten years straight, the small school had representation in every single Ivy League university’s entering freshman class.

  I remembered the two-pronged campaign I had spearheaded to get Ethan into Casden. One prong was getting him in. I pulled every string I could, including setting up a high school internship program for aspiring young writers at Eve. The other was convincing Adam. Public schools had been good enough for the both of us, in his view. We would have killed for the opportunities that a school like Casden could provide, and Ethan would simply take it for granted. I tried to convince him that Ethan was only indifferent to school because he wasn’t sufficiently challenged. Once he was in an institution like Casden, he’d rise to the occasion. I eventually prevailed, but Adam made it clear that it was only because he wanted to pacify me, not because he agreed.

  I never thought it would lead to having Margaret testify against Ethan at his murder trial.

  Once Nunzio was done with background information about the school, he established that Ethan was completing his sophomore year at Casden when Adam was killed.

  “Was there an incident in the fall semester of his sophomore year involving a weapon observed in the defendant’s backpack during school hours?” Nunzio asked.

  “That’s correct.”

  Olivia had sought to suppress the evidence relating both to our ownership of a gun and the fact that Ethan had carried the weapon to school. Once Judge Rivera determined that the gun evidence was relevant, Olivia had stipulated that Margaret could testify to the hearsay reports of the fellow student who had caught sight of the gun in Ethan’s bag. As Olivia explained it, there was nothing to gain from the jury hearing directly from one of Ethan’s peers, who might be tempted to offer an exaggerated portrait of him, whether favorable or not.

  “Please tell the jury what happened.”

  “One of our students was lingering outside my office after classes broke out. I got the sense that he wanted to speak to me, but wasn’t quite certain about how to approach me, or perhaps whether to do so at all. After nearly thirty years at this, you get a sense of how teenagers operate. So I called him in and put the question to him directly: ‘What is it you’d like to say?’ He asked me what a student should do if he were aware of another student bringing a gun to school. I advised him of what I suspected he already knew—that it was a dangerous situation that we absolutely must know about. I asked him how he would feel if something tragic happened and he hadn’t shared whatever it is he knew. At that point, he told me that Ethan Macintosh had a handgun in his school bag.”

  For the record, Nunzio had Margaret identify Ethan as the student in question. I felt all eyes on me again as Margaret explained how she had followed school protocol by calling me to report the problem.

  It was just a mix-up. When we go between the houses, we have a laundry list of things that get carried
back and forth, and sometimes I jam things wherever they fit. That’s what I had told her. It was true, for the most part—an anomalous shortcoming in our usually methodical planning skills. Adam had once found a week-old banana inside a tennis shoe.

  But Margaret didn’t give the jury our side of the gun story. That was going to be one of the things I’d have to explain when I eventually took the stand.

  “To the extent you spoke to Ethan’s parents about any discipline that would be applied in response to the gun incident, with whom did you speak?”

  “Initially, his stepmother, Chloe Taylor.”

  “Did you also speak to his father, Adam Macintosh?”

  “Yes, I called her, and then both of them came to the school to meet in person.”

  “And how would you describe their responses?”

  Olivia objected to the question as vague, and Rivera sustained the objection.

  Nunzio quickly rephrased. “Did one of his parents appear more concerned about Ethan’s current status with the school than the other?”

  This time, Olivia’s objection was overruled.

  “It was my impression that his stepmother simply wanted to put the episode behind them, while Adam was genuinely worried that Ethan might be having problems.”

  “What types of problems?”

  Olivia had barely risen from her chair before Rivera warned Nunzio to restate the question. Among the many pretrial motions was one to limit evidence relating to Ethan’s academic performance and general social position at the school. The prosecution had wanted to show that Ethan’s grades had been slipping and that he was known as a loner, but Olivia had convinced the judge that the evidence was irrelevant.

  I assumed that Nunzio would excuse Margaret from the stand now that his attempt to bypass the judge’s pretrial ruling had failed. Instead, Nunzio asked, “What makes you think that Adam Macintosh was more worried about his son than his wife was?”