The Ex

by Alafair Burke

  In the same way I had not been able to stop myself from watching the constant replays of planes heading toward the Twin Towers, I had been glued to my television for consecutive days afterward, afraid to leave my apartment in the midst of warnings about feared copycat attacks.

  How did a fifteen-year-old boy have access to those kinds of weapons? outraged and bewildered New Yorkers wanted to know.

  After another twenty-four-hour news cycle, we began to have an answer to that question. Todd’s mother, still clinically depressed despite three hospitalizations, killed herself when he was just eight years old. Todd’s older brother was nearly out of college at the time. Todd’s father, determined that his younger son be treated “normally”—despite multiple assessments from teachers and counselors that he was anything but—resisted mental health treatment or anything that would label his son as “sick” like his mother (his word, not the doctors’).

  He moved his son from school to school, in search of a place that was willing to ignore Todd’s behavioral and psychological problems. At the time of the shooting, Todd was enrolled at the Stinson Academy, apparently a last stop for rich screwups in the world of elite private schools. Instead of seeking help for his increasingly alienated and angry son, the father used his considerable wealth to encourage activities that father and son might enjoy together, at least in the few minutes a week the father could spare for his son: Yankees games, an occasional round of golf, and guns. Lots of weapons. Lots of ammunition. Lots of hours at the shooting range near their country home in Connecticut.

  Todd did not leave a note, a diary of his plans, or a video-recorded manifesto like so many other mass shooters, but police did find drawings: baby dolls hanging from nooses, rabbits angrily mounting each other, men in capes being eaten by dragons. But no explanation was really needed. Mental illness, social isolation, guns: all the ingredients in a familiar and deadly recipe.

  And then in the next news cycle, the photographs of the victims started to emerge. Thirteen lives lost, their faces and short bios filling half a page of the New York Times. A forty-six-year-old cancer researcher. A twenty-one-year-old Korean exchange student. A sixty-six-year-old Vietnam vet who’d survived Agent Orange. A forty-year-old teacher. A ten-year-old Alabama boy visiting New York City for the first time.

  Todd had chosen them indiscriminately—white, brown, and black; male and female; young and old; rich and poor. A small but representative New York City melting pot, their fates bound together only by the misfortune of being within a bullet’s reach from Todd that horrible morning.

  My gaze had circled back to the photograph of the teacher. I froze at the immediate recognition but checked the name anyway. “Molly Harris, 40, New York City, substitute teacher,” the text beneath the photograph read. I had seen her face on Melissa’s refrigerator for more than a decade’s worth of Decembers: Jack; Molly; their daughter, Buckley, moving from baby to toddler to girl to tween.

  I scoured the Internet, rereading the media coverage with a new focus. According to multiple survivors, a middle-aged woman in a blue dress was seen speaking to Todd right before she became the first of his victims. Todd froze as the woman fell to the ground. Some witnesses said that his face was so distraught that they failed to notice the gun in his hand. And then the pause was over, and he began shooting.

  A Daily News article identified the woman in the blue dress as a mother and teacher. “Those who knew the woman have suggested that, in light of her training in how to respond to school violence, she may have tried to talk him out of his deadly intentions.” I reexamined the New York Times tribute. Molly had been the only teacher. Instead of running or ducking, Jack’s wife had died trying to save complete strangers.

  Within weeks, it wasn’t just the faces of the slain on news pages and television stations. Family members came forward to speak of their loved ones. From a shared and unwanted bully pulpit, they called for reforms like increased security on mass transit, better mental health services, and increased regulation of firearms. And some were even willing to say aloud what many people had been wondering from the beginning: what the hell was that father thinking?

  And then a year ago, after train ridership had returned to pre-shooting levels and victims’ names had faded from public consciousness, those survivors—led by “the husband of the heroic teacher”—went further and filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the shooter’s father, just before the statute of limitations was set to run out. Last month, newspapers barely noticed when a New York County trial court dismissed the families’ lawsuit for failure to state a claim of action.

  And now this morning, the city had suffered another report of shots fired, followed by terrified New Yorkers fleeing for safety. And, once again, this time, not everyone had made it out alive. Only three dead, according to Detective Boyle, not thirteen. But for immediate purposes, what mattered most was the identity of one of the three: Malcolm Neeley.

  I didn’t need to do any research to know that Malcolm Neeley had been a multimillionaire, an investment banker to some of the wealthiest and most powerful people in the world. He was the kind of rich that made celebrities look poor. Yet few people knew his name—until his fifteen-year-old son, Todd, opened fire in Penn Station, killing thirteen people and wounding eight others.

  He’d made it through the wrongful death lawsuit only to be killed this morning. And now the hero-teacher’s husband was in custody, and the closest thing he had to an alibi was a woman he didn’t even know.

  Chapter 4

  ON THE OTHER side of the conference table, Jack’s eyes were closed and he was whispering to himself that he couldn’t believe this was happening.

  My mind jumped back to our sophomore year in college. Jack banging on my door, breaking down into tears once he stepped inside my dorm room. His father had died of a heart attack. Charlotte was on one of her weekend trips to somewhere fabulous. I can’t believe this is happening. That’s what he kept saying over and over again as he sobbed with his head in my lap. His mother had died of cancer when he was still in high school. He and his brother, Owen, would now be on their own.

  I stroked his hair until he fell asleep and then sat there on the bed, my back against the wall, for the rest of the night. When he finally woke up, he told me he didn’t know what he would do if I weren’t in his life. Until that moment, I had no idea how much I meant to him.

  Leaning forward now, I touched one of his handcuffed wrists for emphasis. He needed to focus.

  “What else could the police possibly have?” I asked. “Other than your statement.”

  He shook his head, sounding dazed. “I told you. I have no idea. I mean, I get how it looks. I did try to sue Malcolm Neeley. But I wasn’t the only plaintiff. The lawsuit was on behalf of all the families, a united front.”

  I was probably one of the few people who had followed the failed lawsuit in the news. At one point, I had even looked up the attorney’s phone number, tempted to offer help.

  Jack may not have been the only plaintiff, but the media certainly had chosen him as the face of the lawsuit. It was a role that suited him. He was a successful literary author with three acclaimed novels, now raising a daughter on his own. His wife had been the hero who tried to talk Todd down. The most in-depth stories even managed to throw in the fact that Jack’s brother, Owen, was an NYPD cop who died in a car accident shortly after Jack graduated from college.

  He was the poster child for hard knocks.

  “Jack, if those handcuffs haven’t made it clear, you’re under arrest. They don’t do that unless they have probable cause. They must think they have something more than your problem with Malcolm.”

  “I had more than just a problem with him. It’s because of that man that my wife is dead.”

  I shushed him. “That’s the kind of stuff a prosecutor will use to bury you in front of a jury.”

  “A jury? It’s going to get to that?” His voice cracked. “Sorry, Olivia. I hated that man—if you could even call him
that—but, I swear to God, I did not do this. Find Charlotte. She’s got keys to my apartment. She can bring my laptop, and I’ll show the police the e-mails. Madeline will back me up. I was only there this morning to meet her.”

  “Jack, if I had to guess, the police are probably searching your apartment right now. And trust me, they’ll scour every byte of your computer.”

  “Well, good. They’ll see that I’m telling the truth.”

  I’d seen this before—someone so certain that the truth would set him free. I still had no idea what evidence the police had against Jack, but I could read the tea leaves. He wasn’t going home tonight. But I couldn’t bring myself to tell him that. We both had learned the hard way that I was incapable of breaking bad news, at least when it came to Jack.

  I started rattling off the names of some excellent lawyers, but he was shaking his head. “No, I don’t want that. I want you.”

  “Jack, I came here because I assumed it was some mix-up I could get straightened out right away. But this is serious.”

  “Yeah, no shit.”

  “Let me find you someone, okay? Without our . . . baggage.” I had always wondered what it would be like if I ever ran into Jack again. Once, I went so far as to schedule a coffee appointment at a café next door to one of his signings, hoping he might spot me through the window as he passed. Would he come inside to say hello, or pretend he hadn’t recognized me? I didn’t stop monitoring the sidewalk until long after his event would have ended. Now we were finally in the same room, and he was in handcuffs. All those conversations I had imagined would have to wait. “I’ll make sure they see you through this.”

  “It’s too late for that. You’re here, and you said yourself they’re going to be back any second to transport me. God knows how long it will be before they let me see a different lawyer.”

  “I’ll tell the new lawyer everything you’ve told me, okay?”

  “No!” He slammed the tabletop with his fists, the sound amplified by the clank of his handcuffs against the faux wood grain. Even when I had been horrible to Jack, he had never once yelled at me. I jumped from my chair on instinct, and he immediately apologized for the outburst. “I’m begging you, Olivia. I know you’re used to representing people who can take this in stride. They get booked and processed and detained. They get strip-searched and deloused and use the toilet in front of their cell mates. They wait it out for trial and trust you’ll do your thing along the way. But I can’t wait, okay? I have Buckley. She’s only sixteen years old, and she’s already lost one parent. You know I didn’t do this, but some other lawyer won’t. They’ll just put me through the system. I need to go home. Olivia, please, you’ve got to get me out of here.”

  The last bit of light fell from his face. Even after hours in custody, the thought of his daughter having to live without a parent aged him another decade.

  I rose from my chair, turned my back to him, and banged loudly on the conference room door to indicate I was ready. Behind me, I heard Jack choke back a sob.

  Detective Boyle cracked the door open. “Just in time for transport, Counselor.”

  “Do you have any idea what you’ve done, Detective? Your next move had better be a phone call to someone with the power to unlock those handcuffs and escort Mr. Harris back to his apartment, apology in hand, or you’ll be on the front page of the Post as the nitwit thug who locked up the Penn Station widower. If you’re lucky, you’ll spend the rest of your career investigating subway cell-phone grabs.”

  Boyle reached out and patted me on the head. “Your tough-talking defense attorney bullshit’s adorable.”

  I hadn’t expected that. But I did know what he was anticipating in return: offense and outrage. Instead, I took a seat and calmly crossed my legs. “Then call my bluff. Or play it safe and call ADA Scott Temple. Tell him exactly what I said to you, and then see what happens. Things will be interesting either way, Detective, I promise.”

  JACK WAS TAPPING THE TABLE so loudly that my head was starting to throb, my hangover resurfacing. I knew that every minute that passed without him getting moved to MDC was a good sign, but Jack was growing more anxious by the second.

  I pulled a notepad from my briefcase and slid it across the table with a pen. “Your computer information. All your e-mail accounts and passwords. Your Web provider. Any social media pages. Everything.” It would keep him busy, or at least his hands from that incessant tapping.

  When he nudged the pad back in my direction, I blinked at the sight of a tidy list in neat, round, perfect, familiar print. Even with the cuffs, he was like a human Cambria font.

  Jack@jackharris.com

  Jacksonharris@gmail.com

  Jharrisbooks@aol.com

  Facebook.com/jackharrisauthor

  @Jackharrisbooks

  Wow, Jack on Twitter. Somehow I had missed that in my late-night drunken cyberstalking over the years.

  “Passwords, too,” I said.

  “It’s the same for everything, down at the bottom of the page.”

  Volunteered to go to the station. Didn’t lawyer up. Consented to a GSR swab. And one password for every account. He was still the same, naive Jack.

  At least the password wasn’t “password.”

  He had written:

  jack<3smollybuckley

  It took a second to register. Less than, like the math symbol, followed by the number 3. The two shapes together formed a heart. Jack loves Molly and Buckley.

  “It was an easy way for all of us to remember our passwords when we first set up the accounts. Molly’s was Molly loves Jack and Buckley. And so on.”

  “Sweet,” I said, because it seemed like something I should say.

  “The Olivia I knew would be more like—” He made a gagging gesture with his finger and laughed quietly. “Hey, I don’t know why I feel the need to say this, but I’m not some blubbering fool who falls in love with a pretty woman at the park. Or, despite all appearances, some imbecile who gets railroaded by police saying they’re on a routine canvass. I mean, how many times have I wondered what you would think of me if we ever saw each other again, and here I am, some pathetic pushover.”

  So he had wondered, too. “None of that matters right now, Jack.”

  “No, I guess not. But I do want to thank you—for coming here, and for staying. I mean it. I don’t know what I’d do if I didn’t have someone who knows me—who knows I couldn’t have done this—on my side. You scared me with that ‘call my bluff’ business, but I think whatever you said may have rattled him.”

  I had given Jimmy Boyle two choices—process Jack as he planned, or call ADA Scott Temple. At that moment, I placed the odds at fifty-fifty.

  Once the room fell silent, I was the one getting nervous. I pulled out my cell phone and called the office. Einer picked up, as I expected. “Good afternoon, Ellison and Randall.”

  “Einer, it’s Olivia.”

  “Hey, mamacita.” For reasons that remained a mystery, Einer Ronald Erickson Wagner, raised by law professors in Connecticut, had decided to co-opt myriad distinctly non-WASPy linguistic styles. “You coming in today? Don was asking.”

  I did not want to think about what Don would say when he found out about our new client. “I’m following up on that kid’s call. You got a second?”

  Einer was a jack-of-all-trades, but the fact that Don and I were almost completely dependent on him for any computer work that went beyond basic e-mail and Google explained why we put up with his many eccentricities. I gave him an extremely truncated version of the facts: a missed-moment post on the Room, followed by some e-mail messages back and forth. I asked him to find the original post, the e-mails between Jack and Madeline, and, most important, whatever information he could track down about Madeline.

  “Sounds like the beginning of a rom-com. This is what that kid was yammering on about this morning?”

  “Just do it, okay? Oh, and while I’ve got you—” I said it like there was no connection whatsoever. “Any arrest in that shooti
ng downtown yet?”

  “Nope. I’ve been flipping channels and refreshing constantly for any updates, but so far there’s no real news. Only three shot, at least one dead, reporters waiting for confirmation about others.”

  We now lived in a country where only three shot was good news. “Nothing else? Witnesses? Rumors?”

  “Nah. I mean, they’ve got the usual interviews—the sounds of gunshots, people running. But without any concrete information, they’re already resorting to talking heads debating gun laws and whether New York City is getting more dangerous.”

  So Jack’s name wasn’t out yet. That was good. Once his name was leaked, the news reports would create their own momentum and I’d have no hope of stopping the train. “Great. Call me about those e-mail messages as soon as you’ve got something.”

  Another call came through before I’d even disconnected. I didn’t recognize the number on the screen but answered anyway. “This is Olivia.”

  “Did you find my dad?”

  “Yes,” I said neutrally. I didn’t want to upset Jack any further than necessary. “I’m working on that now.”

  “Is he okay?”

  “Just fine. I’ll know more soon. You found a place to wait?”

  “Yeah, I’m at Charlotte’s. You know her, right?”

  “Yes,” I said, “from a long time ago. I’ll call you back as soon as I know more. I promise.”

  Jack looked up at me as I clicked off the call. “Another client in trouble?”

  “Something like that.”

  MY CELL PHONE RANG AGAIN within minutes. It was the office. “Einer, you’re a star. You found something already?”

  It wasn’t Einer. I heard a familiar gravelly voice, heavy Brooklyn accent firmly in place. “Can you please tell me why I just saw Jack Harris’s name on Einer’s computer screen? Imagine my surprise when he tells me it’s for our new client. Something about a phone call earlier today?”

  I signaled to Jack that I needed to step into the hallway outside the conference room. “Don, I was planning to tell you, but this was urgent.” I lowered my voice to a whisper. “He’s under arrest. It’s serious.”