“Einer, what are you doing here?”
“You didn’t answer your cell. I must’ve called ten times in a row. And you’re like the only forty-year-old I know who doesn’t have a landline.”
Einer had a way of saying “forty” like it was a hundred and two. I blinked a few times, hard, trying to clear the clouds from my throbbing head.
“I just overslept.”
“Well, I can see that now. Don got all worried, saying you always answer your cell. And then I started thinking about that lady in Queens who had a stroke and spent seven hours immobile on her kitchen floor until someone came to check on her. I mean, you don’t even have a cat or anything.”
“Nice to know you care, Einer.”
I looked around and saw my cell phone on the kitchen counter. Rookie fucking move.
Sixteen missed calls. And it was nearly noon. “I must be coming down with something.”
“I call it the tequila nod.”
“Not funny, Einer. And don’t repeat that to Don.”
“Fine, none of my business. Jack Harris has been calling the office, saying it’s important. Something about the woman who sent those e-mails.”
Right. Madeline. I e-mailed her last night. At least, I thought I had.
My cell phone was ringing again.
“You want me to answer that?” Einer asked.
I checked the screen. It was Jack. I shook my head as I opened my laptop. I knew Jack was convinced that Madeline could make his entire case go away.
I was relieved to see that not only had I sent the e-mail to Madeline, but that it was appropriately firm, edging on intimidating.
I clicked over to my in-box and was excited to see a new message with my own name in the subject line: From Olivia Randall, Esq. Ugh, I had actually referred to myself as Esquire.
I clicked on the message. Your message to the following e-mail address was rejected. The e-mail address wasn’t found at the destination domain. It might be misspelled or it might not exist any longer. Try retyping the address and resending the message.
I nudged the screen in Einer’s direction. “I sent a message last night to Jack’s missed-moment woman, and got this in response.”
“You’re sure you got the address right?”
I was fairly certain I had copied the address directly from one of Jack’s e-mails, but double-checked. “Yes. We didn’t get that message before when we tried contacting her, right? What does that mean?”
“I’m no lawyer, but I’d say someone’s going out of her way to make sure you don’t find her. Maybe that’s why Jack was calling.”
And just then, my phone rang once again.
I shepherded Einer to the front door as I answered Jack’s call. As I offered a vague apology for not picking up earlier, Einer mouthed the words “morning breath” at me before leaving me in peace.
“I was calling about Madeline,” Jack said.
No surprise. How could a person be smart enough to recite entire pages of William Faulkner from memory, casually mention the influence of The Canterbury Tales on everything from mystery novels to rap music, and publish three acclaimed best-selling books, but not realize that the DA wasn’t going to dismiss first-degree murder charges all on the say-so of some woman from an online flirtation?
“Look, I know you think that she can back you up by saying she’s the one who invited you to the football field, but your case is not getting dismissed. There’s still motive. And the gunshot residue. And the deposition.”
“What deposition?”
I shut my eyes and forced myself to concentrate. Right, I hadn’t asked him yesterday about the deposition because I wanted to make sure he signed the psych release. What deposition? he wanted to know. The one where Malcolm Neeley testified that he could be found at the football field every Wednesday morning like clockwork. The one Jack had kept a copy of in his file cabinet. I spelled it out for him now.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I told you, I never even looked at that stuff. I was as shocked as anyone when the police told me that Neeley was at the football field that morning.”
There was silence on the line. “Oh my God, you think I did this. I heard it in your voice when I first got home. I told myself afterward I was being paranoid. Being in jail for three days can do that, I guess. But I was right. Do you seriously think I’m capable of something like this?”
“I’m just working through all the evidence, Jack. That’s my job.”
“I swear on my life, Olivia, I did not read that deposition. Call Buckley’s therapist if you don’t believe me. You can make her sign a medical release, too, I guess.”
“Just stop, Jack, I believe you.” Did I believe him? Maybe. Why did Madeline dump her e-mail address? If I were a prosecutor, I’d be able to get information from her e-mail provider about the defunct account in a matter of days, but as a defense attorney, the same task would take me months, if the company bothered to respond at all. “You called about Madeline.”
“Not just Madeline,” Jack said. “The basket. The prosecutor at the bail hearing knew about the picnic basket I took to meet up with Madeline. They said they have footage of me carrying it.”
“They do, both from the waterfront and your building elevator.”
“Right, but they don’t believe that it was all part of this stupid blind date. At the time, I just assumed that Madeline chickened out or something. But here’s the thing: the prosecutor at the bail hearing accused me of using the basket to carry a gun, like I couldn’t just stick it in my waistband.”
“They skew everything to fit their theory of the case.”
“That’s not my point, Olivia. Was the basket reported on the news? Because if so, if you were Madeline—you’d put two and two together and figure out that the police arrested the person you stood up. If you were the one who said you bring the basket—”
I immediately saw where Jack was going. She’d call the police. Or me. She’d come forward to say that the guy on the news didn’t do this, that the basket wasn’t to hide a gun. But no one had come forward.
“Hold on a second. I need to think.” I pulled a bottle of Tylenol from my kitchen drawer and swallowed three without water.
I was trying to figure out how Madeline fit into all the possible scenarios, but Jack’s fretting on the other end of the line was keeping me from thinking straight. “I’ll call you right back.”
THE WHOLE CASE STARTED BECAUSE the police were able to place Jack near the football field right before the time of the shooting. That was where I needed to start, too.
I forced myself to concentrate and started a list in my notepad:
Three explanations.
1. Coincidence.
The “coincidence” theory had never sat right with me, and the police clearly never bought it. And Jack was right: if it were pure coincidence that Madeline happened to send Jack to the site of the shooting, with some innocent explanation for not showing up, she would have made the connection between the shooter’s picnic basket and her missed moment. She would have come forward. But instead, she closed her e-mail account. I was not liking this theory.
My cell phone was buzzing across the table. I turned it off and picked up my pen again.
2. E-mail hack/fall guy.
This had been Buckley’s theory when she overheard Charlotte and me after her father was arrested: Someone who wanted Neeley dead went looking for a fall guy, identified Jack and perhaps others, and began spying on their e-mails in search of an opportunity. Jack’s e-mail to Charlotte about the woman in the grass, followed by Charlotte’s missed-moment post, provided that opportunity. The bad guy then responded to the ad as “Madeline.”
The problem with the e-mail hack theory was that, according to Gmail, the only log-ins to Jack’s account in the days before his arrest had come from Jack’s own IP address. The hacker would have had to enter Jack’s building to be able to piggyback off his wireless signal, a completely unnecessary risk.
&
nbsp; I didn’t like this theory, either.
3. Jack did it.
Jack hated Neeley, even more so when the civil suit got dismissed. He knew where to find Neeley because of his deposition testimony. He had been hanging around a shooting range recently, a fact he neglected to mention until I pressed him for an explanation about the gunshot residue on his shirt. He wrote the Madeline e-mails himself to provide an excuse for being near the football field in case someone saw him.
No muss, no fuss. I circled the period at the end of the sentence until it was a solid black circle.
I started to put my pen down. This was the only theory that worked.
Except it didn’t. Not exactly. Not the way it seemed to yesterday.
The problem: I had e-mailed Madeline the night of Jack’s arrest, and did not receive a “closed account” message in response. So sometime between then and last night, “Madeline” had closed her account. And Jack no longer had access to the Internet.
Maybe he called someone else to do it—Charlotte, perhaps, or a hired stranger. But why take that kind of risk when he could have left the account dormant?
Was there any other possibility? My pen began to move again.
4. Catfish
This was Charlotte’s theory from the very beginning. It was like Buckley’s theory, but more complicated. Bad guy identifies Jack as the perfect fall guy, then mines the Web for information to plant the perfect woman on his running route.
Maybe they expected Jack to make the moves in person, and then planned to use the woman to frame him. Jack (being Jack) didn’t take the bait, but then Charlotte’s missed-moment ad gave them another chance. Along came “Madeline.”
It was possible.
I started at the top of my notes and reconsidered every option. As screwed up as this catfish theory sounded, it had better be right.
Because, otherwise, Jack was guilty. I turned my phone back on and called him.
“I believe you: Madeline’s the key to everything. I’ll find her. I promise.”
I had no idea how.
IT TOOK ME TWENTY MINUTES to get through the other messages I had missed this morning.
A bunch of voice and e-mails that could wait. Only two texts. The first was from Ryan, sent at two in the morning. Are we good? Not sure what I did.
One from Melissa. It was her day off, and she wanted to know if I could meet for lunch. How was it time for lunch already?
I was trying to think of somewhere to meet when my phone rang again. I recognized the digits on the screen as the district attorney’s general number. “Olivia Randall.”
“It’s Temple.”
“Let me guess: you want to remind me that my client’s guilty.”
“I said my piece yesterday.”
“You’re calling to confess that you’re the one who put Max Neeley up to that interview with the Post yesterday?” A grieving son, the last surviving member of the Neeley family, might actually be able to put a sympathetic face on his father. If he kept this up, I might have to leak his little episode at Princeton to some dogged young journalist.
“Not that, either. And I swear I didn’t know he was going on the Today show this morning.” Another thing I had slept through. “You got a pen?”
Temple gave me a name—Carl Wilson—and phone number, which I scribbled on my notepad. “He can get you whatever video you need from the parkway. He’s expecting your call and knows he should give you as much time and access as you need.”
“If only your office always rolled out the red carpet this way.”
“It’s a lot easier to give defense attorneys what they want when we know it’s a dead end. Have fun wasting your time.”
I never actually thought Temple would produce as much video as I requested. Now that I had access to it, I wasn’t sure I wanted it. What if I found footage of Jack on his morning run, past an empty Christopher Street Pier—no woman in the grass, no picnic basket, no champagne? What if the missed moment had never happened? This video could confirm my worst suspicions.
I’d be scouring hours of grainy video searching for a woman who might not even exist. I could almost feel my eyes cross at the thought of it.
But if Jack was telling the truth, this video was our best hope of finding whatever woman had sent him to be framed for a triple homicide.
I sent a reply to Melissa: No time for lunch, but do you have time to help me with something?
Four crossed eyes were better than two.
CARL WILSON MET US AT police headquarters with a big smile, an enormous beer belly, and a strong handshake. “Call me politically incorrect, but when the DA told me some criminal defense attorney would be fishing through video, I didn’t expect the company of two beautiful women.” His words were directed at both of us, but his eyes were clearly focused on Melissa. “You’re both lawyers?”
In my gray sheath dress and matching blazer, I looked the part. Melissa, in her skinny jeans, black tank top, and biker boots, not so much.
“Watch your mouth,” Melissa said. “I’m just helping my friend here. I own a bar.”
“Dear lord, woman. You’re breaking my heart.” He led the way to a long, narrow desk lined with computer screens. “When I talked to the DA, he didn’t sound real sure on what exactly you were looking for. Let me just say up front: don’t get your hopes up.”
Carl continued to ramble, as Melissa and I got seated at the desk with him. “People call us up saying, hey, I think my husband’s cheating. Can you check whether his secretary comes to our apartment? If you ask me, the media’s got people so scared of wiretaps and drones and Big Brother that the average American thinks there’s a giant eye in the sky that hears and sees everything, and it’s all uploaded to some magical cloud. Like, take your case, okay? The DA told me this is about the waterfront shooting, right?”
I nodded.
“Okay, so here’s the thing: I can tell you right now that the actual shooting’s not on film. No eyes on the football field.”
Scott Temple had already told me as much. I told Carl I was interested in all footage that might capture anyone heading to or from the field.
“Well, in theory, that could be a camera forty blocks north in Times Square an hour earlier. You gotta be reasonable. We’re talking about the greenway, presumably, right? In which case, I can tell you what we’ve got. South to north: Battery Park, a whole lot around the World Trade Center site and the Holland Tunnel, then the Pier 40 parking garage, Christopher Street Pier, then Chelsea Piers, followed by of course a ton of eyes on the Lincoln Tunnel. You get the idea.”
So basically, seven clusters of cameras across approximately four miles of waterfront. Importantly, one was at the Christopher Street Pier, where Jack first spotted his mystery woman—or so he claimed. “I’m surprised the coverage is that spotty,” I said nonchalantly.
“How is that possible?” Melissa asked. “This is post-nine-eleven New York City.”
“And it’s also the real world,” Carl said. “Times Square? Rockefeller Center? Grand Central? We got those places locked down tight. But what jihadist plotting from a hellhole in Afghanistan gives a rat’s ass about the Hudson River greenway? As it turns out, though, we’ll have a bunch more cameras along the west side in the next month or so.”
“To respond to the shooting?” I asked.
“Nah, a couple weeks ago, one of my idiot counterparts gave a walk-through to some New York magazine reporter who was interested in CompStat. Guess she started asking about surveillance cameras or whatnot, so he tries disabusing her of her paranoid fantasies about twenty-four/seven eyes in the sky. He specifically used the Hudson River Park greenway as an example, telling her exactly where we do—and don’t—have cameras. I tell you, some people got squash for brains.”
“So did this article get published?” Again I did my best to sound nonchalant.
“Oh, yeah. The bosses weren’t happy. You know, it’s a catch-22. If we say we’ve got it all under control, people complain about t
he loss of privacy. But here this dumb guy was trying to say, No, it’s not like that, and the story gets twisted into, How safe are we? You can’t win.”
“And did the article mention the actual camera locations?”
“Oh, the specifics were definitely there. Trust me, if we weren’t union, that guy would be out on his ass.”
So not only were we missing video coverage of the football field, but whoever shot Malcolm Neeley could have been counting on exactly that.
I had Carl play footage from different cameras at sporadic intervals. I wanted to bury my actual inquiry among several others, just in case Scott Temple asked Carl what I seemed to be looking for.
After about forty minutes of skimming footage, I asked him to pull up the Christopher Street Pier cameras from the morning Jack saw his missed moment. I hoped that with luck, we’d get one quick glimpse of a woman in a fancy dress walking in and out of the frame with a basket.
But that’s not what we saw. Melissa started to point at the screen, but I tapped her arm gently as a signal to wait.
I let the tape play a few more minutes before announcing that I was beat. Feigning fatigue, I told Carl that I appreciated his help, but that I couldn’t make heads or tails out of the video without my client, who was on house arrest. “Is there a way to get it on disc or something?” I asked. “I can tell you which cameras and time periods we’re interested in.” I planned to make them broad enough to feed Temple’s opinion that I was on a fishing expedition.
“Well, the ADA did tell me to give you whatever you wanted.”
As we were leaving police headquarters, zip drive in my briefcase, Melissa asked if we had found what I was looking for. All I had told her was to look for dark-haired women, especially one wearing a party dress.
I gave Melissa a little hug. “Remember my drunken babble last night? Forget everything I said.”
Despite what I’d led Carl to believe, what we’d seen had surpassed my expectations. Saturday, June sixth, Jack in his T-shirt on his early morning run. And right there on the grass was a woman in a blush-colored gown, bottle in one hand, book in the other. The woman in the grass was real. Jack wasn’t lying.
The Ex Page 16
