The Ex

by Alafair Burke

  Even though her expression was fixed, one second she looked like an anxious little kid, the next an angry, defensive teenager. Her pale, thin face and wide, light eyes were so hard to read.

  “You would’ve done the same thing,” she finally said. “I mean, you’re a famous lawyer; if I did something so wrong, you wouldn’t have Ronald McDonald here doing his cyber thing.”

  Einer waved over his shoulder. “Don’t mind me—right here within earshot. Been called that before, by the way. If you hear me sniffling, it’s just me suffering high school flashbacks.”

  I turned to face Buckley. “You could have gotten into major trouble. Not to mention how it looks if a suspect’s own kid gets caught snatching evidence. It looks like you think your father’s guilty.”

  Her bottom lip started to quiver. So far, I had chalked up Buckley’s attitude to normal teenage angst, manifested as cocky smugness, but now I could see that the tough exterior masked a more sensitive core. “It’s not like that. I only took the laptop to be safe. Dad backs his manuscripts up to it. It’s his work. At least, that’s what I was thinking at first. And then, once I had it in my bag, I just left.”

  “Is there something we’re going to find on that laptop that’s a problem, Buckley?”

  “I swear, I was only thinking about his book. He’s nearly done with it.”

  Einer’s fingers stopped clicking on the keyboard, and he sat back in his chair. “Here’s the deal: no sign of remote site software. But there’s—”

  “Dumb it down, please.” It was one of my frequent requests when Einer came to my rescue on the technological front.

  “Okay, so the most thorough way to spy on someone is to install remote site software on his computer. Basically it lets someone clone the computer in its entirety—every keystroke is replicated remotely. Nothing like that here. But there are sixteen thousand ways to have accessed his e-mail, leaving no fingerprints on the hardware.”

  “So basically, you can’t tell from the laptop whether someone hacked him.”

  “Correct. Your best bet is to contact his e-mail provider and find out when it was accessed and from where. He can then see if anything looks weird. Let me take a guess: you want me to get to work on that?”

  “Please.”

  “And one more thing,” Einer added. “This one here may say she only grabbed the laptop for a book, but Ronald McDonald has a feeling the police might be interested in this.”

  He hit a few keys and the screen filled with a gray window labeled “Library.” “This is the browser history,” Einer explained. “It’s a list of all the websites visited from this computer.”

  I couldn’t believe what I was looking at. It seemed like every other result involved the name Malcolm Neeley. Regular Google searches of both his name and his hedge fund, the Sentry Group. Clicks on results from his country club (placed third in a golf tournament two weeks earlier), the 92nd Street Y (“Leader’s Circle” for donating more than fifty grand), a Princeton alumni report. There were even Zillow searches of Neeley’s home address (current Zestimate=$8.2 M).

  Einer clicked on the menu on the left side of the screen, pulling up the history for the previous month, and then the month before that, and the month before that. More of the same.

  Charlotte, looking over my shoulder at the screen, asked Buckley, “Did you know about this? Is this why you took the computer?”

  “No, I swear. Besides, it’s no big deal. If you looked on my computer, you’d find the same thing. Ask all the other victims. We all checked up on Malcolm, because we all hated him. The guy was an asshole, and he let his fucked-up loser kid kill all those people. He killed my mother.”

  Buckley’s whole body was shaking by the time she wiped away a tear. Charlotte wrapped an arm around the girl’s shoulder and kissed the top of her head.

  “Anything else?” I asked Einer quietly. He shook his head, and I gestured that we should leave.

  I was reaching for the front door when he asked me, “Are you really leaving that computer with those two?”

  “Unless you think we need it.”

  “The police, Olivia. They’re the ones who will want it. They’ll figure out it’s missing. And you know that mama bear woman’s going to scrub it. Or throw it off the GWB with her big strong arms. Did you see those guns?”

  “The laptop’s not our problem, Einer.”

  “I hope you know what you’re doing on this one.”

  As we rode downstairs in the elevator, I shared his hope, because I was about to tell Don Ellison—the man who gave me a new career when my old one fizzled—why, for the first time in our law partnership, I was going to take a client whether he liked it or not.

  Chapter 8

  I COULD HEAR the usual evening sounds of Café Lissa—a blend of raised voices and a killer playlist—before I even reached the revolving front door. As banks, drugstores, and big-box chains drove up the price of Manhattan’s commercial real estate, small restaurants were closing in droves. But thanks to loyal neighborhood regulars, Lissa’s dinner turnout rivaled that of any celebrity chef.

  The wait at the bar was three people deep, and the Ramones were pumping from the overhead speakers. Hey, ho. Let’s go!

  Melissa was behind the bar, her preferred spot unless a crisis was unfolding elsewhere in the restaurant. Like me, she was forty-three years old, but somehow her tricep revealed no sign of a wattle as she shook a martini over her right shoulder. As she tipped the clear liquid into a glass, I heard her ask a bearded man whether he wanted an orange twist. He marveled at her recall, saying he’d only been in once, three weeks earlier.

  That memory had earned Melissa a 3.84 GPA as a biochem major. Then a year into med school, she announced that her real dream was to open a restaurant.

  I gave a quick nod to Melissa and then scanned the restaurant for Don. He was at his favorite table in the back corner, reading glasses helping him browse the New York Post.

  “I see you’re keeping an eye out on the enemy,” I said. “You may as well have Fox News on replay in your bedroom.”

  “That’s the problem with your generation,” he said. “You have too many options. Too much freedom to choose what you want to hear, what you want to read. It’s good for the brain to listen to opposing points of view. The jurors who decide our clients’ fates read the Post, if they read the news at all. You need to understand their world view.”

  One of Melissa’s bar backs, in a white oxford shirt and blue jeans, dropped off a martini I hadn’t asked for. I raised it to Don’s pint glass and gave it a clink. “So, speaking of opposing world views—”

  “I’m not stupid, Olivia. You avoided me all day, then had my niece call to make sure I’d be here tonight. Clearly there’s something you think we need to discuss, and I suspect it involves that case you had a feeling about. Go ahead and say it.”

  When I first started working for Don, he tolerated me only as a favor to Melissa, who was basically like a daughter to him. In his eyes, I was an elitely educated, big-law drone, brainwashed to think that real lawyers worked for the corporate clients who could afford to pay the best and brightest to do the highest quality legal work imaginable. At Preston & Cartwright, I once spent ten hours to draft two paragraphs of a thirty-page summary judgment brief. I dreamed of being a partner at a top-tier firm. If I made partner, it would validate all the personal sacrifices I had made to get there.

  But then I reached the eight-year associate mark, and I didn’t get the dream. I billed a gazillion hours. I approached the law in a “steady, workmanlike manner.” But I had failed to “develop meaningful relationships with mentors” or to “take on a leadership role with the younger associates.” I had not “demonstrated the potential for significant client development.” I was “too blunt in my interpersonal communications.” I had memorized all of these words because I’d replayed them repeatedly in my head in the weeks and months that followed. In short, I could do the work, but no one liked me.

  I should n
o longer consider myself on the partner track. That was code for take a year or two, but get out.

  When Melissa told me that her uncle Don needed a junior lawyer, my first instinct was to think I was too good for the job. At one point, I had aspired to being a Supreme Court clerk or a law professor. I graduated from law school with one of the best résumés in the country. I was supposed to be a corner-office partner in charge of national litigation, not some errand girl for a solo practitioner catching criminal cases at the courthouse. But I was no longer straight out of school. I was a ninth-year associate. My résumé may as well have borne a giant stamp reading “couldn’t cut it.”

  When I tried to make up excuses to decline Don’s offer, Melissa had told me she’d “punch me in the pepa” if I turned it down. I was no expert in Spanish slang, but she’d made her point. It wasn’t like Melissa to ask her family to help her with anything. But she hadn’t asked for herself. She’d asked for me. I had to accept.

  To my surprise, Don had taught me more in my first year than I ever learned at Columbia or Preston & Cartwright. I owed it to him now to be direct.

  “Here’s the situation.” I leaned forward. “Jack was booked. No eyewitnesses, but they can place him near the scene around that time. And one of the shooting victims was Malcolm Neeley.” Don continued to shake his head as I outlined what I knew about the evidence against Jack, not yet mentioning the GSR results.

  “I can see why they made an arrest. It’s all coincidental, but then his cockamamie mystery woman story completes a circle for the investigation.”

  “What do you mean by a circle?”

  “They respond to a shooting with three victims. One of them turns out to be a high-profile guy. Every theory is up for grabs, but it’s only natural for the police to think, Hey, maybe this has something to do with the fact that Malcolm Neeley’s son killed all those people. So then when they’re watching surveillance video and just happen to spot a man carrying a basket who resembles one of the victims’ family members—arguably the most well known of them all—of course that becomes the center of their attention. But, still, maybe there’s some innocent explanation. Maybe it’s not Jack Harris on the video after all. Or if it was, maybe someone was with Jack at the waterfront and can vouch for his innocence. But instead of clearing matters up, Jack offers some cuckoo story about an anonymous woman, and that story further highlights the fact that Jack was near the scene of the shooting, alone, carrying a picnic basket before the shooting, and leaving the waterfront without it afterward. Prior to that story, this was one theory of an infinite number.”

  I completed the thought for him. “But Jack’s statement closed the circle for them, bringing them right back to their initial suspicion.”

  “Correct.” Don sat back in the brown leather booth and took another drink of his beer. “Of course, we defense attorneys prefer to call this ‘tunnel vision.’ The police placed Jack near the scene, and then interpreted everything else through that lens. Happens all the time. But if Jack’s lucky—or better yet, innocent—they won’t find enough to convince a prosecutor to charge him.”

  “They’re going forward. When we talked on the phone today, I was pretty sure I was close to getting Jack released. But then the GSR tests came back.”

  Don set down his mug roughly enough that some foam spilled onto the table. “See? This is why you don’t vouch for people. Residue on his hands?”

  I shook my head. “His shirt. It’s still not good. But we’ve gotten past GSR evidence before.”

  “Yeah, by arguing that the police were sloppy or worse. Pretty hard to believe they’d screw up a case this important, this fast, against a rich white guy beloved by the entire city. Not how the system works, Olivia, and jurors know it.”

  “Right. But I’m mapping out another theory.” I walked him through the possibility that someone had either orchestrated the encounter at the pier from the very beginning, or been monitoring Jack’s e-mail looking for an opportunity to set him up for Neeley’s murder. “And we know that Malcolm Neeley has many more enemies than just Jack. For every person who feels sorry for him that he lost his son, another four blame him for the Penn Station massacre. So if someone was looking to kill Neeley, and somehow knew about Jack’s plans to meet this woman today—”

  “And then somehow managed to spritz him with GSR?”

  “It’s possible. I haven’t had a chance to talk to him about possible sources of contamination. Or maybe the NYPD did something weird with the testing. Or whoever framed him passed him on the waterfront and—”

  “Or he did it. The lawsuit against Neeley got dismissed. Jack could have snapped. It happens to people. You know that.”

  Yes, I definitely did know that, especially when it came to Jack. But Jack’s version of “snapping” would never involve harming another person, and I didn’t know how to get Don to see that.

  “You think my judgment is clouded, but trust me, Don: I know him at his core.” The entire reason Jack and I didn’t work out was because I knew him better than he knew himself. He thought I could make him happy for the rest of his life. I knew him well enough to realize that I’d keep disappointing him. “He didn’t do this. If nothing else, I can’t see him taking the risk of leaving his daughter without a parent.”

  Don held my gaze for several seconds before speaking. “Look, I know I’m a hundred and seventy years old, and Melissa would probably accuse me of man-splaining for what I’m about to say. But the only thing I know about this man Jack is from when you’ve mentioned him on occasion over the years, never when you’re at your best.” That was Don’s polite way of saying that when I’m drunk, I have a way of blubbering about my past fuck-ups, with Jack traditionally at the top of the list. “I gather he’s some kind of great love, and you think you botched it. I know you feel guilty, but God knows you’re not the first young person to have been a jerk to a boyfriend. You don’t owe him anything.”

  “But I do, Don. You have no idea just how much I owe him.”

  CHARLOTTE MAY NEVER HAVE LIKED me, but, ironically, I may never have met Jack if it weren’t for her. She was the one who kept bringing her childhood pal around the dorm, making a point to linger near our open door when Melissa was home. Her desire to play matchmaker between Jack and Melissa was almost as obvious as the fact that neither of them was interested, or that Charlotte might have had her own reasons for liking Melissa.

  Under orders from my parents to make my private education “worth it,” I focused almost exclusively on my studies until the occasional episode of binge drinking left me open to the idea of companionship for the night. Jack’s name was never among the potential candidates. He was cute and funny and shared my passion for Twin Peaks and the Smiths, but he was a little too clean-cut for my taste. Then one night when he walked me home from an especially boozy off-campus kegger, we ended up talking for two hours. I spent the night with him, sneaking out of his dorm the next morning in time for breakfast. I thought we both knew it was a one-time hookup, and, sure enough, his sweet, safe drop-ins continued, with no mention of our stumble into bed.

  When I was packing up my dorm room for a summer internship in D.C., he dropped by with a mix tape, and my first day back on campus, he found me at the new dorm, asking what I thought. I lied and said it was great, but he could tell I had never even listened to it.

  He came back the next day with a twelve-pack, and a few beers in, made Melissa and me promise to dance with him to the first song on a duplicate tape; it was “Debaser” by the Pixies. We wound up in our own three-person mosh pit, slam-dancing around the room. When the song was over, he popped the tape from the stereo and declared that our “musical education” would continue later.

  As the school year continued, we fell into a pattern. Impromptu dance parties—sometimes in a group, sometimes one-on-one, but always one song at a time with that same stupid mix tape. They were great songs, too: “Magic Carpet Ride” by Steppenwolf, “Candy” by Cameo, “Blue Monday” by New Order, �
��Hot Pants” by James Brown, “This Is Not a Love Song” by PIL, “Mirror in the Bathroom” by the English Beat, “Rock Your Baby” by . . . I don’t know. A Sting song I would have hated if I hadn’t found a certain amount of comfort in being held in my room for a slow dance.

  That tape—and the ones that followed—had been a good move, the only one I ever saw Jack play. I started to look forward to his knocks on the door. Every pop-in was an adventure. I felt special and sought after. Over time, the music became less important than spending time afterward with someone who made me happy.

  But I was still young and naive enough to believe that boys and girls—with their first taste of independence and college hormones raging—could be “mostly friends.” Though I resisted labeling our relationship, that’s how I chose to think of us: a friendship with benefits—nonmonogamous, at least on my part.

  Then I heard rumors that Shannon Riley was showing up at Jack’s dorm regularly after dinner, asking for help with her bio assignments, even though Jack sucked at science. After spotting Jack and Shannon traipsing around campus for the umpteenth time in weeks, I told Melissa that I was looking forward to Jack’s “little dalliance” running its course.

  “Why do you care?” Melissa had asked.

  “Because it’s Shannon Riley. She’s loud and obnoxious and always has to be the center of attention.”

  “No. I mean, Olivia, why do you care?”

  “Because Jack’s going to end up hurt when Shannon decides to move on to someone else.”

  Melissa had shaken her head and laughed. “No, you care because you miss him. I’ve seen you perk up when there’s a knock at the door. How you come home after seeing him like you’re all high on something. It may have happened slowly, but I’ve seen how he’s changed you. You love that boy.”

  “Jack and I are good where we are.”

  “You might be, but obviously he’s not. You’ve been getting all the comfort of a boyfriend, without any of the responsibility. He comes when you call him, holds your hair when you’re sick, and puts up with your shit. Meanwhile, you get to go on with your business. Honestly, I don’t blame him for moving on. And you better watch out, because if I had to guess, once Shannon has him locked down, he’ll stay that way for a long, long time. If you want him, you better take him.”