The Ex

by Alafair Burke

  BY MR. TEMPLE:

  One more condition, Your Honor. In light of the defendant’s prior, adamant denials, the People have requested as part of negotiations that Mr. Harris provide a detailed factual basis for these charges to put to rest any kind of doubt the victims’ families or the public might have about his guilt.

  BY COURT:

  And this is acceptable to the defendant as well, Ms. Randall?

  BY MS. RANDALL:

  Yes, Your Honor.

  BY COURT:

  Very well, then. Mr. Harris, please state your actions that give rise to the charges against you.

  BY DEFENDANT:

  Thank you, Your Honor. Roughly three years ago, my wife, Molly, was murdered during the Penn Station massacre by a boy named Todd Neeley. For reasons that are detailed elsewhere, I blamed the killer’s father, Malcolm Neeley, for his son’s actions. When a civil suit against Malcolm Neeley was dismissed, I came up with a plan to kill him. On June 17, I shot Mr. Neeley two times. I also shot two other people who were in the vicinity. I later learned that they were Tracy Frankel and Clifton Hunter. To say that I regret my actions sounds hollow, but I do regret them. It’s almost like I can’t believe I actually did this. But I did. I did this, and I want to say with all sincerity that I’m sorry, especially to the families of Ms. Frankel and Mr. Hunter. No one else was supposed to get hurt.

  BY COURT:

  Is that satisfactory to the People, Mr. Temple?

  BY MR. TEMPLE:

  No, Your Honor. The defendant went to elaborate lengths to make it appear that someone else had framed him. Though the parties have a joint sentencing recommendation, I do not want a situation where Your Honor hears facts that might be beneficial to the defendant—the tragic loss of his wife and expressions of contrition—without hearing the rest, including the extensive planning that went into these murders.

  BY COURT:

  Mr. Harris, can you tell me more about the preparation for these crimes?

  BY DEFENDANT:

  I know it seems like planning, but at the time, it felt like a fantasy, like I was making up a plot in my head. I knew from a deposition in the lawsuit that Mr. Neeley went to the waterfront football field every Wednesday morning before work. Not long after that, I read a review of a book called Eight Days to Die that mentioned a scene set at the football field. So I bought the book and started telling people how I loved it and was even checking out some of the New York settings, so maybe if I went to the football field and confronted Neeley, I could use the book as an excuse for running into him. But then it would just be my word without any backup. A friend had told me about people who start up online relationships using false identities. I came up with the idea of making myself appear to be a victim of one of these scams, where my supposed love interest would be the one to tell me to go to the football field. I wrote a chain of e-mails back and forth with this nonexistent person. I even hired a woman to pose as her in case anyone doubted that she was real. Is that enough, Your Honor? The point is that I’m guilty and take complete responsibility for my actions.

  BY COURT:

  I’d say that’s quite complete. Mr. Temple?

  BY MR. TEMPLE:

  That’s fine.

  BY COURT:

  The change of plea is accepted, and I understand that we are proceeding straight to sentencing. Is there anything either party would like to add before I reach a decision?

  BY MS. RANDALL:

  Just that you follow the joint sentencing recommendation, Your Honor.

  BY COURT:

  Very well. Mr. Harris, I am accepting your change of plea, and you are hereby convicted of three counts of second-degree murder. It is the judgment of this court that the defendant is hereby committed to the custody of the New York State Commission of Correction for twenty-five years to life.

  Chapter 23

  JACK’S FRONT DOOR was propped open by a stack of books. I managed to weave a path through the clutter to find Charlotte in the back hallway, yelling at someone in Buckley’s bedroom not to “linger on the panties. Don’t think I didn’t see you.”

  “Movers are all ex-felons,” she muttered.

  I was pretty sure that wasn’t true, but Charlotte needed something to yell about today. Jack had been sentenced two weeks ago, and she was already breaking down his home.

  “Not wasting any time, are you?” Seeing Charlotte in the midst of open boxes and Styrofoam peanuts reminded me of the day she came to our apartment to pack Jack’s things.

  “If it were up to me, I’d pay the maintenance for the next twenty-five years. But Buckley’s therapist says it’s for the best. As long as she’s running back and forth between here and my place, she’ll keep telling herself it’s temporary. Sounds like a crock of shit to me, but for once, I’m doing as told.” Charlotte’s voice mail summoning me to the apartment hadn’t explained the timing of the move. “I was starting to wonder if you were going to come.”

  Charlotte’s message had also asked whether I wanted the old photographs of me and Jack, the ones he kept in his closet. It took me hours to decide that, yes, I did want them. I had no idea why, other than that the thought of them being thrown down the trash chute with coffee grounds and greasy takeout containers made me break down in tears in my office.

  She went to the dining room and handed me an envelope. I tucked it into my briefcase and pulled out a much larger envelope for her. “Mostly I wanted to drop these off.” They were guardianship papers. Until Buckley reached the age of majority, Charlotte would be the legal equivalent of her parent.

  She muttered a thank-you, and then I handed her something else, a black velvet box. She peeked inside and then closed it. She didn’t ask for an explanation. After all these years, I could finally return Owen’s watch to someone he really loved. I kept my necklace.

  I started to leave, and then turned back. “Jack tells you everything. He always has.”

  “Not this time. He confessed to you before me.”

  “But you knew he was guilty. When you came to my office about Ross Connor, you made it sound like you’d support Jack one way or the other. But you already knew.”

  “I had my suspicions when you first realized Tracy had been calling the Sentry Group. I never knew her name, but Jack told me he screwed up. Some high school girl he slept with years ago had turned up at the apartment trying to blackmail him. And remember how I said Tracy looked like a young version of you? With the exception of Molly, everyone Jack ever fell for looked like you. I even asked him about it. Tracy was the girl, all right, but he insisted he was innocent. I guess some things are just too horrible to admit, even to your best friend.”

  Until the prosecution had dropped the IP evidence on us, Jack had said the same thing to me—admitting to the affair with Tracy but insisting that he was framed. I had never seen a defendant change his position so quickly.

  Charlotte was pulling books off the office shelves and stacking them in boxes. “I’m the last person who should be doing this. I can’t throw anything out. I keep thinking that he’ll want it later. But there is no later.” She paused on one of the books. “Oh, man, what should we do with this? Save it or burn it in the street?”

  She held up a copy of Eight Days to Die.

  “I hate to tell you this, but there’s probably a market for that on eBay. They call it Murderabilia—sick fucks who collect souvenirs from criminal cases.”

  “I don’t think I can hold on to this,” she said. “Can you please take it? Don’t even tell me what you do with it. Give it to your sad little boy Einer, or something.”

  “Sure.” She handed it to me, and then, for perhaps the first time since I’d known her, she hugged me with both arms. She was a good hugger.

  “You did your best for him,” she said. “Thank you for that.”

  I told her to take care of herself.

  MELISSA WAVED AT ME FROM behind the bar. She somehow managed to see every corner of the restaurant simultaneously.

  She
reached for a martini shaker, but I asked for a glass of prosecco instead.

  “Look at you getting all classy.” She hit the nasal hard for the word “classy.” “Seriously, Livvie, you look good.”

  “Thanks.” I had finally been able to sleep through the night a few times in the last week. Yesterday, I had even gone to the gym for the first time in months.

  I had just started to tell her about my conversation with Charlotte when we heard a glass break at the back of the restaurant, followed by loud voices. Melissa threw her bar towel on the counter. “I knew I should have kicked those drunk douche bags out. Hold on a sec.”

  While she left to do crisis management, I reached into my briefcase, retrieved the photographs Charlotte had given me, and flipped through the collection. When I first found them in Jack’s apartment, these scenes felt like yesterday. Now even that moment felt like it was a lifetime ago.

  As I slipped the envelope back into my briefcase, I saw Jack’s copy of Eight Days to Die. Like that old child’s game of hot potato, I had accepted it from Charlotte and now had no idea how to get rid of it.

  I couldn’t remember the last time I’d read a novel. I scanned the back cover. A woman has scheduled her own death in eight days. What does she do with her remaining time?

  I flipped to the final chapter of the book to confirm my suspicions. Yep, her scheduled death was an execution, and all those scenes that preceded it were memories supplemented by imagination. This is why Melissa would only watch movies with me if I promised not to yell out my theory about the ending.

  I took another sip of my prosecco and looked for Melissa. She had her hands on her hips and was scolding a hipster with a soda-fountain mustache and skinny jeans. It was no contest; the only issue was how long it would take for her to get him to leave without more breakage.

  I opened the book again, this time at the beginning. On the title page was a handwritten inscription.

  3/18 To the best dad a girl could ask for. Happy Birthday, Old Man. Love, Buckley

  I had finished a short first chapter before turning back to the inscription. At his plea colloquy, Jack said he bought this book after reading a review that mentioned the scene at the football field, but it had been a birthday gift from his daughter. It was a tiny discrepancy, but I couldn’t stop looking at that inscription.

  Buckley. She heard and saw everything that happened in that apartment of theirs. Her parents’ fights. My conversations with Jack. She may have told me that Tracy Frankel had only asked for directions, but what if Tracy had told Buckley everything? She’d been at the apartment by the time the police arrived for her father, but where had she been the morning of the shooting? The freight elevator, unlike the one her father had used, had no cameras. She could have easily slipped in and out of the building, while her father assumed she was still sleeping in her bedroom.

  I pulled my laptop from my bag and used my phone hotspot to jump online. I pulled up the website for Paperfree and found the link to reactivate a closed account.

  Enter e-mail address: mlh87@paperfree.com

  The “Madeline” account, the one used to make it appear that a stranger had beckoned Jack to the football field.

  Enter password.

  I’d typed Jack’s so many times that my fingers nearly moved on muscle memory to jack<3smollybuckley.

  But that wasn’t the password I was interested in. I thought about Jack’s explanation at the First Precinct: “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.”

  And so on. That many years ago, Jack and Molly would have set up their daughter’s password, too. And like most people, she may have continued to use that same password for everything, even an account no one was supposed to trace to her.

  I sounded out the words mentally as I typed:

  buckley<3sjackmolly

  Enter.

  I realized I was holding my breath as a circle turned on my screen. I let myself exhale with relief when I got an error message. Your e-mail address and password do not match an account that can be reactivated. Try again if you think you have made an error, but, remember, there is no password retrieval for an account that has been closed.

  I was about to close my computer when I decided that if I was chasing paranoid theories, I might as well be thorough.

  Enter password. Buckley<3smollyjack.

  Another error message, followed by another try.

  Enter password. Buckley<3smomanddad

  Congratulations. Your account has been reactivated. We hope you and your paperfree account have a long and fulfilling relationship.

  Chapter 24

  ABOUT FOUR YEARS LATER

  August 10

  I FOUND MYSELF looking at my watch, even though I’d only been here twenty minutes. “Here” was the Greenhaven Correctional Facility. Despite the name, there was nothing correctional about it. This was a maximum-security prison, former home to “old sparky,” when New York used to electrocute people.

  The first time I visited Jack at Greenhaven, I’d stayed more than an hour. I was officially still his lawyer, so the guards gave me relatively free rein.

  In the last two years, Jack’s only other visitors, according to the prison staff, were Charlotte, Buckley, and Jack’s editor, who was pressing him to write a memoir. I knew that as long as he was in prison, he would never write about his case.

  “So, I take it your answer’s still the same?” I asked.

  Today was the four-year anniversary of his guilty plea. Every year, on this date, I had made the drive to Greenhaven to try to convince him to let me work with the district attorney’s office to set aside his conviction. But, because Jack couldn’t be freed without revealing the truth about who killed Malcolm Neeley, Tracy Frankel, and Clifton Hunter, he refused. I had called the state bar multiple times, trying to find some way around Jack’s authorization. The law was clear: I was bound to pursue his interests as he defined them. And I had been tempted countless times to say, fuck ethics. But without Jack’s cooperation, I had no hope of convincing anyone of the truth.

  “I know you don’t want to hear this, Jack, but she’s not going to be okay.” At least on the surface, Buckley was doing fine, having finished her sophomore year at Brown. “She can’t have a normal life after what happened. You’re not protecting her.”

  “I am for now.”

  For now. That was as much as I’d ever gotten.

  I was about to signal for the guard when Jack said, “You look good, Olivia. Happy.”

  “I am, finally.” Unless he noticed the bump last year, he didn’t even know about Grace. I saw no reason to tell him. Maybe I was projecting, but I had the feeling he was keeping something from me as well. “You can tell me anything. You know that, don’t you?”

  He nodded.

  “Will you at least tell me whether she knows that you know?”

  He smiled and shook his head. At least she had no idea that I had figured it out. Unlike Jack, I didn’t have a maximum-security prison to protect me.

  “Not that it’s the same, Jack, but in a weird way, I feel like I lost twenty years of my life, because I squandered it. And now I’m free. And someday you will be, too. Call me the minute you’re ready.”

  I TOSSED MY BRIEFCASE IN Grace’s car seat. It was a multifunction accessory.

  Once I was behind the wheel, I checked my e-mail. Einer had scheduled four more interviews in the next two days. Lately, I seemed to spend more time as an employer than a lawyer. Don was determined to retire, at least as he defined that term. I knew he’d still have his hands all over every case, but he was insisting that I find a “me”—a younger lawyer who would eventually become a full partner.

  More immediately, Einer was starting his third year of law school, and we needed someone—probably three someones—to begin training to replace him once he graduated.

  I hit Reply. Einer, please cancel all
the lawyer interviews. At some point, I’ll stop begging, but I refuse to hire someone until you tell me you’re going elsewhere. And why would you do that? Ellison, Randall & Wagner has a nice ring to it, don’t you think? Eventually he’d realize it wasn’t a pity offer. He was the perfect person for the job.

  I was halfway back to the city when my phone rang. It was a familiar number. I could hear the caller clearly through the car’s speakers. “Good news,” he said. “I didn’t think it would happen, but Miller just pled out. I’ll get Grace from day care, and was thinking about picking up some steaks for dinner?”

  “Have I told you lately that you’re a really good husband?”

  Only seven months old, Little Miss Grace Randall Temple was in her first weeks of part-time day care. I had never understood those mothers who fret about leaving their children with other people, but now I was one of them, and fortunately I had a spouse who shared my dedication to figuring out a schedule that made sense for all three members of our family.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  My husband, still at the district attorney’s office, knew about my annual visits to Jack, but had no idea of the real reason behind them. It was, to my knowledge, the only secret between us.

  “I’m good, Scott. Thanks.” As usual, we exchanged I love yous before I hung up.

  One of these days I would tell him. I still wasn’t certain, but until I heard otherwise, I believed Buckley never meant for her father to be convicted. I had seen her face when I told her about the GSR results. She was devastated, but not for the reason I assumed at the time. At some point after the shooting and before the police arrived at the apartment door, Buckley must have hugged her father. That’s why his hands were clean and his shirt was dirty. That was her first mistake.

  But even with the GSR, I could have gotten an acquittal. Buckley’s big slip was letting their home’s IP address show up on a log-in to the “Madeline” e-mail account. It wasn’t Jack’s laptop that had been used for those e-mails. It was Buckley’s.

  Jack had known it was Buckley the moment he heard Tracy Frankel’s name among the victims at his arraignment. That’s why he had turned to look at her.