Beach Wedding(33)

I stood up from the desk in our luxurious master suite that was now covered with my dad’s case. There were folders and binders and copy paper everywhere. On the bureau and desk, the bed and the mini fridge. There were several piles of printouts on the floor.

“Okay, Viv. Are you with me? Do I have your undivided attention?” I said as I lifted up the whiteboard that I’d bought at Staples in Riverhead that afternoon.

“Wait. Not just mine,” Viv said, smiling from the bed. “The baby’s kicking.”

I went over and put my hand on her belly and laughed as I felt it.

“You gotta be kidding me. Even the next generation of Clan Rourke is excited about going after this cold case, huh? I love it,” I said.

After dipping out on the gang in the city and almost missing meeting the bride-to-be for the first time, I was grateful to be back in Viv’s good graces. She had even somehow managed to smooth things over with Tom and the others.

“Okay, without further ado, here’s what happened with the State of New York v. Hailey Sutton.”

“No, wait,” Viv said, grabbing her carton of Chubby Hubby off the nightstand. “Okay, ready. Go.”

“On July 5, 1999, a call went into the village PD at 8:31 a.m.,” I said, pacing around the room as I read from my notes. “Responding Village of Southampton police officers, Timothy Page and Raymond Gabrielson, arrive at 8:43.

“They both get there at the same time in separate patrol cars and get buzzed into the estate. The maid is waiting for them outside in the driveway, and they go in and find the deceased, Noah Sutton, in the left wing of the house on the floor of his office.”

“Not in bed?”

“No. Either he woke up and came downstairs or he actually crashed there on the couch the night before. He slept in the office sometimes, the maid said, especially when he and Hailey were fighting. He’d been spending a lot of time in the office in the weeks leading up to the murder, she said.”

“Continue,” Viv said.

“Noah’s in his boxer shorts, no shirt, facedown between the couch and the desk, blood pooled on the Persian rug. There were two shots to the right side of his head. One in the temple and one farther back, right above his ear. There was plenty of blood but no brain matter. Often with head wounds, the thick skull bone slows the acceleration of the bullet considerably. The bullets, two .38-caliber rounds called wadcutters, were still lodged in his brain.”

Viv shuddered. “What’s a wadcutter?”

“It’s a kind of practice or target bullet. They’re not really common in shootings. They made a big deal about that fact at the trial.”

“Was there evidence of a struggle?”

“Not definitively. There seemed to have been a bit of a struggle that was over quickly.”

“Like, ‘Hailey? Honey, what the hell is that in your hand?’”

“Exactly.”

“Where was Hailey when the cops showed?”

“This is where it gets interesting,” I said. “When Officer Gabrielson asked where the lady of the house was, the maid said she didn’t know. She’d run straight to Hailey’s bedroom directly after she saw Noah, she said, but Hailey wasn’t there.

“The maid speculated to the arriving cops that Hailey could have been in the guesthouse. But she was afraid to check without the police. When the responding officers went to the house with a key, they found the sleeping party guests inside alive and well.”

“But no Hailey?”

“No. Only when the officers return to the house at around 9:12 a.m. do they find Hailey sobbing beside her beloved Noah in the office.”

“Where had she been?”

“No one knows, but the officer noted that she was wearing sneakers and workout clothes, not pajamas.”

“That would also come up at the trial?”

“Yes,” I said. “That was prosecution point number one. Where was Hailey Sutton when the cops showed up?”

“This is fun,” my wife said, spooning some more ice cream into her mouth. “Keep going.”

“Prosecution point number two,” I said, “was what detectives found in the garbage next door.”

“I know this one. Hailey’s hoodie with blood on it,” Viv said.

“Noah’s blood, to be precise,” I said. “And what really should have cooked Hailey’s goose was when the detective, Marvin Heller, who arrived at 9:20, asked her if she or her husband owned a gun. She said no.”

“Which was a lie because the maid had already told the cops she had seen a gun,” Viv said.

“Precisely,” I said, pointing to where I had written Hailey Lies on the whiteboard.

“Then there’s Hailey’s background,” I said. “Hailey was from backwoods Wisconsin originally and had worked her way into a very shady real-estate management firm in Manhattan. She worked there for three years, going from assistant to full broker. Her boss went to federal prison for bribery three months after she left.”

“She get charged?”

“No. She was the one who ratted him out.”

“That’s how she originally met Noah, right?” Viv said. “She was his broker?”

“That’s right,” I said. “She sold him a huge penthouse on Central Park West.”