The Ex(2)

Boyle: What happened to the basket?

Harris: I left it outside the field with a note.

Boyle: I see. Where outside the field?

Harris: On a bench on the path leading to the street. I figured she’d see it if she showed up later.

Boyle: What exactly was in the basket?

Harris: Wow, you really want the details. Um, a few croissants and some grapes. And the note.

Boyle: Where’d you get the paper for the note?

Harris: I always have a reporter’s pad in my pocket. Tools of the trade, I guess.

Boyle: When did you hear the shots?

Harris: I didn’t know they were shots until later, when I got home and heard the news. Other people around me—we were all wondering what the sounds were. Like firecrackers. They seemed distant, so it was hard to tell.

Boyle: Okay, but where were you when you heard them?

Harris: Charles Street. On the opposite side of the West Side Highway. I’m surprised the sound carried so far.

Boyle: Believe it or not, they’ve got acoustic sensors that can pick up gunfire two miles away. So, just to sum up, there’s no reason you went to the football field other than to meet this Madeline woman?

Harris: No.

Boyle: You don’t know anyone else who would’ve been at the field this morning?

Harris: No. Other than Madeline, of course. I can give you her e-mail address.

Boyle: Okay, so it’s just a coincidence that Malcolm Neeley was one of the shooting victims?

Harris: I’m sorry. What—

Boyle: You know the name, right? Of course you do. Malcolm Neeley was one of three people shot this morning at the football field, just yards from you and your little picnic basket. Care to explain that, Mr. Harris?

Harris: Wait, that doesn’t make sense.

Boyle: You said yourself: The story sounded a little surreal. You even said “incredible” at one point.

Harris: You don’t . . . you can’t possibly think I did this. [No response]

Harris: I need a minute to think.

10:36 AM—recording stopped





Chapter 1


WHITE NOISE IS magic, right up there with tinfoil and Bluetooth and Nespresso pods. White noise makes the sounds of the city disappear. The horns, garbage trucks, and sirens all vanish with the touch of an app on my iPhone. When white noise fills my room, I can be anywhere, which means I’m nowhere, which is the only way I can sleep.

And then the phone rings.


RELYING ON MUSCLE MEMORY, I managed to answer without opening my eyes because I knew the room would be filled with light I was not ready to face. “Olivia Randall.”

“Hey.”

I knew from the voice that it was Einer, our assistant-slash-investigator. A deeper voice behind me murmured something about what time it was, and I felt a heavy forearm drape across my hip. I rolled forward to face my nightstand, away from the voice in my bed. “Hey,” I said in response.

“Don thinks you’re taking the morning off because of Mindy,” Einer said. “He says you’re resting on your laurels, but I think he’s jealous of all the attention.”

I forced myself to open my eyes. The clock in front of me told me that it was 11:17 AM, nearly halfway through a normal person’s workday.

Next to the clock was a half-empty bottle of grappa. Grappa? The odd shape of the bottle triggered a memory: a client—referred by a law school friend who, unlike me, made partner at Preston & Cartwright—handing me a bottle, inexplicably shaped like the Eiffel Tower, to thank me for getting a glove compartment full of parking tickets dismissed in one fell swoop. I told him that a tip wasn’t necessary, but he missed the hint that it was insulting. Into the kitchen cabinet went the bottle. And then another memory: the forearm across my hip reaching into the cabinet last night: “Grappa! I love grappa.”

I forced myself to focus on Einer’s words. Morning off because of Mindy. Right: Mindy, the twenty-four-year-old former child starlet I saved from prison yesterday by suppressing the cocaine that had been found in her impounded Porsche while she was collecting a ten-thousand-dollar club-promotion fee in the Meatpacking District.

My fee was more.

“Tell Don I have no laurels to rest on,” I said, leaning back against the padded headboard of my bed. Don’s my law partner. He’s also my mentor, plus an honorary dad or an uncle or something. Most important, right now he was probably wondering where I was. I could still hear the white noise, even though the app was closed now, as I wracked my brain for a credible story I hadn’t used recently. “A client from a couple of years ago called early this morning. His son got picked up on a DUI coming home from a house party in Brooklyn. He thought he had slept it off but was still drunk from the night before.” The voice next to me muttered, “He’s not the only one.”

“It took a little longer than I thought to keep him from getting booked.”

“Good, I think Don will be happy to know you’re not in the neighborhood. He won’t admit it, but that old softie worries about you like crazy.”

I didn’t get the connection between the two sentences, but here’s the thing about being a liar: you develop an instinct for when you’ve missed a step and need to fake it. “No cause for worry,” I said. “You weren’t calling to check on me, were you?”

“No, there’s some kid who keeps calling. Won’t leave a name. He or she or whatever is threatening to come to the office if you don’t call back. And when it comes to kids, that’s a serious threat by my standards.”