The Ex(21)

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 any thing 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 *, and he let his f*cked-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.