The Ex(38)

Chandler sprang from her chair. “Your Honor, I object to this elitist argument. You mean an award-winning author should be shown favor over a regular workingman?”

“Ms. Chandler can throw around as much hyperbole as she wants, but she’s right about only one thing—this was a heinous crime, a triple homicide, committed only yesterday. If the People get a no-bail hold, they’ll be under the clock of New York law to seek an indictment. They’ll rush the investigation, as they’ve already done, and as we’ve seen them do in other high-profile cases.”

“Your Honor,” Chandler said, “discussion of other cases is highly inappropriate.”

Perhaps, but Judge Amador had to remember that, just last year, the district attorney persuaded him to hold a defendant without bail based on preliminary information. Only after the man was brutally assaulted in jail did prosecutors discover evidence proving his innocence.

“What’s inappropriate is taking away a man’s liberty based on nothing but inflammatory rhetoric. And if that happens, Your Honor, my client will have to wait and wait and wait for his day in court, while he endures the hardship of custody, while he’s separated from his daughter, and while his daughter is forced to live without the only parent she has left.”

I wanted the reporters to remember that Jack was a real person—a widower and a father. “The sole consideration today is whether there is some set of circumstances to assure you my client will appear for trial. We know the charges are as serious as they come, but they can’t come in here with no concrete evidence and pull this two-person family apart. My client will do whatever is necessary to assuage any concerns you have: a gag order, turning over his passport, home confinement—”

“Electronic monitoring?” the judge asked.

I answered immediately, while we had momentum. “Absolutely.”

Chandler was up again. “Your Honor, this is ridiculous. It’s a triple homicide. This is a classic no-bail case.”

“And that’s the problem, Ms. Chandler. Someone sent you here thinking your job would be that easy. Do you have any other evidence to show that Mr. Harris is a flight risk, if he’s on twenty-four-hour home arrest with monitoring?”

Chandler was flipping through file pages to no avail.

“That’s what I thought. Mr. Harris, I have no idea whether you’re guilty or not, but the last time I checked, we have a presumption of innocence in this country, and I don’t appreciate the way the prosecution tried to ignore that fact today. I am troubled that your lawyers seem to know more about the relevant evidence in this case than the prosecution.”

As the judge read a long list of the release conditions, even I could not believe what I was hearing. “Bail is set at one million dollars.” Charged with three counts of first-degree murder, Jack was going home.


DON WAS GIVING ME VERBAL pats on the back as we stepped into the courthouse elevator. The doors were stopped by a last-minute hand, and a young man stepped forward to hold them open. He looked familiar, but I did not immediately place him.

“Is that how you plan to defend my father’s killer?” The spittle that flew from his lips with the “f” in father landed on my face, and I wiped it with the back of my sleeve. Now I recognized him. Max Neeley’s sandy blond hair was swept back the way he’d worn it for his photo on the Sentry Group website. “You can’t just drag a dead man through the mud that way. I’ll sue you for slander. Leave the fund out of this. That’s his legacy, don’t you get it? Sentry Group is all I have left.”

I was pushing the Door Close button, and the elevator alarm began to sound.

“This isn’t the place, son—” Don placed a gentle hand on one of Max’s shoulders, but Max immediately pulled away.

“Don’t touch me. And don’t you dare call me son. How the hell can you people sleep at night?”

He stepped backward, leaving us alone in silence. Buckley was pressed into the corner. When I asked if she was okay, she nodded, but she was obviously rattled.

As we stepped from the elevator, Don whispered to me, “So which was it? Protecting his father’s legacy or all that money?”

I had walked into the courtroom with so many alternative suspects that I’d had a hard time keeping all the theories straight. Max Neeley had just made himself a lot more interesting.

My call to Gary Hannigan went to voice mail. “I’m hoping that lunch at Veselka entitles me to one more favor. You mentioned that Max Neeley had an ex-girlfriend who wasn’t too fond of her would-be father-in-law. Do you happen to have a name and number for her?”


TWO DAYS LATER, I ARRIVED ten minutes before my scheduled appointment, my umbrella still dripping from the summer rain. But when I walked through the front doors, Einer immediately glanced toward a woman sitting in the waiting room. She was early.

I had Googled Amanda Turner after getting her name from Gary Hannigan, so I had seen a few photographs of her—one on her LinkedIn profile, a few on her otherwise private Facebook page, a charity fund-raiser in East Hampton. But in person, she was stunningly beautiful, the kind of pretty you don’t expect outside the airbrushed, Photoshopped pages of a magazine. She was wearing jeans, but they were fancy skinny jeans, paired with high-heeled sandals and a bright pink silk blouse. Even though it was humid and sticky outside, her long caramel-colored hair looked freshly blown. I knew from last spring’s “must have” list in the Bloomingdale’s catalog that the handbag on her lap had a four-digit price tag.