The Ex(42)

“But you could have.”

“I honestly don’t remember. How long can that stuff stick around?”

“Let me worry about the details.” I had him write down the name of the shooting range.

“And your book will make clear that you were doing this research?”

“The one I’m working on now is almost finished. The gun research was for the next one.”

“But do you have notes or something?”

“No, I don’t work like that. It lives in my head until I find the story. But I told the guys there that I was a writer and wanted to learn about guns. I’m sure they’ll remember.”

He still didn’t seem to understand that the prosecution wasn’t going to accept everything he said at face value.

As he handed the notepad back to me, he asked if I had gotten in touch with Madeline yet. “Once she tells the police that she was the one who picked our meeting place and time, that knocks out the coincidence of me being at the field that morning.”

I had sent an e-mail to her from Jack’s account after he was arrested, but, with everything that had been going on, I hadn’t even logged into Jack’s e-mail accounts for the last couple of days. “I wanted to talk to you about that, Jack. Maybe it’s not just a coincidence. Other people had a motive to go after Neeley. If someone else wanted Neeley dead, you were sort of the perfect fall guy.”

“You think Madeline set me up?”

I explained the possibility that someone had read his e-mail exchange with Madeline and then took advantage of knowing exactly where he would be. When Buckley had first raised the possibility the night of Jack’s arrest, it had sounded fairly simple. Now that I was explaining the theory aloud, I saw the flaws in the hypothesis. Einer had already contacted Gmail with a privacy release from Jack. The only log-ins to Jack’s account since he first told Charlotte about seeing the girl in the grass were from the IP address at Jack’s apartment, so there was no way anyone had hacked into his account unless they did it from his own wireless network. Most important, even if someone had known where Jack would be that morning, they’d also have to know that Neeley would be there. The whole setup sounded too complicated.

When I was done thinking aloud, Jack stared at me in silence. It dawned on me that this was the first chance he’d had to focus on me since his arrest. At both the precinct and the bail hearing, he’d been panic-stricken, threatened with imminent incarceration. He was no longer looking at me like his savior. He looked hurt.

“Is this a cross-examination?” he asked.

“What? No. Jack, I’m just going through every possible explanation.”

“Except you pretty much trashed that one all on your own. You don’t think I did this, do you?”

“Of course not, but I’m seeing the problems now with the e-mail hack theory. And I have to think about how all this is going to look to the prosecution. They seized an entire file cabinet of material about Malcolm Neeley from your office, Jack. And I saw your Internet history—you did an awful lot of fishing around about Neeley.” I had been very careful not to ask Charlotte and Buckley what had become of Jack’s laptop. “You told the police that you were only going along with the other families in the civil suit, but the DA will make it look like you were obsessed. I mean, the value of Neeley’s real estate?”

“It’s a civil suit. How much the man’s worth is relevant. You know, maybe you should go work for the other side, because you’re twisting everything around.”

“No, you are.” I actually said the words, No, you are. I forced myself to take a deep breath. I knew my tone had sounded harsh, but this conversation was reminding me of how sensitive he had always been, so quick to feel rejected. When the first literary agent he approached turned down his work, he had torn the rejection letter to shreds and refused to write another word for two months. To Jack, what every writer expected as part of the journey was utter humiliation.

We heard footsteps in the hall. Buckley was standing in the doorway, looking at me suspiciously. “Is everything okay?”

“It’s fine,” Jack said. “I’ll come get you when we’re done.”

When we were alone again, I reassured Jack that I wasn’t accusing him of anything. “My job is to get your side of the story, which means asking hard questions.”

“Then just listen, okay?” His voice was calmer now. “Most of the stuff in the files was just paper sent to all the plaintiffs by our lawyer. As for the rest, the research on Neeley was something we did together—Buckley and me. It’s something her therapist suggested. I know, it sounds weird, but I’ve been encouraged to stop sheltering her from information about the shooting. They tell me to be open about everything—absolute truth. Molly’s death was hard on Buckley—”

“Obviously—”

“No, more than the obvious. The morning of the shooting, it was snowing. Molly was substituting at a school in Port Washington, so she was reverse-commuting for that. She and Buckley had both been hoping for a snow day, and it didn’t happen. But Buckley wouldn’t wake up, and then she tried playing sick. It’s just a stupid thing kids do in the winter. But Molly spent so much time dragging Buckley out of bed that she missed the early train. She waited twenty minutes to catch the next one. I still remember her joking that she might not get her lessons planned, but at least she had time for oatmeal.” For a second, he was back in that memory, but he quickly pulled himself out of it. “Anyway, the first thing Buckley said when I told her about the shooting was, I should have gotten up.”