The Ex(53)

I’d be scouring hours of grainy video searching for a woman who might not even exist. I could almost feel my eyes cross at the thought of it.

But if Jack was telling the truth, this video was our best hope of finding whatever woman had sent him to be framed for a triple homicide.

I sent a reply to Melissa: No time for lunch, but do you have time to help me with something?

Four crossed eyes were better than two.


CARL WILSON MET US AT police headquarters with a big smile, an enormous beer belly, and a strong handshake. “Call me politically incorrect, but when the DA told me some criminal defense attorney would be fishing through video, I didn’t expect the company of two beautiful women.” His words were directed at both of us, but his eyes were clearly focused on Melissa. “You’re both lawyers?”

In my gray sheath dress and matching blazer, I looked the part. Melissa, in her skinny jeans, black tank top, and biker boots, not so much.

“Watch your mouth,” Melissa said. “I’m just helping my friend here. I own a bar.”

“Dear lord, woman. You’re breaking my heart.” He led the way to a long, narrow desk lined with computer screens. “When I talked to the DA, he didn’t sound real sure on what exactly you were looking for. Let me just say up front: don’t get your hopes up.”

Carl continued to ramble, as Melissa and I got seated at the desk with him. “People call us up saying, hey, I think my husband’s cheating. Can you check whether his secretary comes to our apartment? If you ask me, the media’s got people so scared of wiretaps and drones and Big Brother that the average American thinks there’s a giant eye in the sky that hears and sees everything, and it’s all uploaded to some magical cloud. Like, take your case, okay? The DA told me this is about the waterfront shooting, right?”

I nodded.

“Okay, so here’s the thing: I can tell you right now that the actual shooting’s not on film. No eyes on the football field.”

Scott Temple had already told me as much. I told Carl I was interested in all footage that might capture anyone heading to or from the field.

“Well, in theory, that could be a camera forty blocks north in Times Square an hour earlier. You gotta be reasonable. We’re talking about the greenway, presumably, right? In which case, I can tell you what we’ve got. South to north: Battery Park, a whole lot around the World Trade Center site and the Holland Tunnel, then the Pier 40 parking garage, Christopher Street Pier, then Chelsea Piers, followed by of course a ton of eyes on the Lincoln Tunnel. You get the idea.”

So basically, seven clusters of cameras across approximately four miles of waterfront. Importantly, one was at the Christopher Street Pier, where Jack first spotted his mystery woman—or so he claimed. “I’m surprised the coverage is that spotty,” I said nonchalantly.

“How is that possible?” Melissa asked. “This is post-nine-eleven New York City.”

“And it’s also the real world,” Carl said. “Times Square? Rockefeller Center? Grand Central? We got those places locked down tight. But what jihadist plotting from a hellhole in Afghanistan gives a rat’s ass about the Hudson River greenway? As it turns out, though, we’ll have a bunch more cameras along the west side in the next month or so.”

“To respond to the shooting?” I asked.

“Nah, a couple weeks ago, one of my idiot counterparts gave a walk-through to some New York magazine reporter who was interested in CompStat. Guess she started asking about surveillance cameras or whatnot, so he tries disabusing her of her paranoid fantasies about twenty-four/seven eyes in the sky. He specifically used the Hudson River Park greenway as an example, telling her exactly where we do—and don’t—have cameras. I tell you, some people got squash for brains.”

“So did this article get published?” Again I did my best to sound nonchalant.

“Oh, yeah. The bosses weren’t happy. You know, it’s a catch-22. If we say we’ve got it all under control, people complain about the loss of privacy. But here this dumb guy was trying to say, No, it’s not like that, and the story gets twisted into, How safe are we? You can’t win.”

“And did the article mention the actual camera locations?”

“Oh, the specifics were definitely there. Trust me, if we weren’t union, that guy would be out on his ass.”

So not only were we missing video coverage of the football field, but whoever shot Malcolm Neeley could have been counting on exactly that.

I had Carl play footage from different cameras at sporadic intervals. I wanted to bury my actual inquiry among several others, just in case Scott Temple asked Carl what I seemed to be looking for.

After about forty minutes of skimming footage, I asked him to pull up the Christopher Street Pier cameras from the morning Jack saw his missed moment. I hoped that with luck, we’d get one quick glimpse of a woman in a fancy dress walking in and out of the frame with a basket.

But that’s not what we saw. Melissa started to point at the screen, but I tapped her arm gently as a signal to wait.

I let the tape play a few more minutes before announcing that I was beat. Feigning fatigue, I told Carl that I appreciated his help, but that I couldn’t make heads or tails out of the video without my client, who was on house arrest. “Is there a way to get it on disc or something?” I asked. “I can tell you which cameras and time periods we’re interested in.” I planned to make them broad enough to feed Temple’s opinion that I was on a fishing expedition.