The Ex(54)

“Well, the ADA did tell me to give you whatever you wanted.”

As we were leaving police headquarters, zip drive in my briefcase, Melissa asked if we had found what I was looking for. All I had told her was to look for dark-haired women, especially one wearing a party dress.

I gave Melissa a little hug. “Remember my drunken babble last night? Forget everything I said.”

Despite what I’d led Carl to believe, what we’d seen had surpassed my expectations. Saturday, June sixth, Jack in his T-shirt on his early morning run. And right there on the grass was a woman in a blush-colored gown, bottle in one hand, book in the other. The woman in the grass was real. Jack wasn’t lying.





Chapter 15


THE NEXT MORNING, Einer and I sat with Jack at his dining room table, huddled around Einer’s laptop, searching the video footage from the waterfront for additional sightings of the missed-moment woman.

Einer hit Pause. “Take a look here. Is that her?”

A voice broke through on the speakerphone. “Wait. Who are you talking about?”

Thanks to the byzantine rules governing Jack’s release, Charlotte had to dial in. Plus, Jack couldn’t have an Internet connection. The legal team was allowed to go online but, without a wireless network, we had to use my cell’s personal hotspot, which wasn’t breaking any records for speed. Somehow Einer and Charlotte had figured out a way to connect their computers remotely so Charlotte could see whatever was happening on Einer’s screen, but she still missed out on other information, like Einer’s finger pointing to a woman with an umbrella passing Chelsea Piers the morning before the shooting.

Jack shook his head, and Einer continued to play the tape.

“Who were we talking about?” Charlotte asked again.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said, annoyed by the cross talk. “Jack said it wasn’t her.”

So far, the only sighting we had of the woman we were still calling “Madeline” was the one I’d found yesterday. A few minutes after Jack had passed her on his morning run, Madeline packed up her picnic, turning to the camera just enough to permit Einer to grab a still shot of her face from the footage. In theory, it was a decent enough image that someone might recognize her.

Charlotte had been running that photograph on the front page of the Room website since last night. She had blurred the background so no one would connect what all the “Roomers” were calling “Who’s That Girl?” to the shooting at the piers. A couple of smaller media-focused websites had picked up the link, wondering why the Room was so curious about the “lady in the grass,” or to debate the ethics of conducting an online hunt for an anonymous woman. Charlotte was sifting through the hundreds of (mostly smart-assed) responses she’d received, but so far none of the tips had panned out.

Meanwhile, Jack continued to watch surveillance video, hoping to catch a glimpse of Madeline on another day, in a different place, on her way to the football field—anything.

As disappointment began to set in once again, I tried to remind myself that we were lucky to have the initial missed-moment contact on video. Jack’s description of seeing the woman would have sounded ludicrous to the police after he was arrested. The video proved that he’d been telling the truth, at least about seeing her in the first place. It also helped bolster his explanation for carrying a picnic basket into the park the day Malcolm Neeley was shot, and coming home without it.

Charlotte gave us the flavor of some of the tips coming into her website. That’s your mother after I kicked her out of bed last night. My next ex-wife. Send her my way when you find her. “I’ve always known that my site caters to the worst of humanity, but damn, I’m starting to hate my readers. I do have a few more people for Jack to look at, though. I’m sending them to you now.”

So far, Charlotte had not heard from anyone claiming to be Madeline, but she had gotten a few legitimate messages from people who thought they might know the woman. In those instances, she was doing her best to get a first and last name and then to aggregate online photos of candidates for Jack’s review.

While waterfront footage continued to play on Einer’s laptop, I used mine to open the incoming messages from Charlotte.

I turned the screen toward Jack as Charlotte continued to speak. “The third woman seemed like she could be a match, but the rest didn’t really look right to me. But you’re the one who saw her in person.” Charlotte could not see Jack’s face fall as he clicked through the photographs.

As he pushed the laptop back toward me, I saw his eyes suddenly light up. “Hey, you. Didn’t hear you come in.”

Buckley’s high-waisted denim shorts and cap-sleeved blouse looked like an outfit I would’ve worn at her age. “I guess today’s therapy session has me walking on air,” she said in a sugary-sweet voice.

I suppose if I’d seen a therapist as a teenager, I would have poked fun at it, too.

“Hey, kiddo,” Charlotte called out from the speaker.

“Hey. I don’t want to be negative, but I hope you’re working on some other defense than finding the woman in that picture. I mean, it seems like a total long shot.”

Charlotte insisted she was on top of it. “Since we don’t really think Madeline herself is behind this, someone must have hired her. I’ve got a bunch of temp workers pulling up casting and escort sites, looking for a match.”