The Ex(62)

So I was right. Scott may not have turned over everything, but something that helped Jack was buried in the avalanche of paper spilled across our conference room. “Give me a hint. A little help for both of us. I don’t rat you out to the judge, and you tell me what’s hiding in those boxes.”

“You know that story about the frog and the scorpion? The scorpion bites the frog even though it means they’ll both die. The frog says, ‘Why?’ and the scorpion says, ‘It’s in my nature.’ You’re a defense attorney. In my book, that makes you the scorpion.”

“Except you’re the scorpion for assuming you can’t trust me. You know I don’t vouch for clients unless I mean it. And I know you want to get convictions the right way. This hide-the-ball stuff might be par for the course for your office, but not you. You’re too good for this.”

He pulled out his wallet, dropped a couple of twenties on the counter, and drained the rest of his wine.

“It’s always a tough call, Olivia.” His hand squeezed my forearm. “I’ll talk to you later.”

I left fifteen minutes after Temple, my martini softening the edges of my anxiety. I pulled up Einer’s number on my cell once I hit the sidewalk, and hit Enter.

“Hey.”

“You still going through the discovery?” I asked.

“I’ll say yes if I’m supposed to, but do you know what time it is?”

I looked at my watch. Five minutes past midnight.

“Some of the documents are phone records, right?”

“Yeah, a bunch. The LUDs from both of Neeley’s homes and his cell. And Jack’s cell, of course. Plus call records for the Sentry Group. I told you: they flooded us with paper.”

“Whatever they’re hiding, it’s got something to do with the phone records.”

“How do you know that?”

“I just do.”

It’s always a tough call, Olivia. That was my hint.


I JERKED AT THE SOUND of my own cell phone on the nightstand the next morning.

Barely morning: 10:45. It was Einer.

“Hey. I was just walking out the door.”

“I don’t know how you had magical information at midnight, but your inner soothsayer was right. All those boxes of paper, and somehow you nailed it. It was in the phone records. The incoming calls to the Sentry Group, to be exact.”

“Please don’t tell me that Jack called him.” When I first learned that the police had pulled incoming calls to the Sentry Group, I had assumed they were looking for evidence that Jack—true to their stalking theme—had phoned Malcolm Neeley. But Jack had assured me that there would be no such evidence. And I was sure that whatever the prosecution was hiding in those boxes would help us, not hurt.

“No, thank God,” Einer said. “I can’t believe I missed it, but the list of calls is long. The Sentry Group records are only for the main switchboard, so I was paying more attention to Neeley’s home and cell phones. And the records only have the phone numbers on the other side of the line, not the name of the caller or anything.”

“I got it. Just tell me.”

“You ready? In this very long list of incoming calls to the Sentry Group during the week before the shooting, three of them came from the same number.” He rattled off ten digits. “You wanna take a guess? Because, trust me, there’s no way you’d ever guess—”

“Einer!”

“It’s Tracy Frankel. That number belongs to the cell phone found in Tracy Frankel’s purse after she was killed at the football field with Malcolm Neeley. She was calling the Sentry Group. Now does that blow your mind, or what?”





Chapter 18


TWO DAYS LATER, I showed up at Judge Amador’s courtroom during his afternoon motions docket.

“Well, good afternoon, Ms. Randall. I didn’t see you on the list. To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“Something has come up in the Jack Harris case, Your Honor. You oversaw his bail hearing? It’s a touchy discovery issue that I thought you might be able to oversee informally if you have the time.”

Amador had his clerk call Scott Temple to see if he was available. Five minutes later, Temple walked into the courtroom, a legal pad in hand. “Very mysterious,” he whispered as he joined me past the bar.

“Predictable is boring,” I said. I felt bad for what I was about to do to him, but it was all part of the job.


“YOUR HONOR, I’M HERE TO request a subpoena for the phone records of Tracy Frankel.”

The judge squinted. “Remind me again of who that is?”

“She was one of the other victims—the youngest one, the female.”

“Oh, of course. I should have realized. I’m sorry. What is this all about?”

Temple gave me a worried look.

“We believe the phone records are Brady material, but have serious doubts about the prosecution’s willingness to disclose it voluntarily. Unfortunately, after a week spent reviewing several boxes of unlabeled and unorganized documents produced by the People, we finally realized that they had intentionally buried important and exculpatory evidence that should have led them on their own to obtain the information we’re requesting.”

“What kind of evidence are we talking about?”