The Ex(77)

Still lying. “This whole time, you’ve been saying it was so unseemly to point out that she was a drug addict. Basic human decency. You are so full of shit, Jack. You didn’t want us digging into Tracy’s background because you were afraid we’d come right back to you. I called the Stinson Academy. You taught one of your workshops while she was a student. Tracy’s mother told me she had a crush on a poetry teacher. The condoms that Ross Connor saw. It all makes sense now; she was one of your girlfriends.”

I saw Jack’s gaze move toward the back of the apartment. Even with a life sentence on the line, he was worried about his daughter finding out he was a cheater.

“I screwed up, okay?” He sat on the sofa and gripped his knees with his fingertips. “It was a few times, and it was colossally stupid.”

Finally. “So what happened, Jack? Did Tracy get a little too clingy after Molly died, calling you at home, talking about becoming the next Mrs. Jackson Harris? So you dropped her cold and disconnected your phone, and thought you’d gotten rid of her. But fast-forward, and now Mommy and Daddy won’t pay her bills. You’re in the news, a beloved widower and plaintiff in a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against a hedge fund manager. Suddenly you’re back on her radar.” I was pacing, my words flowing quickly. I could see every part of the story I was telling. “She calls the old number three times in a row, then starts showing up at your building. And when you don’t give her what she wants, she moves on to another target. She wasn’t calling the Sentry Group for Max; she was calling Malcolm. She was going to tell him everything she knew about you. And now she and Malcolm are both dead.”

“You really think that? You think I could do something like that?”

Yes, after all these weeks, with all this evidence, I finally did.

Jack could see the answer to his question in my eyes. “I disconnected our phone line because she kept calling me after Molly died, and I just couldn’t even look at her without feeling sick. Then she showed up at the building a couple of months ago. She was blackmailing me.”

“I found a witness who saw Tracy talking to Buckley. Was she threatening to tell your daughter, too?”

Jack shot another look toward the back hallway. “She doesn’t know anything. Tracy asked her for directions or something, and then told me she’d met my daughter. Yes, she threatened to tell her everything.”

“This wasn’t just about your affair with a seventeen-year-old girl,” I said. “This had something to do with Penn Station. Your lawsuit. Why else would Tracy go to Malcolm Neeley?”

When I first realized Tracy had been trying to call Jack, I had assumed that it had something to do with an affair. But once I connected them both to the Stinson Academy, I had seen the common link to Todd Neeley. He had also been a student there, in love with an older girl named Tee, with dark hair and pale skin.

“She saw the lawsuit in the paper. She cornered me when I was coming out of my building and said, ‘I wonder what Mr. Neeley would think if he found out that you had a role in the shooting, too?’ I honestly never made the connection until then.”

The connection. I felt the links in the chain beginning to form, but I still hadn’t managed to hook them together. “Todd found out about you and Tracy.”

Jack nodded. “He was obsessive. I guess he followed Tracy around enough that he saw her get in my car.”

“And Penn Station?” I asked.

“The witnesses said Molly was talking to Todd before he pulled out the gun. Everyone assumed she had seen something—some kind of gesture or a flash of the weapon, or maybe heard him say what he was about to do. She was the heroic teacher, the one who tried to talk him out of doing it.”

“But Tracy told you otherwise,” I said, “when she showed up this summer.”

“At first, I had no idea what she was talking about,” Jack said. “But then she tells me that she knew Todd from school. When he asked who her boyfriend was, she actually told him—that’s how she was. Bold. Reckless. And smart enough to figure out the truth. I should have told you, but I was afraid no one would believe me. I mean, falling for some girl who threw herself at me—”

“Really, Jack?”

“She did,” he said. “Repeatedly. But you’re right; she was seventeen years old. I don’t know what the hell I was thinking. I was—I wasn’t happy with Molly. I always had one eye open, looking for something else—someone else. You of all people should understand.”

It was a low blow. “That’s not the same. I wasn’t a teacher sleeping with a teenager.”

“No, you were just f*cking my brother.”

I felt myself flinch. All these weeks, he had acted like he had forgiven me. I had convinced myself he didn’t know it was Owen. “Jack—”

“I helped him pick out that watch.” His voice sounded distant. “Nice enough to be presentable, cheap enough to take an occasional beating on the job.”

I searched his face for some explanation for why he hadn’t said anything earlier, but his eyes were dead. I had no idea who I was looking at.

“You keep accusing me of lying?” he said. “The biggest lie I’ve told was that I don’t blame you for what happened. Of course I do. I called him so I could beat the crap out of him. But when he walked into the bar, I realized I’d have no one else. I wasn’t going to let you take away the only family I had left. I wallowed all night about you, but never said what I knew. That’s why he drank so much, because of what you made him do.”