The Ex(86)

I had just started to tell her about my conversation with Charlotte when we heard a glass break at the back of the restaurant, followed by loud voices. Melissa threw her bar towel on the counter. “I knew I should have kicked those drunk douche bags out. Hold on a sec.”

While she left to do crisis management, I reached into my briefcase, retrieved the photographs Charlotte had given me, and flipped through the collection. When I first found them in Jack’s apartment, these scenes felt like yesterday. Now even that moment felt like it was a lifetime ago.

As I slipped the envelope back into my briefcase, I saw Jack’s copy of Eight Days to Die. Like that old child’s game of hot potato, I had accepted it from Charlotte and now had no idea how to get rid of it.

I couldn’t remember the last time I’d read a novel. I scanned the back cover. A woman has scheduled her own death in eight days. What does she do with her remaining time?

I flipped to the final chapter of the book to confirm my suspicions. Yep, her scheduled death was an execution, and all those scenes that preceded it were memories supplemented by imagination. This is why Melissa would only watch movies with me if I promised not to yell out my theory about the ending.

I took another sip of my prosecco and looked for Melissa. She had her hands on her hips and was scolding a hipster with a soda-fountain mustache and skinny jeans. It was no contest; the only issue was how long it would take for her to get him to leave without more breakage.

I opened the book again, this time at the beginning. On the title page was a handwritten inscription.

3/18 To the best dad a girl could ask for. Happy Birthday, Old Man. Love, Buckley

I had finished a short first chapter before turning back to the inscription. At his plea colloquy, Jack said he bought this book after reading a review that mentioned the scene at the football field, but it had been a birthday gift from his daughter. It was a tiny discrepancy, but I couldn’t stop looking at that inscription.

Buckley. She heard and saw everything that happened in that apartment of theirs. Her parents’ fights. My conversations with Jack. She may have told me that Tracy Frankel had only asked for directions, but what if Tracy had told Buckley everything? She’d been at the apartment by the time the police arrived for her father, but where had she been the morning of the shooting? The freight elevator, unlike the one her father had used, had no cameras. She could have easily slipped in and out of the building, while her father assumed she was still sleeping in her bedroom.

I pulled my laptop from my bag and used my phone hotspot to jump online. I pulled up the website for Paperfree and found the link to reactivate a closed account.

Enter e-mail address: [email protected]

The “Madeline” account, the one used to make it appear that a stranger had beckoned Jack to the football field.

Enter password.

I’d typed Jack’s so many times that my fingers nearly moved on muscle memory to jack<3smollybuckley.

But that wasn’t the password I was interested in. I thought about Jack’s explanation at the First Precinct: “Jack loves Molly and Buckley. It was an easy way for all of us to remember our passwords when we first set up the accounts. Molly’s was Molly loves Jack and Buckley. And so on.”

And so on. That many years ago, Jack and Molly would have set up their daughter’s password, too. And like most people, she may have continued to use that same password for everything, even an account no one was supposed to trace to her.

I sounded out the words mentally as I typed:

buckley<3sjackmolly

Enter.

I realized I was holding my breath as a circle turned on my screen. I let myself exhale with relief when I got an error message. Your e-mail address and password do not match an account that can be reactivated. Try again if you think you have made an error, but, remember, there is no password retrieval for an account that has been closed.

I was about to close my computer when I decided that if I was chasing paranoid theories, I might as well be thorough.

Enter password. Buckley<3smollyjack.

Another error message, followed by another try.

Enter password. Buckley<3smomanddad

Congratulations. Your account has been reactivated. We hope you and your paperfree account have a long and fulfilling relationship.





Chapter 24


ABOUT FOUR YEARS LATER

August 10

I FOUND MYSELF looking at my watch, even though I’d only been here twenty minutes. “Here” was the Greenhaven Correctional Facility. Despite the name, there was nothing correctional about it. This was a maximum-security prison, former home to “old sparky,” when New York used to electrocute people.

The first time I visited Jack at Greenhaven, I’d stayed more than an hour. I was officially still his lawyer, so the guards gave me relatively free rein.

In the last two years, Jack’s only other visitors, according to the prison staff, were Charlotte, Buckley, and Jack’s editor, who was pressing him to write a memoir. I knew that as long as he was in prison, he would never write about his case.

“So, I take it your answer’s still the same?” I asked.

Today was the four-year anniversary of his guilty plea. Every year, on this date, I had made the drive to Greenhaven to try to convince him to let me work with the district attorney’s office to set aside his conviction. But, because Jack couldn’t be freed without revealing the truth about who killed Malcolm Neeley, Tracy Frankel, and Clifton Hunter, he refused. I had called the state bar multiple times, trying to find some way around Jack’s authorization. The law was clear: I was bound to pursue his interests as he defined them. And I had been tempted countless times to say, f*ck ethics. But without Jack’s cooperation, I had no hope of convincing anyone of the truth.