The Better Sister Read online

  “You probably figured out by now that I checked with the case agents and they weren’t exactly forthcoming with information on an investigation that’s not mine, and which I planned to share with a curious detective.”

  “Yup. I get it.”

  “Well, apparently that’s changed now.”

  “Huh.”

  Another brake tap from Bowen, who was looking at her and uttering “What?” under his breath.

  “Do you mind if I put you on speaker? It’s just me and my partner in the car.”

  “No problem.” Once the phone was on speaker, Katz continued. “So one of the case agents just gave me a heads-up. He said when you first called, it seemed like a fishing expedition. Then he saw the news from the kid’s murder trial yesterday.”

  “They’re trying to pin it on the wife’s side piece.” At Nunzio’s request, Bowen and Guidry had tracked down Jake Summer the previous night to see if he had anything he wanted to share with them—like, maybe an alibi for the time of the murder. As expected, he refused to speak to them without a lawyer, so that was the end of that.

  “Supposed side piece,” Bowen whispered next to her. So far, they had found no cell phone records or any other evidence to substantiate Chloe Taylor’s claim that she and Summer were having an affair. Bowen was convinced that Chloe and the kid’s lawyer had fabricated the entire story to distract the jury. But if that was the case, Guidry didn’t understand why Summer was lawyering up instead of burning the theory to the ground. Maybe if the affair was real, he was actually willing to let the defense do this to him to cover for the kid.

  Or, maybe Olivia Randall was actually onto something about him being guilty, and that’s why Katz was calling.

  “Yeah, so, here’s the thing,” Katz said. “The prosecutor on the Gentry case is reaching out to the ADA on the murder case, but since you’re the one who sort of set this thing in motion, the case agent said I could circle back to you. I don’t have all the details, but you were right—Adam Macintosh was at our office those two dates you gave me. He was looking for a cooperation agreement for providing information on Gentry.”

  “What about attorney-client privilege?” she asked.

  “Doesn’t apply if the client’s engaged in an ongoing crime. Or if the lawyers are coconspirators.”

  “Macintosh was dirty, too?”

  “Nope, or that’s what he claimed, at least. But his law firm was, and he was willing to give up both Gentry and the lawyers. And he definitely didn’t want his partners to know. The case is being worked out of the field office in Manhattan. He arranged to meet with the agents here instead, because he didn’t want anyone who knew him from his US attorney days to recognize him going in and out of the building.”

  “So maybe an affair with Chloe Taylor wasn’t Summer’s only reason to want Macintosh out of the way?” Jake Summer had been the one to provide a quote to the New York Times about the Gentry investigation, so he must have been one of the other lawyers working on the matter.

  “Maybe,” he said. “And that’s why the lawyer on our case is calling the lawyer on your case, which is why I’m reaching out to you. If I had to guess, you’ll be hearing soon from one pissed-off ADA. The case agent told me that if you hadn’t made that phone call asking about Macintosh, they might have made a different judgment call on whether to share the information with local law enforcement.”

  “Let me deal with that. But do you know for a fact that Macintosh was offering to flip on Jake Summer? Is it possible Summer found out?”

  “He hadn’t actually given up the information yet, but obviously Summer’s one of the lead lawyers for the client, at least as of now. Apparently Macintosh was looking for guarantees not only that he wouldn’t be charged but that he could come back to work at the US Attorney’s Office. Obviously something like that’s not easy to work out. Then he was killed. Seemed like you had a decent-enough case against the kid—you probably still do—but the department didn’t want this blowing up on us down the road when it all becomes public. And with that, you now know everything I know.”

  “Got it. Thanks for the heads-up, Katz.”

  “No problemo.”

  She hit the end-call button.

  “You called the feds about that Gentry thing?” Bowen asked.

  The company name hadn’t come up between them since the early days of the investigation, after Chloe mentioned that she wasn’t sure where Adam had been the last two days of his life.

  “I saw this article in the Times the other day about Gentry being investigated, and I realized the FBI has an office right at Kew Gardens. I got curious,” she said with a shrug. She was the one who had narrowed in on Ethan. It had been her call to make the arrest, even as Chloe Taylor had been pushing her to figure out where Adam had spent the last two days of his life.

  “And now you’ve managed to dig up Brady material that Nunzio’s going to have to share with the defense.” As a prosecutor, Nunzio was required to notify the defense of potentially exculpatory evidence, even if it came to light as the trial was coming to a close.

  They were pulling into the police department parking lot when Guidry’s cell phone rang again. It was Nunzio, and, as Agent Katz had predicted, he was not happy. “Do you know what a lawyer like Olivia Randall is going to do with this? You just bought me two straight days of getting splinters wedged under my fingernails.”

  Even without the phone on speaker, Bowen had heard enough to grasp the situation. “You don’t even seem upset. That kid could get off because of this.”

  Guidry could live with that. Maybe that kid never would have been arrested if she had seen the full picture to begin with. If she were on that jury, she knew how she’d vote.

  36

  It had been so long since I’d spent a night in the apartment that I opened the wrong kitchen cabinet when I went for a water glass, envisioning the layout of the East Hampton house instead. I realized I had literally never been alone in the apartment. Even Panda was out in East Hampton now.

  After three and a half weeks of Ethan’s trial, I finally had to come back to the city for a day to meet with the board of directors that oversaw the magazine. In theory, the company was standing solid on Team Chloe since Ethan’s arrest, but the personal information that had come out during the trial was taking its toll.

  If social media was any indication, many of the people who had already respected me now admired me even more, while the people who already hated me now despised me more. But there was definitely a vocal group of “dead to me” former supporters who saw me as a phony figurehead who needed to go for the sake of the movement. And thanks to widespread cable news coverage of Ethan’s trial, whole swaths of the population who had never heard of me before now thought of me as that trashy woman who used her husband’s abuse as an excuse to have an affair that got her husband murdered and her stepson sent to jail.

  The me of a year earlier would have spent days preparing for tomorrow morning’s meeting, weaving together digital analytics data and powerful story pitches to convince the board of my value. Instead, I had memorized a one-page statement about how committed I was to Eve, along with a promise to respect whatever decision they made about the future of the magazine. Either way, my publisher was planning a half-million-copy print run of my memoir (thank you, cable news), and my contract with Eve guaranteed me a seven-figure buyout if they gave me the heave-ho. So, as Nicky had said as I got in the car to drive into the city, fuck ’em.

  I taped another cardboard box of books shut, and then gave myself a break to stretch my back. I reached for the cell phone on my office desk and sent Olivia a text. No word?

  It was the third day of jury deliberations.

  No. I’ll call you immediately. I promise. And remember: This is good for us.

  According to Olivia, the jury would have convicted Ethan by now if they thought the case was as cut-and-dried as Nunzio had presented it to be. Three days in the jury room meant they couldn’t agree, which meant at lea
st one of the jurors was on our side.

  I had decided to use my night in the apartment to start packing up my home office. If Ethan got acquitted, he’d be allowed to walk out of the courthouse with us that very moment. Nicky and I were choosing to be optimists and were planning for that to happen. Once he was home, Nicky wouldn’t be able to sleep in his bedroom anymore.

  Mrs. Schwartz on the twelfth floor was moving to Florida in four months. I had already signed a contract to rent her apartment for Nicky for a year with an option to buy. In the meantime, I had found the perfect little Lucite desk for my bedroom, and I would turn my office into a nice space for Nicky until her apartment was ready.

  I opened the pencil drawer of my desk, removed a key from the back corner, and crawled onto the floor with a newly popped-open box to begin the process of sorting through the files I keep at home. Half of it—old bank statements and receipts—went into the shredder. The rest of it would fit on the floor of my closet for the time being.

  I reached what I thought would be the final folder—Wells Fargo—to find an unlabeled brown Redweld pocket file. I removed it from the drawer, released the elastic cord, and flipped it open. I immediately recognized Adam’s chicken-scratch handwriting on the wrinkled Post-it notes jutting out from the margins of some of the pages.

  Flipping through the pages, I remembered the angry look on Adam’s face when I made a bitchy comment about finding his whiskey glass in here one day. He never did tell me why he’d been in my office without me, but I took it as yet another meaningless battle of wills. I assumed at the time he had simply been looking something up on my desktop instead of powering up his laptop, but didn’t like the idea of owing me an explanation.

  He was killed eight days later.

  Looking at this file, I realized he had been working on something he didn’t want stored at the law firm.

  There had to be at least two hundred pages of documents. Financial statements. A flowchart of wholly owned subsidiaries and other affiliated corporations. Memoranda of agreements for various mergers and acquisitions. Some portions were highlighted. Others were flagged with Post-it notes and arrow stickers. Most of them were related to the Gentry Group, but some of the company names seemed to be unrelated. I didn’t have the legal or financial expertise to understand what most of it meant.

  But when I reached the end of the file, I found eight pages of yellow legal-pad paper covered with Adam’s handwriting in blue ink. I was probably the only person in the world who could make out every word without effort.

  It was an eight-page outline, perfectly organized in three parts, with asterisked bullet points beneath each section: (I) How I Knew—Gentry; (II) R&B Pattern; (III) What I Need.

  I pieced together enough of part I to see the connection to the ongoing investigation into Gentry. Olivia had even managed to get an FBI agent on the stand in Ethan’s trial to give the broad strokes to the jury. As Jake had told me, Gentry was on a buying and merging spree, purchasing foreign factories, energy providers, and distributors to expand its global operations. But where he said that Rives & Braddock kept clients happy by steering them to the right side of the legal line, Adam believed that Gentry was crossing it—repeatedly. They set up a complicated network of sham shell companies to hide the fact that they were doing exactly what Jake had described as the forbidden temptation—paying off every player up and down the line.

  Part III was crystal clear. Adam wanted complete immunity; he wanted an opinion letter from the Department of Justice that he had committed no crimes, was not violating attorney-client privilege, and was acting within the bounds of professional ethics; and he wanted his old job at the US Attorney’s Office back.

  It was part II that was hardest for me to digest. The first few bullet points were about R&B’s skyrocketing client-satisfaction rates after international transactions compared to other law firms, and the number of new multinational corporate clients retained in the last three years. But it was the final two notes that had the sound of my own blood rushing in my ears.

  R&B not going along with clients; R&B is initiating, recruiting, and planning.

  Bill Braddock: Goes to in-house counsel directly after initial docs drafts, he’s “good cop” v. bad cops of assigned team, undermines compliance. Takes piece of resulting deals for PC LLC in exchange.

  I flipped backward through the deal pages and found accounting entries for payments to “PC LLC.” Patsy Cline, Bill’s favorite singer, for whom he had named his horse.

  In an instant, I realized how many things I had chalked up to Bill’s old age in the last six months. Pretending not to have heard of the Gentry Group at the Press for the People gala. Not returning press phone calls after Adam’s murder. Not even reaching out to me for two days. And through it all, I was so convinced he was supporting me, proving himself to be not just my lawyer but a true friend.

  The Press for the People gala. I replayed the conversation in my head. When I had mentioned that Adam was meeting with people from Gentry near JFK, I didn’t know that the FBI had offices in the area, but Bill probably did. I was the one who had tipped him off to Adam’s extracurricular activities. It was my fault that he figured out Adam was cooperating with the FBI.

  Would Bill kill someone to protect himself? I thought about all the times I had told him he was my octogenarian soul mate. You’re an assassin, Bill Braddock. Take no prisoners.

  I reached for my cell and pulled up Olivia’s number. I was about to hit the call button when I stopped myself.

  She and I didn’t have attorney-client privilege. She had made that clear to me repeatedly. If I gave her these notes, would she have to share them with Nunzio, the way he had been forced to tell her what he knew about the FBI investigation into Rives & Braddock? I knew from Adam’s trial days how a case could be upended by newly discovered evidence. The prosecution could ask for a mistrial, right when the jury deliberations seemed to be going Ethan’s way. If that happened, we’d have to start all over again, and the second trial could be even worse for Ethan.

  I stuffed the documents back into the Redweld, rested the file against the back of the desk drawer, and then stacked the remaining folders from the cardboard box in front of it. I locked the file drawer and walked to the kitchen to find my purse. After adding the file key to my keychain, I poured myself a glass of wine. The movers weren’t hauling the stuff to storage until the next week. If the jury didn’t come back with the right verdict, I could always say I found the file later, and we would live to fight another day.

  I was almost done with my wine when my cell phone rang. It was Olivia. Sometimes I wondered if she had wired me with surveillance equipment.

  “Did something happen?” I asked.

  “The judge’s clerk called. She wants me there tomorrow at nine thirty.”

  “The jury’s back?”

  “They never say, because they don’t want it to leak. But, yeah, that’s my expectation.”

  “Okay, I’ll be there.” I would cancel my meeting with the board and instead email the statement I had prepared for the occasion. If they couldn’t understand my decision, I didn’t want the damn job anymore.

  “Are you all right?” Olivia asked.

  I paused, thinking about those eight yellow lined pages of Adam’s notes. I was the one who had introduced Adam to Bill Braddock. I was the one who pushed him to work for that firm. I was the one who said we were lucky to have someone like him on our side.

  Bill had had Adam killed, and it was all my fault. And if I told Olivia, maybe the police could actually prove it. Adam, with his white-hat ways and meticulous record-keeping, would solve his own murder from the grave.

  But all that mattered now was Ethan.

  “Yeah, I’m fine.”

  “Do you want to ride out with me in the morning?”

  “No, I’m good.”

  I got into my car five minutes later. I wanted to be with Nicky.

  Judge Rivera may have tried to keep the fact of the jury’s de
cision a secret, but her efforts had failed. There were more film trucks outside the courthouse than any other day of the trial, and courthouse security was operating the elevators to cut off access to the third floor. The courtroom was officially full.

  When Ethan walked out through the side door and saw the scene, he froze for a moment. He hadn’t seemed so scared since he was first arrested. This was the juncture when we’d find out whether this was the end of a temporary nightmare or the beginning of a future that would be even worse.

  Olivia whispered something to the deputy who walked them to counsel table, and the deputy nodded. She turned to Nicky and me and waved us forward, allowing each of us to give Ethan a quick hug.

  The courtroom silenced as the bailiff announced that the Honorable Judge Rivera was presiding. She then announced what we had all anticipated—that she was bringing in the jury to read the verdict.

  Once they were seated, Judge Rivera asked the foreperson to stand.

  I recognized the man who rose from his chair as the retired owner of a masonry shop on the North Fork. I thought he had scowled a few times when I was testifying, but I hadn’t been sure about it. I had been rooting for the outlet-mall woman, but tried not to read into the decision.

  The judge asked him if the jury had reached a unanimous decision.

  “We have, Your Honor.”

  “Will the defendant please rise?”

  As Olivia and Ethan stood, Nicky reached for my hand and grabbed it. It was finally happening.

  “Will the foreperson please read the verdict?”

  “On count one, murder in the second degree, we the jury find the defendant not guilty.”

  Ethan said something to Olivia that I couldn’t hear. She answered, and then he turned to look at me and Nicky. I reached across the bar and hugged him, then felt Nicky’s arms around me, too. This time, we didn’t need the deputy’s permission. We would stay like that as long as we wanted.