The Better Sister Page 8

  Given Ethan’s slumped shoulders when he opened his bedroom door, I inferred that the intruder—or intruders, as Guidry had noted—had gone there as well, but, truth be told, I couldn’t tell the ransacked version from its usual state. Guidry and I left him there while we continued the tour.

  When we were finally finished, I told her that the only thing I noticed missing was the portable Bluetooth speaker that lived on the kitchen windowsill. “We take it outside sometimes to listen by the pool. It’s possible it’s somewhere else, but, honestly, I don’t think anything else is gone. Except maybe Adam’s laptop? We both carry ours back and forth. And he should have had his briefcase, too.”

  Guidry was already nodding. “We have both. We’re hanging on to those for now.”

  “This seems like a lot of searching for a random burglary,” I said, thinking aloud.

  “We’re aware of the threats that have been made against you online, Chloe. We’re already working on a subpoena to try to identify the users who posted the most inflammatory comments.”

  “You should also try to find out where my husband was the last couple of days. He told me he was meeting with a client called the Gentry Group at a hotel near JFK. He was supposed to be there all day Thursday and Friday, but when I asked him for the details, he seemed a little evasive.”

  Guidry lowered the pad of paper she had been jotting notes in to make eye contact with me. “Do you have a theory about where he might have been other than with this client?”

  I told her it was nothing that specific, just a gut instinct. “Usually when he ran late, he’d tell me more about the specifics of the work. I feel like it’s something you should check. Just to be a hundred percent certain.”

  “Like verifying that your sister was in Cleveland?” Guidry asked. She said it like we were friendly enough for her to mock me, which we weren’t. But she was right. It had been a silly request, and I knew it.

  “No,” I said with a sigh. “That, I admit I was being paranoid about. But I have to think it’s relevant to nail down where a homicide victim spent the last two days, and I’m telling you that it was unusual for him to spend all that time at some business commuter hotel with a client without giving me any other details—like bad fish sticks for lunch, or moldy carpet, or a colorful hooker at the bar. Adam and I shared those kinds of dumb observations with each other.”

  She gave me a sympathetic smile and placed a gentle hand on my forearm. “Okay, I understand now. And, yes, we’ll make sure we have his movements locked down. And I did check your sister’s whereabouts, by the way. You can rest assured that her cell phone was pinging in Cleveland, right where she belonged.”

  “You still haven’t called her, right?” I asked. Guidry had assured me she’d give me until “the end of the day,” but that could mean anything.

  “I’m just about to. Do you want to do it together? She’ll probably want to talk to you right away.”

  “She knows my number.” I heard the iciness in my own voice. It was unavoidable when the subject of Nicky arose.

  Guidry stiffened as she looked over my shoulder, and I turned to see Ethan coming out of his room.

  “They took my Beats and my Rayguns.”

  I rolled my eyes. The headphones had been his main Christmas present last year. Adam and I didn’t understand why he needed the thousand-dollar iridescent version instead of the regular Beats. And the fight he and his father had had over those fucking ridiculous shoes. Of course they were gone.

  “Beats meaning headphones?” Guidry asked. Ethan nodded. “And Rayguns?”

  “They’re tennis shoes,” I explained. “Red and yellow and black, with a little cartoon guy on the side holding a ray gun.”

  Guidry was jotting down notes again. “And those are worth . . .”

  “About a hundred dollars retail,” I said. “But the kids resell them. You can apparently get more than a thousand dollars for them on the aftermarket.” Guidry’s eyes widened. Yes, it was a lot for a pair of sneakers, but the thought that my husband might have been killed for them made me want to break the rest of the windows. “I’ll pull up a picture and email them to you,” I added.

  “So that’s it? Headphones, a speaker, and the shoes?”

  “Like I said, we didn’t have anything valuable here. Unless they were going to back up a moving truck for the furniture, I don’t know what they’d be looking for. Please, check on whether he was meeting with this client, the Gentry Group.”

  She said they’d be checking on everything, but was already asking Ethan for more details about the three items that had been stolen. I could see she was going to chalk the episode up to a residential burglary gone wrong.

  “He took an Uber to and from the meetings. They should be able to tell you where they picked him up, right?”

  She jotted down a few more notes and assured me she’d contact them. First I had asked her to run my loser sister’s phone records. Now I sounded like a jealous wife who wanted to double-check her husband’s whereabouts, even in death.

  As Ethan and I exited through the sliding glass door, I considered imploring her one last time to look more carefully at Adam’s work, but worried it would look like an attempt to deflect attention from myself. Because that’s how guilty I felt.

  We had streamed fifteen minutes of Elf, which Adam called my “Instant Chloe Happiness Movie,” no matter what season, when I hit the pause button.

  “A movie can’t fix this,” I announced.

  “Bet you wish you hadn’t flushed all that weed last summer,” Ethan said dryly. Yet another fight with his father, even more colossal than the one regarding the shoes. “I can’t believe he’s not coming back.”

  I started to cry and then forced myself to stop. I had to be strong for Ethan. “Let’s go back to the city. You okay with that?”

  “Fuck yeah.”

  Once we were in the car, he asked if we could swing by Kevin’s house to get his backpack. He’d been so tired when I picked him up that morning, he forgot all about it.

  When he hopped out of the car, I tried again to remember everything Adam had told me about the work that had kept him late most of the previous week. Just an hour earlier, with my flip-flopped feet still sandy from my climb over the dunes, I had broken up with my lover, “at least for now,” I told him. Under the circumstances, of course he understood. He kissed me when I left—it was a good kiss—and then said he had something he needed to tell me, even though it might hurt me: he didn’t think Adam had actually met with the client he’d supposedly spent Thursday and Friday with.

  I asked him how he could possibly know that.

  “I checked yesterday. When you said he was late to the gala because he was meeting with the Gentry Group, it didn’t sound right to me. He hadn’t billed a single minute to Gentry for the last ten days.”

  The person I was sleeping with behind Adam’s back was one of his law partners, Jake Summer. He was the one who had convinced Bill to buy a table for the Press for the People gala, so he could be there for my big night without raising any suspicions.

  “Maybe he just hadn’t done his time sheets yet.” One of the many things Adam hated about private practice was the requirement that he account for his time in six-minute increments.

  Jake had shook his head. “He filed his time sheets last night, a little before seven.” It must have been during the car ride. “He had a few phone calls and emails billed to various clients—less than two hours total—but nothing for Gentry.”

  “Two hours? But he was gone all day Thursday and Friday.”

  “He blocked out both days as client development, Chloe.” Client development. Meaning, not billed. Two full days of time in a black hole. “I’m so sorry.”

  So when I asked Guidry to look into Adam’s schedule, I had good reason. But I couldn’t exactly tell the police about that, could I?

  My thoughts were so focused on why Adam might have lied about seeing a client that it took a few of Ethan’s taps on the back
window of the station wagon before I popped the hatchback. We rode in silence back to the city, Ethan choosing the playlist and playing games on his phone while I wondered if Adam had been having an affair, and if I would have even cared if I’d known about it.

  13

  Before her partner opened his mouth, Guidry knew Bowen was going to say something about the wife being involved. He’d made his mind up before they’d even walked into the house the previous night.

  “You said I was jumping to conclusions? Did you see the way she was fiddling with those vases? That was straight-up rain-man bullshit.”

  Thoughts were pinging so quickly in Guidry’s head, she was having a hard time making room for Bowen’s comments. “Says the man who has been stuffing Mike and Ikes in our fleet car upholstery.”

  She decided to walk through the house one more time.

  The house was one story, exempting the basement and the pool house. Adam Macintosh had been killed in what was basically the middle of the house, near the entrance of the living room, but only a few steps in any direction from the kitchen, master, and the other two bedrooms. The house had been trashed, but the pandemonium wasn’t divided equally. The master was untouched, as was the living room.

  But what was bothering Guidry were the other two first-floor bedrooms: one belonging to the son, Ethan, the other the guest room, where the intruder had broken a window. The theory was that Adam had woken up and surprised the burglar. But if the burglar thought the house was empty, why save the living room and master bedroom for last?

  She was standing in the hallway that connected the two smaller bedrooms, listening to Bowen psychoanalyze Chloe Taylor. “Sorry, I know it’s not PC, but the bitch is an ice queen. Who the fuck marries her own sister’s husband?”

  Guidry held up a hand, trying to block out what she considered to be noise for the moment.

  “The scene,” she said. “We need to focus.” Nothing was missing from the guest bedroom, according to Ethan and Chloe, and yet she couldn’t pull herself from the doorway. And then she realized what she had been missing. “We’ve got a problem,” she said.

  “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. We need to take a closer look at the wife.”

  She crooked a finger to nudge him closer. “Take a look at this room only. The glass from the window.”

  “It’s broken. That’s where they gained access.”

  “Yeah, but look.” The duvet cover was white with tiny yellow ducks on it. Little rubber duckies. It looked high-end, crisper than any cotton Guidry had ever slept under. It was folded in thirds, accordion style, but the entire comforter had slipped sideways from the foot of the bed onto the hardwood floor. She pointed to the shards of glass that were scattered on top of it. “See that?”

  It took Bowen too long to figure out the implications, confirming everything she had always thought about his intelligence.

  A window broken in the wrong direction—inside to out—was the most obvious mistake she’d ever seen in a staged break-in. In this case, the glass was at least broken from the outside, but the shards of glass had fallen onto a comforter on the ground. “This is one of the ransacked rooms,” she said, “but nothing is missing.” The nightstand and dresser drawers were open, but, according to Chloe Taylor, they had been empty to begin with.

  Bowen had now caught up to her chain of reasoning. “And look, there’s some shards in this open drawer, too. We need to get CSU back in here.”

  The implication was obvious. The room had been mildly mussed up—drawers opened and duvet thrown to the ground—before the glass was broken from the outside.

  Bowen shimmied his shoulders as if he were about to dance under a mirrored ball. “I knew it. Did you see how Chloe was in total robot mode just now? Like she was trying to figure out how an innocent person is supposed to act when her husband’s killed. Like she was trying to replicate it perfectly for a camera.”

  Guidry shook her head. “She’s alibied. Besides, she’s way too smart to make a mistake like this.”

  They knew from Adam’s texts that he didn’t get to the house until after Chloe was already at her friend’s house. Chloe said she left shortly after midnight—which they could easily confirm with other guests at the party—and the 911 call came in at 12:23. Given the drive time from Sag Harbor, she couldn’t have had time to kill him and then ransack the house. And she couldn’t have trashed the house before the party, or Adam surely would have mentioned it in their text conversation.

  “So then she didn’t do it herself,” Bowen said. “She had someone do it for her, and made sure she was alibied up at her friend’s house when it went down.”

  “Then why did she text him from the party asking him one last time if he wanted to join her? Not exactly a good way to set him up for the hit man.”

  She had no idea what kind of strings Bowen had pulled to be working major crime investigations. His career should have stalled out on rounding up late-night beach trespassers.

  “Admit it,” she said. “You don’t like her or what she stands for, so you want her to be guilty.” Guidry had read the entire series of articles for which Chloe Taylor was now famous, and she had wondered how long it would take for those stories to trickle their way into law enforcement.

  “Then what’s up with the glass being on top of the blanket? You think it just slipped to the floor at some point and she didn’t notice? Did it ever dawn on you that you might have a blind spot for your feminist hero?”

  She had no interest in taking Bowen’s bait. “We need to take a deep dive on Ethan. Look at the things that were missing from the house: a Wi-Fi speaker, headphones, and shoes? Only a kid’s going to know that a pair of kicks is worth a grand. And it would explain why the master’s untouched.” Guidry remembered how freaked out she felt whenever she went into her parents’ bedroom as a child, even if it was just to use the phone.

  “Yeah, but if Chloe spent any time reading the local crime stats, she’d know most of our burglaries are pulled off by teenagers. It’s inevitable, when you think about it. All summer they’re surrounded by Porsches and Teslas, city kids buying ice creams with hundred-dollar bills at the beach shack. If I had grown up like that, I might’ve been tempted to even the score a little myself. So Chloe hires someone to off her husband, and then tells them to take some of her kid’s toys to make it look like a burglary.”

  His logic wasn’t wrong, but Bowen hadn’t been in the room when Ethan heard the news about his father. The kid had gone wooden, absolutely still like that old game of freeze tag, waiting for permission to move again. He hadn’t even cried. It wasn’t normal. She did her best to describe it to Bowen, knowing she sounded no more persuasive than he had when he’d deemed Chloe’s responses too “robot-like” for a grieving spouse.

  “There’s also a problem with Ethan’s alibi,” she said. “He and his friend Kevin each say they were together all night, but the details don’t match up. Remember how Chloe said the kids went to a movie? Well, when Ethan told me what he was doing all night, he said he and Kevin were just cruising around, hanging at different beaches. Super vague. When I talked to Kevin alone, he was equally mushy, mentioning some of the same beaches but no particular time line. And then I made a point of saying ‘This was after the movie, right?’ And he couldn’t have confirmed that version of the story fast enough.”

  “So maybe they did see the movie and Ethan forgot to mention it.”

  She shook her head. “Nope, I specifically asked him. He said it was sold out, which I confirmed with the theater. All the tickets were sold online before the ticket counter even opened. My guess is Ethan realized we might figure that out, so he told the truth about missing the movie. But Kevin didn’t know that and was trying to parrot whatever he thought Ethan said. Something’s not right. You had a point about Chloe being guarded with us. But maybe she’s not covering for herself. If I noticed the kid seeming off, she had to see it, too. She could have her own suspicions.”

  “No way you c
ould stab someone like that and not end up with blood on your clothes,” he said.

  “Ethan was wearing a black T-shirt and blue jeans when we picked him up at his friend’s. He’s probably got ten of each lying around his bedroom floor. He strips down by the body, puts on clean clothes, sends the bloody stuff out into the ocean.”

  She was relieved when Bowen didn’t immediately argue with her theory again. “Why would a spoiled kid like that stab his father?” He shook his head at the idea of it.

  “You never know what’s going on in a family behind closed doors. Speaking of which, I need to call Chloe’s sister.”

  “The one who’s also the ex-wife and the biological mother?”

  “One and the same.”

  “I’m sorry, but that’s fucking weird,” Bowen said.

  “My guess is she might have something to tell us about that perfect family.”

  14

  When we got back to the city, I stood in front of the open refrigerator while Panda rubbed against my shin and Ethan checked out the options over my shoulder. Unexpired milk and an enviable collection of condiments, but no food except a jar of pickles, a mystery brick of tinfoil, and four pieces of string cheese.

  “Good job, Betty Crocker.”

  “How do you even know who Betty Crocker is?” I asked.

  My son smiled for the first time that day. “I actually have no idea.”

  “We’ll get takeout.”

  “Just let me go downstairs.” There was a Greek deli beneath our building. The owner, Kostas, continually flouted the city code “fascists” by allowing dogs inside. He also, in my opinion, flouted gender discrimination laws by only hiring his sons and women with a minimum C cup.

  Ethan must have sensed my reluctance to let him leave on his own, because he added, “It might be the last time I get to go outside before everyone starts treating me like ‘that poor kid.’”