It had been two days since May had been back in the city, and with each passing hour, it seemed possible she would never have to think about David Smith or the whole parking space incident ever again.
But when Joe, the swing-shift doorman, called up to say that two police officers were in the lobby for her, that cocktail napkin left on a windshield was the first thing she thought of.
“Did they say what it’s about?”
“Nah, I don’t ask questions, you know?” Joe said. “Especially when it comes to the NYPD. Figured they’re working on one of your cases. Want me to ask?”
Joe obviously assumed she was still at the District Attorney’s Office. It’s not as if she sent out a memo to the entire building about the change in her résumé.
“No, it’s all good, Joe. Send them up.”
She had already pulled her Smashing Pumpkins T-shirt over her head and was slipping on a bra when Josh followed her into the bedroom, trailed by Gomez. “Are we having people over? I didn’t see anything on the calendar.”
“Nothing scheduled.” They had begun sharing their calendars with each other after the official engagement. She was still getting used to the idea that he was aware of how she spent each minute of her time, even when they were apart. “I guess the police are here to see me about something.”
She headed for the roller bag, open on the upholstered bench at the foot of the bed, still unpacked. Pre-2020 May would have had the empty suitcase tucked neatly away within fifteen minutes of coming home. She pulled out her black shirt-dress while she untied the drawstring of her running shorts with her free hand.
“What about?” Josh asked.
“No clue,” she said, fumbling with the buttons of the dress. She paused in front of the full-length mirror next to the closet door and smoothed her hair into place. But I do have a clue, she thought. I have a terrible feeling that I know exactly what this is about.
“You don’t have to snap at me. What has been going on with you lately? You said that trip would help you get back to normal, but you’ve been high-strung ever since you got home.”
She looked at him with an arched brow. Sometimes she wondered if Josh even knew her.
“Very poor word choice,” he conceded.
“Indeed.”
The doorbell rang. They were here.
When Joe had first called up about police, she’d feared the worst: uniforms from East Hampton. But these two were plainclothes. Detectives. Detective Danny Brennan, specifically, with a second detective in tow. As far as she knew, Danny was still assigned as an investigator to the Manhattan DA’s Office. That was good, she was hoping.
“Hanover!” Danny’s voice was husky as he drew out the syllables of her last name playfully. “How have you been, lady? You look good. Rested. Getting out of the game has served you well.”
I am definitely not rested. “Not totally out of the game. More of a coach now.”
“As they say, those who can…do. Those who can’t—”
“How dare you?” she said with feigned outrage. “You know firsthand that’s not true when it comes to me.”
Danny Brennan had been her principal law enforcement witness in her last major trial—an attempted rape and murder case where the defendant was caught crawling through the window of a ground-level apartment, gloved and ski-masked, armed with a hunting knife, zip ties, and condoms. He claimed his only plan had been to steal anything valuable from the apartment, but May had been able to use two prior sex-offense convictions and a plethora of violent pornography found on his computer to persuade a jury he had more terrifying intentions.
Danny’s shoulders shook a bit as he chuckled quietly. “No question about that. Not too many ADAs charge as hard as you did. And, oh, say hi to Clark here. New to detectives. Trailing me today.”
“Hi, Clark.” One name only, but she was sure it was his last name. Even when she and Danny had gotten close enough that she moved to a first-name basis, she had always remained Hanover to him.
The trainee raised a sheepish hand. “Hey.”
“Have a couple quick questions,” Danny said. “Could’ve called but figured it’d be good to get the new guy outside for a bit since we had the time.”
“Sure, of course. Come in. Um, this is Josh.” Josh looked up from the pasta pot he was filling with water and gave an awkward wave.
“Yeah, I’m just gonna wait in the bedroom while you guys talk, okay?”
Gomez waddled behind him, almost like he knew trouble was coming.
“So what’s going on?” she asked once they were alone. Realizing how aggressive she sounded, she softened her tone. “Or are you just here to butter me up into going back to the DA’s Office?” It was the kind of harmless flirtation that women learned as a coping skill to avoid tension.
“I’d give it a shot, Hanover, if I thought it would work,” Danny said with a wink. “Clark, why don’t you lay it out?”
“Sure.” The new detective cleared his throat with a nervous cough. “So we got a phone call from a detective in Suffolk County. East Hampton, to be exact. They’ve got a missing-person case out there and are looking for possible witnesses. They got your name from a—”
Clark was cut off by the wrong answer sound of a game-show buzzer. Aangh. May was happy for the interruption. So they were here about East Hampton.
“See, Clark, this is why I brought you here to get some training on safe ground with Hanover. You gave up way too much information. You owe zero explanations, and you ask the questions, not them. Leave them wondering what you do or don’t know. Scare them, they might walk into a trap. Like this: So, Hanover—sorry, Professor Hanover—where were you last Friday, July twenty-first?”
She was relieved when he turned to Clark and said, “See, with a real interview, you got to do it more like that, you see?”
The younger detective was nodding eagerly. “Yeah, I got it.”
Thanks to loose-lipped Clark, she knew that the East Hampton police already had her name. But how?
“I was in East Hampton,” she said.
“With anyone or alone?”
“With two friends visiting from out of town.”
“Did you happen to have any interactions with this guy?” In the photograph Danny pulled from his blazer pocket, David Smith was wearing a suit and tie, his light, wavy hair combed neatly into place. It looked like a corporate headshot, but wasn’t familiar from any of the online searches she had done for David Smiths who lived in Rhode Island. “Last Friday, he might have looked more like this.”
It was a second photograph of the same man, this time on a beach, hair windblown, a slim-fit floral-patterned shirt left unbuttoned over his swim trunks. It was the picture that had been on the missing-person flyer that Lauren had brought home from the farm stand. Side by side, the competing images reminded her of the social media meme—me on LinkedIn versus me on Instagram. Two completely different portraits of the same person, but neither one entirely authentic. “His name’s David Smith. He may have been with a girl—a young woman, I mean.”
She shook her head. Wouldn’t the people who were looking for him know who his girlfriend was? “I don’t know the guy in the first picture, but assuming he’s the same guy in this one, there were missing-person flyers around the Hamptons with that same photo. Why? What’s up?”
“Not real sure, but if they care enough to ask for a courtesy interview from another jurisdiction just because you were born a little Miss Nancy Drew, I gotta think the kid’s family has some suck.”
Danny had been the one to give her the nickname, based on her habit of asking the DA investigators for extra work on her cases. Even if she had all she needed to get a conviction, her curiosity often led to nagging questions that she could not leave unanswered. The investigators probably would have started boycotting her requests if they didn’t occasionally pay off in big ways. May, in short, had been a kickass prosecutor.
She was wondering why Danny would be using the nickname in this context when she realized what must have brought her to the attention of the police. Her curiosity. Her inability to accept questions without answers. Her refusal to mind her own fucking business.
It was the detour to Sag Harbor on the way home.
She hadn’t left her name with the restaurant, and had made it a point to park four blocks away. Even if someone managed to write down her license plate after she asked a few questions, it would have traced back to Josh, not her. How did the police find out who she was? And why did they send an investigator from her former office to question her?
“I do love a good mystery, but I’m not sure what you mean, Danny.”
“According to the detective out east—name’s Carter Decker, by the way—they’re retracing the missing guy’s steps to see if he might have gotten into some kind of jam. Guess he had dinner at someplace called Page on Main Street in Sag Harbor. They canvassed the local area. A few people remembered seeing him with a girl. Young woman. The waiter said they seemed fine and normal. Nothing of interest. Then, when the police went to the American Hotel, no one recognized the guy, but the hostess told them an Asian woman had come in Monday asking whether anyone had seen the guy on Main Street. She thought maybe the couple might have been arguing outside. So now this Carter Decker wants to know why you were asking around.”
She had only gone back to the restaurant to check if anyone had seen Kelsey leave the note on Smith’s car. She learned that no one at the American Hotel remembered seeing David Smith at all. When May mentioned the possibility of surveillance cameras outside, the hostess kindly volunteered that they didn’t have any, and that from what she’d heard from surrounding businesses, no one had found any footage of the missing man.
If this Detective Decker had known to call the DA’s Office for a courtesy visit, it meant that he knew not only May’s name but also that she had formerly worked at the prosecutor’s office.
“One of my friends saw the flyer at a farm stand. I thought it was possible I spotted him in Sag Harbor when we went there for drinks Friday, but I really wasn’t sure.” The easiest way to maintain consistency with a lie was to imbue it with as much of the truth as possible. So far, so good. “On my way home, I decided it wouldn’t hurt to go back and see if anyone at the restaurant recognized him. They didn’t, so there was really nothing for me to call in to the tip line.” All entirely true.
“But you suggested they might have been arguing. Is there a reason you thought that was the case?”
Danny asked the question breezily enough, but it was good follow-up work. This was it. She either told the truth or she didn’t. She pictured herself telling him about the note. Then she’d have to tell Josh, too, and he would not approve. Josh liked Nice May, not Snarky, Bitchy May. And Danny would tell Carter Decker. And the note was mean. Really, really mean. That’s why it had been funny. People would keep talking about it. Someone would post it online. It would go viral. If she tried to explain that Lauren had been the one to write it, and Kelsey was the one who left it on the car, she’d lose both of them as friends. And the law school could even treat a second round of negative attention as grounds for not renewing her contract.
She was determined to make sure no one ever found out about that horrible note.
“The couple I saw on the street was sort of snipping at each other.” She remembered the two of them, his arm comfortably draped across her shoulders, hers wrapped around his waist. “But, like I said, I have no idea if it was even the same guy. I think I let my imagination get a little carried away from me. Nancy Drew and all.”
“Yeah, when I talked to Decker, I told him it was probably something like that. You know there’s a podcast now about that Washington, DC, case you were so obsessed with?”
“Of course I know. I was listening to it on the drive back from East Hampton. Come to think of it, I wonder if that’s what made me itchy for something to amateur-sleuth for a little while.”
“Weird way to spend your vacation, Hanover. I’ll relay all this to Decker, but he might want to talk to you himself.”
“No problem. Let me give you my cell.” She jotted the number down on a notepad they kept on the kitchen island and handed it to him. “How’d he know where to find me?” She tried to keep her tone light.
“Turns out you’re not the only girl detective running around Sag Harbor. The hostess you talked to described you to the servers who were working over the weekend, and one of them remembered you and your friends. They said one of your friends can pound the booze, by the way.”
“How embarrassing.”
“They also said you tipped very generously, so there’s that. Anyway, they found the credit card charges for your table. Lauren Berry split the check with you? That sound right?”
“Yeah, one of my girlfriends.” Great. They had Lauren’s name, too.
“Guess Decker googled you, found your profile, called the law school, and got a message that email was a better way to contact you during the summer. Sweet gig, Hanover.”
She smiled politely and nodded. “Oh great, he googled me. Total shitshow, right?”
“Yeah, that. I almost reached out when that all went down, but, you know…” She knew, all right. “To be honest, my guess is he felt a little hinky about you, so called the DA’s Office to check you out. I didn’t have your cell number so offered to track you down myself, and he took me up on it. Figured Clark and I could make a house call.”
“Makes sense,” she said. “Well, it’s good to see you.”
“Yeah, you too. Can I get phone numbers for those friends of yours too? I get the impression this Decker cat’s got absolutely nothing. Trying to find anyone who might have noticed the smallest thing. That’s how cases break sometimes, right?”
She tried to think of any excuse not to provide their contact information, but came up empty. “Of course.” While she pulled up the contacts on her phone, he handed her back the slip of paper containing her own number and she added Lauren’s and Kelsey’s information.
“I forgot how perfect your handwriting is. So which one’s the wino?”
She laughed. “My guess is the waitress was talking about Kelsey.”
“I’ll pass this on to the folks on the East End.” He folded the sheet of paper and tucked it into his pocket with the photographs of David Smith. One slip of paper. A simple little note—but the potential for so much damage.
“I don’t even think they noticed the couple I was thinking of,” she said, leading the way to the apartment door. “I eavesdrop more than the average bear.”
“I can only imagine. But maybe they’ll have noticed something that you missed.”
“It’s possible.” She hoped her voice didn’t betray the simmering anxiety that was about to boil over.
In the hallway, Danny paused and turned around. His voice was low as he sought out May’s gaze. “And hey, Hanover? That video. I know you. I can see what happened, but I also know you probably still beat yourself up over it.”
She looked down at the floor. “That’s not not correct.”
“You’re good people, lady. Don’t forget it.”
“Yeah, thanks,” this time returning his gaze.
“And your op-ed? I read it. It was smart. And badass. Like you.”