The detective gestured for Lauren and Nate to follow him to the front porch. He handed Nate a set of documents he had tucked beneath the cushion of one of the Adirondack chairs.
“I guess I’ll give this to you since you’re family—copies of the search warrant and arrest warrant.” Nate began skimming the papers while the detective continued. “What’s going to happen now is a thorough search of the house. To be honest, that’s not going to be done until early tomorrow morning. You have somewhere to go until then?”
Nate’s attention remained on the documents. He was not about to accept some token effort at kindness. “We’ll figure it out.”
“You won’t find a hotel room out here. Not this time of year. You might have a better chance in maybe Riverhead or Islip.”
Lauren folded her arms. This asshole was pretending to be helpful now? “Like Nate said, we’ll figure it out.”
He explained that they could go inside the beach rental with police supervision to retrieve their personal belongings, and could return to the house once the search was completed tomorrow. “And if you could hand over the keys to Kelsey’s Audi, that’ll make the search a little faster.”
Nate’s jaw was clenched as he handed Decker the car key.
“My phone’s in the backyard,” Lauren said. “Can we make some calls from there while you’re wasting your time searching the house?”
“That’s no problem.”
The first call Lauren made was to Suzanne Kim. Kelsey had given Nate and Lauren the lawyer’s number after Decker’s initial visit to the house just in case they needed it. Suzanne had represented Kelsey’s family after Luke’s murder. A call to her firm reached a voicemail saying that the office was closed but providing an after-hours number in the event of an emergency.
That number picked up after two rings. “Call center.”
Lauren put her phone on speaker as she explained who she was and why she was trying to reach Suzanne Kim. The three minutes that passed before she got a return call felt like days, but she spent the time organizing her thoughts so she was able to lay out the facts for the lawyer succinctly.
“Are there statutory provisions listed there with the names of the charges?” Suzanne asked. Lauren recited them from the section of the arrest warrant Nate was pointing to. “Okay, I’m going to have to look those up since it’s New York law, but it’s probably for lying to the police about the fact that she knew David Smith before that incident with the parking spot. I’d be surprised if it’s more serious than a misdemeanor, but they’re obviously looking at her for more serious offenses, both there and in Boston.”
Lauren still could not believe that what she had thought was a practical joke had turned into murder investigations of two men in different states. “They said she’s being arraigned tomorrow. Can you get here for that?”
“No, that’s not how this works. I’m not licensed in New York and don’t know anything about those offenses. I can reach out to some referrals, but it will be hard to find someone on short notice for a new client on what’s likely a misdemeanor. Worst-case scenario, she could ask for more time to locate counsel since she obviously won’t qualify for a public defender.”
Next to her, Nate was holding up his hand like a child asking permission from the teacher. Lauren nodded for him to go ahead.
“Hey, this is Kelsey’s brother, Nate,” he said. “I looked up the statutes. They’re both Class A misdemeanors.”
“Okay, could be worse. Let me make some calls and get back to you.”
So Kelsey was too rich to get a public lawyer, but apparently not rich enough to make a top-notch lawyer scramble out to Long Island.
“We should probably call her father,” Lauren suggested. “Well, your father too. Sorry.”
“An understandable mistake,” Nate said as he pulled up the number on his phone. She could hear one ring after another, followed by a recorded message and a beep. “Hey. It’s Nate. Can you please call me as soon as you get this. It’s about Kelsey. She’s in trouble.”
“Do you have another number for him? His office maybe?”
He shook his head. “He’s glued to his cell phone. I guarantee you he saw my name and just didn’t pick up. That message will light a fire—”
The phone rang in his hand. “Told you,” he said, extending the screen to show a single name—dad—before answering. “Hi. I’m not sure exactly how to say this, but we’re in the Hamptons, and Kelsey’s been arrested.” She listened as Nate explained the series of events that had led to her charges. “She was out here with her girlfriends…Yes, May and Lauren…I only came out because May went back to the city early and there was an extra room…Okay, none of that is relevant right now, Dad…Fine, Bill. I can’t believe that’s what you’re focusing on, but all right…Yes, we’re trying to find her a lawyer now. Suzanne’s calling people in New York…I know about Suzanne because I know Kelsey and she tells me things…Fine. I’m really just trying to help.”
His eyes looked flat as he extended the phone to Lauren. “He apparently prefers to talk to you.”
She had no idea the situation between Nate and his former stepfather was that estranged. “Hi, Bill. I’m so sorry to be speaking under such awful circumstances.”
She had not seen Kelsey’s father since the wedding. Even though Kelsey had mentioned that the prostate surgery and subsequent radiation had taken their toll, she was taken aback by how frail he sounded. “Well, at least you’re there with her,” he said. “I had no idea Nate was involved in this trip. She told me it was with you and May.”
“It was. Nate came out last minute when May left early. I was the one to suggest it, in fact, because I haven’t seen him in years.” It was a lie, but she found herself wanting to protect Nate from his former stepfather’s iciness.
“They really put her under arrest? Like actual handcuffs in a police car arrest?”
“Yes. She’s her father’s daughter, so she handled it like a boss, but I could tell she was afraid.”
“Couldn’t you have stopped it? I mean, we could have posted any amount of bail they needed for her to come back tomorrow for court.”
Lauren pressed her lips together and counted to five in her head to gather her patience. “That wasn’t an option, Bill.”
“Don’t be naive, Lauren. Everything’s an option if you find the right people.”
She shifted away from what sounded to her like a suggestion that she should have bribed the police, telling him what she knew about the timing for the arraignment the next morning.
“I’ll start making calls,” he said. “I’ll get her the best lawyer in the city. She’s such a good girl, Lauren. She’s had terrible misfortune in her life. I know not to speak ill of the dead—but for Luke to leave her after everything she went through with the surgery…I saw her inner light dim even from the separation. Then for her to be blamed for the shooting? It was ridiculous. I don’t know how any one person can be expected to bear the pain she’s gone through.”
She knew that in William Ellis’s eyes, Kelsey would forever be a child who lost her mother at the age of seven and needed his constant protection. Kelsey had complained that her father could be overly involved in her life, but Lauren hadn’t realized until now the extent to which he infantilized his daughter. Kelsey had never been helpless, not even as a child. As he continued to rant about how unfairly she had been treated—by fate, by the media, by internet “looky-loos”—and how he was going to use his money and influence to protect her, she recalled the screenshot May had sent her from the true crime message board.
The police think there is a connection. And guess what the connection is? Kelsey Ellis!!
But Kelsey wasn’t the only connection. Luke Freedman broke the heart of William Ellis’s beloved daughter. And David Smith was a player who had misled William Ellis’s poor, heartbroken, vulnerable daughter into believing they might have a future together.
And William Ellis had money. A lot of money. Enough money to make extraordinary things happen—as long as you, in his words, could “find the right people.”
She lied and told Kelsey’s father that a call was coming in that might be one of the New York lawyers. When she hung up, she asked Nate why Bill had been so cold toward him.
“Aah, the question I’ve explored for countless hours with many, many therapists. One theory is that, despite all the words to the contrary, he never really saw me as a son. I was an extension of my mother, not an actual person. And when he left her, he left me.”
Lauren pictured younger Nate, who always seemed so sweet and a little awestruck around her. She couldn’t imagine how Bill Ellis could treat him so cruelly. It was amazing he had turned out as well as he had under the circumstances. “I’m sorry. That’s…awful.”
“To be honest, I’ve got another theory. Mr. Ellis’s wives may have come and gone, but his one and only is his most beloved, Kelsey.”
The idea of it made Lauren feel queasy. She knew it happened, of course. Back in Louisiana in her childhood, they thought it was only in certain types of families, but that kind of abuse wasn’t confined by class. “You don’t mean like he ever—”
“No,” he said, shaking his head quickly. “She would have told me. But he’ll never accept her as an adult who can make her own decisions. He wants Kelsey to be his little girl, running off to Daddy for help, for as long as he’s on this earth. It’s like he gets off on coming to her rescue.”
She saw it so clearly now. “So much so that he might hurt other men for hurting her?”
The words felt like a weight that she had removed from herself and dropped onto him. He took a deep breath.
“I actually asked Kelsey if that was possible after Luke was killed. She got so mad, she didn’t talk to me for a month. She managed to convince me it was a ludicrous theory cooked up by those true crime vultures online. I can’t believe I didn’t think of him again after all this stuff with Dave came up.”
“And now?” she asked.
Nate stood up silently and put his hands in his pockets, staring out toward the bay.
“I’m sorry. I’m sure this is digging up a lot of feelings about your father, but this is for Kelsey. Is it possible—”
He turned to face her abruptly. “Look, there’s something I’ve never told anyone, not even Kelsey.” He sat back down on the sofa, his voice low. “When everything first went down with Luke and people were questioning if Kelsey and her dad were involved, my mother told me she had a feeling he had something to do with it.”
“What?”
He nodded, and when he spoke again, he sounded more confident. “This was after she started struggling to find words here and there, but her memory was still spot-on. She said Kelsey’s grandfather had been wrapped up with the Boston mafia, just like the rumors said, and that Bill had taken the business legit for the most part, but still had contacts with people she described as dangerous. He had…How did she put it? The moral code of a lizard. That’s why she didn’t even try to challenge the prenup. She told me she was afraid he’d find a way to deal with her, as she put it. When I clarified to make sure she was talking about murder, she said he’d do it in a heartbeat if he thought someone deserved it.”
Lauren could almost hear Jeanie’s voice uttering the words. “She didn’t think to tell the police any of this?”
“Tell them what? That she thought her ex-husband was a bad guy? She didn’t know anything concrete. And at the time, even I sort of chalked it up to her being resentful toward him about the divorce and for being such a dick to me. But now that this other guy is dead too? I should have said something earlier. Maybe the police would have—”
Lauren’s cell phone rang. It was a Boston area code. “That’s probably Suzanne Kim about the lawyer referrals.”
“Lawyers that will be paid a fortune by my father,” he said. “They won’t pursue what we’re talking about now.”
They let the call go to voicemail.
Nate rubbed his temples with his fingertips. “Guess what really smart former prosecutor already researched all that complicated stuff about the laws covering lying to police in New York?”
They needed May.