“Has anyone ever told you you’re a terrible driver?”
Technically the speed limit on this section of Abraham’s Path was thirty, but even civilians averaged a little over forty. Guidry could see from the passenger seat that Bowen was rolling at a constant thirty-one, and that’s when he wasn’t tapping the brakes for reasons known only to him.
“Pretty much every person who’s ever ridden shotgun with me. I grew up in Queens. Went into the navy. Managed to never drive a car once until I decided I wanted to be a cop. You haven’t noticed I’m more than happy to sit in that seat over there?”
“Thought you were overcorrecting for the fact I’m female.”
“You overthink.”
“Or maybe you just like sitting here to jam all your candy into the seat cushion like a fucking squirrel preparing for winter.” She slipped two fingers into the upholstery tear, pulled out a gummy bear, and tossed it out the window. “Seriously, what is wrong with you?”
He chuckled. “Just seemed funny at first. Then I started wondering if you’d ever notice.”
“I’m taking the car home tonight and having Amy sew this up for good.”
Guidry’s cell phone buzzed in her blazer pocket. A 917 number, a city cell phone.
“Guidry.”
It was Agent Damon Katz from the FBI. “I got your message asking about the Gentry Group.”
“Not Gentry per se,” she clarified. “Their lawyer, Adam Macintosh.”
Bowen tapped the brake at the mention of Macintosh’s name, sending Guidry lurching against her seat belt. She shot him an annoyed look and gestured for him to pay attention to the road.
“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.