Page 39 of Hard to Kill

There’s a high view of the street, looking directly across at the Parsonses’ house, a low view, angles from both sides of the old woman’s house, and from the back, facing south.

“My son says this stuff automatically gets erased every week.”

It’s all right, Jimmy tells her, the Parsonses were murdered four days ago.

Jimmy works off the laptop in the studio after she gives him the password, the system synced up with the cameras. He starts looking at the video from three days before the murders, focusing on the two cameras facing the Parsonses’ house.

It’s the night before the murders, and night of, when things get interesting.

The same car cruising the neighborhood both nights.

A blue Bentley.

Jimmy is pretty sure he knows the car. Just to make completely sure, he calls his friend Detective Craig Jackson in the city and asks him to run the plates.

Jackson calls back within five minutes.

The Bentley belongs to Claire Jacobson.

Rob Jacobson’s wife.

Hardly any degrees of separation there,Jimmy thinks.

Hardly any at all.

THIRTY-TWO

THE BLUE BENTLEY IS in the driveway when I arrive at the Jacobson home in Sagaponack.

When Claire Jacobson opens the door and sees it’s me, she says, “If I had to make it clearer that I have nothing to say to you I’d have to hire one of those skywriters you see over the beach on the weekends.”

She then starts to close the door in my face.

I stop it with my foot. I’m wearing sneakers, but I’m not going to let her see the sting of applying that force. Claire Jacobson has been annoying me for a long time, getting up in my face with the skill of a prosecutor practically every chance she got during her husband’s first trial. And I’ve done my level best to annoy her right back.

“This won’t take long,” I tell her. “But there are things we need to discuss.”

I’m holding the door open with my hand now.

“Is this about Rob?”

“It’s about you.”

“What about me?” she says. “We have nothing in common except that we dislike each other.”

She doesn’t try to close the door again. Like I’m some old-time traveling salesman, I take that as progress.

“What I’m here to discuss is you cruising Elise Parsons’s neighborhood a couple of the nights before she died, and me thinking you’d rather talk about it with me than the police.”

Then Rob Jacobson’s wife, who I had always seen as the ice-queen bitch of the world, surprises me.

She opens the door wide.

It’s as if a switch has been thrown.

“I apologize for being rude,” she says. “I’m glad you’re here, because there’s something I need to discuss with you. Please come in.”

Please?

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