Page 29 of The Better Sister

18

I told Nicky that I needed to approve proofs for the magazine, but I really just wanted to be alone in my office. I was bouncing among Twitter, Poppit, and a Facebook group someone had started called Justice for Adam. Catherine had told me recently that my compulsive need to read the horrid things that anonymous strangers wrote about me online evidenced a subconscious desire to punish myself. She asked if I felt guilty for being a successful woman. I thought the theory was silly then, but now it was hitting closer to home.

I closed the social media windows and played yet another round of “guess Adam’s email password,” giving it four tries before calling it quits. I was worried the law firm’s system might have a security setting that would lock me out after too many failed attempts.

Where were you last week, Adam?The police had taken his phone and laptop, and his credit card statements went to his office, so I didn’t have any of those options to explore.

I pulled up our one joint credit card—the one we used for restaurants, shopping, and travel to get more points—though I assumed Adam wouldn’t be careless enough to use it for anything he wanted to hide from me. Looking at our recent transactions, I realized how lazy I had gotten about our finances since I began having more money than time.

There were no smoking guns like hotels, online dating accounts, or pickup bars, if pickup bars even existed anymore. I did, however, see a few charges from Adam: $396 for aNew York Law Journalsubscription, $25 for some court clerk’s office thing, and, most recently, four Uber rides: three for $80-odd each on Thursday morning and evening and again on Friday morning, and then $320 on Friday night. The times and amounts corresponded to what he had told me about going to a hotel near JFK to meet with the people from the Gentry Group.

He had used Uber instead of the law firm’s car service, and had billed the rides to our personal card instead of his business account. All of it suggested that Jake had been right. Adam hadn’t been meeting with a client.

I pulled up Uber’s website and logged in. We had opened a family account because Adam wanted to be able to check on Ethan’s location, as if our teenage son couldn’t find alternative means of traveling in New York City.

I pulled up the receipts for the four rides. The corresponding maps showed a common pickup and drop-off location: the Union Turnpike–Kew Gardens subway station. It was in Queens, right at the connection between the Jackie Robinson Parkway and Queens Boulevard, nowhere near the strip of airport hotels I’d been picturing.

I zoomed out and looked up directions from the station to JFK. The airport was more than five miles away.

I clicked on the “nearby” icon, and then clicked on “hotels.” The closest option was a Comfort Lodge five blocks away, but it was hard to imagine a client like the Gentry Group using such a budget-friendly hotel. Not to mention, there were several more luxurious options located closer to the airport.

I clicked around the surrounding area in Google Maps and found a FedEx drop-off, a Starbucks, and a cemetery. Queens County Criminal Court was just a few minutes’ walk from the drop-off location, but Adam had told me he was meeting the clients at a hotel. And if he’d been going to the courthouse, why wouldn’t he have asked the driver to take him directly there?

I was trying to imagine Adam in a neighborhood I’d never been to, meeting someone I had never met, and I simply couldn’t picture it.

I opened my contacts and pulled up the entry for Carol Mercer, the wife of the in-house counsel for the Gentry Group. I started a new email message:

Dear Carol, I can’t believe it has been three years since that epic meal at the Ledbury. At least Roger and Adam have been able to stay in touch with one another more frequently thanks to work. On that note, I have an odd favor: Can you please ask Roger if Adam was meeting with anyone from the Gentry Group last week?

“Odd” was an understatement. I tried again.

Dear Carol, I’m sorry to write with awful news and a strange question for Roger.

My third attempt was interrupted by the phone on my desk. It was the doorman. When I hung up the phone, I closed the email message I had started and hit the print key on the Uber receipts. Detective Guidry was here.

19

I found Nicky sitting cross-legged on the living room floor. Panda had twisted himself into a perfect oval to fill the space in her lap, and half of the coffee table was covered with pieces of colored ceramic and various hoops and wires.

After Mom had passed away, I had given Nicky the half that I was entitled to, and then continued to pay the property taxes and insurance so she could afford to keep our parents’ house. But her day-to-day income came from the extra money she made selling jewelry on Etsy.

“Be careful with that stuff, okay?” I asked. “Panda has a way of hoovering anything he can get his paws on.”

Nicky gave Panda a little rub beneath the chin. “A little reckless, are we? You like flirting with danger? You should have seen me in the nineties.”

I was unlocking the front door in preparation for Guidry’s imminent arrival. “Maybe cool it with the colorful humor for a second. The homicide detective’s coming up.”

Guidry didn’t arrive alone. Detective Bowen was with her, and I wondered if he was also obligated to appear for whatever “DA thing” had brought Guidry into town on a Sunday evening.

They both declined my offer of water, tea, coffee, anything. While Guidry was asking me how Ethan and I were holding up, Bowen’s eyes scoured my apartment, as if he were a contestant on the Manhattan real estate version ofThe Price is Right. If I told him we paid $4 million and had a terrace with a view of Washington Square, would that make me a murderer?

I had already asked Ethan to wait in his room. Nicky scrambled to her bare feet to introduce herself.

“I’m Nicky Macintosh,” she said, shaking Guidry’s hand. Nicky never changed her last name back to Taylor, and it had seemed petty to fight with her about it. “We spoke on the phone.”

I offered them spots on the sofa and took a seat in Adam’s favorite chair, a white leather recliner from Design Within Reach. I said nothing when Nicky decided to join us in the matching chair next to me rather than give us the room. Once we were in place, I asked the detectives if they had any leads in the investigation.

“We’re looking into every possibility,” Bowen said, fiddling with the piping on the sofa cushion beneath him. “But we have a few questions that might help us target our efforts.”

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