Page 58 of The Better Sister

“Top off?” It was Ivy the waitress, offering even more coffee. Guidry happened to know that Ivy had originally been hired just for the season, needing a job of her own while her boyfriend had a gig doing private security for a party club out in Montauk. She didn’t press charges after police responded to a Labor Day weekend 911 call at their summer rental, but she did move out. Now she had joined Guidry and countless others who had come out to the East End to hang on the beach for one young summer, only to start a whole new life.

“Better not, or I’ll never make it through my beach walk without a bathroom break.” Fall was Guidry’s favorite time of year. The summer crowd was gone, the leaves had turned, and the waves were roaring. She knew Amy, for all her strengths as a girlfriend, never gave Cosmo a proper walk, and she was looking forward to seeing her beautiful boxer gallop unleashed along Maidstone.

While she waited for the check, she flipped through the one untouched section of theTimes, the business section, in the interest of completeness. “Gentry Reports FBI Investigation.”

Something about the company name sounded familiar. It was described as a “publicly traded powerhouse in the energy, health-care, and industry sectors,” not exactly the crime and political news that Guidry tended to follow. But then she came to a quote from the company’s lawyer, Jake Summer of the New York City law firm Rives & Braddock: “The Gentry Group is conducting an internal investigation and also plans to cooperate with all investigative agencies.”

The Gentry Group was the company Chloe Taylor kept mentioning when she was trying to figure out where Adam Macintosh had spent the last two days of his life. Guidry had done the legwork of reaching out to Uber, but she hadn’t learned anything beyond what Chloe already knew—that he’d been dropped off and picked up at the Kew Gardens train station. Once the investigation pointed to his son, Ethan, she had dropped the inquiry.

The year before, Guidry had been a small part of a big mail theft case that sprawled from Queens to Brooklyn and through Nassau and Suffolk Counties. The defendants had washed and forged millions of dollars in checks. When Guidry drove to the FBI regional office handling the investigation, she had parked next to the Kew Gardens train station.

She was still thinking about that when she was about to start the engine of her CRV. It’s one phone call, she thought. What’s the harm?

She searched her old emails, trying to remember the agent’s name. How could she have forgotten? He was a nice guy. Cute, too, and had asked her to dinner. She still felt a little guilty for not telling him the real reason she didn’t accept the offer.

Damon Katz. There it was. She tapped the phone number in his email signature line to make the call and got his voice mail after three rings.

“Agent Katz, this is Detective Jennifer Guidry from Suffolk County Police. I think you’ll remember me from that Tobin and DeLaglio investigation a couple of years ago. I’m hoping you can help me out with something. Any chance your office had any contacts with Adam Macintosh last spring? Perhaps something to do with a company called the Gentry Group—I’m wondering if he might have been at your offices on two specific days in May. Give me a call when you can.”

By the time she pulled out onto Newtown, she’d told herself he’d never call back. There was no way the FBI was going to call some Long Island detective about a pending case. She didn’t even know why she was curious. Ethan Macintosh was their guy. She had called it, almost from the start.

31

Looking at Ethan on the witness stand, I was able to see how much he had changed in the six months since his arrest. His chest and shoulders were broader, and his voice was lower. Now that his face was more defined, his chin and jawline were just like Adam’s. He wasn’t quite an adult, but nothing about him looked boyish anymore.

Nicky and I knew Olivia had spent hours with Ethan, preparing him to testify, but we had no idea what he would actually say. We wanted to believe that Olivia was putting Ethan on the stand because his innocence would be obvious to the jury once they heard his side of the story. But more likely she was doing it because she believed he’d be convicted unless he gave it a shot.

He grew more comfortable speaking in the courtroom as Olivia posed a series of basic questions about where he was born, when he moved to New York, where he lived, and other background information. Once he seemed at ease, she walked him through his time line for the night of the murder. For the most part, his version lined up with Kevin Dunham’s. They were together all night except for a one-hour window. The only variation was the reason for the separation. Kevin had testified that Ethan was supposed to meet someone on the beach to sell some pot, while Ethan claimed he had asked to be left at the beach while Kevin finished a deal.

Olivia showed Ethan a list of the items we had reported stolen from the house after Adam’s murder, and then showed him a matching list of the items seized from the top shelf of his bedroom closet in the city. “Now, are the three items from your closet the same things that were reported missing from your house?”

“Yes.”

“And how did those items come to be on your top shelf?”

“I put them there.”

“Do you remember when you put them there?”

“Yes. It was Saturday night.”

“Which Saturday was that?” she asked.

“Sorry. The night after my dad was killed. Mom and I drove back to the city that afternoon.”

Olivia stated the exact date in May to clarify, which Ethan confirmed.

“Were you in possession of those three items when you left East Hampton and went to the city that afternoon?” Olivia asked.

“No.”

“So where were those items immediately before you put them on the top shelf in your closet?”

“In my bedroom.”

“Which bedroom?”

“Sorry, my bedroom in the city.”

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