Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Thirty-Nine

  Forty

  Forty-One

  Forty-Two

  Forty-Three

  Forty-Four

  Forty-Five

  Forty-Six

  Forty-Seven

  Forty-Eight

  Forty-Nine

  Fifty

  Fifty-One

  Fifty-Two

  Fifty-Three

  Fifty-Four

  Fifty-Five

  Fifty-Six

  Fifty-Seven

  Fifty-Eight

  Fifty-Nine

  Sixty

  Sixty-One

  Sixty-Two

  Sixty-Three

  Sixty-Four

  Sixty-Five

  Sixty-Six

  Sixty-Seven

  Sixty-Eight

  Sixty-Nine

  Seventy

  Seventy-One

  Seventy-Two

  Seventy-Three

  Seventy-Four

  Seventy-Five

  Seventy-Six

  Seventy-Seven

  Seventy-Eight

  Seventy-Nine

  Eighty

  Eighty-One

  Eighty-Two

  Eighty-Three

  Eighty-Four

  Eighty-Five

  Eighty-Six

  Eighty-Seven

  Eighty-Eight

  Eighty-Nine

  Ninety

  Ninety-One

  Ninety-Two

  Ninety-Three

  Ninety-Four

  Ninety-Five

  Ninety-Six

  Ninety-Seven

  Ninety-Eight

  Ninety-Nine

  One Hundred

  One Hundred One

  One Hundred Two

  One Hundred Three

  One Hundred Four

  One Hundred Five

  One Hundred Six

  One Hundred Seven

  One Hundred Eight

  One Hundred Nine

  One Hundred Ten

  One Hundred Eleven

  One Hundred Twelve

  One Hundred Thirteen

  One Hundred Fourteen

  One Hundred Fifteen

  One Hundred Sixteen

  One Hundred Seventeen

  Discover More

  About the Authors

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Copyright © 2023 by James Patterson

  Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

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  For my favorite New York lawyer,

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  Both Mr. Patterson and I thank them for their generosity in the writing of our book. —M.L.

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  One

  “FOR THE LAST TIME,” my client says to me. “I. Did. Not. Kill. Those. People.”

  He adds, “You have to believe me. I didn’t do it.”

  The opposing counsel will refer to him as “the defendant.” It’s a way of putting him in a box, since opposing counsel absolutely believe he did kill all those people. The victims. The Gates family. Father. Mother. And teenage daughter. All shot in the head. Sometime in the middle of the last night of their lives. Whoever did it, and the state says my client did, had to have used a suppressor.

  “Rob,” I say, “I might have mentioned this before: I. Don’t. Give. A. Shit.”

  Rob is Rob Jacobson, heir to a legendary publishing house and also owner of the biggest real estate company in the Hamptons. Life was good for Rob until he ended up in jail, but that’s true for pretty much everybody, rich or poor. Guilty or innocent. I’ve defended both.

  Me? I’m Jane. Jane Smith. It’s not an assumed name, even though I might be wishing it were by the end of this trial.

  There was a time when I would have been trying to keep somebody like Rob Jacobson away from the needle, back when New York was still a death penalty state. Now it’s my job to help him beat a life sentence. Starting tomorrow. Suffolk County Court, Riverhead, New York. Maybe forty-five minutes from where Rob Jacobson stands accused of shooting the Gates family dead.

  That’s forty-five minutes with no traffic. Good luck with that.

  “I’ve told you this before,” he says. “It’s important to me that you believe me.”

  No surprise there. He’s been conditioned his entire life to people telling him what he wants to hear. It’s another perk that’s come with being a Jacobson.

  Until now, that is.

  We are in one of the attorney rooms down the hall from the courtroom. My client and me. Long window at the other end of the room where the guard can keep an eye on us. Not for my safety, I tell myself. Rob Jacobson’s. Maybe the guard can tell from my body language that I occasionally feel the urge to strangle him.

  He’s wearing his orange jumpsuit. I’m in the same dark-gray skirt and jacket I’ll be wearing tomorrow. What I think of as my sincerity suit.

  “Important to you,” I say, “not to me. I need twelve people to believe you. And I’m not one of the twelve.”

  “You have to know that I’m not capable of doing something like this.”

  “Sure. Let’s go with that.”

  “You sound sarcastic,” he says.

  “No. I am sarcastic.”

  This is our last pretrial meeting, one he’s asked for and that is a complete waste of time. Mine, not his. He looks for any excuse to get out of his cell at the Riverhead Correctional Facility for even an hour and has insisted on going over once more what he calls “our game plan.”

  Our—I run into a lot of that.

  I’ve tried to explain to him that any lawyer who allows his or her client to run the show ought to save everybody a lot of time and effort—and a boatload of the state’s money—and drive the client straight to Attica or Green Haven Correctional. But Rob Jacobson never listens. Lifelong affliction, as far as I can tell.

  “Rob, you don’t just want me to believe you. You want me to like you.”

  “Is there something so wrong with that?” he asks.

  “This is a murder trial,” I tell him. “Not a dating app.”

  Looks-wise he reminds me of George Clooney. But all good-looking guys with salt-and-pepper hair remind me of George. If I had met him several years ago and could have gotten him to stay still long enough, I might have married him.

  But only if I had been between marriages at the time.

  “Stop me if you’ve heard me say this before, but I was set up.”

  I sigh. It’s louder than I intended. “Okay. Stop.”

  “I was,” he says. “Set up. Nothing else makes sense.”

  “Now, you stop me if you’ve heard this one from me before. Set up by whom? And with your DNA and fingerprints sprinkled around that house like pixie dust?”

  “That’s for you to find out,” he says. “One of the reasons I hired you is because I was told you’re as good a detective as you are a lawyer. You and your guy.”

  Jimmy Cunniff. Ex-NYPD, the way
I’m ex-NYPD, even if I only lasted a grand total of eight months as a street cop, before lasting barely longer than that as a licensed private investigator. It was why I’d served as my own investigator for the first few years after I’d gotten my law degree. Then I’d hired Jimmy, and finally started delegating, almost as a last resort.

  “Not to put too fine a point on things,” I say to him, “we’re not just good. We happen to be the best. Which is why you hired both of us.”

  “And why I’m counting on you to find the real killers eventually. So people will know I’m innocent.”

  I lean forward and smile at him.

  “Rob? Do me a favor and never talk about the real killers ever again.”

  “I’m not O.J.,” he says.

  “Well, yeah, he only killed two people.”

  I see his face change now. See something in his eyes that I don’t much like. But then I don’t much like him. Something else I run into a lot.

  He slowly regains his composure. And the rich-guy certainty that this is all some kind of big mistake. “Sometimes I wonder whose side you’re on.”

  “Yours.”

  “So despite how much you like giving me a hard time, you do believe I’m telling you the truth.”

  “Who said anything about the truth?” I ask.

  Two

  GREGG McCALL, NASSAU COUNTY district attorney, is waiting for me outside the courthouse.

  Rob Jacobson has been taken back to the jail and I’m finally on my way back to my little saltbox house in Amagansett, east of East Hampton, maybe twenty miles from Montauk and land’s end.

  A tourist one night wandered into the tavern Jimmy Cunniff owns down at the end of Main Street in Sag Harbor, where Jimmy says it’s been, in one form or another, practically since the town was a whaling port. The visitor asked what came after Montauk. He was talking to the bartender, but I happened to be on the stool next to his.

  “Portugal,” I said.

  But now the trip home is going to have to wait because of McCall, six foot eight, former Columbia basketball player, divorced, handsome, extremely eligible by all accounts. And an honest-to-God public servant. I’ve always had kind of a thing for him, even when he was still married, and even though my sport at Boston College was ice hockey. Even with his decided size advantage, I figure we could make a mixed relationship like that work, with counseling.

  McCall has made the drive out here from his home in Garden City, which even on a weekday can feel like a trip to Kansas if you’re heading east on the Long Island Expressway.

  “Are you here to give me free legal advice?” I ask. “Because I’ll take whatever you got at this point, McCall.”

  He smiles. It only makes him better looking.

  Down, girl.

  “I want to hire you,” he says.

  “Oh, no.” I smile back at him. “Did you shoot somebody?”

  He sits down on the courthouse steps and motions for me to join him. Just the two of us out here. Tomorrow will be different. That’s when the circus comes to town.

  “I want to hire you and Jimmy, even though I can’t officially say that I’m hiring you,” he says. “And even though I’m aware that you’re kind of busy right now.”

  “I’d only be too busy if I had a life,” I say.

  “You don’t have one? You’re great at what you do. And if I can make another observation without getting MeToo’ed, you happen to be great looking.”

  Down, girl.

  “I keep trying to have one. A life. But somehow it never seems to take.” I don’t even pause before asking, “Are you going to now tell me what you want to hire me for even though you can’t technically hire me, or should we order Uber Eats?”

  “You get right to it, don’t you?” McCall asks.

  “Unless this is a billable hour. In which case, take as much time as you need.”

  He crosses amazingly long legs out in front of him. I notice he’s wearing scuffed old loafers. Somehow they make me like him even more. I’ve never gotten the sense that he’s trying too hard, even when I’ve watched him killing it a few times on Court TV.

  “Remember the three people who got shot in Garden City?” he asks. “Six months before Jacobson is accused of wiping out the Gates family.”

  “I do. Brutal.”

  Three senseless deaths that time, too. The Carson family. Father, mother, daughter, a sophomore cheerleader at Garden City High. I don’t know why I remember the cheerleader piece. But it’s stayed with me. A robbery gone wrong. Gone bad and gone tragically wrong.

  “Well, you probably also know that the father’s mother never let it go until she finally passed,” he says, “even though there was never an arrest or even a suspect worth a shit.”

  “I remember Grandma,” I say. “There was a time when she was on TV so much I kept waiting for her to start selling steak knives.”

  McCall grins. “Well, it turns out Grandma was right.”

  “She kept saying it wasn’t random, that her son’s family had been targeted, even though she wouldn’t come out and say why. She finally told me why but said that if I went public with it, she’d sue me all the way back to the Ivy League.”

  “But you’re going to tell me.”

  “Her son gambled. Frequently and badly, as it turns out.”

  “And not with DraftKings, I take it.”

  “With Bobby Salvatore, who is still running the biggest book in this part of the world.”

  “Jimmy’s mentioned him a few times in the past. Bad man, right?”

  “Very.”

  “And you guys missed this?”

  “Why do you think I’m here?”

  “But upstanding district attorneys like yourself aren’t allowed to hire people like Jimmy and me to run side investigations.”

  “We’re not. But I promised Grandma,” he says. “And there’s an exception I believe would cover it.”

  “The case was never closed, I take it.”

  “But we’d gotten nothing new in all this time until a guy in another investigation dropped Salvatore’s name on us.”

  “And here you are.”

  “Here I am.”

  “I don’t mean to be coarse, McCall, but I gotta ask: who pays?”

  “Don’t worry about it,” he says.

  “I’m a worrier.”

  “Grandma liked to plan ahead,” he says. “She was ready to go when we found out about the Salvatore connection. When I took it to her, she said, ‘I told you so,’ and wrote a check. She told me that she was willing to pay whatever it took to find out who took her family.”

  “This sounds like your crusade, not mine.”

  “Come on, think of the fun,” Gregg McCall says. “While you’re trying to get your guy off here, you can help me put somebody else away.”

  I know all about McCall by now. He’s more than just a kick-ass prosecutor. He’s also tough and honest. Didn’t even go to Columbia on an athletic scholarship. Earned himself one for academics. Could have gone to a big basketball school. His parents were set on him being Ivy League. Worked his way to pay for the rest of college. The opposite of the golden boy I’m currently representing, all in all.

  “I know we’re supposed to be on opposing sides,” McCall says. “But if I can make an exception…”

  I finish his thought. “So can I.”

  “I’m asking you to help me do something we should have done at the time. Find the truth.”

  “You ought to know that my client just now asked me if I thought he was telling the truth. I told him that I wasn’t interested in the truth.” I shrug. “But I lied.”

  “If you agree to do this, we’ll kind of be strange bedfellows.”

  “You wish,” I say.

  Actually, I wish.

  “I know asking you to take on something extra right now is crazy,” he says.

  “Kind of my thing.”

  Three

  ON MY WAY HOME, I call Jimmy Cunniff at the tavern. He used to get drunk there in summers when he’d get a couple of days off and need to get out of the city, day-trip to the beach and party at night. Now he owns the business, but not the building, though his landlord is not just an old friend but also someone, in Jimmy’s words, who’s not rent-gouging scum.

  A Hamptons rarity, if you must know.

  Jimmy’s not just an ex-cop, having been booted out of the NYPD for what he will maintain until Jesus comes back was a righteous shooting, and killing, of a drug dealer named Angel Reyes. He’s also a former Golden Gloves boxer and, back in the day, someone who had short stories published in long-gone literary magazines. The beer people should have put Jimmy out there as the most interesting man in the world.