“Maybe they’ve got decoder rings for their special losers’ club.”

  Jane picks up a tennis ball and throws it into the yard for Rip.

  When he comes back, he drops the ball at Jimmy’s feet. Jimmy grins. “Come on, that’s funny shit right there.”

  “Maybe to you.”

  Jimmy picks up the ball now. Groans as he brings his arm forward, manages to throw the ball about twenty yards.

  “I think you might have come off the Injured List too soon,” Jane says.

  He ignores her.

  “I’m thinking that if McKenzie was in town last night, maybe that means he’s back living at his Southampton house,” he says.

  “Maybe they had a sleepover.”

  “Wouldn’t that be a joy?”

  He finishes his iced tea, stands, hands the ball to Jane when Rip brings it back this time.

  “You going to head over there?” she asks.

  “I am,” he says. “It would practically be a sin not to, since talking to losers has always been one of my specialties.”

  “Maybe we’re the ones who should have decoder rings,” Jane says.

  EIGHTY-THREE

  JIMMY SAYS HE’LL CALL only if he finds out anything interesting at McKenzie’s house. Nothing unusual about Jimmy Cunniff refusing to treat a cell phone like a pacifier.

  After a couple of hours of radio silence, I check his location on my phone, since he’s reluctantly given me permission to track him when necessary.

  But he’s obviously disabled that setting.

  I try to get some work in before dinner, knowing he’ll call when he does know something, if he does. I spend some time on a Zoom with the two law school students, both women—Estie and Zoe—whom I’ve hired for research and trial prep.

  I continue to hydrate, like a good girl.

  Around six I grab my phone and Rip and take a long walk on the beach.

  No calls from Jimmy.

  No texts.

  I check his location again.

  Jimmy still has his phone turned off. Or maybe the battery drained and he didn’t have a charger with him. I call the bar and tell Kenny Stanton, Jimmy’s top bartender, to call me as soon as Jimmy shows up. Or if he hears from him.

  For dinner I make myself a fully loaded baked potato, butter and sour cream and crispy bacon chopped up into it, thinking how proud Sam Wylie would be. I even think about texting her a picture of it.

  Still no Jimmy when I’ve finished and cleaned up.

  I’m in the living room, watching the Mets game, when I hear my phone.

  Not Jimmy.

  Danny Esposito, our new friend from the State Police.

  He skips the preliminaries.

  “Have you heard from Cunniff?”

  I tell him that I was supposed to have heard from him by now, that I’d last seen him this morning.

  “He called me a few hours ago. Said he had to make it fast, there was something maybe going on with his phone. And to come to his bar. I’m here now.”

  “He say why he was calling?”

  “He said he might need my help on something, but he didn’t say what.”

  I have walked back into the kitchen by now, am staring out the window at my feeder.

  No birds.

  “But he still hasn’t shown up,” Danny Esposito says.

  EIGHTY-FOUR

  Jimmy

  EDMUND MCKENZIE’S HOUSE IS on Gin Lane in Southampton, the ultimate old-money address.

  McKenzie hasn’t been on the premises for weeks. Jimmy knows because he’s been checking. But it’s still Jimmy’s dream that McKenzie and Eric Jacobson are both at the house, so that he can brace them both at the same time.

  For now, though, he’d settle for a face-to-face with McKenzie. That way Jimmy can ask him, straight up, about his friendship with Rob Jacobson’s son.

  Working a case, you can run into something, or something runs into you. Like the night before at the Bell & Anchor, when Jane saw McKenzie and Eric Jacobson together, right before she went down and out and ended up in the hospital.

  Jimmy is on his way through Southampton town, passing Fellingham’s, an old neighborhood-type bar he likes almost as much as his own, when his phone pings.

  It’s not a text alert, he sees when he pulls over, but another device attempting to access his phone.

  Or, as far as Jimmy knows, already has accessed it.

  No location on the other device.

  What the fuck?

  If it’s not some kind of mistake, somebody has gotten sloppy trying to track his phone. Or hack into his phone remotely. It’s not Jane. Jimmy knows she can check his location whenever she wants to. He told her he’d be the one to call her if he found out anything interesting at McKenzie’s place, but he’s not even there yet.

  Jimmy’s not enough of a techie to know exactly how they’re doing it with his phone, or from where. If he were smarter about phones, maybe he could try to find out where. But when he’s watching TV and somebody starts speaking cell phone on one of those commercials, he either mutes the set or changes the channel, because he just doesn’t give a shit, you could stump him with any question about what 5G even means.

  Right now all he knows is that the best thing for him, in real time, is to turn the phone off.

  He even considers tossing it.

  He hasn’t been checking for a tail since he left Jane’s. And good luck to anybody who might have been following him in a car. He’s taken back roads to Southampton to stay away from the afternoon westward grind of people who work out here but can’t afford to live out here.

  Only now he gets this alert.

  To him it means somebody is trying to tail him, just not in a car.

  Once the phone is turned off, it feels the way it did in the old days when Jimmy was running down a lead with just a gun and badge. Sometimes the only person who knew where he might be headed was Mickey Dunne, and sometimes not even Mickey, when Jimmy needed to be on the move.

  He makes the turn onto Gin Lane and is approaching Mc-Kenzie’s house when he sees the automatic gate at the end of the driveway pull back and a black Tesla spraying gravel in all directions as it ramps up from zero to sixty.

  As the car flies past him, he spots Edmund McKenzie behind the wheel.

  Jimmy turns around in the closest driveway and follows the fancy car when it makes its first turn away from the ocean. Something else from the old days.

  Follow that car.

  Jesus, those really were the days, no matter how old he feels missing them the way he does and thinking about them as often as he does.

  But when he looks in the rearview mirror, he’s smiling back at himself.

  He makes the same turns heading for the village, from a distance, that the Tesla does.

  Hell, yeah.

  Follow that car.

  Old school.

  Even if he’s chasing an electric car.

  EIGHTY-FIVE

  DANNY ESPOSITO AND I are at Jimmy’s bar.

  Still no word from him.

  “I can call the boys back at our office and see if they can try to track him off the cell towers out here, when you can find a goddamn tower,” Esposito says. “Maybe have them do that triangulation thing they do.”

  “I just keep telling myself that there must be a reason why he doesn’t want to be located,” I say, “and why he hasn’t reached out.”

  We’re at the end of the bar, my usual seat when it’s Jimmy and me. The Yankee game is on the TV closest to us. Esposito tells me that he’s not much for baseball, he’s more of a hockey guy.

  “I knew eventually there had to be something about you I’d find appealing,” I tell him.

  He drinks some of his beer, licks foam off his upper lip, and grins. “I’m getting this feeling—you must be getting the same one—that there’s a bond starting to form here.”

  “Fight it.”

  While we sip our beers, I catch him up on Licata, McKenzie, Eric Jacobson. My ex. Even my brief trip to the hospital.

  “You lead a very rich and full life,” Esposito says.

  “Full of what?”

  He runs a hand through his wavy hair. “How motivated might McKenzie and the Jacobson kid be to jam up your client if they got the chance?”

  “Very.”

  “Now Cunniff goes off to jam them up if he gets his chance.”

  “Trying to add to his own rich and full life.”

  “You act like it’s no big deal that he’s not here,” Esposito says. “But being as he’s a highly decorated investigator, I can see that you’re worried about him.”

  “Very,” I say again.

  I have settled into a nice routine. Talking with Danny Esposito, checking the game, checking my phone, watching the front door, waiting for Jimmy to walk through it.

  I know how much I love my sister. I have come to love Dr. Ben Kalinsky.

  I love my work, more than I should.

  I love the holy hell out of my dog.

  But Jimmy, in all the important ways, is the true love of my life.

  If something ever happened to him, I would want to die.

  Where is he?

  Something happens in the ball game, something that must be good for the Yankees, because the Yankee fans in the place are cheering and clapping.

  I check my phone again, the Find My app.

  Jimmy’s last location was in the middle of Southampton town.

  I look back at the door, trying to will Jimmy to come walking through it.

  “You think McKenzie and Eric Jacobson could take Jimmy down, if it ever came to that?” Esposito asks.

  “Not unless McKenzie has a stockpile of automatic weapons at his house.”

  “Then he’ll be here.”

  “When?” I snap and slap the bar with the palm of my hand, loud enough that some of the guys at the other end turn to look at me.

  Jimmy finally comes walking through the door about fifteen minutes later. I can see how pissed he is before he gets to the bar, or says a word, because that’s how well I know him, he might as well be carrying a sign.

  “I got played,” he says, and takes the seat next to Esposito.

  He makes a motion to Kenny that he wants a drink and wants it right now.

  “Beer, boss?” Kenny asks.

  “Bourbon. The good stuff.”

  Kenny brings him a glass of what I know is Pappy Van Winkle. Jimmy throws half of it down in one shot.

  “Sometimes,” he says, looking past Esposito at me, “I think somebody’s been playing us since we took this freaking case, and trying to run us in circles.”

  “But who?” I ask.

  “I thought you were supposed to be the brains of this operation,” Jimmy says.

  “If you still believe that,” I tell him, “then you’re right. You have been played.”

  EIGHTY-SIX

  JIMMY GIVES US CHAPTER and profane verse on the wild goose chase all over the South Fork on which he’d been taken by Edmund McKenzie, until they were finally heading back west on 27 from Montauk and McKenzie floored it and passed about a half dozen cars on the double line and lost him like Jimmy’s car was riding on its rims.

  “Pro tip?” Jimmy says. “If the guy in the Tesla wants to lose the guy in the Jetta, he does.”

  “Good to know,” Danny Esposito says.

  One of the stops McKenzie made at the start of their little road trip, Jimmy says, was at the Bell & Anchor. But before Jimmy could follow him inside, McKenzie was back outside and heading over the bridge and into Sag Harbor.

  “Total head fake, just to screw with me,” Jimmy says.

  “You think he knew you were coming to the house?” I ask.

  “Knew I was coming, knew when I was getting close, wanted me to follow him,” Jimmy says. “What I can’t figure is why. Which, I might add, joins a whole long list of things I can’t figure these days.”

  He tells Esposito about the alert he got on his phone when he started to get close to McKenzie’s house, and how, other than the one quick call he made to Danny Esposito, he had shut the phone off.

  “What I was going to ask you, is if there’s any mechanism to find out who was tracking me, and from where,” Jimmy says to Esposito now.

  “Not a snowball’s chance in Miami,” Esposito says. “You could ask the feds, but they’re not going to do shit for you. Because here’s their dirty little secret: The tracking abilities they do have? They won’t even admit they have them.”

  “Not even a location?”

  Esposito grins and shakes his head. “Sorry.”

  We all drink in silence for a few minutes.

  “At least you’re safe,” I say to Jimmy.

  “And a schmuck,” he says.

  Esposito has a fresh beer. He’s mostly listening tonight and not trying to play the part of the cool-dude cop. Another reason, on top of him being a hockey fan, why I am starting to like him a lot more than I did the night I first met him at the Parsonses’ house.

  “You think Licata is the puppet master?” he asks Jimmy.

  “I’ve got nothing to base this on,” Jimmy says, “but I have this feeling somebody else might be calling the shots. Somebody who does keep pointing us in the wrong direction. Look over there, schmuck. Not over here.”

  Jimmy has already passed on a second drink. He stands.

  “I’m going back to Southampton,” he says, “to see if the Tesla is back in the mutt’s driveway.”

  “Want some company?” Esposito says.

  “Sure.”

  I tell them to go have their cop fun. I’m heading home, it’s getting near my bedtime.

  Jimmy leans over and kisses me on top of my head.

  “Thanks for worrying about me,” he says.

  He gives me a long look, his face both somber and curious at the same time.

  “What if our guy isn’t a murderer?” he says.

  “Not to make too fine a point,” I say, “but which murders are we talking about?”

  “All of them,” Jimmy says, then tosses Esposito his keys and tells him he can drive.

  EIGHTY-SEVEN

  JIMMY AND ESPOSITO’S TRIP back over to McKenzie’s house turns out to be another waste of time. No Tesla. No lights on in the house. Nobody home.

  “I’ll find him,” Jimmy tells me when he calls in the morning to give me the update.

  “I never doubt you.”

  “Never too late to start,” he says.

  An hour later, I’m staring out the kitchen window at the feeder, telling myself that if I just close my eyes for a moment, when I open them at least one hummingbird will have come back.

  Instead, the phone rings. Brigid is calling from Switzerland.

  “Tell me you’re being released with time served and are coming home,” I say.

  “Not yet.”

  Her voice sounds small, flat, in a way that has nothing to do with the distance between us. I know this voice from my sister, have known it my whole life; don’t like it and never have.

  “It turns out I’m not nearly as good at remission as I thought I was,” she says.

  “Talk to me, sis.”

  “I’m coming to the end of one last triple-shot jolt of chemo,” she says. “If it doesn’t work, they want to discuss a stem-cell transplant.”

  “I’m coming over there.”

  “No,” she says in her big-sister voice, “you are not.”

  “Not your call.”

  “Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. But my body, my choice.”

  I remember using the same line on Jimmy the other day, trying to be funny.

  This isn’t. I don’t say anything because I’m afraid I might start crying, that’s the last thing I want her to hear, as if I’m feeling sorry for myself about my sister’s current circumstances. And making this about how I feel. People doing that has pissed me off my whole life. Martin used to do it. He’d be talking about a waitress going through a tough time and before long he’d be complaining how now he had to fire her and how badly he felt about that.

  “Don’t get crazy until we see how the chemo works. I’m almost done with this cycle.”

  “Isn’t it a little late in the game for you to be telling me not to be crazy?” I ask.

  “It must be the drugs talking,” she says. “And how about we change the subject, and I get to ask you how you’re feeling?”

  “Nothing to see here. I’m actually feeling pretty great.”

  “I don’t want to break this to you,” Brigid says. “But you were never a good liar.”

  “Wait. Do you really think I got to be one of the top criminal attorneys in the country by being truthful?”

  We both manage to laugh, even if it doesn’t last long.

  “I always thought it was you who put the criminal in criminal defense attorney.”

  “Only when defending one of your old boyfriends.”

  “Be nice.”

  “Your old boyfriend makes that extremely difficult sometimes.”

  I talk about my own upcoming chemo without telling her about my fainting spell at the Bell & Anchor. Brigid knowing about that won’t make her feel any better or will only make me feel worse. Basically, I’m still playing the role I’ve always played in our family:

  The strong one.

  I was the strong one when Mom got sick, even for our dad, the tough ex-Marine who simply couldn’t deal with her illness, or with the prospect of losing her.

  Now I had to be the strong one for Brigid. Today, anyway.

  “Before I hang up,” Brigid says, “I have to tell you something Rob told me on the phone the other night.”

  I hold the phone at arm’s length, stare at it, and sadly shake my head.

  “So you’re still in contact with him.”

  “Nothing has changed, Jane. I still love him as a friend.”

  I can’t help myself. “So you’re the one.”

  “Be nice,” she says again.

  “What did he tell you that you want to tell me?”

  “He says that sometimes he thinks about killing himself,” she says. “And that scared me.”

  I don’t believe it. Or him.

  “I know depression can be as serious a subject as cancer, sis. But he talked about it during the first trial. And as you remember, nobody really bought it then. Sorry, but I’m not buying it now.”