“Don’t worry. I’m not going to ask you lots of questions,” Millie went on. “I actually don’t want to be sitting with you either.” My eyes shot up. But Millie’s expression was straightforward, not like she meant it meanly, but like it was the truth. She leaned in closer to whisper. “I mean, we’ll just pretend for a few to make your mom happy. We’d both do anything for her, right?”
Once Millie drew closer on the street, I noticed how thin her face was, her skin papery. How long had it been since we’d actually seen each other in the flesh? More than a decade maybe. Longer than I’d let myself think about. Millie and her emails were in a secret box, one that I peeked into as required, but which I otherwise stored far away.
“Look at you,” Millie said quietly, staring up at me from the bottom of Zach’s stairs.
I stood. “I’m sorry, Millie … Your emails—I’ve been really underwater at work, a—”
Millie held up her hand and shook her head as she made her way up the steps. “No, no,” she said. “I’m glad that you called.”
“It’s good to see you,” I said, trying to ignore the burning in my throat as Millie and I exchanged a quick, firm hug. She felt noticeably frail in my arms.
“You know I’m always here to help,” she said. “In any way I can.”
That was certainly true and it was because of her friendship with my mom. Guilt, too. Millie had always felt more responsible than sheshould have for the way things turned out. Like if she’d been able to find the guy who swindled my dad, my family would have survived.
“Thank you,” I said. “For everything.”
Millie looked for a moment like she might say something more, but instead she nodded and turned to eye Zach’s brownstone. “Now, what the hell happened here?”
Inside, we stood at the edge of the living room side by side, staring at all that blood at the bottom of the steps. I’d given Millie the background on Zach and Amanda, such as it was. I’d explained that Zach and I had been pretty good friends in law school, but that I hadn’t seen him in years.
“Well,” she began, eyeing the staircase, “at least this isn’t your mess to clean up.”
“Look at this,” I said, stepping over to that swirled pattern in the blood on the metal tread of the second to last step. I pointed. “Isn’t that part of a handprint? And maybe one fingerprint?”
Millie moved closer and tilted her head. “Could be,” she said, not sounding especially impressed. “Sure.”
“The police tonight were pretty blasé about taking prints in the kitchen, and that was after I told them I thought whoever was here probably had something to do with what happened to Amanda. I mean, they said they’d put in the request to get a team out here, but who knows? What if whoever was here the first time missed that print? It is hard to make out. I don’t see any fingerprint dust anywhere, either. Maybe they didn’t print anything.”
“Oh, I doubt that,” Millie said. “They’d have run prints. And there’s lots of ways to lift a print, tape and whatnot. Dust is only for latent prints, not visible ones. It is possible they missed this one, with what a disaster this place is. But my guess is they probably did take it. Real issue is what happens when that print doesn’t belong to your guy and isn’t in the system. NYPD will eventually get elimination printsfrom friends, housekeepers, that kind of thing. But that’ll take time. They get them as they interview people. And what’s the rush when they think they’ve got their man?” Millie frowned equivocally. “There isn’t a police department in the country that’s got the resources to prioritize looking for alternate suspects to undermine a good case. But you know all that. You were a prosecutor. By the way—not that it matters, I’m here to help you, not him—but do you think your client did it?”
“No,” I said without hesitating. But also without elaborating. Because that remained the whole of my opinion on the matter of Zach’s innocence. I didn’t think he had killed Amanda.
“Of course, given the right circumstances, anyone is capable of anything.” Millie turned to look at me. “We both know that.”
“Yeah,” I said, looking away. “We do.”
We stayed quiet then for an awkward moment. I kept my eyes on the stairs. Looking at all the blood was better than facing Millie. Was she going to insist that we talk about everything, right now?
“Can whatever it is wait just a couple more days?” I asked, heading her question off at the pass. I motioned to the stairs. “I need to deal with this first, okay?”
“Okay. A couple more days.” She took a deep breath. “Let me make some calls and see how fast I can get someone of our own down here to lift prints, including that one on the stairs. I’m sure the NYPD will send a team for the kitchen, and I can wait until they get here. Once we’ve got our own prints to work with, we can make whatever comparisons we want. We’ll get a blood spatter person, too. In the meantime, why don’t you try to find the golf bag—the club came from somewhere—and whatever else upstairs might be interesting. Investigators might have ‘overlooked’ something that wasn’t useful to them. Try not to touch anything with your bare hands, though, and take off your shoes. Let’s not corrupt the scene any more than necessary.”
While Millie got on the phone, I made my way up the steps,trying not to look too closely as I stepped around the blood in my stocking feet. At the top, well past all the blood, there was what looked to be fingerprint dust, so the NYPD had indeed done something. Upstairs, I passed Case’s spotless but cheerfully childlike bedroom and headed onward to Zach and Amanda’s master suite at the front of the house. I used the edge of my shirt to open their door.
The master bedroom was massive, spa-like and serene. Every surface was bright white—from the linens to the curtains to the walls—and yet somehow the exact right shade so as not to be sterile or cold. I tried to imagine Zach and Amanda snuggling in that huge fluffy bed late on Saturday, Case in between them, but I just could not picture it.
I turned away from the bed and headed toward the closet in search of the golf clubs or, as Millie had said, anything else that might be useful. A vast walk-in, with warm lighting and a small bench in the center, the closet had artfully arranged floor-to-ceiling racks and cubbies and endless amounts of extremely expensive clothing on hangers. I knew such closets existed in mansions somewhere, but in Brooklyn—even in a house as nice as Zach’s—it was hard to process. It also wasn’t a closet for golf clubs. Downstairs, maybe, or wherever they kept the rest of their sporting equipment. They had a child. They probably had a designated area for such things.
But first I needed to take a closer look in the bedroom closet. As Millie had pointed out, there could be something helpful tucked somewhere, though it already felt uncomfortably intimate, standing there in the doorway in my nearly bare feet. Lingerie, sex toys, there was no telling what I might find. After all, Zach and Amanda had been at a sex party that night. And now, here I was mixed up in whatever they had done. As if I didn’t have enough of my own problems. It had been so reckless to ask Paul about Zach’s case. Stupid, actually. I braced myself as I finally stepped inside the massive closet.
I opened one drawer after another. Clothes and more clothes,that was all. There was actually nothing very personal anywhere, much less anything scandalous. I lifted the lid on a jewelry box to an eye-popping collection—necklaces, bracelets, and earrings with colored stones and, yes, plenty of actual diamonds. It seemed to rule out a robbery, unless Amanda had interrupted the burglar before he’d found the stash he was looking for. Maybe I’d cut short his return trip to finish the job.
I headed back out into the bedroom, where I looked over the built-in bookshelves. There were dozens of classic novels, Shakespeare plays, and Nietzsche, separated every dozen books or so by a short cluster of coffee-table and art books stacked on their sides. Amanda’s, surely. Back when I’d known him, Zach hadn’t been much of a reader, a fact he’d seemed to offer as a challenge to anyone willing to judge him. Amanda—poor background, uneducated, but a big reader and a great mother, not to mention gorgeous. A jury was going to make somebody pay for what had been done to her.
As I turned back from the shelves, a nearby nightstand caught my eye. The top drawer was open slightly. I made a note for myself in my phone:Fingerprint nightstand drawer. Then I used the edge of my shirt to open it.
The orderly, impersonal contents of the top drawer bore no resemblance to my own overstuffed night table, with its tangled headphones and receipts for store credit that had long since expired. There was a small tube of very pricey, very female hand cream next to a thin box of tissues—it was Amanda’s nightstand, presumably. The only genuinely personal item was a card from Case that—judging from the childish handwriting—had likely been written years earlier:I luv u momy. You ar the best and only momy.
