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“Please, call me Lauren,” the woman said. She hefted the toddler on her hip. “And this is Tyler.”
Tyler had blond hair and big, beautiful brown eyes. He smiled, then giggled when I tickled his bare feet.
“Come on inside,” Lauren told us.
As soon as I stepped into the living room and looked at the photos lined up on the small fireplace mantel, I had the confirmation I needed, that Lauren Cedar’s husband was definitely the same man from the sports bar.
I talked to her for a minute more but didn’t want to give out too much information. She was still shaken.
Lauren sniffled, recounting for me the outburst from her husband that had prompted the call to the police. It had started when she found a couple of burner cell phones and confronted him with them, accusing him of cheating on her. Instead of denying it, he’d gone on the offensive, yelling and throwing things around.
She said, “I told him he was being too loud and that he was scaring Tyler. That he was even scaring me. You know what he said?”
I shook my head.
“He said that Tyler and I should be terrified of him. Then he grabbed my arm and jerked me back into the kitchen.” She pulled up the sleeve of her blouse and showed me her right arm, where a perfect imprint of a large hand was already turning into a bluish bruise.
I asked a few more questions and wrote down the information she gave me.
Her husband, Jeffrey Cedar, was an attorney in lower Manhattan, and according to his wife, he was a lying piece of shit.
Which certainly seemed true.
But I was growing more and more convinced that this lying piece of shit might actually be a killer.
My only real question was whether he’d killed them all.
Chapter 68
Jeffrey Cedar sat in his law office not far from the criminal courthouse in lower Manhattan. He was finding it difficult to concentrate on the client sitting across from him. He’d had an argument with his wife that morning after she questioned where he went at night when he said he was working. Then she accused him of cheating on her. She’d found a couple of the burner phones he often used to stay in touch with the different women he met. He always took care to bring these women to places far from Cobble Hill or lower Manhattan—anywhere, really, as long as it wasn’t the kind of spot his wife would ever have any interest in going.
But this morning, no matter what he said or how loud he said it, his wife just wasn’t buying it. She seemed to be spinning off the rails, she was so upset. He even had to grab her arms and hold her still just to get her to listen to him. That, added to the sound of his son wailing, had started his day off on a sour note. And it didn’t feel like it was getting any better.
Once, about three years ago, Jeffrey had smacked Lauren in the face after she refused to stop nagging him. The blow had left a mark on her cheek for over a week, and he’d had to keep her at home for fear of getting arrested for domestic abuse. Even worse, she’d been pregnant with Tyler at the time. But he’d learned from his mistake. Now he was always careful. Subtle. Never did anything that would show up on his wife’s face.
Jeffrey returned his focus to the client sitting at his desk. He twirled his pen in his left hand as he listened to the young man across from him explain that he wasn’t actually “dealing” drugs so much as he was “redistributing” them for someone else.
Jeffrey felt like his degree from Syracuse put him a notch above a lot of the other bottom-feeders in the criminal justice system. He did admit to some jealousy at the NYU and Columbia grads working at the big firms. But he’d found his niche and was doing fine on his own. He usually wouldn’t even take on a low-end dealer client like this kid, except that said kid’s parents had plenty of cash and had thrown a big chunk of it at Jeffrey to clear their son of the drug charges against him.
He tuned in to hear some of what his client was droning on and on about. “The damn cops took my entire stash. All of it. I couldn’t believe what dicks they were.”
“It sounds like we’re going to have to cut a deal, Jason,” Jeffrey told him. “It’s too hard to explain why you were holding so much heroin and four thousand dollars in cash.”
“All I was doing was helping someone out. They needed this stuff delivered. I didn’t negotiate with no one. I didn’t force no one. All I did was deliver.”
“And now, unfortunately, that solid work ethic is going to have to be put on hold for one to five years.”
Jeffrey wrapped up that meeting with his disgruntled client and, a few hours later, found himself listening to another douchebag talk about how he had been railroaded. He felt like he’d been listening to this particular pitiful client all day, though they’d been meeting for only about forty minutes.
The client insisted on sticking to the story that his eight-year-old niece was making a wild and unsubstantiated accusation against him. He was outraged that the police had arrested him on the word of a child. He never brought up the fact that forensics had found semen on one of the girl’s dresses and that two different psychological assessments had determined the niece was rational and telling the truth.
Jeffrey put on a show for the client, who was already paying an exorbitant rate for his services. “I think we can work this out. It’s going to take some extra time on my part. And I’m afraid I can’t make any absolute promises. I will, however, need a much larger retainer to pursue the case the way I think it should be pursued.”
Without a word, the douchebag client reached into the front pocket of his baggy pants and pulled out a checkbook. Jeffrey had already run the guy’s credit score and talked to him about what assets could be open to a civil judgment if his wife’s sister’s family sued him. Using that as a cover story, he’d learned the guy had more than three hundred thousand dollars in a 401(k) plan and another thirty-five thousand dollars in liquid investments. The only real calculation Jeffrey made was how much he could ask for without scaring the client off. It was almost like betting on a hand in Texas hold ’em poker. If you raised too much, the suckers at the table tended to fold.
When he saw the hesitation on his client’s face, Jeffrey said, “I can almost guarantee, no matter what happens, you won’t do any jail time. I can point out your record of employment, no previous convictions, and I assume you will be able to get character witnesses to speak on your behalf.”
The client nodded solemnly, his long brown hair flopping in front of his face.
