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“Before or after Tyler McCormick was murdered?” asked Jack.
“Before.”
“Really, Imani? We’ve been talking all day about you and Shaky on a trip to the Caribbean. You’re just now telling me about this trip to the Bahamas?”
“The Bahamas aren’t in the Caribbean,” she said. “They’re in the west Atlantic.”
It seemed like a technicality, but Jack had won plenty of cases on so-called technicalities. “Where in the Bahamas were you?”
“I don’t know. They have hundreds of islands there.”
Hannah interjected. “The mass hanging of 1718 was in Nassau.”
“Were you on a boat?” Jack asked his client.
“Who goes to the Bahamas and doesn’t go on a boat?”
“Was Paxton on this trip?”
“I don’t remember,” said Imani. “My bodyguard came along, so Shaky could have brought his, too.”
Jack took a minute, then gave his honest assessment. “This is going to make it very hard to convince a jury that the conversation Paxton testified about could never have actually happened. It puts you and Shaky in a place famous for gibbeting of pirates before the murder of Tyler McCormick.”
Jack stopped himself, then had a thought. “Wait a minute. Tyler McCormick was from the Bahamas.”
“So?” asked Imani.
“Is that where you met him? Did you meet Tyler McCormick on this trip to the Bahamas?”
“Not that I remember,” said Imani.
“Could there have been some encounter?”
“I don’t know. I’m a celebrity. I meet people all the time. Maybe even say a couple of words to them. The whole encounter means nothing to me, but it means the world to the other person.”
“Is that when the stalking started?” asked Jack. “After this trip?”
“Yes.”
“Is it possible he followed you from the Bahamas to Miami?”
“The newspaper article said he was a student at Miami-Dade College at the time of his death. I don’t know when he enrolled, but I guess it’s not impossible that it was after I went to the Bahamas.”
“Did he communicate with you from inside the United States or from the Bahamas?”
“I don’t know. My security team tracked down the texts he sent. They all led to a burner.”
Jack had to go back more than a decade to remember a criminal case that didn’t somehow involve a disposable phone.
“Do you still have copies of the texts on your phone?”
“No. I deleted them a long time ago, and I’ve probably had ten phones since then. Why would we want copies of those messages anyway? You said it yourself: the fact that Tyler McCormick was stalking me only gives Shaky and me a stronger motive to get rid of him.”
She had a point. But Jack was not ready to let go of this thread and see where it led.
“In the middle of your civil lawsuit with Shaky, I got an anonymous call. The tip was that if I wanted the case to go away, I should tell Shaky’s lawyer that I was going to cross-examine Shaky about Tyler McCormick.”
“I remember,” said Imani. From her tone, it was clear she also recalled having lied to Jack about not knowing the name Tyler McCormick.
