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Important enough to Mickey Dunne that he hid it.
Kids, looking like teenage kids, posing for the camera.
Boy and three girls.
The boy has what Mickey Dunne always called hippie hair, even now, and is wearing a bathing suit a lot smaller than young guys wear nowadays.
They happen to be standing next to theATLANTIC AVENUE BEACHsigns in Amagansett, in front of a beach Jimmy Cunniff has walked with Jane plenty of times.
The beach doesn’t interest Jimmy so much.
It’s the kids in the picture.
The boy has his arms around all three girls at once, all the girls in bikinis, one of the girls with an old blue-and-orange Mets cap pulled down low over her eyes, so Jimmy can’t make out much of her face.
But the boy—no doubt in Jimmy’s mind whatsoever, none—is a much younger version of Rob Jacobson.
He stares at him.
Then at the girl closest to him on his left.
Takes out his phone just to make sure that he’s certain about her,herface not covered by a hat, a lot of red hair and some body on her, smiling and squinting into the sun.
Looking so much like her daughter would look later, before they got shot to death in Garden City.
“Nice to finally meet you, Mrs. Carson,” Jimmy says. “Wish it was under better circumstances.”
Seventy-Six
I SIT ACROSS THEsmall table from her in the downstairs coffee shop at the Suffolk County Court.
She looks as beautiful as she always does, even as steamed at me as she so clearly is. I’m no fashionista, and have the clothes closet to prove it, but I know it’s an expensive black dress. Chanel maybe, but I’d only be guessing. A single strand of pearls.
No wedding ring.
That’s new.
“Why won’t you leave me alone?” Claire Jacobson says.
She is about as happy with me as my sister would be if I’d hauled her back here from Switzerland to testify. A contact of Jimmy’s from the FBI helped them track down Rob Jacobson’s wife, and serve her, before she boarded a private jet at Teterboro Airport in Jersey, trying to get to their place in Cabo.
“I hardly think that calling you as a witness in your husband’s murder trial is a form of harassment. Were you heading to Cabo alone when you were served? I’m just curious.”
“None of your business.”
I sip some coffee. There is some fresh fruit on a plate in front of me. I’d promised Sam Wylie before I left the hospital that I would try to start eating better. That may have fallen under the category of lie, because presently the fruit remains untouched.
“Claire,” I tell her, “we can do this the easy way or we can do it the hard way. And the hard way only begins with Judge Prentice holding you in contempt if you refuse to testify. And we both know you’re not going to get on the stand and invoke your Fifth Amendment rights and look as if you’re the one who has something to hide. Imagine the cocktail party chatter that would generate out east.”
She smiles thinly. “Don’t be so sure. And by the way? I thought contempt was my husband’s thing.”
She leans forward slightly, points a finger at me.
“I am not allowing the likes of you to dragmygood name through the muck.”
“Why do you assume that’s what I intend to do?”
“Because you’reyou,” she says. “If you’d sell out your own sister, you’d sell me out in a heartbeat. Which, I might add, is why your sister got even farther away from this trial than I had planned to be.”
