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“How about I share that this is all pretty goddamn convenient for you and him.”
“Enough!” Chief Larry Calabrese says. “From both of you! Maybe the two of you esteemed lawyers could stop thinking about your goddamn case and think about what appears to be a suspicious and senseless death here. Unless Nick Morelli took his boat out and hit himself in the head and decided to swim to New London to get himself stitched up.”
Jimmy tells me the rest of it now. Another fisherman, on his way back in, sawNick O’ Timedrifting out past Montauk Point a few hours ago, at about the time when a lot of boats that had gone out early were already on their way back in.
“Even if Nick’s not coming back in,” Jimmy says, “he ain’t drifting out there, especially since nobody saw a customer with him when he left the dock.”
“Anyway,” Calabrese says, “the other fisherman, Ed Fournier, gets as close as he can and starts yelling for Morelli. Nada. Tries to raise him on the radio they still use.”
“Good luck with that,” I say.
“You know somebody does this for a living?” Calabrese says.
“Knew,” I say. “An uncle. My mother’s brother. Passed a couple of years ago.”
“So you know the cell service is for shit out on the deep blue sea,” Calabrese says. “It’s one of the last places on Earth where people aren’t checking their phones every two minutes.”
Ed Fournier is worried now, Calabrese says, and calls the Coast Guard. They come out and find that no one is on board, and there is indeed blood inside the cabin and on the deck. They bring back the boat. The Coast Guard has its search-and-rescue boats out on the water.
“Good luck with that, too,” Chief Larry Calabrese says.
Ahearn has walked away. Calabrese sees one of his cops waving at him from Nick Morelli’s boat, walks over, climbs aboard. It’s just Jimmy Cunniff and me now, all the way at the end of the dock. I look out at the water and think of the way my uncle Sal once described Montauk to me. A small drinking town with a big fishing problem.
I’m almost certain he didn’t mean this kind of problem.
“So Ahearn turns out to be right about something,” I say. “What are the odds?”
“By the way?” Jimmy says. “I don’t care what else Morelli had to say about our boy. He did enough damage right after they swore him in.”
“Maybe it really was only going to get worse for Jacobson.”
“You ever have a witness get himself disappeared like this in the middle of a trial?” Jimmy says.
“No. Though I have thought about doing it myself once or twice. I had a good cross planned, for what it’s worth.”
“I’m sure you did,” Jimmy says. “And I planned to grow up and play centerfield for the Yankees.”
And just like that, staring out at the deep blue sea, I am thinking about what Sam Wylie told me. What was happening inside me. How long I had. Did it matter that Sam had tried to give me a heads-up about when my time was going to be up? That I’d been given notice? What kind of notice did Nick Morelli get before he went over the side?
I say to Jimmy, “If there’s more bad stuff on Jacobson and the dead girl, and it’s for real, Jacobson knows, and he’s not telling.”
“You gonna ask him about that?”
“First thing.”
“You know what I think about coincidence,” Jimmy says.
We’re walking along the dock to the parking lot.
“I do. It’s your lifelong belief that coincidence is a monumental load of crap.”
On my way back home I call the sheriff’s office in Riverhead, tell them who I am, tell them it’s urgent that I set up a video call with my client. They say they’ll ask the prisoner.
“No,” I say. “Tellthe prisoner.”
The rest of the way back to the house I hear myself in Judge Jackson Prentice’s courtroom saying that murder trials always come back to one thing.
Motive.
