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“You need to understand something,” I say to him. “If you had sex with an underage teenage girl, now deceased, and if Nick Morelli told Kevin Ahearn, you are the one who is screwed. And there is nothing I can do to unscrew you.”
“But I didn’t,” he says.
“And you had nothing to do with Morelli’s boat basically coming back without him?”
“We went over this.”
“Humor me.”
“Hard no on that as well,” he says.
“You better be telling me the truth.”
“To quote my hotshot attorney, who said anything about the truth?”
He smiles again. Same coyote smile as before until he gets up out of his chair and walks away.
“Zoom meeting has ended,” I hear him say in the background.
Seventeen
AHEARN GIVES A SUNDAY-NIGHTinterview to Jim Acosta on CNN and tries to be cagey about what Nick Morelli’s continued testimony would have been like if he wasn’t missing and presumed dead.
“Are you suggesting there was even more of a relationship between Mr. Jacobson and Ms. Gates than the scene outside the Stephen Talkhouse that Mr. Morelli described?” Acosta says.
“You said that, Jim, not me.”
“If there was,” Acosta says, “is there a way for you to get it into the record?”
Ahearn, who is generally about as subtle as a jackhammer, tries to look coy.
“Jim, it’s like I suggested in my opening statement, even if I didn’t put it quite this way. Facts are as stubborn as Long Island ticks.”
Instead of Nick Morelli, Ahearn’s first witness on Monday morning is Officer Liam Murphy, a forensics specialist for the Southampton Police. By then Ahearn and I have met with the judge. As I suspected, he raises the idea of a mistrial because of Nick Morelli’s disappearance. Kevin Ahearn tells him what he told me at Montauk, that he doesn’t want one.
Neither do I.
I spent a fair amount of time—two separate pretrial interviews—questioning Murphy about the abundant amount of DNA evidence from Rob Jacobson found at the Gateses’ rental house. Like an abundance of riches for the cops and for the district attorney. A treasure chest, all in all.
Too much evidence, I’ve thought all along.
In too many rooms.
Too pretty a picture.
Ahearn painstakingly has Liam Murphy take the jury through all of it now, as if it’s a house tour.
Finally I think they’re done, and I’m ready to cross, step right up and ask Officer Liam Murphy if he’s ever seen this much trace DNA at any crime scene.
But Ahearn isn’t quite done.
He walks back to his table, pulls a photograph and a sheet of paper out of the folder on top of a stack of papers there, walks it past the jury and up to Judge Prentice, who covers his microphone as he and Ahearn have a brief conversation.
I stand up.
“No keeping secrets,” I say.
Prentice glares at me. It’s already become like a default move for him, like reaching for his gavel just about every time I object.
