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Put my bag on the front hall table, take out my gun, put it in the top drawer.
I am about to check my phone for messages, having had it on silent all the way home so I could listen to Keith Urban, when I walk back to the door and open it.
And then say to the dog what I’ve always hated saying to anybody.
“You win.”
I get him a bowl of water. Then I open the refrigerator, chop up some leftover chicken into a bowl of rice and heat it all up in the microwave.
The dog is right behind me the whole time.
“You’re an idiot.”
Not talking to the dog.
Talking to myself.
After he finishes eating, I tell him that I might as well give him a name.
Rip.
Rest in peace.
Twenty-Nine
LATE THE NEXT MORNINGAhearn calls Otis Miller to the stand.
Nick Morelli, the fisherman still missing and presumed dead, really wasn’t Ahearn’s star witness.
Otis Miller, though, is. Ahearn knows it. I already know it. The jury is about to find out, in the place my old man used to refer to as Macy’s window.
Miller lives three doors down from the house Mitch Gates rented for his family. He’s Bridgehampton, born and raised, the son of a potato farmer. Just the beginning of a pretty fascinating backstory. Prominent architect. Iraq vet, Army Intelligence, finally checked out with a Purple Heart and PTSD as parting gifts. He’s written in theEast Hampton Starabout that, and openly about being a recovering alcoholic, and one who’d come home from the war addicted to opioids before rehab. He even writes long, intelligent letters to theStarabout everything he thinks is wrong with the Hamptons, which is a lot.
I am always comparing good-looking guys to actors. Otis Miller isn’t as pretty as Pierce Brosnan, the James Bond before the most recent one. But he reminds me a little of Brosnan. A lot of silver hair. Beard. Good tan. Hard body.
All in all, my kind of guy.
Just not today.
Because Otis Miller is up there trying to kill me—and killing my client in the process.
He is testifying now that on one of his long, nightly walks around the neighborhood, ones that sometimes take him all the way into town and back, he nearly got hit by a car that came flying out of the Gateses’ driveway, spitting gravel and forcing Miller to dive for safety into the bushes in front of the rental house.
He found out the next morning what had happened inside the house. He hadn’t heard shots; no one else in the neighborhood had, either.
But there was more than enough light, because of a full moon—I know this the same way Ahearn does, because Jimmy and I have checked—for Otis Miller to see Rob Jacobson behind the wheel of that car, a black Mercedes.
“You’re certain of this,” Kevin Ahearn says.
“I have lived here my whole life. I have built houses that Mr. Jacobson has sold. By now I know what he looks like, even without the ads.”
“Did you think it was unusual,” Ahearn says, “Mr. Jacobson driving that quickly?”
“Like I said, I know him. He had a DUI a couple of years ago. I actually thought he might be drunk.”
“Objection!” I’m standing. “Your Honor, to call that conjecture is insulting to actual conjecture.”
“Sustained.”
