Page 146 of The Hamptons Lawyer

“For the exercise, Batman?”

“Because I still feel like there’s somethingwe’remissing,” Jimmy says.

“Another feeling?”

“Go ahead and kid,” Jimmy says. “But yeah.”

“Those feelings ever wrong?”

“Hardly ever.”

They head outside and separate again, Jimmy going right, Esposito going left. They’ve both noticed the Ring doorbellcamera over the front door and know from the police reports that there are three others on the house, one on the right side, one on the left, one over the back door. All had been deactivated, they learned from the Garden City cops, on the night of the murders.

“Paranoid much, Hank?” Esposito says.

“And in the end,” Jimmy says, “all the security in the world did him no freaking good.”

“Guns win again,” Esposito says. “Amazing how often it works out that way.”

They are standing in the middle of the back patio. The lawn that stretches out in front of them looks perfectly manicured, which means someone is attending to it, maybe the bank that now holds the paper on the house and is getting ready to sell it as soon as the trial ends. Did the killer come through the door here, or the one in front, or even through a window? They’ll probably never know.

Jimmy notices the hummingbird feeder, full of rust now, but still hanging from the sturdy branch of a small tree on the other side of a low brick wall.

He thinks:What is it with women and these damn twitchy birds?

Suddenly, though, he is staring at the feeder, as if he’s being pulled toward it by some kind of weird magnetic force, no birds in sight; Jimmy knows from Jane that they’re supposed to have migrated south for the winter, Jane sounding as sad when she told him this as if Rip the dog had run away.

Jesus Christ,he thinks.

The old altar boy in him has him bowing his head, even though he hasn’t said the Lord’s name out loud.

He walks toward the feeder, until he is right in front of it, now frozen in place, eyes fixed on the feeder.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” he says softly.

Esposito walks over now. “What?” he asks.

Jimmy reaches over and puts his finger on a small camera set into the top of the feeder, almost invisible against theblack paint, as small as the camera he sewed into his Yankee cap.

“This is what,” Jimmy says, pointing.

Esposito leans closer. “I had a girlfriend had one of these,” he says. “You can take pictures of the birds with this thing.”

“Maybe not just birds,” Jimmy Cunniff says.

ONE HUNDRED FOURTEEN

IT TAKES JIMMY AND Esposito all of the next day to find what they hoped they might find, if they finally did catch a break.

The separate company that Hank Carson had hired to install the camera in the feeder—called WeSeeU, an outfit neither Jimmy nor Esposito has ever heard of—wouldn’t even talk to them until Danny got a court order. Once he did, they checked back on Hank Carson’s account and told them that the camera was still operational on the date in question, the night the murders at the Carson home had been committed, the battery not dying until a month or so later.

But whatever footage there was, from that night and the time leading up to it, was stored on Hank Carson’s iCloud.

Jimmy and Esposito have set up shop at Jimmy’s house by now. Court wasn’t in session today because Katherine Welsh requested an additional twenty-four hours—and perhaps more than that—to prepare for cross-examining Rob Jacobson once Thomas McGoey finishes with him.

Welsh doesn’t know that Jane has quit the case. Apparently, the judge hasn’t said anything to Welsh, because he thinks Jane will change her mind. It just says to Jimmy that Judge Michael Horton hasn’t been paying close enough attention to the action.

Jimmy and Danny Esposito are seated side-by-side at Jimmy’s kitchen table now, both of them staring at the screen of Jimmy’s laptop. It turns out that Carson, paranoid to the end, had separate iCloud accounts, too.