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C arter had no problem spotting Christine Harper standing alone on Railroad Avenue. As she had described over the phone, she had shoulder-length strawberry blond hair and was wearing a purple T-shirt and white shorts. One hand shielded her eyes as she searched from one end of the street to the other. Carter approached cautiously. “Christine Harper?” he asked.

Christine’s eyes met his, and relief washed over her face. “Oh good, you’re here. Just you?” She shifted her hot-pink roller bag to make way on the sidewalk for other train passengers searching for their rides .

Carter had been irritated when Christine insisted on meeting him in person to tell him what she knew. She was probably one of those people who binged crime shows where the worn and weary detective magically discerns the truth about a witness’s character by searching their souls with a look in the eyes. “Were you expecting a cavalry?”

“I didn’t know what to expect. My head’s reeling. I still can’t believe this is happening. There was some part of me afraid that Dave’s mother would have pulled all her strings to have me rounded up and waterboarded. From what I’ve heard, she’s calling everyone Dave has ever met—or at least the ones she knows about. Someone told her I was the one here with him and that I was still in New York, and she was talking about having me arrested. My mother was asking if I needed a lawyer and is freaking out.”

“Well, let’s start by finding somewhere a little more private.” He led the way to his Dodge Charger and opened the passenger door. “Front seat, not the back. You’re not in custody, to be clear. And you don’t need to come with me, in fact. If you’d prefer to talk in a coffee shop, or not talk at all, this is all completely voluntary. You understand that?”

She looked at the open car door and then to him. “But is it actually voluntary? Or is this like on TV shows where the police tell the guy he’s not under arrest and is free to go, but then arrest him anyway when he tries to leave?”

He smiled. He’d been right about the television thing. “It’s voluntary-voluntary. If you want to test it, you can wave that cabbie over right now. His name’s Al. I promise I won’t stop you.”

“I know I sounded confident and everything on the phone, but that’s how I get when I’m overcompensating. I’m legit scared right now.”

“I get it.” He pointed to the handle of her roller bag. “Can I take this now?”

*

Once they were on Newtown Lane, he told her that instead of him asking a bunch of questions, he’d like to hear from her about the trip with David.

“Starting from when?”

“Whenever you think you should start.”

“Well, we came down Friday morning from Providence. We drove onto a ferry and then I think another two short ferries. Got here midafternoon. Had lunch at the hotel. Um, I kept calling it ‘Gansevoort,’ but it’s not that. You probably know already.”

“Gurney’s, I think?”

He saw her nod in his periphery. “That’s it. Then we drove out to Montauk village and walked around. Looked at a few shops. I bought a T-shirt for my niece. Then we went back to the hotel. We both had work emails to deal with since we’d been offline all day, so we sat out on the deck, enjoying the view of the ocean.”

“And David seemed normal during all of this? No reason to be upset or nervous about anything?”

She shook her head. “No, it was all fine. Then we went to a different town called Sag Harbor. I’ve never been to the Hamptons and had read that there are a lot of nice little shops in that area, and I knew our dinner reservation was there—at a place called Page. And all of that was fine, too. But then after dinner, we came back to our car and there was something on the windshield. At first, David thought it was a parking ticket and got really annoyed because we hadn’t seen a meter or anything. But as we got closer, I realized it looked more like a napkin tucked under the wiper. It was on my side of the car, so I was the one who removed it. It was a handwritten note.”

“And what did it say?” Carter asked, hitting mute to silence his dash-top radio.

Christine hesitated a beat before answering. “It said ‘He’s cheating. He always does.’”

He could see why she had paused. A scorned woman who had already admitted having a heated argument with her missing boyfriend the last time she saw him makes for a pretty good primary suspect. “And then?” he prompted.

“I walked back over to his side of the car and just held it up so he could read it too. He kind of squinted at first like he didn’t even get it and then he started laughing and grabbed the note and balled it up. He seemed surprised when I didn’t find it so funny. So I said, ‘Well?’ And he kind of scoffed, so I said, ‘Are you?’ He totally denied it, saying I couldn’t possibly think someone would tell me he was cheating with an anonymous note. I wanted to believe him, but honestly, why would someone make that up? Which is what I said to Dave. He said it was probably some stupid TikTok thing. People messing with strangers to start fights and record them. I wasn’t sure what to believe, but I figured it was best either way not to make a public scene on the sidewalk. People record everything nowadays for spectacle.”

“What happened to the napkin?”

She pursed her lips, trying to remember. “He tossed it in a trash can down the street.”

“So then what happened?”

Christine looked down, her fingers nervously fiddling with the cell phone in her lap. “I pretended to let the issue drop. We had a couple of drinks at the hotel bar. We went back to the room. We had … like I said, I pretended everything was normal.”

“I assume you mean sex.”

“Yes. And afterward, I fell asleep. By the time I woke up on Saturday, he was already awake and at the hotel gym. I tried to get into his phone while he was in the shower, but it was locked. Then we went to brunch … I don’t know what it was called. It was at an inn that looked like a big house. It was really nice.”

“There was a charge on his card for Topping Rose?”

“Yes, that’s the place. The whole time we were there, I was looking at him, trying to tell myself it was all in my head. I pictured some bored teenagers leaving notes on cars, trying to stir people up for shits and giggles. My mom told me when she worked at the mall in the eighties, she and her friends would superglue quarters to the tile floor and then hide behind the cashier’s desk to watch people bend over and then freak out because they knew they’d been punked. I really, really wanted him to be telling me the truth,” she said, sounding genuinely hurt. “But my suspicions kept eating at me.”

Whether she intended to or not, Christine was dragging out the details of what happened. Maybe she was trying to win his favor by coming across as likable. Or maybe she was replaying her thoughts because part of her regretted whatever she might have really done to her boyfriend.

“And you didn’t let it drop,” he said.

“No. When he dozed off for a nap in the hotel after we went to the beach, I held up his phone to his face. I wasn’t sure it would work since his eyes were closed, but it did.”

“It depends on the settings,” Carter said. He had changed his own after growing tired of his phone refusing to unlock if he was wearing sunglasses.

“I looked at his texts first. Then his photographs. No suspicious messages. No nudes. I scrolled through his apps. No Tinder, Bumble, OkCupid, or whatever. I really was ready to stop worrying. And then I opened his Instagram. I don’t do much social media for myself because I think of it as work, so I never noticed how many women he was following. Lots of flirty messages going back months. Women he met at bars. In airports. Old classmates from high school. Seemed like a third of them were married. And it was clear from the direct messages that he was doing more than following some of these women. There were messages about meeting up for drinks, had fun last night, that kind of thing. My guess is he may also have been texting these women too, but then deleting the messages so I wouldn’t see them.”

So far, everything Christine had told him was consistent with what he’d heard about David from his friend Simon.

“So what did you do after you discovered all the Instagram activity?”

“I woke his ass up and confronted him,” Christine replied, anger creeping into her voice. “He denied any actual cheating, but it was too obvious from the messages. He was totally gaslighting me. Calling me crazy and paranoid,” Christine said, the pitch of her voice rising. “Then when he finally admitted it, he told me he thought he had a ‘love addiction.’ His college girlfriend died the summer after graduation at some camp, and he started blaming that. I didn’t really see the connection. I told him he was just making excuses. Then he made it sound like he was somehow the victim, complaining that someone catfished him.”

David’s friend Simon had told Carter that David had fallen hard for someone who turned out to be a “crackpot.” “David told you he was catfished?” he asked.

“He didn’t use that word, but he said some woman used a fake name to dupe him into falling in love with her, as if I was supposed to feel sorry for him. I said he was looking for sympathy when the truth is he was a giant narcissist who thrived on female attention. He lashed out and told me I was a monster—like I was the bad guy. I was so fucking mad. Sorry, language. I grabbed a little figurine from the hotel dresser—it was a bird—and threw it. I wasn’t aiming at him, I promise. I was just pissed. I mean, we had just slept together the previous night and he was lying right to my face, saying I was ridiculous not to believe him. It hit the wall and shattered. He started calling me crazy, so I packed up my stuff as fast as I could and got out of there. I took an Uber to the Amagansett train station and got on the next train to the city to stay with my friend.”

“And have you spoken to David since then? ”

“No.”

“He didn’t call or text you? Try to convince you to come back?”

She shook her head. “Oh, I think we both made it pretty clear there would be no going back.”

Carter had not found anything disrupted in the hotel room when he initially searched it, and the hotel staff only realized the bird figurine was missing when Carter specifically asked them about it after Christine’s call. Apparently the housekeepers didn’t take an inventory of missing or damaged items until checkout. Was it possible Christine cleaned up the scene after the fight and was only telling the truth now because the hotel would notice the bird was missing? Or had David Smith cleaned it up himself after Christine left on her own, just as she was saying she did?

Carter nodded. “Let me shift direction for a second. Is there anything else unusual that came up during your trip?”

She was biting her lip as she shook her head.

“Did David say anything about maybe purchasing drugs or any other kind of meetup that might have taken a bad turn?”

She shook her head again, this time a bit less emphatically. “I mean … unless he decided to try to find another woman to spend the rest of the weekend with, but obviously I wouldn’t know that.”

“What about any phone calls that seemed unusual? ”

She shrugged. “We were both on the phone a lot. Work never ends, you know? But nothing that seemed to be bothering him.”

He flipped his sun visor down and handed her the list of weekend calls from David’s phone that he had stashed there. He watched as her eyes scanned the pages. It seemed to line up with the times she recalled him on the phone, she said, but she couldn’t add to the information. He called specific attention to an incoming call late Friday night from a Rhode Island number that Carter had not been able to lock down yet.

“I was already asleep by then, and that number doesn’t look familiar. Sorry.”

He only had one question left by the time he pulled into the station parking lot. “How long had the trip here been in the works? Did you two plan it together?”

Christine sighed. “I have no idea. I found out by accident. He opened the Resy app for us to look at dinner options in Providence, and I noticed that the location that popped up was the Hamptons. When I asked him if he was planning a trip, he told me it was supposed to be a surprise.”

“And when exactly was that?”

“I don’t know … two weeks ago? It was a Friday night, so I guess two and a half weeks ago.”

According to Simon, Smith was originally planning to bring a different woman to East Hampton, but Christine didn’t seem to know that yet. Smith’s hotel reservation was booked the morning after Christine had seen the Hamptons restaurant search on his phone. Carter’s best guess was that Smith felt locked into taking Christine after she saw that he’d been looking at restaurants in the Hamptons.

The lies, the other women, a shattered clay bird—none of this painted a picture of a happy couple, but the fact that Christine was being so forthright about the ugly details suggested to Carter that she might be telling something close to the truth. He’d call her friend to confirm she really had been in the city since last Saturday, but if so, that did not bode well for David Smith. It was looking increasingly unlikely that Smith was just off having fun, as Carter had originally hoped. Maybe he went looking for a party and found the wrong drug dealer. Accidental fentanyl deaths were spiking again. Or maybe his goal had been a new hotel companion, and he ran afoul of the wrong boyfriend or husband.

In the police lot, Carter pulled Christine’s bag from his trunk and led the way to the station. “I’ll get a more formal statement from you in writing if that’s okay, and then we can get you on your way.”

They were greeted inside the lobby by a loud, imperious voice. “I’m only asking you one simple question. Have you received any new information about my son’s disappearance or not?” The voice’s owner placed her handbag on the reception counter. She had a silver-gray bob and wore a bright blue linen blazer with a black skirt.

“As I told you before, ma’am, let me find a place for you to wait until I can reach the detective in charge.” Tim Keene, the on-duty desk sergeant, sounded harried. Clearly this exchange had been going on for some time.

“His last name is Decker. I have his number.” She pulled a cell phone from her purse.

Carter asked Christine to take a seat on a bench in the foyer, then approached the front desk. “I’m here. I’m Carter Decker.”

She looked him up and down, not bothering to mask her displeasure. “I’m David’s mother, Tinsley Smith.”