The Ex Read Online Free PDF Page B

bluff. Or play it safe and call ADA Scott Temple. Tell him exactly what I said to you, and then see what happens. Things will be interesting either way, Detective, I promise.”
    JACK WAS TAPPING THE TABLE so loudly that my head was starting to throb, my hangover resurfacing. I knew that every minute that passed without him getting moved to MDC was a good sign, but Jack was growing more anxious by the second.
    I pulled a notepad from my briefcase and slid it across the table with a pen. “Your computer information. All your e-mail accounts and passwords. Your Web provider. Any social media pages. Everything.” It would keep him busy, or at least his hands from that incessant tapping.
    When he nudged the pad back in my direction, I blinked at the sight of a tidy list in neat, round, perfect, familiar print. Even with the cuffs, he was like a human Cambria font.
    [email protected]
    [email protected]
    [email protected]
    Facebook.com/jackharrisauthor
    @Jackharrisbooks
    Wow, Jack on Twitter. Somehow I had missed that in my late-night drunken cyberstalking over the years.
    “Passwords, too,” I said.
    “It’s the same for everything, down at the bottom of the page.”
    Volunteered to go to the station. Didn’t lawyer up. Consented to a GSR swab. And one password for every account. He was still the same, naive Jack.
    At least the password wasn’t “password.”
    He had written:
    jack<3smollybuckley
    It took a second to register. Less than, like the math symbol, followed by the number 3. The two shapes together formed a heart. Jack loves Molly and Buckley.
    “It was an easy way for all of us to remember our passwords when we first set up the accounts. Molly’s was Molly loves Jack and Buckley. And so on.”
    “Sweet,” I said, because it seemed like something I should say.
    “The Olivia I knew would be more like—” He made a gagging gesture with his finger and laughed quietly. “Hey, I don’t know why I feel the need to say this, but I’m not some blubbering fool who falls in love with a pretty woman at the park. Or, despite all appearances, some imbecile who gets railroaded by police saying they’re on a routine canvass. I mean, how many times have I wondered what you would think of me if we ever saw each other again, and here I am, some pathetic pushover.”
    So he had wondered, too. “None of that matters right now, Jack.”
    “No, I guess not. But I do want to thank you—for coming here, and for staying. I mean it. I don’t know what I’d do if I didn’t have someone who knows me—who knows I couldn’t have done this—on my side. You scared me with that ‘call my bluff’ business, but I think whatever you said may have rattled him.”
    I had given Jimmy Boyle two choices—process Jack as he planned, or call ADA Scott Temple. At that moment, I placed the odds at fifty-fifty.
    Once the room fell silent, I was the one getting nervous. I pulled out my cell phone and called the office. Einer picked up, as I expected. “Good afternoon, Ellison and Randall.”
    “Einer, it’s Olivia.”
    “Hey, mamacita.” For reasons that remained a mystery, Einer Ronald Erickson Wagner, raised by law professors in Connecticut, had decided to co-opt myriad distinctly non-WASPy linguistic styles. “You coming in today? Don was asking.”
    I did not want to think about what Don would say when he found out about our new client. “I’m following up on that kid’s call. You got a second?”
    Einer was a jack-of-all-trades, but the fact that Don and I were almost completely dependent on him for any computer work that went beyond basic e-mail and Google explained why we put up with hismany eccentricities. I gave him an extremely truncated version of the facts: a missed-moment post on the Room, followed by some e-mail messages back and forth. I asked him to find the original post, the e-mails between Jack and Madeline, and, most important, whatever information he could track down about Madeline.
    “Sounds