“Jennifer Stamos.”
“I didn’t know her name until I overheard you talking to her outside the town house.”
Shit, thought Devine. Her room overlooks the front of the house. She heard everything. And that conversation signed Stamos’s death warrant.
“The night she died you were up early. You said you had a Zoom interview with a magazine in the Netherlands.”
“There was no interview. But I had just gotten back from killing her and you caught me, so I had to come up with something.”
“You didn’t have any blood on you or anything.”
“I wore scrubs over my clothes and booties on my feet and then got rid of them in a Dumpster.”
“You mutilated her body, Jill.”
“She took Sara from me. So I had to take something from her.”
“You were also probably worried that Sara had told Stamos about you. But I never mentioned you to Sara or Jenn; there would have been no reason to. But you couldn’t chance that. Jenn was smart. She might put two and two together. And I got the emails telling me of their deaths. That was you, right? The untraceable emails.”
“I wanted you to know. I wanted you to feel guilt that you helped cause Sara’s death. And the others’， too. And making those emails work the way I did was a challenge. I enjoyed it. These internet assholes think they control everything. Well, I just blew that up, didn’t I? A little old girl.”
“And you went out the night that the Eweses were killed. You stabbed them in the heart.”
“Yes, while you were probably screwing Speers. I know you two were lusting after each other.”
“Do you have any idea where she is? Did you kill her, too?”
“I had no reason to kill her.”
“But you hired Jerry Myers to kill Sara. How did you and Myers hook up?”
“He was Hummingbird subscriber seven thousand nine hundred and four. Lonely man with several bad relationships and one lousy marriage behind him looking for warmth, humor, and female companionship. New York Giants and New York Mets fans and beer drinkers particularly welcome,” she said, apparently reciting his profile from memory.
“But how did you get him to do it?”
“He had been to prison. I found that out. It wasn’t in his profile. He did it because I paid him and paid him well. He was just that sort of guy.”
“But then he bought the truck?”
“It wasn’t just that. He came back to me for more money. I paid him. He came back again for more. He left me no other choice. I don’t like people who break their word.”
“How did he get Sara alone?”
“I sent an email to Sara that she thought was from Brad Cowl basically ordering her to pull an all-nighter to meet a deadline. I later deleted it completely. And I mean completely. I know how. The NSA desperately wanted me to work for them, and I did for a year, which I never told anyone about. The NSA usually signs you to five-year deals. They don’t like turnover for obvious reasons. But what were they going to do to me? They could keep me from getting another government job, but I didn’t want that. So they had no leverage. But the bottom line is that I know how to wipe things clean. Jerry had never left the building. He hid in the storage closet where Sara was found. He waited until very late to make sure no one was around, went to her office, strangled her, and then strung her up.”
“Hanged her for, what, being a traitor? To you?”
“To me and our baby. I had earlier hacked into the firm’s calendar and found out about the M and A seminar the next day. That made it perfect for Jerry to kill her the night before. I told him no one would suspect him if he was the one to find the body. And you don’t need your card to enter or leave the building during normal business hours. And Jerry had ridden up on the elevator to the fifty-second floor with some other people he knew worked on that floor, so he didn’t have to use his card. After he killed Sara he slept in a spare office and showed up for work in his uniform.”
“But he would need his security card to take the elevator down from the fifty-second.”
“No, he just used the stairs. There are so many people coming in during the morning that there was no way to say for sure he wasn’t in one of those groups. And while he was doing some work in the lobby the day before, Jerry shifted the camera positions just a bit to make it pretty much impossible to verify who came and went through each day. And the guard isn’t there every minute. Then Jerry took the elevator up using his card the next morning and started his duties. On the fifty-second floor.”