The 6:20 Man

Chapter 27

The admin cubicles up here were not occupied. These folks simply earned a salary, no more and no less, regardless of how hard they worked. So unless there was some sort of apocalypse, they came in at nine and left at five or close to it.

Jerry Myers was up a ladder down one of the halls. The suits hadn’t arrived en masse yet here either, Devine knew. He would have heard fingers clacking on computer keyboards behind the closed doors. Most of his kind got in around eight but didn’t leave until around nine at night. And there were no watercooler breaks at Cowl and Comely. It was pedal to the metal until lights out.

“Mr. Myers?”

The man turned on the ladder and looked down at him. He was about Devine’s height, barrel-chested and strongly built, around forty-five with a thick head of dark hair.

“Yeah?”

“I’m Travis Devine. I work here. I was a friend of Sara Ewes.”

Myers finished with the lights, clipped the cover shut, and climbed down. “That was the worst damn day of my life,” he muttered.

“I bet. It must have been traumatic as hell.”

Myers folded up the ladder and picked up a box of light tubes. He looked at Devine and said, “You want something?”

“Sam told me about you finding her and then mentioned you were up here replacing some lights.”

“Okay, so?”

Devine thought quickly, realizing he was close to blowing this whole thing. “Like I said, I was a friend of hers. I still can’t believe she’s dead. First they said suicide, and now it’s murder. I mean, what the hell, right?”

Myers looked sympathetically at him now. “Yeah, it was a gut punch for everybody. It sure as hell looked like a suicide to me, but what do I know? I never found a dead body before.”

Devine picked up on this. “You found her around eight thirty or so?”

“Something like that, yeah. Told the cops that.”

He started to walk down the hall and Devine kept pace with him as he thought of his next question.

“Sam said you came to the lobby to tell him and that he called the police.”

“That’s right. I was shaking like a baby. Could barely hit the elevator button or swipe my card through.”

“What’d you go in the room for?” asked Devine.

“Look, I already told the cops all this.”

“I know,” said Devine quickly. “It’s... it’s just that we were friends and this has really shaken me to my core. I just want to know some of what you know. It might help me process all this.”

Myers studied him curiously for a moment and then nodded. “Okay, I can understand that. The fact is, I went in there to get a damn printer cartridge, if you can believe that. Got a message that one of the big printers in the business center on that floor was low and needed to be replaced. Opened the door and there she was. My ticker must be strong, otherwise I’d be dead.”

“I bet. So is that room normally kept locked?”

“I don’t know about normally. I know I had to use my key to unlock it that morning.”

The ladder banged against Myers’s leg.

“Here, I’ll take that,” said Devine. He relieved the man of the piece of equipment.

“Thanks.”

“Was it a Detective Hancock who told you that Sara had been murdered? Black guy in his forties?”

“No. I heard it on the news, I guess along with everybody else.”

He stopped at a point in the hall and he and Devine set up his ladder. Devine held the ladder steady for him, took the old light from him when he handed it down, and passed him a new light. Myers put it in, clambered back down, and they moved on.

“Was there anyone around when you found her? I mean, in the other offices near the storage room?”

“None of the secretaries were in, least that I saw. Little bit too early for them. I can’t say one way or another for anybody in their offices. Can’t remember hearing or seeing anybody. Told the cops that, too.” He shook his head. “Stupid me, I coulda called down to the security desk from my phone, or any of the other phones up there. But I was so...” He shook his head again and glanced up at Devine. “You ever find a dead body?”

“No,” Devine lied.

“Well, I hope you never do.”

“So you came back up here with Sam, and then what?”

“He took a look-see in the room, probably just to make sure I was telling the truth.”

“And did you notice anyone around then?”

Myers stopped and looked suspiciously at him. “Come on, I know you said you were friends, but why all these questions, buddy? You sound like a cop.”

Devine was now ready for this. “I was in the military. Army Ranger. I have experience with the Army CID.”

“Oh, okay. Hey, thank you for your service.”

“You look like you might have worn the uniform.”

“Wanted to, but my eyesight and hearing weren’t good enough. Failed the physical. Wear a hearing aid and contacts, but they got minimums even with that.”

“Yeah, I know. So anyone else around?”

“Not that I could see. Quiet as a...”

“...tomb?” said Devine.

Myers visibly shuddered. “Yeah. About the time the cops got here some of the secretaries were arriving.”

“How about the suits, meaning nonadmin people?”

“Nope, don’t remember seeing any of them.”

“But isn’t that strange? They all get in before the staff.”

“Don’t know what to tell you.” He glanced at Devine. “Is that what you do here?”

“Yeah. But I work on another floor. Then the cops secured the room and started clearing the space?”

“Yeah, but only after the detectives showed up, you know, those guys in suits. Until then, they wouldn’t let anyone off the floor, including me. Later, they took folks down to a conference room on another floor. I guess to take statements and such. That’s where the cops took my statement and then cut me loose. I went outside and just walked around. I couldn’t get her image out of my head.”

“How long do you think it was between the time you left the body and then returned?”

Myers knitted his brows and then said, “I had to explain things to Sam, and I was all tongue-tied, so that took a bit. Then he had to call the cops, then he had to get another guy to cover the lobby. Mighta been like six, eight minutes, something like that. Maybe a little longer. I wasn’t looking at my watch. I do know after we got back up no one went near that door other than me and Sam.”

“Okay, look, I appreciate your time.”

Myers studied him for an uncomfortably long moment. “You two must’ve been really good friends.”

“We were.”

He left Myers and walked back out into one of the main areas for the secretarial staff. Grunts like him were sequestered in large interior, windowless offices separated into cubicles, so their focus would be total. The company executives had the corner offices with views outside. He walked through the staff slots until he spied an empty space. No photos, flowers, other personal touches. But it did have a computer. With the log-in information for the computer helpfully printed on a Post-it note stuck to the screen. Decent security defeated by a tiny slip of yellow paper and a lazy or forgetful employee.

He sat down and used the information Valentine had sent him to get into the security logging database.

He typed in the search. Who had accessed the fifty-second floor on Friday morning? Because it would all be in there, and at least that would tell him who was around. It was likely that whoever had sent him the email had killed Ewes. And the person would have been in the building the previous night between midnight and four. But there was still a chance that someone else had killed Ewes, and the email sender had simply seen Ewes’s body between the time Myers had found it and when he and Sam had returned to the fifty-second floor. If so, Devine wanted to find that person. And ask them why Devine had been sent the email.

Did they know about me and Sara?

He waited for the names associated with the swipe cards to cascade down the screen. At that time in the morning, the floor should have been filled with stiffs like him.

He was thus stunned when not a single name, other than Jerry Myers, appeared on the screen as having accessed that floor on Friday morning. How was that possible? He did another search and then popped his head up for a moment to make sure the coast was still clear. He checked his watch. He still had time.

Okay, now he was going for the big fish as he put in his search parameters. Who had not left the building the night Ewes was killed? Before he hit the Return key to initiate the search he recognized there was a flaw in this methodology. If people had left in a group at night, which they often did, it would only take one of their security swipe cards to send all of them down to the lobby. And you didn’t need your card to leave the building after hours; you just hit an exit button set next to the doors. You also didn’t need your card to enter the building during normal business hours, but you did need it to access the elevators. So the electronic count of the people coming and going really wouldn’t be accurate. But the record of anyone’s coming into the building within the time frame the cops were looking at would clearly be relevant, since no group would be coming in between midnight and four o’clock.

He also checked the log and saw that Ewes had used her security card and arrived on Thursday morning at seven thirty. However, there was no record of her taking the elevator down that evening. That could have been because she left with a group, so he checked to see if Ewes had returned later that night. But there was no record of that, either. She had probably never left because someone had prevented her from doing so by killing her. But why had she been there that late in the first place? Was she working, or maybe meeting someone? Like Brad Cowl? Like Jennifer Stamos had?

He modified his search and hit the Return key. And waited.

It didn’t take long. Only one name came up. Logged in at midnight and logged out at one ten on Friday morning. Perfect window to kill Sara Ewes.

He looked at the name, both seeing it and trying to unsee it.

Travis R. Devine.