The 6:20 Man

Chapter 3

When he heard the ding while he was sitting at his desk at Cowl and Comely, Devine checked the message on his phone’s personal email. He looked at it for a long moment, wondering whether it was a joke or he had simply lost the ability to read.

It was the shortest of declarative sentences, its noun, verb, and predicate adjective filled with ominous potency.

Then he checked out the rest of the email.

Apparently, Sara Ewes had been found hanging in a storage room on the fifty-second floor of the very building Devine was in, the message told him. She had been found by a janitor, her high heels lying on the floor beneath her. The woman’s neck was elongated, her spine cracked, her life over. Or so the mysterious note said.

She had just turned twenty-eight, Devine knew, and had been at Cowl and Comely a little over six years. Ewes was tall and lean, with a long-distance runner’s build. No slouch academically, she’d earned her MBA from Columbia while toiling here, and had obviously made the cut. Normally, the weed-out was complete after one year. Devine had been here six months, which meant he had another six to go before he was either shown the door or elevated to the next level.

He looked at the missive again. Sara dead? It can’t be.

Devine had secretly dated Ewes while they both worked at Cowl. They had slept together, but only once. He had wanted more, maybe much more, in the way of a relationship with her. But then it was over. And now she was dead?

He focused on the sender. He didn’t recognize the email address at all. In fact, he suddenly realized, it didn’t look like any email address he’d ever seen. It didn’t have a domain name, or a suffix like dot-com or dot-gov. It wasn’t a Gmail. It was just a series of numbers. Who had sent it? And how? And why to him?

He looked around at the other cubicles where fingers rat-atatted keys and commerce moved on and fortunes were won or given back. This email hadn’t gone out to his company email account. The compliance folks would be able to see all of that. This had come directly to his personal email. And no one around him was reacting like they had gotten a similar message.

Am I the only one that got it? Is it for real? Is it a hoax? Is Sara really dead?

He wrote a reply to the email: Who is this? And sent it off. Then he looked at his screen and saw that his reply had failed to go. He tried again with the same result.

Okay, this seems to be a one-way message stream.

Devine rose and headed for the door. Not one head lifted to see him leaving. Their battle was won on the screens in front of them and by the amount of time their butts stayed in these chairs. The pie just got one slice bigger, some of them were doubtless thinking, as they heard Devine walk out.

He stepped onto the elevator and headed to the fifty-second floor. As he approached the fifty-first, on impulse, he hit the button for that floor. But even with his security card, the floor button did not light up. In his six months at the firm, Devine had never met anyone who had access to that floor. It was known, informally, as Area 51. He had heard rumors that no one worked on that floor. He had been on the sidewalk and counted the floors from the top down to the fifty-first, and wondered what was really going on there. Then again, it might just be the firm’s high-frequency trading platform. All the major investment houses had them.

As soon as the elevator doors opened, a uniformed policeman stationed there came forward and put his hand out to stop Devine.

Something’s happened, thought Devine. The email wasn’t a sick joke. He felt a wave of dread spill over his body.

“Floor’s closed, sir.”

Devine lied and said, “But I work on this floor.”

“Not today you don’t,” said the cop, and he looked like he meant it. “Nobody does.”

Devine caught the eye of Wanda Simms, a senior member of staff who had been assigned as the admin liaison for his incoming class of Burners, as the group of interns was known — as in burning the candle at both ends. She hurried over to him, looking gray and haggard.

He hit the button to hold the doors open.

“Oh, it’s terrible, Travis, just terrible. They’re keeping everyone off the floor. I just had to go around and check to make sure no one was here.”

She was around fifty and dressed diplomatically in the preapproved black dress and black hose and black shoes attire of Cowl and Comely, but it could have been Goldman Sachs, BlackRock, JP Morgan, Merrill Lynch, or any of the other usual suspects. Glasses dangled from a chain around her neck, along with her security RFID card on a lanyard.

“Why, what’s happened? What’s going on, Wanda?”

She seemed flustered enough to not wonder why he was on this floor during the workday.

“You haven’t heard? It’s Sara Ewes. Did you know her? I remember she was a mentor to your class of interns.”

“No, not very well,” he lied. “What happened to her?”

“She’s dead.”

He didn’t have to pretend to be surprised. The realization that the message was accurate hit him like an IED. “Dead! What happened?”

“She killed herself, or so I overheard the police saying. Hanged herself.”

Oh my God.

“Folks, if you don’t mind, thanks,” butted in the cop.

Simms took Devine’s arm. “Come on, I can talk on the way.”

She swiped her card through the reader in the elevator car and pushed the button for the ground floor.

“Wait, what floor are you?” she asked. “I can never keep track.”

“I’ll go all the way. I have an errand to run.”

She made a show of hiking her eyebrows. As a rule, death in the building or not, Burners didn’t leave their desks until it was time to slink home and fall asleep for a few pitiful hours before the hamster wheel started to crank again.

“So, about Sara?”

The doors closed and Simms said, “One of the custodians found her in the supply closet this morning hanging from the ceiling. Apparently, she lifted one of the panels, hung a cord around a metal pipe there, and jumped off a chair.”

The person who sent me that note knew all of this. How? And why tell me? “When was she supposed to have done this?”

“Late last night or very, very early this morning. It seems she had on her same clothes from yesterday. I guess they can tell from the condition of the body how long she’d been dead,” she added, turning pale.

“Meaning she never went home?”

“Apparently not.”

He thought about the email. “Did she leave a note?”

“Not that I’ve heard. And she seemed so levelheaded. You probably know she worked in the M and A Division,” she added, referring to Mergers and Acquisitions. “She was really going places. The sky was the limit. Mr. Cowl was her personal mentor.”

“I can’t believe she’s dead.”

“I’ve never even seen a dead body, I mean, not unless it was in a coffin. Have you?”

Devine eyed her and said truthfully, “Never in an office building.”

“Her parents will be an absolute wreck. They live out of the country, so it will take a bit of time for them to get here. And it certainly won’t be a good look for the firm.” She put a hand to her mouth. “Oh, I shouldn’t have said that. I mean, someone has died.”

They reached the ground floor and Simms stepped off. “Aren’t you coming?”

“I forgot I have something to finish up,” said Devine. “I’ll see you later.”

Devine swiped his card in the reader and pushed the button for his floor. He imagined Sara Ewes doing this yesterday and perhaps not knowing it would be the last time she ever would. Or maybe she did know. Suicides were often planned. It certainly sounded like this one had been.

As he shot skyward in the elevator shaft, Devine reflected on the fact that he had not told Simms the truth, since he did know Sara Ewes very well. Given time, they perhaps could have grown to love each other. But it hadn’t turned out that way.

And now Sara Ewes was no more. And he needed to know why.