The 6:20 Man

Chapter 82

“What are you doing here, Travis?” she demanded.

He let the file drop to the desk. “Looking for your phone. Your mother called. She wanted to reach you. I knew you didn’t have your phone with you at the hospital. I was trying to find it. It wasn’t at—”

She held up her hand. “Just stop, okay? Please, just stop. Who cares about a phone or my mother?” She glanced down at what he had been holding. “Wonderful Dr. Wyman.”

“Who?”

“Don’t pull the stupid act, okay? I’m really tired from sucking in all that gas.”

“Okay. Then let’s talk about this, but not with the gun pointed at me.”

“I told you to drop the stupid act. The gun is going nowhere.”

She seemed like a totally different person now. He also had the impression that perhaps the Jill Tapshaw he thought he knew was an act. Maybe this was the real version.

He picked up the file. “You and Sara were having a baby together?”

“That was the plan. It didn’t end well. But you know that, right?”

“And your brother was the sperm donor?”

“Why not? He was perfect.”

“I also understand that he’s dead.”

By the look on her face, Devine wished he hadn’t mentioned that.

“Who told you he was dead?” she said quietly.

“Your mother. I mentioned that I wanted to let him know about your being in the hospital, and that’s when she told me he died.” He paused. “Only she didn’t tell me how he died.”

Tapshaw held up the gun. “He put one of these in his mouth and pulled the fucking trigger.”

“Why would he do that? You said he had everything going for him.”

“Because Dennis desperately wanted to transition to being a woman, and my ‘brilliant’ father couldn’t accept that. That’s why my parents finally divorced. He was awful to Dennis. Never one minute’s peace, never any support. He drove him to suicide. I wanted to kill him, but he ran away to Canada, and nobody knows where he is.”

“Wyman said he didn’t know who the sperm donor was.”

“He didn’t. Neither did Sara, at first.”

“So you and Sara were in love and were having a baby? Why didn’t anyone know about that?”

“You met her parents, so do you really have to ask the question? Sara wasn’t about to tell them about me. And it’s not like my father would have been thrilled with two, as he would see it, alien children.”

“But no one even knew you and Sara were dating? That’s hard to believe.”

“Sara wanted it that way. She wanted to move up in her field.”

“There are lots of gay people in the world of finance.”

“Not that many gay women.” She bit her lip and looked unsure for a moment. “And Sara was... confused, it seemed to me, about her sexuality.” Tapshaw’s face twisted angrily. “She needed to make up her mind, so we kept things quiet. Very quiet.”

“So you two broke up? And she terminated the pregnancy. Why?”

She motioned with the gun to the file drawer that Devine had been looking through.

“Her diary is in there. In a yellow folder. Read it for yourself.”

Devine slowly pulled the folder out and found a black journal inside. He flipped through the pages.

“The entry for December fourth,” Tapshaw said.

Devine found it and read through Ewes’s notes. He finished and looked up. “She was afraid of you? She was afraid you were unbalanced? That you were obsessed with your brother?”

“He had recently killed himself. I was distraught.”

“She wrote that you had a shrine to him in your room. That you were too emotional, too over-the-top. Too controlling. And that this was before he killed himself. In her diary she wrote that after that you really lost it.”

Tapshaw said in a strident tone, “She had no reason to be afraid of me. I loved her. And so what if I idolized my brother? Is that a crime?”

“You said she didn’t know he was the sperm donor until later?”

In a calmer voice, Tapshaw said, “She... she found out. I don’t know how. It was supposed to be anonymous, but I arranged for Dennis to donate the sperm.”

“Is that why she terminated the pregnancy? She didn’t want to carry your brother’s baby?”

“It wasn’t his baby; it was my baby. We were twins. If we were the same gender we’d have the same fucking DNA! Dennis got the Y chromosome, but he didn’t want it. And she killed my baby. She might as well have put a bullet in my mouth.”

“And when you found out, you decided to kill her?”

“No, I didn’t. I was still dealing with Dennis’s death.” Her face twisted in anger at him. “But then I found out you two were seeing each other. She moved to her new place. But I found out. I saw you there with her. I know you slept with her. When a room became available at the town house where you lived, I grabbed it.”

“Why?”

“I needed to watch you. I needed to know if you were going to be a good match for Sara.”

“Match? Did you meet her through Hummingbird? She was one of your earliest subscribers, you said.”

Tapshaw nodded and moved closer to Devine. “We were perfectly aligned in every way. The algorithm said we would be happy forever. It was love at first sight, the way it sometimes happens.” She moved closer. “But then she abandoned me, terminated our child, and hooked up with you. And then she dumped you. I didn’t know who she was seeing for a while. I thought it must be another man. I could understand and accept that she might like men and not women. I could have lived with that. I really could have. But then I saw her one night with a woman. They were kissing. They... were very close. They... were in love, obviously.”

“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.”

“To ‘find’ Sara?”

“That’s right.”

“Even more reason to have cameras on all the floors and the stairwells, not just the front and rear entrances.”

She smiled. “From what I heard about Brad Cowl from Jerry, I don’t think he would have liked cameras everywhere.”

“And my security card being on the log the night Sara died? And my video?”

“I cloned your card while you were at the high school working out. It was easy.”

“It’s a one twenty-five piece of shit,” said Devine dully.

“Yes, it is.”

“And the video?”

“I took a film editing class in college. I had started thinking about doing something online, and I thought that skill would come in handy. And it did because I use it on Hummingbird. I took photos and video of you coming and going from the town house, Travis. And Jerry was your height and build. I took video of him going in and out of your building. Then I just digitally sliced and diced and put the appropriate clothes on you. Your head on his body. From a distance, it was close enough for the cops to nail you on it.”

“And Stamos?”

“After I found out who she was, I got her address, broke into her place, drugged her, and did what I went there to do.”

“Like carve bitch into her skin?”

“That was exactly what she was.”

“No, she was the woman that Sara loved. And you couldn’t live with that. And I was the one who told you about Fred and Ellen Ewes and her attitude toward Sara. So, in a way, I’m the reason they were killed. Stabbed through the heart because they, at least in your mind, had no hearts, or at least you implied that in your email to me. And then you manipulated the entry logs to show my card going in at the requisite time to kill Sara, and then you added a video image of me, too, like you just said. Only that didn’t jibe with what the night security guard saw. I guess you didn’t know when the guard made his rounds. And Jerry isn’t there at night, so he wouldn’t know, either. That one little oversight blew up your plan.”

Her face crinkled and she gave him a weak smile that showed a bit of the innocent, kindhearted woman he thought he knew. “You’re a smart person, Travis. And I do like you. I really do. You’ve always been so nice to me. You remind me a little of Dennis, actually.” She stared off for a moment and her look hardened once more. “But when I found out that witch had killed our baby and was now with another woman? Well, I had to do something.”

“But why send me the emails? Why set me up to take the fall, Jill?”

“You were the perfect choice, Travis. I did all the analysis. You’re an Army Ranger, so you know how to kill people. You slept with Sara. You wanted a relationship with her and she rejected you. No one could really be certain you weren’t the father. Those are motives to kill. I tried to be very logical in choosing you. But the main thing was you loved the woman I loved. In a way you took her away from me.”

“I didn’t even know you two were seeing each other.”

“It doesn’t matter,” she snapped. “Okay?” She aimed the gun more rigidly at him.

She glanced over at the large computer where the Hummingbird logo was prominently displayed. “Now Hummingbird is my baby.”

“Yeah, I remember you saying that to me. The only baby left to you.”

She said absently, “I liked Will, too. It was a shame.”

“What do you mean?” he said sharply. In the face of all this he had forgotten all about Valentine.

“When we got back from the bar? He came to my room later. He was really good at hacking. Better than I thought he was.”

Understanding filtered through Devine’s expression. “He finally traced the emails I got. And he traced them back to you. I found the information taped to your computer screen where you showed it was Will who sent them. But that was obviously all a lie.”

“He was good, despite being a pig. And I hated the way he always used the word dude. I mean, it was like a bad 1980s movie or something.”

“And when Will found out it was you?”

“He wanted an explanation. I told him I would give him one. At my office, where I told him I had documents that would explain all. I think I convinced him that you had killed those people and were trying to use both of us to cover up your crimes.”

“You told him I had asked you to track the emails as well?”

“I did. And I intimated that you were working with people that could set us both up as being involved in all this. He wasn’t a US citizen yet. So he was terrified of being deported. Before we left, I did as much as I could on the computer to turn the tables on him and show he was the source of the emails, and not me. I taped up that piece of paper on my computer for people to find.”

“And then what happened?”

“On the drive over I asked him to get something out of the glove box. While he was doing that, I injected him in the neck with the same sedative I used on Stamos. I drove him to the lake near the town house. I stabbed him in the chest and tied a heavy rock to him. Then I threw his laptop and phone in the lake, too, after I rolled him into the water. Will was very heavy, but I was very determined. When I was throwing his stuff in, my phone fell out of my pocket and went into the water. I had some blood on me from stabbing him. I cleaned it up as best as I could, but I probably missed some.”

Devine glanced down at his hand where he had rubbed off the stains from her car seat. Will’s blood? “And the gas in the house? That was you?”

“I had to come up with a reason for Will’s disappearance, namely, that he tried to kill all of us and then disappeared. I went back to the town house, packed some clothes in his suitcase, and tossed it in a Dumpster in the downtown area. Then I came back and fiddled with the gas.”

“But weren’t you afraid of dying from the gas? I mean, you were really close to it, Jill, when I carried you out of the house.”

She looked at him calmly, with an utterly uninterested expression, which, under the tense standoff, was terrifying. “You should have just let me die, Travis. It would have been much better for me and certainly much better for you.”

“Meaning now it’s my turn? Is this what Dennis would have wanted?”

“Dennis never had a chance to know what he really wanted. But for what it’s worth, I’m very sorry, Travis.”

She fired the gun and the bullet slammed into his right shoulder. He fell back against the file cabinet and then dropped to the floor. The blood spurted down his front, and he desperately tried to use his shirt to stanch the bleeding.

She moved closer and aimed the gun at his head for the kill shot.

“I’m sorry, I meant to shoot you in the chest. I don’t have really good aim. But it won’t hurt anymore in a second, Travis. I promise. I never wanted any of this to happen.”

A second shot rang out.

Devine watched Tapshaw stiffen as a bullet went into her back, traversed her thin torso, and exited out her chest. In his wounded, muddled state, Devine thought he could see the bullet in midair. The round smacked into the wall and stayed there.

Tapshaw swayed on her feet for a moment. Then the Sig fell from her hand. And she followed along with it, hitting the hard floor face-first and not moving again, except for one last involuntary twitch as life quickly transitioned to death.

A bleeding and rapidly weakening Devine swiveled his head to the doorway.

Helen Speers stood there with her Glock still pointing at where Tapshaw had been standing a moment before. She looked down at Devine and started to run toward him, her phone coming out as she tapped in 911.

“Travis!” she cried out.

Right as Devine’s eyes closed.