Jim faintly smiled as he shook his head. “No. Not on the night it would have helped me out.”
Evie studied him. She’d formed a lot of impressions, opinions, thoughts while listening to him. Some of what she most wanted to know was likely lost to history and the passing years, but some of it remained. “Why tell me, Jim?”
“I’ve regretted the silence. It might have been the safe thing to do, even the wise thing given I was innocent, but it wasn’t the right thing. I told myself if a cop ever showed up, I’d tell it like it was.”
“You’re the last one to see Jenna alive, other than who did this.”
“I guess I am.” He looked directly at her. “And I honestly don’t have a clue what happened to her. I’m not hiding anything, Lieutenant. I’ll answer any question, I’ll take a lie-detector test if you like—not that it’s going to be that useful after nine years, but it might. Put me through the ringer, I’ve earned it. But if you can spare Lynne, please do so. She doesn’t deserve to have reporters hounding her for what she remembers. She’s mostly been able to let go of what happened, move on with her life.
“I’d like you to believe me, but I know it’s not your job to believe or not—it’s your job to find out what happened to Jenna. Maybe what she was doing with me points to another guy she was playing. I wish I had even a glimmer of an idea to suggest. I don’t. And it’s not for lack of hours spent trying to figure it out, or lack of a few thousand innocent-sounding questions asked of those who drink my coffee.”
Evie thought for a moment and went a different direction. “Why did you break up with Lynne? Her mom said that after you, Lynne went out with a Brad Nevery for a while.”
Jim shifted uncomfortably in his chair.
“Come on. If you can’t tell a cop, who can you tell?” Evie teased gently.
“I just confessed to being the last person to see Jenna alive, and the cop wants to know how come I broke up with my girlfriend.” He gave a half laugh as he stubbed out the cigarette. “For the record, it was easier to tell you about Jenna than to tell you this, but yeah, you’ve got a good reason for asking.
“Lynne and I are both neighborhood kids. It’s got its own code to it, when the college is right there and this place gets overrun nine months a year with people from everywhere but here. Part of that code is you can’t ever dump a neighborhood friend. You can have disagreements and disputes and even some bruises, but you can’t break up and schism things, can’t split your circle into factions.
“I had it out with a guy I went to high school with. He said some things, I said some things back, he shoves, I throw a punch. We don’t shake hands at the end of it and settle the peace. Instead, we’re walking opposite sides of the street, our friends are having to choose. It gets back to Lynne. She’s tied up tight with the guy’s sister since second grade. And I’m like making her choose. So Lynne dumps me—she’s hanging in with Kelly and by the unspoken rules, with Kelly’s brother—because that’s the code. I’m twenty-five and back in grade school with my girl in a huff over the fact I had a fight. Embarrassing is what it is, the mortifying kind. Lynne’s not shy about making her decision known either. I pull out a chair at the table with her and Kelly to try to make peace, and Lynne picks up her coffee and finds herself another table.
“So you bite your tongue and go do what the code requires. Rick and I have a make-up meeting that degenerates into both of us throwing some more fists. Followed by another that is about as scorching. The third attempt we lay down enough peace we shake hands on the matter. Now Rick and I are fine. But Lynne’s still got me stuck in some Siberian doghouse for disrespecting how things were, are, and ever shall be. And she puts a cherry on it by deciding she’s going to see Brad Nevery for a while.
“I’m working on the problem. Lynne’s type of anger is more a deep hurt and it’s slow to cool off. She’s at least not seeing Brad anymore. And she’s back wrapping newspapers at Laura’s come Saturday mornings—even when I’m there. The rest is pretty slow-going. I broke faith with what we are, which is a neighborhood that sticks together. That Lynne’s perception isn’t precisely reality, it’s more a wishful hope, doesn’t particularly weigh in on the matter. I shattered the confidence she had that I understood what matters. For Lynne, loyalty to friends is everything.”
Evie considered that and found it fascinating. “What happens when a true friend breaks faith with Lynne?”
“Lynne gets bewildered. She applies the fault to herself, something she did, and it’s painful to watch.”
Evie could see that. “Anything more you want to tell me?”
Self-deprecating humor filled Jim’s face as he shook his head. “No.”
“You can’t tell Lynne you told the truth to a cop today, maybe get back in her good graces by this brave act, because then you’d have to tell her what the truth was. So you actually did a selfless thing.”
“Noble—that’s me.” Jim sighed and dumped the pack of cigarettes back into the drawer. “I started smoking after Lynne called it quits. Yet another reason she looks at me with pity in her eyes. For her there are only three vices in this neighborhood—drinking, smoking, and not loving music. Make that four and add disloyalty.”
Evie couldn’t help but laugh. She rose to her feet.
Jim asked, “How much is that truth going to cost me?”
It was a fair question, Evie thought. “It’s going to be uncomfortable having cops looking at you, but if you’re innocent, the truth is out there, and it’s something a lot better than simply we couldn’t prove you did it. Go talk to Lynne’s mom, tell her what you told me. David or I will be in touch. There are going to be more questions. Just answer them truthfully, and to some extent, trust that we are good at our jobs. We will figure out what happened to Jenna Greenhill. I know for a fact the case is breaking and rolling toward an answer. And to the best of my knowledge, I’ve never arrested someone who wasn’t guilty.”
She set a second card on the table. “If there’s a name from the past that strikes you as someone you did wonder about, call me.”
“Thanks, Lieutenant.” He stood, reached over to shake her hand, and tucked the card in his pocket.
David was sitting at a table in the coffee shop, a mug by his elbow, engrossed in a newspaper. Evie rapped knuckles lightly on the table as she passed to get a Diet Coke and then walked outside to David’s SUV, waited for him to come with the key. Nine years, she thought as she idly watched Jim through the window. He’s cared about Lynne and held his secret for her sake all this time.
Jim was speaking with the music store clerk, smiled at something he was told, bumped fists with the guy, then walked into the coffee shop. The girl who’d sold Evie the soda nodded at something Jim told her, took off her apron, slipped underneath the counter. Jim took her place, reached into the cooler and came up with a cold root beer for himself, drank half of it before picking up a towel and wiping down the counter. Going back to work . . . after one of the more difficult conversations of his life.
David clicked open the doors, and Evie settled into the passenger seat, twisted the cap off her soda. “So how much did you spend on Maggie, if I may be so bold?” she asked with a smile as she fastened her seat belt.
David smiled. “Not counting multiple coffees and the newspaper, eight thousand.”
She choked and sputtered on her drink. “Next time lead a comment like that with ‘A lot,’” she said through gasps.
“Sorry.”
“Sure you are.” She put the cap back on the soda bottle. If she drank the rest of it now, she would start hiccupping.
And she’d just recorded that whole sloppy episode. She slipped out her phone, closed the recording, sent the audio to her state account for safekeeping and a copy to David. She wasn’t surprised to see her phone battery about dead. She plugged it into the car charger and returned to what David had told her. “Eight with triple zeros after it?”
“And two more for the change.” He pulled carefully into traffic.
“That particular keyboard would have set me back seventeen in New York, even with Maggie’s professional discount. Some guy buys it on a lease plan, can’t make payments after four months, it’s back barely out of the box but they can’t sell it as new, so the leasing company has to eat the difference. The store probably clears a thousand on each of the two sales, and I get more than a bargain. So it’s close to a steal. That model’s got a fifteen-year life-span, even under concert conditions. Put it in Maggie’s music room, our grandkids are going to be learning to play on it.”
“You’re thinking long term. Nice.”
He shrugged. “Short term too. She doesn’t need it, I could flip it next week to one of her friends for ten. Get Maggie to play a concert or two with it, it’s worth fourteen. If nothing else, it’s going to pay for landscaping at my new place—something better than geraniums in a pot.”
She did like his practical side. “So spending eight thousand is a way to make money.”
David laughed. “I’m good at it, you ever need some pointers.”
“In spite of his wealth—or maybe it’s the reason for it—Rob is good for those too. I handed Rob ten bucks one day, sort of a dare, and he gave me twenty-seven dollars and fifty-two cents back a week later. The two pennies he found on the street, but since he was doing business on my dare at the time, he considered it only fair to add them to my take. Rob had turned my ten into a box of very fine chocolates, asked the coffee-shop manager if he could try an experiment, put the open box on the counter next to the napkins with a Post-it note—25 cents, your choice—and an empty jar beside it. When the candy was gone, he collected the quarters, bought more chocolates. Repeated it again. He returned only a third of the profits to me. He’d earned another third for himself and gave the manager a third, though the sales tax he did pay out of the shop’s take. Rob likes to say making money is mostly about spotting opportunities.”
“He’s right about that.”
Evie could feel the tension draining out of her with the small talk, was grateful for it, even though a look at the time was ratcheting up the tension. She would likely be late for the charity event this evening. Her dress was at the hotel, and she was meeting Rob so she could ride with him. Lynne was probably already on her way into the city to get a good spot on the rope line. David would make it in time if she didn’t hold him up any further.
David glanced over and said, “That must have been some conversation with Jim.”
“He may be the last person to have seen Jenna alive. Jim walked her home from the coffee shop, watched her walk into her apartment building at twelve-fifty a.m.”
“The original lie of omission. That is indeed a very interesting wrinkle.”
“Jenna was trying to make mischief between Lynne and Jim, cause some turmoil on the day of Lynne’s joyful meeting with Maggie, only it didn’t go as planned. The audio is now in your account, so you can listen to the flow of it.”
“Does what Jim said help us any?”
“When it comes down to it, only on the margins. Jenna’s late-night walk is confirmed, but it was already on the theory list. She made a habit of stealing other girls’ boyfriends—again, already known. The girl in this instance who would have motive to get even—Lynne—is cleared by her own conduct, her mother’s comments, Jim’s report on the timeline. Lynne simply hadn’t realized what was going on. We now have Jim’s word Jenna was alive at her apartment building an hour later than previously thought. That’s about the substance.”
“Did Jim kill Jenna? Take a crack at her to put a stop to this?”
“He easily could have. Lose his temper, strike out, Jenna’s no more a problem. He’s a local who could hide her body around here without it being discovered. He says she walked into the coffee shop at just minutes before midnight, and he walked her home, saw her enter her apartment at twelve-fifty in the morning. The first part of the statement could be true, the second part a lie if he’s killed her and hid the body. Assume the confrontation takes place in the coffee shop, he’s got hours to clean up the crime scene, make the evidence disappear. Everything he would need for a good cleaning job is in the janitor’s closet. He’s with Lynne and someone named Laura Pip at four a.m.”
“Four hours is a decent enough murder window.”
“Yeah. I’ve seen it done well in forty minutes, but that was with premeditation. Four hours when you didn’t plan to kill someone, panic, ‘What do I do now?’ come up with a plan, then execute it—he would have been hustling. And from what I heard about her, I very much doubt Lynne would have noticed if Jim showed up at four a.m. unusually distracted. She was talking a mile a minute about the concert and Maggie’s method of writing songs.”
“Bottom-line it for me. Where are you, Evie?”
“I want him to be innocent. Jim and Lynne are like a hopeful love story that still might work out. But he’s not innocent. He withheld information from the authorities when Jenna disappeared. It doesn’t mean he caused Jenna’s death, but we’re going to have to find a way to clear him in order to take his name off the top of the list.”
“Does he travel?”
“The conversation didn’t get that far. He’s not a Triple M fan beyond living in the shadow of someone who is. I doubt he recognized you in the brief glance he cast in your direction. He seems to be a homebody from what I picked up. If he snapped with Jenna, it was for a personal reason. So, no, I’m all but certain he didn’t head out to smother those other three girls.” She lifted a hand to put an asterisk on that. “Jim’s smart enough to do other crimes in an attempt to mask Jenna’s murder. But since he didn’t get on the investigation’s radar in the months after Jenna, he wouldn’t have risked another crime when he was getting away with this one. So, again, no. Jim would be lying low—not doing something else that might catch a cop’s attention.”
“I agree with that logic,” David said. “If Jenna is tied by the missing driver’s license to those other three women, it’s likely Jim is in the clear. Did he say anything that might be helpful about someone else? The last person to see Jenna will also be the best witness for the scene that night.”
“Jim didn’t notice anything out of place. We’ll have to push there again. Someone had to have been around if we’ve got the correct window for the crime.”
“Murder is easier at night, but nothing says Jenna wasn’t killed at, say, eight in the morning,” David said.
“Exactly. That possibility is also on the theory list. It’s something to come back to and reconsider. This could have been a Saturday crime.”
David glanced over. “Let me ask you the hard question. Replay this for me. You sit down with Jim. You tell him we’ve just spoken with Lynne, with her mom.”
“Yes?”
“Is Jim telling a fabricated story now to protect Lynne?”
Evie smiled. “I like working with you, David. That was my first reaction when Jim dropped the news he saw Jenna that night and he didn’t tell the cops before. He’s had nine years to work out a cover story that will protect Lynne. And that I could easily see him trying to do. Given how he told this story, it tells me five things are possibly true if Lynne was involved.
“It suggests Jenna died between midnight and one a.m., the time Jim is covering by saying Jenna was with him at the coffee shop. It suggests Lynne went to Jenna’s apartment building after the concert to tell her about the night, and then trouble happened—Jenna hinting of something going on with Jim or speaking badly about Maggie?
“If Lynne did kill Jenna, Jim could be the one who took care of the body. Lynne could clean up a crime scene, erase any trace of it. There was more than forty-eight hours for the apartment air to clear of cleaning products. And she’s good at putting things in their right place, could have easily restored order so it looked normal. Jim could have used the coffee shop’s trash collection to get rid of any physical evidence. Things with blood on them, anything damaged, the murder weapon. They could have hidden the fact Jenna died that night if they worked
at it together.”
“If Lynne did it, talk to me more about the motive and why.”
“The most likely trigger, Jenna tears down Lynne’s illusions. ‘The concert was okay, but I’ve heard better. Maggie didn’t really like you; you’re just the dressing room help. You’re never going to be a singer, Lynne. Grow up and see reality, quit living in a fantasy world. Jim isn’t even a faithful boyfriend, because he’s flirting with me.’ Jenna could slice into Lynne’s soul with words in a bunch of ways. And if this happened after Jim had walked Jenna home, ignored her advances, and is choosing Lynne over her, Jenna is primed to be vicious. All it takes is Lynne pushing her back with a cry of ‘No, that’s not true!’—shoving her hard enough to send her into the corner of a table, and Jenna dies of a broken neck. Boyfriend covers it up, and now tries to protect Lynne years later. It’s incredibly plausible given what I know about Jenna. I’m not sure it’s in Lynne, but it’s in Jenna.”
David drummed fingers on the wheel. “If we didn’t have other related remains, we’d have a hard time not bringing both of them in for formal questioning right now.”
“Take your favorite theory. Jim did it. Or Lynne did it, and Jim is trying to help her. Or it’s not a local crime, our concert traveler picked out Jenna and made her disappear, just like he’s done others—and we’re left with two locals who could look guilty—just like every other disappearance he’s pulled off has been leaving someone local looking guilty.”
“You liked Lynne.”
“I did. And I like Jim. It’s much easier to lay this crime on an unnamed traveling stranger. But odds say it’s Lynne, if it really comes down to it, with Jenna provoking the scene that led to her death. Jim protecting Lynne by helping to cover it up is likely. And I do think that Jim is protective enough, cares deeply enough that he could have killed Jenna before she had a chance to rip into Lynne’s illusions. Maybe it’s not at the coffee shop, maybe Jenna is digging into Jim on that walk home and saying how she’s going to tell Lynne how it really is. Jim is thinking about that, follows Jenna inside and pops her one, ends this at her apartment. Hiding the body is an easier problem than letting Jenna destroy Lynne.”
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