“I don’t know. I really don’t.”
“Have the police found out anything more on Jerry Myers?” she asked.
“Detective Shoemaker contacted me. The killer spiked the bottle of whisky with enough cyanide to kill an elephant.”
“Wow, taking no chances. But if you think Myers was paid to kill Sara Ewes, why wouldn’t the person who killed him have gotten him to kill all the others, too? I know you have your gut feeling on this, but Myers could have killed everybody.”
“Sara, I think, had to be hanged. At least in the killer’s deranged mind. Sara was about five nine and athletically built. Not so easy to hoist someone like that up on a rope. And then the person had to strangle her first. Myers was my size, big and strong. And he had access to the building. The others? Stamos was drugged and then killed. A knife was used on the Eweses, too. Anyone could have done that. Including a woman.”
“A woman?” she exclaimed. “But now I thought you said Valentine was behind this? Although I guess it could be Helen Speers who killed Jennifer Stamos and the Eweses.”
He looked at her inscrutably, certain thoughts, uncomfortable thoughts, running through his mind. “I don’t think Will would know which end of a knife to stab someone with. And with his big gut he’s not crawling through windows. He can barely walk up the stairs. And if he was working with the people behind the money laundering they’d have plenty of skilled foot soldiers to do the deeds. But—”
“But what?”
“Why pay off Myers to kill Sara? Again, why not just use one of your own people, like Hancock?”
“Well, Myers had access to the building, like you said,” countered Montgomery.
“So did Brad Cowl,” retorted Devine. He fell silent. At first he had thought Cowl had been behind the killings. Then he had changed his mind and thought there was a different killer, who had had a grudge against him and who had sent him the weird emails, and killed his victims symbolically. Then he’d changed his opinion again, and decided it was the people behind Cowl and now Valentine who had done the killings, or at least he was involved, and all the rest was just misdirection.
But now I’m not sure. Again.
There was something off here, really off. And he just couldn’t figure out what it was.
But I have to. Eventually. Or else a killer walks free. To kill me.