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.”