He shrugs. “We really hit it off. She was beautiful, smart, and motivated. Classy. We went out for dinner several times, spent a Sunday on Long Island, antiquing. That special trick box in my office that you smashed? Celine bought that for me.” He shrugs. “I liked her.” He stares at the amber liquid in his glass, deep in thought.
“Why do none of her friends know about you two, then?”
“She didn’t want to tell them. She didn’t want to tell anyone.”
That makes no sense. What single twenty-eight-year-old woman lands one of New York’s most eligible bachelors and doesn’t tell anyone?
Then again, Celine was keeping more than one big secret at the time.
“I saw the video, Jace. I’ve also read some of her diary entries. I know what she was doing for money. So maybe she didn’t tell anyone because you two weren’t actually ‘dating.’ ”
“Do I look like I need to pay for it?” he snaps. “I wasn’t one of her fucking johns, and I had no idea how she was making her money when we met.” A hard gaze levels me. “I didn’t find out until I was just days away from bringing her to Chicago for a weekend, to meet my parents. My father, the governor of Illinois.”
I watch him fidget in his chair. He’s uncomfortable, but I can’t tell if it’s because of the subject or because he’s lying.
“I was here for drinks with a client one night. Sitting right over there.” He juts his chin toward another part of the bar lounge. “And Celine strolled by with some guy, her arm hooked through his. The way she was dressed, her makeup . . .” He shakes his head and sneers. “I’m no idiot. This guy had to be thirty years older than her.”
“When was that?”
“Early October.”
Larissa said Celine stopped taking customers in July. Obviously that was a lie. But who was lying to whom?
Jace leans forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “You wanted to know why she didn’t tell any of her friends about me? It’s because she knew that my father would be heading for reelection. I even joked about it on one of our dates, telling her that if she had any skeletons in her closet, she better tell me because his opposition was particularly brutal, and they’d no doubt dig into her, just like they’d dug into me.”
And then everyone would know Celine’s dirty little secret. Rosa could find out. That’s certainly reason enough for her to keep quiet. “So that night at her apartment, the night of the video . . .”
He sighs. “We were supposed to be heading to Chicago the next day, to meet my parents. I went there to confront her and she admitted to working as an escort. Told me that she didn’t want to do it anymore, and had mostly stopped after our first date, but that her mother was sick and she couldn’t get by on just her day salary. She needed the money. The guy I saw her with was an old regular in town, who just wanted a companion. She swore she never fucked him.”
His account jives, in theory, with what I saw on the first part of the video. But not the second part. “Funny. When I’m disgusted by someone, I don’t drop my pants.”
His mouth twists in displeasure. “I’d had a few drinks and I was angry. So I told her to show me exactly what she did for the ones she did fuck. And so she did. And then I threw money down because I knew it would hurt her. I wanted nothing to do with her ever again.”
“And did you have anything to do with her ever again?” I dare you to lie to me, Jace. I have proof—as far as I’m concerned—that he was in Celine’s apartment the night that she died. Unfortunately the apartment’s stored surveillance footage only retains about a week’s worth before it loops over recorded material, so I can’t see how many other times he visited Celine in her home.
He sucks back another gulp of his drink. “That jump drive you stole? It showed up in an unmarked envelope on my desk at work, two weeks after that night in her apartment. The video was on there, with the note that you also took.”
Jace was being blackmailed. Just like Doug had suggested. “So you’re saying that you didn’t hack into her computer and make a copy?”
“Me? Hack into a computer?” Jace’s face screws up. “I may manage hundreds of millions of dollars, but I don’t know the first fucking thing about hacking into computers. Plus, I didn’t even know she had a hidden camera. Do you think I would have done that, had I known? My face is clearly on it, along with a lot more of me. That video would ruin my father if it got out.”
“I wouldn’t know . . . I focused more on the before and after,” I admit, feeling my cheeks flush as that same sickness churns in my stomach now that did when I first watched Celine undress in front of him. “So when you found the video on your desk . . .”
“I thought Celine was trying to extort money from me. So I went to her place and confronted her. She denied it, of course. She even made a huge production of pulling her hidden camera off her shelf and ripping the cord out, saying that she must have been hacked. I didn’t believe her so I called her bluff. I told her to go ahead and leak it.”
“There’s no way Celine would do that. She’d never risk her mother seeing something like that.” I would bet my entire trust fund on it. But what if I’m wrong?
He smirks. “Well, I didn’t pay, and nothing ever happened. You know what that means, right?”
“That you had motive to kill her?”
“I . . .” Whatever he was going to say stalls at his lips as first confusion, then shock, then outrage passes over his handsome features. “No! It means that she had no intention of ever leaking it.”
I’m done playing this game. “Or it means that you killed her to stop her from releasing the video. And then you stole a Chinese vase potentially worth millions that she had recently found in a garage sale.”
“Killed her for a vase?” He leans forward, glancing for any potential eavesdroppers, and then hisses, “Are you completely insane?”
“Maybe. But that doesn’t change the truth.”
“I didn’t kill anyone!”
I study his face for a moment—full of anger and wild panic. I did just accuse him of murder. “Well, someone did.”
“Celine killed herself. You just don’t want to believe that, so you’re trying to pin this on me.” He shakes his head. “And before you come back, accusing me of lying again, let me give you all the facts. I was actually at Celine’s twice after the night of the video recording on that jump drive. Once, to confront her about the extortion scam. And then again, on November fifteenth. Yes, the same night that she died.”