It was from the doctor’s office of Jonathan Wyman, more specifically his clinic for women wanting to undergo artificial insemination.
A stunned Devine slowly opened it and started to read what was inside.
The patient’s name was Sara Elise Ewes.
The procedure was artificial insemination using donor sperm.
Then, written on a Post-it note, was a name: Sperm donor: Dennis Tapshaw.
Jill’s twin brother was the sperm donor for Sara Ewes’s pregnancy?
Devine was so overwhelmed by these revelations that he could barely think.
He turned when he heard the noise behind him.
Jill Tapshaw was standing in the doorway, pointing Devine’s Sig at its owner.
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.”