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“It was you,” Kat said, staring at Will.
He scrunched up his nose. “What was me?”
“You were the one who arranged for Zack Lawson to be hired here. You know him from before, don’t you?”
Suzanne gasped, her hands latching onto her belly as if Kat and her alarming accusation might be a direct threat to her unborn child.
Will snorted. “Have you gone mad, Kat? Do we need to take your temperature?”
Kat ignored his flippant dismissal. “You know him. You can’t deny that.”
“Where on earth did you come up with that idea?” Suzanne said.
“Zack told me.” Although Kat was answering Suzanne’s question, she kept her eyes pinned on Will. “Not in so many words, but I went to talk to him at the police station yesterday, and he called Will here Will. Except he wouldn’t have known your nickname if you two hadn’t met before, would he, Will? Because the only time your name was mentioned in Zack’s presence on Monday was right before the police showed up to arrest him, when Suzanne called you William.”
Until then, Kat hadn’t fully registered the fact that Zack had never explicitly come out and admitted he’d known Wendy. When Kat had referred to the police’s informant as ‘her,’ Zack must have concluded she was fishing and kept mum to protect the man he thought of as his friend from unwelcome police scrutiny.
Little did he know how severely Will had betrayed him.
“That’s all you’ve got?” Will laughed, a harsh sound that struck Kat as contrived. “Please. That doesn’t prove anything. A lot of Williams go by Will.”
“Bill, Willy, and Billy are all popular nicknames for William too,” Kat pointed out. “But Zack didn’t call you any of those.”
“Wow, that’s quite a stretch. Next you’re going to accuse me of being the real killer.”
Kat could feel her heart pounding against her rib cage. “Are you?”
Will crossed his arms over his chest. “And why would I kill Nat Grimes?”
“Nat?” Kat’s skin tingled. “How did you know Natalie’s nickname?”
“It was a guess, okay?” He threw his hands up. “Look, Will, Bill, Natalie, Nat . . . none of it means anything. People use nicknames. You should know, Kat.”
“And how do you explain the emails?” she asked.
“What emails?”
“The mysterious disappearing emails related to Zack and his position here. There are safeguards in place to make it pretty hard to unintentionally erase an email. That’s the whole notion behind the Trash folder. But with your access to the network, it wouldn’t be hard for you to suppress, delete, or intercept any electronic submissions you wanted.”
Will smirked. “Did you ever stop to consider the possibility that perhaps Wendy never really received what she thought she did? You ask me, she’s the one who knows Zack. And now she’s trying to cover her tracks.”
“She’s not the only one missing an email,” Kat said.
Will stared at her for a long moment. “No one mentioned any others.”
“It didn’t occur to me it might be related before now. But Suzanne here should have gotten something from Kim about keeping her in the loop with regard to major decisions—major decisions such as hiring new employees.”
“That’s right,” Suzanne said, bobbing her head. “You mentioned that before. I never saw any emails from Kim though.”
“So she forgot to send it,” Will said. “Big deal. All that means is she was distracted by her upcoming vacation.”
Kat shook her head. “You know how on top of things Kim is. And she might officially be on leave, but she hasn’t gone anywhere. She couldn’t have been all that distracted.”
“Okay. So what? That still doesn’t prove anything. It certainly doesn’t prove I know Zack.”
Kat swiveled sideways. “Suzanne, you have access to all of the new-hire paperwork, don’t you?”
“I do,” Suzanne confirmed.
“So you could find out when Will first started working here?”
“Or I could just tell you he’s been here for a few years now.”
“A few? Meaning about three?”
“Give or take,” Suzanne said with a nod.
Kat looked at Will with raised eyebrows.
“What?” he demanded. “I started here three years ago, so now I must have been running around with Zack Lawson before then? Get real.”
Rather than answering, Kat faced Suzanne again. “Will’s employee file would note where he worked prior to joining DataRightly, wouldn’t it?”
“Yes, naturally,” Suzanne said. “That’s one of the things we verify, a potential hire’s prior employment.”
Will paled. He seemed to have lost some of his bluster, his hands now kneading the cushiony ends of his chair’s armrests.
“Suzanne,” Kat said, watching Will closely, “you could find out from the HR files whether Will worked somewhere in Idaho before moving to Cherry Hills, couldn’t you?”
“I could.” Suzanne’s brow furrowed. “I don’t think that’s something I could share though. Employee confidentiality—”
Kat cut her off with a sharp look. But it didn’t matter. Will no longer seemed to be listening. The futility of trying to deny a connection to the events of three years ago finally seemed to be sinking in.
“All right,” he said, snapping forward in his chair so fast that Kat’s heart rate spiked. “I suppose I was bound to get caught eventually. Given your reputation around town, I’m not surprised it was you who figured it out, Kat.”
“You don’t seem too upset about it,” Kat commented.
“To be honest, I’m tired. Tired of running, tired of always looking over my shoulder, tired of wondering if this will be my last day of freedom.” He rubbed his temple. “Nat’s murder remaining unsolved for so long was never part of the plan.”
Suzanne sucked air through her teeth. “You killed that girl?”
“Yes,” Will confirmed. “And Zack was supposed to go down for it. Except he took off. I’ll tell you, those first few months I was on pins and needles, waiting for the police to locate him. But they never did.” He shrugged. “Guess I shouldn’t blame them. Even I didn’t know where he was until he called me out of the blue a few weeks ago.”
“Why did he reach out after three years in hiding?” Kat asked.
“Why else? He ran out of money. I promised him I could get him a job here, but the deal was if I did him this favor he couldn’t mention anything about our shared past. I didn’t want any trouble.”
“How do you two know each other?”
“Way back when, during happier times, before things got so messed up, Zack and I were friends. We met at work. It was a small place, like this one. We were both doing IT support at the time. Then one day I got this bright idea I wanted to go into business for myself.”
“Doing the same thing?” Kat asked.
“Nah, I was tired of that. Am still tired of it. You’re always fielding the stupidest questions. People telling me their computer’s on the fritz when really they just need to reboot, or trying to convince me the network is down and it turns out they’ve kicked a cord loose.”
Suzanne’s face flamed red. Kat wondered if the examples Will had chosen had been real-life issues she’d come to him to fix.
Will folded his hands behind his head and leaned back in his chair. “I had this dream I could code something, put it out there, and sit back while the money poured in.”
“The designated driver app was your idea?” Kat said.
Will glanced at her. “You know about it?”
“It was mentioned in some of the articles on Natalie’s murder.”
“Ah. I’ll tell you, Zack may not have been the one to stab Nat, but she would still be alive today if it weren’t for him.”
“How’s that?”
“I made the mistake of telling him about my idea. Just casually, one day at the office. I should have kept my mouth shut, but I was excited. I didn’t intend for him to get involved, but then he told me he had this friend who was more connected than us. He said if we partnered up, he would bring her in and we could tap into her network.”
“And the friend turned out to be Natalie Grimes,” Kat guessed.
“Bingo. I never planned to take on one partner, let alone two, but who in my position could turn down a huge infusion of cash right from the get-go?” Will’s nostrils flared. “Zack never told me how cutthroat Nat was. I had to figure that out on my own.”
“What did she do?” Kat asked.
“It all started when one of the financial backers she found decided he didn’t like me.” Anger turned Will’s face red, and his hands curled into tight fists. “This rich yahoo actually had the audacity to claim I didn’t have enough coding experience to make him feel confident in the project, that Nat needed to get somebody on board who knew what they were doing.”
Knowing how this story ended, Kat felt sick to her stomach. “I take it she cut you out.”
“Oh, she offered to pay me for my idea. But it was a one-time fee, a slap in the face, nothing like I imagined I’d earn from this thing. Nothing like I deserved.”
“So you killed her.”
“So I killed her,” Will confirmed.
Suzanne dropped onto the edge of Will’s desk with a noisy clunk. For one terrifying second Kat thought the baby might be coming early, but when Suzanne didn’t say anything, only continued to stare at Will with slack-jawed horror, Kat realized she was merely reacting to the discovery that her coworker was a cold-blooded killer.
“I knew Zack was due to see her that evening,” Will went on. “After all, Natalie hadn’t tried to push him out. When she made me that offer of the one-time fee, I said I wanted to talk to both of them, to see if we could work out a deal. Naturally, I knew there would be no deal. She knew it too, but I guess she felt she owed me some explanation. So she told me when Zack would be coming by, and I made sure to show up a half hour earlier. I brought the knife with me.”
A strangled sound emerged from Suzanne’s throat. She wrapped her fingers around the edge of Will’s desk, clinging to it as though it might be the only thing keeping her upright.
Will eyed her. “Don’t worry. I slipped a little something into her wine before I did the deed. I doubt she felt a thing.”
Not surprisingly, Will’s words didn’t seem to offer Suzanne any comfort.
Will continued with his story. “After I stabbed her, I slipped outside and hid in the shadows. When Zack’s ugly brown beater pulled up, all I had to do was wait for him to go inside the building before I tossed the knife through his car window.”
Kat didn’t have to ask whether Will had wiped his prints off the weapon. He had obviously planned out exactly what would happen before he went over to Natalie’s apartment that night. “You intended to set Zack up from the very beginning.”
Will regarded her with an expression so cold her skin crawled. “Wouldn’t you, if you had been in my position?” he asked.
She didn’t deign to respond. She was still struggling to reconcile Will the IT guy with the heartless, calculating killer in front of her now.
“I figured getting rid of Nat and framing Zack would be my best option to exact revenge on both of them,” Will said. “I didn’t count on him running. And I certainly didn’t count on him staying hidden for this long.”
“This is the first time he’s been in touch since he fled Ketchum?” Kat asked.
“Not the very first time. He called me that night, after he hotfooted it out of town. Told me what happened, never suspecting it was me who did it. He didn’t know about her insulting little one-time fee offer. He didn’t know she wanted to buy me out. She was going to tell him that night, but of course that was too late.”
“He didn’t know about that?” Kat pursed her lips. “Then why did you frame him? What did he ever do to you?”
“He was the one who dragged Nat into my life, wasn’t he?”
Kat could see Will was convinced Natalie was the beginning of all his problems, and therefore Zack, as their mutual friend and business partner, was complicit.
“That night,” Will said, “when he phoned, I tried to persuade him to turn himself in and let the justice system prove his innocence. But he had already spotted the knife and was too panicked to listen. I’d hoped the police would track him down, but no luck there either, even after they contacted me looking for him and I told them he’d called from the road.”
“The police didn’t suspect you?” Kat asked.
“Why would they? I wasn’t the one on the lam.”
Kat peeked at Suzanne to see how she was faring. She had one hand pressed against her stomach and her eyes were on the verge of falling out of their sockets, but she otherwise looked okay. Will’s shocking confession didn’t appear to be causing her to go into premature labor, at least.
“I couldn’t believe it when Zack called me here at the office right before Halloween,” Will said. “Three years I hadn’t heard from him, and then bam! He looks me up online.”
“So you schemed to get him hired here,” Kat said.
“With Kim due to be out of the office, the timing was perfect. Step one was to capitalize on Suzanne’s insecurities and arrange for her to post that job opening as soon as Kim’s vacation began. Never know when a baby might pop out early, am I right, Suzanne?”
Suzanne gaped at him before touching her fingers to her abdomen as though to make sure the baby was still there.
“Then, as soon as the official listing went up, I told Zack what to put in his résumé so he’d be guaranteed a call back. I had it set up so Suzanne’s emails would forward to me before I rerouted them back to her. Didn’t want any better qualified candidates getting their applications through first.” Will winked at Suzanne. “Thanks for giving me your password the other day. That came in real handy.”
“You said you needed that to troubleshoot my connectivity issue,” Suzanne croaked.
Will faced Kat again. “Since I was screening Suzanne’s emails, I spied Kim’s request to be kept informed as soon as she sent it. Her involvement might not have made a difference, but I didn’t need any additional variables complicating my plans. Seemed to me it would be much easier to push that fake background check through if it only had to pass muster with one person. Then, once Zack got here, it was easy enough to clue Wendy in to his sordid past. With all her student loans, I figured she’d jump at the chance to not only turn him in but to pocket that reward money too.”
“Then you deleted the email you sent her,” Kat filled in.
Will shrugged. “No point in leaving a trail if I didn’t have to.”
Suzanne’s mouth opened and closed as if she wanted to say something, but no words emerged. She seemed dumbstruck by the extent of Will’s deception.
Kat regarded him. “Did you go through all this trouble just to turn Zack in?”
Will sat there for so long Kat thought he might not answer. Just when she was about to give up he said, “Baiting him with that job was the only option I had to draw him out. When he called me out of the blue like that, it brought everything back. It made me realize how fast the past can come back to bite you. Nowadays with forensic advances and DNA testing everywhere, you’re never really safe. And I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life always looking over my shoulder, wondering if I would be caught one day. I needed closure. I needed for Zack to be caught and convicted, and for Nat’s case to be closed.”
With a heavy heart, Kat studied the coworker whose past she had never known. She had a feeling he was about to get his wish.
Natalie Grimes’s murder case was finally about to be closed for good.
