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  67. 3:46 a.m.

I set the pages down. I could perfectly see what happens next. She goes up to the guy the next day, shows him the pics, tells him to give her two hundred bucks, then follows him to an ATM where he pays her. It is too easy.

I pick up the pile and rifle through thirty pages or so. Some of them appear to be journal entries, more about Bob, Megan, Markus, THE BITCH; however, most are descriptions of the people she blackmailed. She never uses names. She nicknames them after streets intersections — 3rd and Mass, or K and Juniper, or 5th and Penn — purportedly where she spotted them, or perhaps even photographed them.

One of these people killed her.

It could have been 1st and Macon, or R and Mathis, or Lexington and Race.

Someone either didn’t trust her to not show the pictures to their spouse or caught her in the act.

But who?

I suppose if they knew that, then it wouldn’t be a cold case.

I set the journal pages down and reach across the table and grab a large blue binder. The investigation report.

The men investigating the death of Jennifer Nubers were Washington, DC, homicide detectives Albert Johnson and Devin Cornish.

The report was done on a typewriter. More than twenty pages long. There are several pictures of the crime scene, which I decide are images I have no intention of looking at. I open the three-ring binder and find the investigative report.

It is 3:27 a.m.

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Homicide detectives Johnson and Cornish met with Bob Gillis, Jennifer Nubers’ stepdad, on January 13, 1985. He was the one to call her in missing forty-eight hours earlier.

When the two detectives told him Jennifer’s body was found in a park on the west side of town, that she had been murdered, the man fell to the floor. Cornish attempted to help the man up, but he was of considerable height and girth — 6’1”, easily two hundred and ten pounds — and it took both detectives to raise him.

Johnson, the senior detective by more than seven years, had alerted more than fifty families to the murder of a loved one, and he immediately eliminated Gillis as a suspect in his stepdaughter’s death.

The man continued to sob as they asked him questions about Jennifer. Who was she friends with? Was she dating anybody? Did she have any known enemies?

The only intelligible and perhaps audible answer he gave was the name Megan.

Megan Nubers was Jennifer’s best friend and cousin. She was a year ahead, a junior, at Theodore Roosevelt High School.