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  67. 3:46 a.m.

“No, never. It wasn’t him. It was one of the guys she was blackmailing.”

Both detectives and both her parents’ eyebrows scrunched together in near unison.

“Blackmailing?” her father asked, beating both detectives to the punch. “What do you mean, blackmailing?”

Megan took a deep breath and told them.

Told them everything.

::::

“Why didn’t you idiots just read the journal?” I ask out loud, though I’m sure at some point they would have. Possibly they had to turn the pages over to evidence to look for fingerprints before they read them over. Or maybe the pages were found far from where Jennifer’s body was found and only later were they connected to her.

I flip forward a half dozen pages.

It is 3:46 a.m.

::::

Of the more than twenty-five people Jennifer Nubers blackmailed over a ten-month span, detectives Johnson and Cornish were only able to track down three.

3rd and F

22nd and New Hampshire

And 2nd and Mas.

And this was only because there were banks located on these exact street corners. Using Jennifer’s descriptions of the men from her journal and the intersections, they were able to use the banks security tapes to locate the gentlemen. It would have been nearly impossible to look through a year’s worth of tapes, but luckily, in all three circumstances, Jennifer mentioned which movie Megan and her boyfriend (or all three of them) saw and the detectives could narrow the timeline to a couple weeks.

In all three cases, the men — Jack Newborn, Chase Wingleberry, and Montel Hermann — admitted to being blackmailed by Jennifer Nubers.

Both Jack Newborn and Montel Hermann said that they paid her $250 after she showed them pictures of them having affairs (in Newborn’s case, with another man), then never heard from her again. Wingleberry, perhaps the scummiest of the three, took money out of the ATM, then decided not to pay her. He said, quote, I didn’t give that little bitch a dime. My wife knows I fuck around. I told her to go right on and tell her. Shit, she’d probably love the pictures of me and the redhead.

Newborn, an account executive at JP Morgan and Sons, a father of four, with perhaps the most to lose and therefore the biggest motive, was in London on business when Jennifer was murdered.

Hermann too, was on business, in Seattle.

Both men’s trips were corroborated.

Wingleberry’s alibi was his wife. Though when they interviewed her, she said she was NOT okay with her husband, quote, fucking around, but that he was with her the night of Jennifer’s disappearance.

Johnson and Cornish knew the wife was lying.

It took her coming down to the precinct three times before she cracked. Before she admitted Chase wasn’t with her that night. That he never came home. That he was gone for two days. The exact two days that Jennifer Nubers’ was missing.