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Back 3 a.m.
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  67. 3:46 a.m.

“Yes, a flash drive. It had one file on it: Project Sandman.”

“My mother’s confession for killing Jennifer Nubers.”

He looks impressed. “Correct.”

“Was it typewritten or a video?”

“A video.”

“And she confesses to killing Jennifer Nubers?”

He nods, then asks, “Would you like to see it?”

::::

“My name is Elena Janev,” my mother says. “The date is January 15, 1985.” She holds up a newspaper to confirm this.

She looks exactly how I remember her, which makes sense, because the last time I saw her was three weeks before she recorded the video. Her brown hair is held back in a ponytail. Her green eyes are the green of the deep Amazon jungle. Her high cheekbones taper gently to full lips.

She has bruising around her throat and a cut on her forehead, evidence that Jennifer Nubers put up a fight.

“Three days ago, I murdered a sixteen-year-old girl named Jennifer Nubers. My motive was that she was blackmailing me for having an affair with a man. As you may know from her journal, which we scattered around the crime scene, this was a hobby of Jennifer’s. She approached me two weeks ago and requested a sum of ten thousand dollars or she would send the photographs to my husband.”

I glance over my shoulder at Ewen.

He nods, as if to say, “Yes, she is a monster.”

And she was.

She was even worse than Ewen. In Ewen’s warped mind, he killed to protect America. My mother killed to protect herself.

My mother continues, “Five days ago, January 10th, I met Jennifer to pay her. I injected her with a sedative, put her in my car, and brought her to a motel room.”

Liar.

You brought her here.

To the White Room.

“After two days of interrogating her to discover the whereabouts of the pictures, and failing, I lost my temper. I grabbed a lamp off the table and hit her in the head, thereby inflicting a deadly head trauma. I then transported her to McKinney Park, scattered her journal around her, and left.”

The video cuts out.

I sit in silence for a long minute.

Half of this monster’s DNA is inside me.

I want to wretch. To get a scalpel and attempt to cut away half of each cell.

But then whose DNA would I be left with?

I stand up and turn to face Ewen. “Is David Sullivan my father?”

He laughs. “How did you find out?”

I tell him about how I had doubts my dad was truly my biological father and how I sent out his and my hair samples to a DNA testing company and the results were negative.

Ewen says, “If you like, I can tell you for certain who your father is right now.”

“You can?” But of course he could. Of course he had David Sullivan’s DNA on file.