Jozy.
NotJersey. NotJuicy. NotCozy.
Jozy.
The nickname Bill himself used at the Crispin, talking about DeMaris while taking a pull from his flask.Jozy always could hold his liquor.
If Bill was as open with his wife as Kir is with his, then Susan would’ve heard that name a hundred times as Bill stayed up late at night, fretting about the consequences of fuck-ups in the sordid games he was trying to escape. So when she clawed her way up through the morphine for one breath, one word, one chance, it wasn’t a beach in Spring Lake she was thinking of.
It was aman.
“Mat?” Jillian’s voice cuts through. “You look like you’re about to either pass out or punch a wall. Which is it?”
“It’s Jozy,” I rasp.
“What?”
“Susan’s last word. To Caroline. She didn’t say Jersey. She saidJozy. As inSenator Josiah DeMaris.” I jab a finger at the folder swelling open on her screen. “Look at the size of that folder, Jillian.Look at it.”
Her jaw drops. She turns back to the laptop and starts to click.
The folder splits open into more folders.Wires. Photos. Correspondence. Travel. Personnel.Jillian dives intoWiresfirst.
It’s a ledger. A spreadsheet, hundreds of rows long, each line a wire transfer. Originating accounts in Cyprus, the BVI, Liechtenstein, Macao, a smattering of Caribbean banks. Receiving accounts that I recognize from my own work at the firm—Vainakh shells I’ve helped paper over the years without ever knowing what was actually moving through them. Dates. Amounts. Notes columns annotated in Bill’s clipped little shorthand.JD app’d in person, Geneva.JD verbal, secure line.JD sig req’d, see attached.
JD. Josiah DeMaris.
The dates start in late 2018 and run all the way through the third week of January of this year.
“That’s—” Jillian leans in, her finger hovering over the screen. “Mat, those areapprovals.Look at the language.App’d.Sig req’d.These aren’t paymentstohim. These are payments authorizedbyhim.” She turns to look at me, awestruck. “Josiah wasn’t gettingpaid offby Vainakh… He was running the whole fucking show.”
What does that make Raymond? It’s becoming clear that Raymond wasn’t even the principal in his own life. He was an errand boy who got cocky.
DeMaris was the man who’d decided enough was enough.
Jillian closes the computer very, very softly. “Mat…” The reporter has stepped back, and whatever Jillian is underneath that—a friend, a soon-to-be-mother, a woman who read this exact kind of dossier on her own husband before falling in love with him anyway—is sitting next to me at her kitchen island. “I have to tell you something you don’t want to hear.”
I nod. “Go.”
“This is a career-enderfor DeMaris. If I leaked this to the right desk at the Times, or at ProPublica, or to anyone with half a fucking spine still left in journalism, then he’s done. Indictments inside a month. A Senate ethics committee will roast him alive, then throw his carcass to the Bureau to finish the job.”
I frown. “That all sounds pretty fucking good to me. Which part would I not want to hear?”
She turns on the stool to face me. Her eyes are red, like she hasn’t slept well in a long time, and I remember that she is also three months away from birthing a child into a world that contains men like Josiah DeMaris. “None of that gets Cass out of a cell.”
That knocks me stupid and silent.
“A public scandal isn’t a legal defense for her,” she goes on, more gently. “Politically, he burns. But the GSR on her hand doesn’t disappear because a senator’s career does. The prints on the weapon don’t lift themselves off the grip. The D.A.’s case againsther stands on its own forensic legs, and a smart prosecutor will argue it stands even taller now—because if Vainakh was real and Raymond was their guy, thenof courseRaymond’s wife had even more motive to want him dead.”
I feel fucking sick. I was ready to celebrate. But Jillian’s right, of course. She’s sharp like that. I’m the one fumbling along in the darkness.
“You need a confession,” she concludes. “Or… you need a body that confesses for him.”
I close my eyes and think.
I’d known it, really. Jillian’s very good at her job, but I’m every bit as good as mine. I guess part of me just wanted to hear it in someone else’s voice. To have somebody outside my own head deliver the verdict, so I couldn’t pretend later that I’d talked myself into it.
That the killing wasn’t over.
