her phone, maybe I could track it using her texts. Turns out I could, kind of.”
Jessie waited for him to continue but he seemed hesitant, as if she might shoot him down.
“Go ahead,” she said. “Your job is to give me the facts, whether I like them or not.”
That seemed to set him at ease a bit.
“Right, so I found the corresponding text from after the caterer incident, at five forty-six a.m. She told one of her staffers that she wanted to look into a new catering company because the current one was incompetent. So we know the text matches her expected location. She sent multiple other texts throughout the night, all very demanding, most unpleasant. I won’t depress you with the details. But there were two in particular I wanted to draw your attention to.”
He punched up a new screen that included the texts with their timestamp and what appeared to be locations on the estate.
“So,” he continued, “other than these two texts it’s basically impossible to verify Salter’s location at the time they were sent. Despite their vitriol, they either weren’t specific enough or nowhere near a camera. But these are different.”
He enlarged one text. It read: Buster’s wreaking havoc. Getting complaints. Don’t need a lawsuit. Kick him out. The timestamp was 2:57 a.m.
“Now look,” he said.
He played a video time stamped 3:04 a.m. from the South House main entrance. It showed the door open and a portly, balding man being escorted forcefully to an area to the west of the roundabout, where several taxis were waiting. He was placed in one, which pulled out seconds later.
“What did I just see?” Jessie asked.
“That was Buster Catalano, the comedian.”
“The guy who does impressions of people no one cares about,” Karen added.
“Right,” Jamil said. “He’s also notorious for being grabby. He’s been sued for sexual harassment twice. It appears that he was up to his old tricks and Salter wasn’t happy about it. In fact, she was so unhappy that she personally supervised his removal from the estate.”
He recentered the image and magnified it to show a figure standing in the doorway, watching Buster being taken away. The face was cut off because of the camera angle but the business suit and doily scarf were visible. Jamil looked over at Jessie proudly.
“We couldn’t mark her location with facial recognition earlier because there was no face to recognize.”
“That’s good, Jamil,” she said, “really good. What’s the other text?”
Jamil pulled that one up. It read: Be there in 2 min. It was from 3:13 a.m.
“So I checked to see what she was replying to,” Jamil said. “And it was this.”
He pulled up a text from someone named Mary Proul. It read: Grease fire extinguished in the kitchen. Ugly mess. Smoky. Please advise.
“This is what we see a few minutes after that,” he said, zooming in on a small open space between the junctions of the South House and East House. “According to the house plans, that’s the side door of the service kitchen.”
At 3:22 a.m., a young woman walked out the open door, disappeared briefly from the frame, and returned with a wheeled trash bin. Someone who couldn’t quite be seen tossed several bags of trash in the bin. Jamil froze the frame, then pulled cropped images of the person’s sleeves and shoes over to another monitor. He then pulled images of the sleeves and shoes Nancy Salter wore at the main entrance when Buster Catalano was kicked out. They matched exactly.
“So that’s her then?” Jessie said, verbalizing the obvious.
“It would seem so. She drops in additional trash bags at three twenty-six and three thirty-two.”
“Okay, Jamil,” Jessie said. “Why don’t you pull up the timeline I know you’ve created and are dying to show me?”
Jamil smiled at her, then pushed a button. A timeline appeared on the screen. It was titled “Millicent Estrada window of death” and read: 3:00 to 3:50 a.m. He hit another button and a new timeline appeared below the first. It was titled “Nancy Salter time accounted for.” It read: 2:57 a.m. to 3:06 a.m. and 3:13 a.m.to 3:32 a.m.
“So,” Jessie concluded, “while it was technically possible for Nancy Salter to have killed Milly, she would have had an extremely tight window and she would have had to go from the far end of one wing of the estate to the opposite end of another wing. Is that what you’re telling me?”
“That’s what I’m telling you,” Jamil confirmed.
Jessie sighed. Her suspicion of Salter wasn’t completely disproven but it