Page 54 of The Business Trip

In the Hotel Room

Glenn’s face is what came to mind first. I imagined that the person under the pillow was him, a weak, pitiful version of him, and I was the physically strong one.

Then I pictured Allison. Her words from the party flew through the air at me in Stephanie’s hotel room like tiny swords:

What a pathetic cat outfit, Jasmine.

You crazy bitch.

You are so fucked up, Jasmine.

My mother floated to my brain next. Her telling a friend she never should have had a third child. Her calling me “Little Piggy” and making me wear pigtails. That final card with the words “Have a very Merry Christmas.”

This trio of people taunted me as slowly, slowly I brought the pillow down and covered Stephanie’s face, pressing as hard as I could.

Within a few seconds, I heard her coughing and fussing about. I pressed harder. She began to flail. She was stronger than I thought, and I had a sudden fear that she might overpower me. The angle I was at was not going to work, so I keptpressing and climbed onto the bed, straddling her waist for a firmer position.

I thought of only Glenn again, and renewed strength came into my limbs as I pressed down.

Stephanie’s arms and legs thrashed wildly, but I was winning. I heard her gasping for air,The Golden Girls’laugh track offering a sickly ambient noise.

My breathing was ragged, but my limbs felt electric with adrenaline. Sweat popped out on my forehead.

Slowly, her movements got lighter and less frequent and then stilled. I kept the pillow on her face for an extra sixty seconds, counting carefully to myself.

Lifting the pillow a few inches, I took a peek around the edge, ready to restore it if she moved at all.

Her face was frozen in a state of shock, mouth and eyes open, a single tear falling from one eye toward her temple. Seeing her dead made my stomach curdle, and I raced to the bathroom and threw up the beef jerky and Diet Coke.

I had just killed someone. For a second time. What. The. Fuck. Like murder, real premeditated murder this time. A woman I barely knew, a woman who had woken up in her home in Madison that morning without a clue that she would be gone within twenty-four hours in a hotel room in San Diego.

But it needed to be done, I reminded myself. There was no other way. She’d had a way better life than mine for however old she was. It was my turn to have a way better second half of life.

OK, now I had to focus.

Her face was disturbing me, so I got the pillow and placed it back over her head. Picking up my phone, I used it to google “rigor mortis.” It would set in about three to four hours after death. OK, I had to get her scrunched into the giant suitcasebefore then, but I had a tiny bit of time. Grabbing her laptop, I flipped it open.

There was a yellow Post-it note stuck to the screen. It said “Phone and laptop passwords: EvanFred0503.”

What? How could anyone besostupid as to advertise their passwords? I felt like I had just hit a bull’s-eye in darts, cranked a home run out of the park, or earned a gold medal in figure skating. I mean, WTF?! This had to be yet another sign from my grandma that I had just done the right thing. There was simply no other explanation.

“Thank you, Gram,” I muttered, bringing my hands into a prayer motion and looking up at Stephanie’s hotel ceiling.

I had no time to waste in celebration, though. Logging in, I started opening all of her pages and scrolling through to see what I could learn. She had tabs across the top for work email, personal email, something called LinkedIn (which I had heard Anna talk about but had never tried myself), Facebook, Twitter (or whatever it was called now), Google Docs, and TikTok. First, I took a quick peek at her personal email. There was a back-and-forth with some female friends about tickets to Florida for a girls’ trip.

“Bring on the vacay—I need it! Strawberry margs are definitely calling my name! I booked us a super cool Airbnb on the beach!” Stephanie had written in the last one. Another richy-rich privilege the rest of us didn’t get to have. Weekend getaways, Airbnbs on the beach.Not going to happen now, spoiled bitch, I thought as I glanced back at the bed.

Next I went to the files under the desktop icon. Scrolling through ones with boring titles like “Taxes,” “San Antonio trip photos,” and “New friend, Diana,” I finally spotted the one I was looking for: “Passwords.” This was it, the holy grail.

Clicking it open, she had everything neatly laid out by category, and I spotted the one I was hoping to see: banking. It listed all of her passwords for her online bank accounts. They were variations of “Evan” and “Fred” and numbers, sometimes with an exclamation point or some other sort of punctuation at the end.

I had done it. I had hacked into exactly what I would need to drain her money.

Next I looked at LinkedIn. It was some sort of professional work site, and I checked her profile, hoping to learn more, to memorize details so that I could spit them out in the morning when I attended the conference.

I had to make an appearance as her, I knew that, to make my story believable. She couldn’t just not show up at the conference at all. Someone would question her absence, maybe call back to her station. No, her name tag had to be picked up, her presence visible at least for a bit. A day was my plan. She had told me on the plane that she had never met any of these people, that there were thousands of news directors across the country and this group was all new to her. I felt confident I could pull off being her for a day, but to be sure, I needed more info.

Her background on LinkedIn was laid out to me clearly in a résumé-style list: went to DePaul, was from Indiana originally, had worked in Chicago before Madison. That was easy enough. Just in case, I looked up the mascot for DePaul (Blue Demons) and the names of the freshmen dorms so that I would sound authentic if anyone said they also went there. I scribbled these all down on my paper.

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