“You were his best friend and he was so hurt by you. I could tell when he came to visit…. He said, ‘Mother, Cindy hurt me so much, I miss her so much.’ And then he was distraught when he got back home and…Cindy, why would someone murder him?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. I, he said something, I don’t know exact—”

  “What? Why?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.”

  Elayne continued to question Cynthia about the breakup, asking at one point, “Did Ed suspect something between you?”

  “No. No.”

  “No?”

  “I mean, he just, he just wasn’t acting right. I mean, and he, I, I know he said something about having to go and get away and—”

  “But he said he wasn’t ‘allowed’ to be your friend anymore.”

  Cynthia continued to say, over and over, “I don’t know.” She sounded confused and bewildered. Like there were no words to describe how she felt and how her relationship with Jeff had ended. The tone of her voice would have led one to believe that Jeff’s murder was something she had never expected. Not what she wanted by any means. She was as surprised by it as everyone else.

  They talked about Bonnie for a time, Cynthia explaining how she wanted to attend the funeral and call the house, but she didn’t want to impinge on Bonnie’s pain, making her grief any worse. Elayne brought up Ed again, but Cynthia ignored the mention of her wealthy husband and focused on why she didn’t attend the wake or funeral.

  “He was distraught,” said Elayne, “and why someone would murder him—”

  Cynthia cut in. “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t…,” she said, trailing off. Then, “I mean, I, I was supposed to be in the [Mrs.] Ohio pageant and I didn’t even go. I mean…everything was ready in the program and everything, I…I…couldn’t go. I just couldn’t go. I can’t…I just can’t say that he was acting so strange lately.”

  Elayne Zack was getting tired of hearing “I don’t know.” With a more stern voice, quite out of character, she asked, “I want to know why he wasn’t allowed to be your friend! That’s what I’m curious to know, because I know that”—she hesitated for a moment—“he used to come to Phoenix and call you like every five minutes.”

  After another round of “I know…I don’t know,” Cynthia went back to saying how sorry she was for not stopping by the house or going to the wake. “I was just afraid of Bonnie, you know, what she would think….” In the same breath, however, not being able to make the Mrs. Ohio pageant that year seemed to bother Cynthia more than missing Jeff’s funeral. While talking about Jeff, she added, “I had sent all my money in and…and been through the whole thing.” It was a waste. All that time. The application and interview process. Fixing her hair. The clothes. Exercising. For what?

  Nothing.

  “But why didn’t you go?” Elayne asked. “Because you were upset about Jeffrey?”

  “Yeah, I mean, I, I couldn’t, you know…I just…he, he…I wanted to go over there…”

  “But didn’t your husband ever suspect that something was maybe going on between you? Didn’t he wonder?”

  Cynthia went silent.

  25

  When Cynthia decided to speak again after a short pause, she said, “Well, he, you know, I always like, you know, a lot of time he would call, he, and just be upset about anything or whatever. It just seemed like I was the one that he always, you know…” She trailed off, apparently lost in thought.

  Elayne was confused: “Who, Jeffrey or Ed?”

  Cynthia didn’t answer at first. Then she digressed yet again and carried on about Jeff’s various jobs and how he had perhaps got hooked up with people on crack cocaine. It was a shock to Elayne that Cynthia would say such a thing.

  Crack cocaine? Jeffrey? Come on.

  Elayne countered by saying he would never take that type of drug. Cynthia ultimately agreed. They were going around in circles. Elayne kept dangling the Ed George carrot, but Cynthia wouldn’t take it.

  After talking a bit about how members of the CAPU were at her house the previous Sunday asking questions, Cynthia sounded exhausted and even more confused, talking in brief sound bites that made little sense to Elayne, who kept pressing, asking about the relationship and what could have happened to Jeff.

  At one point, Cynthia went on the offensive. “I know my husband did not hurt Jeffrey! I mean, if that’s what you’re implying.”

  “No, I just, I know he didn’t, either. He wouldn’t have done it purposely himself.”

  Cynthia changed the subject and asked about Ashton, saying at one point, “It’s a tragedy.”

  And it was. Regardless of the type of person some thought Jeff Zack was, he had been a dedicated, loving father to his son. The boy was going to suffer the most. He would bear the brunt of the media’s coverage as the case developed. The more skeletons that came out, the more Ashton would begin to question things.

  “It is a tragedy,” Elayne agreed. She was hurt. There was no need to pump up that emotion. What could be worse than losing a child?

  Cynthia blamed the end of the relationship on extenuating circumstances, explaining that there was something else going on in Jeff’s life that weighed heavily on the two of them, which ultimately became a problem within the dynamic of the relationship. In describing that, she seemed to suggest those problems were too overbearing and the relationship wasn’t worth the trouble it was causing. What would become important to the investigation later, Cynthia made no mention of any type of sexual or physical abuse as a reason for her ending the relationship. To the contrary, she blamed the breakup on the problems it was causing for both their marriages.

  Still, Cynthia was very vague, not locking herself into what, exactly, had caused the demise of the romance. Elayne wanted specifics. She was determined to find out precisely what, as she later put it, the “final straw” had been. She said she wanted to “understand” what happened so she could have some closure. It was going to help her during the grieving process. As Jeff’s mother, didn’t she deserve as much? “I’m not accusing anybody,” Elayne finally said. “I’m not implying anything.” She sounded strong and organized in her thoughts.

  “No, no,” said Cynthia.

  “I’m just curious to know why you wouldn’t see him anymore?”

  It was awfully strange to Elayne that they had dated for nearly ten years and only weeks after the breakup Jeff ended up dead.

  “It…it didn’t have anything to do with that,” Cynthia said.

  “He never told you what it was?” asked Elayne after Cynthia went on about “something” that was bothering Jeff.

  “Um…ah…”

  “He probably confided in you more than anybody else.”

  “The last thing I…the last thing he said [to me] was, ‘They’re investigating me at work.’”

  “Cindy,” Elayne said, sounding as though she were rolling her eyes, “I saw his boss. There’s no way.”

  “That’s the last thing that he told me,” Cynthia said sharply. She meant what she said.

  “There’s no way.”

  “I don’t know…I mean, you can ask, I don’t know. But that’s what I, that’s what he told me. Something about…uh…you know, Phoenix and—”

  “Oh?”

  “Of, if, uh, and the, um, he was just, you, you know if you, the way that he is or was…he was acting like that all the time.” According to Cynthia, when she was around Jeff during those final weeks, he, too, was calm and apologetic. Much different from the norm.

  “So you told him that he couldn’t see you anymore?” Elayne wanted to pinpoint Cynthia down to some sort of concrete story.

  “No, I just, I just, I said, ‘I don’t know what you’re, what’s going on or what, you know, but, you know, you know, I can’t, I can’t have, you know, it’s, it’s, you know…’”

  It was getting ridiculous. Cynthia would start to say something, but then stop herself.

  “No more fun,” Elayne said condescendingly.

  Ignoring that, Cynthia came back with, “He said, ‘I got to get out of here. I gotta, I gotta get out of here.’”

  Elayne didn’t know what to make of the statement.

  “I don’t know what kind of trouble he was in,” Cynthia said.

  Elayne pounded home the point that it was nearly impossible for her to believe that between all the time Cynthia and Jeff spent together that Ed George never questioned the relationship. It was inconceivable.

  Cynthia agreed. What else could she say? Elayne wasn’t some deranged mother, filling her days with The Young and the Restless, ignorant to what was going on in the world. She was an educated, intelligent woman. Cynthia had better not underestimate her.

  “It was a problem here and a problem there,” Cynthia said.

  Elayne didn’t answer.

  “But he, he really, he didn’t care,” added Cynthia.

  They continued to talk about how distressed Jeff seemed recently. Then Cynthia dropped the Arab card, saying that she knew Jeff was doing some work for an “Arab family,” adding, “I don’t know if he owed money [to] them.”

  Elayne was still puzzled by the fact that Ed George didn’t make more of a stink about the relationship, saying, “I mean, if my husband saw me on bike trips and being with another guy, he would have wondered and said something. I had to call and ask you that, and I’m not accusing anybody and I know that he had nothing to do with it, believe me, it was the guy probably Jeffrey cut off.”

  Cynthia responded immediately: “Pardon me?”

  “The guy that murdered Jeffrey,” Elayne said harshly, trying to shift the conversation into the reason why she agreed to make the call. “Jeffrey probably cut him off, had a fight with him, because he left here angry on Saturday morning. He probably had road rage somehow. I’m not, I know Ed had nothing to do with it. But I never could understand and I, I just need to know.”

  “Yeah,” Cynthia said, “that, that [meaning road rage] happened a lot….”

  This theory of Elayne’s seemed to calm Cynthia down. She started talking about what she was doing on the day Jeff was killed. She mentioned the wedding she and Ed had attended with the kids. Then she said the police had scared the kids by coming to the house on Sunday to ask questions.

  Then the conversation went back to Bonnie. “Bonnie never gets mad at anybody,” Elayne said.

  Cynthia disagreed, claiming that Bonnie had screamed at her a few times.

  For the CAPU, the telephone call wasn’t going to obviously produce anything of investigatory value other than—as Ed Moriarty explained it later—proving that Cynthia and Jeff had an active extramarital affair going on for quite some time. It was significant for the reason that Cynthia herself, on tape, was admitting to it.

  “Ed kind of accepted that we were friends…,” Cynthia said near the end of the conversation.

  Cynthia and Jeff had told people their relationship was a platonic friendship—that Cynthia knew Jeff better than anyone and had been, as she tried telling Elayne, “consoling” Jeff on the problems he had in life.

  To that, Elayne said, “I have to be honest and tell you that he did, he, he did tell someone that, ‘If something happens to me, it’s because of Ed George.’ Now, that could be Jeffrey’s drama.”

  “Yeah,” Cynthia said quickly, seemingly unaffected by the comment.

  “You know Jeffrey was very dramatic.”

  “Right.”

  26

  Detective Melissa Williams caught up with the guy Jeff had supposedly taken a bike trip with to West Virginia between June 8 and June 13. No sooner had Williams flashed her badge and explained why she was at the guy’s work, then he came clean and said he and Jeff never took that bike trip. “It was just a cover so Jeff could go to Las Vegas and see this girl.”

  Detective Williams, just to be sure, asked Jeff’s friend if he was talking about the same woman everyone else had been.

  “No, this is not Jeff’s mistress, who he has been seeing for ten years.”

  So the question became, then, how in the heck did Jeff know a woman in Las Vegas? How many girlfriends did the guy have?

  Apparently, while Jeff was on his way out to Arizona to visit his mother for Mother’s Day—that weekend everyone had said he was not himself, making amends and apologizing for his previous behavior—he met a woman on the plane ride out there, sweet-talked her, and ended up not only sleeping with her, but spending a better part of the week with her.

  Williams took notes, prodding. “Tell me about this ‘mistress,’ as you call her.”

  “All I know is that Bonnie knew about her [Cynthia George].” They were standing in a warehouse. It was noisy. Machines buzzing. Loudspeaker. The guy asked Williams to step into the lunchroom, where it was quieter, adding as they entered the room, “And so did the woman’s husband.”

  “What did Jeff say about the husband?”

  “That he was in the mafia.”

  “Was Jeff concerned?”

  “I don’t think so. It had been going on for so long and nothing happened. Jeff really didn’t think it was a problem.” Then the guy explained that Jeff and “his mistress” had recently split up.

  “You know why—did Jeff ever say why?” Williams asked.

  “I believe Jeff wanted to make things better with his family.”

  Bonnie Zack had given Ed Moriarty and the CAPU several photographs of the George family Jeff had either taken himself, or Cynthia had given him. One of those photographs had struck Moriarty as particularly strange ever since he saw it that first time. There was something different about the photo, no doubt about it. Not the image itself, a simple family portrait: Ed, Cynthia and their seven children standing in rows on the stairs of their home like grammar-school kids on a podium posing for their class picture. From the image, the Georges appeared to be a happy, close family. But it was one of the kids, Moriarty thought. Five of Cynthia and Ed’s children looked alike—with the exception of one, a child they had adopted. Yet the seventh child, born just recently, didn’t quite match up with the other children, who were all dark-skinned and dark-haired, obviously taking on the bulk of Ed George’s Lebanese genes.

  Moriarty called several of his colleagues together and asked, “Do you see anything in that photo that seems significantly inconsistent?”

  Everyone agreed. That one child, the youngest, looked remarkably different from the others.

  But what did it mean?

  By June 21, Detective Williams was able to find Jeff’s Las Vegas lover. After speaking with Jeff’s friend, the one who had unearthed the Las Vegas connection, in a smart piece of police work, Williams figured Jeff had likely called the woman from his cell phone. So she went through the long-distance calls Jeff had made during that time period—June 8 through June 13—and found several calls to a number with the name Lisa scribed in the cell phone’s directory. But when Williams called the number, she got a voice mail message: “Hi, this is [Lisa], I’m not available right now….”

  So she left a message.

  A short while later, the woman called back.

  “It is my number,” Lisa said. “I’m in [another state] with my aunt. She’s sick.” Lisa, who lived in Arizona, sounded beaten, like, OK, you caught me. She had been anticipating the call, she admitted.

  “You know why I’m calling you?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Do you know that Jeff Zack has been killed?”

  “Yes, I heard.”

  “I’m going to have to ask you some questions about your relationship with Mr. Zack—” Williams started to say as Lisa interrupted.

  “I know. I understand. I’ve already decided to be open and forthcoming about it all. But it will be difficult.”

  Williams was curious. “Why?”

  “I’m married. My husband doesn’t know a thing about my relationship with Jeff.”

  “Can you give me your full name and address, Social Security number and date of birth?”

  Lisa gave Williams her address and name, but declined to give up her Social Security number or date of birth. She was worried. It was in her voice. Her entire world—which she had kept hidden from her husband—was about to collapse. How many lives an affair could ruin—but people still felt the need to do it, rather than divorcing and moving on.

  Jeff and Lisa had hooked up on that flight Jeff took to Arizona. She was on her way home from a business trip. They talked, she said, and bonded instantly. She believed after spending just a few days with Jeff in Phoenix after the flight that she had “found [her] soul mate.” Isn’t that always the case? The inevitable life partner—the adultery excuse of the twenty-first century: I met my soul mate. I couldn’t help it. A spiritual connection, one that her husband wasn’t giving her.

  After the flight, she and Jeff exchanged business cards. “Call me,” she said.

  “I will,” said Jeff, smiling.

  The next day, Jeff called and asked Lisa about purchasing some of the equipment she sold.

  “We became inseparable after that,” Lisa explained to Williams over the telephone. “We spent every day together while he was in Phoenix visiting his family. I had never done anything like that in my life, but I had no control over it. I was devastated by Jeff’s death when I heard.”

  When they parted in Phoenix, Lisa told Jeff about a business trip she had planned for Las Vegas a week and a half later. Jeff was thrilled. He said he’d meet her there.

  “When you were in Vegas together,” Williams wondered, “did you guys talk…I mean, did Jeff open up about his life?”

  “Sure. We talked about everything. He told me about his affair with Cindy.”

  “He did. What did he say about it?”

  It was shocking that Jeff was honest with his new lover about his affair with Cynthia—yet he hadn’t been truthful in respect to the details of it. “He said he and Cindy ended it about two years ago. He said it had been on and off for about ten years.”

  It was a lie. Cynthia had told Jeff it was over about a month before he was murdered. Jeff never ended it.