“I don’t know any one of you from Adam, and I’ve already explained to you that we never wanted you to go down. We’ve got no beef with you, other than the will you wrote.”
“I’ve already told you I tried to talk him out of it.”
“I get it. Fonda and I both do, okay? You were never on our radar. It was the cop’s idea.”
“And now? What are you going to do about it?”
“We’ve got the dirty cop dead to rights. We know he went to you asking for a bribe. He’s the one who tried to pin it on you. He set it in motion before you married Rock, and it was too late to do anything about it after you married him. He didn’t want to pin it on a Wolfe, even though the evidence was there.”
“Let me guess.” My mind raced. “He saw the Wolfes as a paycheck.”
“I’d say you’re smarter than you look,” he said, “but you might take that the wrong way.”
I pushed the nose of the firearm further into his temple. “Nice. Are you forgetting who’s holding the gun here?”
“No, I’m not. But if you pull that trigger, all the information I have will be down the freaking toilet.”
He wasn’t wrong. He had me at metaphorical gunpoint while I had him at actual.
“I can always go after Fonda,” I said.
He winced. Only slightly, but I noticed. That continuing legal education class on body language I took last year had definitely paid off.
“How’d you find out your father was faking his death?” I asked.
“He told me.”
I nearly dropped the gun. “You’re the leak. It wasn’t Derek. It was you. Your voice. You sound just like the others. You made that call to Rock in Montana. From Reid’s office. It wasn’t Derek at all. Then you called Nieves Romero, saying you were Roy.”
“Give the lady a gold star.” Jordan chuckled.
“But why? You knew what would happen.”
“Hell, no, I didn’t know what would happen. I thought it would implicate Reid and Roy. Rock and Riley already had reason to be implicated. Reid was my father’s right-hand man, and I didn’t know about Roy and the elevator at that time. I needed all four of them in the mix. I had no idea the Romero woman would intercept the message to Rock and tip off the cops, but I used it to my advantage to bring Roy into the mix.”
I shook my head. “We had it all wrong. We thought Derek was trying to take his children down.”
“Dad did a number on them with that will he had you draw up. Why would he try to send them all to prison? Who’d run his billion-dollar enterprise then?”
I picked my jaw up from the floor. How had we gotten this so wrong?”
We hadn’t known Derek had another kid, for one thing. But we’d overlooked Fonda from the very beginning. If Derek had treated her the way he treated Connie, his kids…
Damn. We should have known.
“Which one of you did it? You or Fonda?”
“Listen. If I tell you… If I give you proof that implicates the two of us, you have to do something for me.”
“Not likely.”
“Then kill me. Kill me and kill her. That information dies with us, and you go down.”
50
Zee
“Then we’re back at the beginning.” Rock paced across the floor.
“You just claimed your son was innocent,” Reid said. “So we know it wasn’t him, right?”
“I meant innocent in the way a mother will always see her child. As innocent as the day he was born. His father tainted him, corrupted him.” Diamond sniffled. “I’ll always believe he’s the baby I carried.”
Diamond had taken care of me. She took care of the girls. She was first and foremost a mother.
And a mother would always believe in her child.
A good mother would, anyway.
“You also just said Derek corrupted your son,” Rock added.
“He did. He took Jordan from me. The one thing I loved more than my own life.”
“You’re not ruling him out, then,” Reid said. “He could be the killer.”
Diamond said nothing.
She didn’t have to.
Everything became clear to me then. Why Diamond hadn’t tried to leave the island. Why she stayed. It wasn’t just because the women needed her. It was because she no longer had a life outside this place. She had no motivation to find something better once her son had been taken from her.
“Take us to the women,” I said. “We have to get them out of here.”
“I just told you—”
“You heard my wife,” Reid said through clenched teeth. “She wants to see them, and I do too.”
A little while later, we arrived at what Diamond called “the dorm.” Where I’d been held when I first got here.
“Some of them are in the common area,” Diamond said. “Others won’t leave their rooms.”
“I understand,” I told her.
“I believe if anyone here understands,” she said, “it’s you.”