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“Okay.”

“So then he said I needed to be in White Bear, closer to the action.”

Light dawning, she said, “No. This has to do with Harvey Marquart?”

“Yeah. So he was involved in some high-level drug trade, using his motel as a cover.”

She settled back in the recliner, the kitten not moving a muscle. “And the kidnapping scheme?”

“I knew Helen was Harvey’s cousin. So I befriended her at a café like?—”

“You befriended me,” Monica said, amused.

“Yeah, but not for the same reason. She was a means to an end. I smooth-talked her into thinking I had tons of money.”

“Which you do, unless you bamboozled me.”

“I do have tons of money, and that’s why I was able to relocate here without any trouble. I had the notion that I could ‘get involved’ in Harvey’s drug trade since I had the money, but the payoff was really DEA money. The next thing I know, Denny arrives at the house with the scheme that he’s kidnapping her, and I’m paying a ransom. She’s Harvey’s cousin, so I wondered if that was another reason they came after me and the money.”

“Totally throwing off your drug deal.”

“Yeah, they just wanted the fast money and didn’t want me involved in their drug business. My DEA handler wasn’t happy.”

“I bet. Did you really give him five hundred thousand?”

“No. I told him I had to get the rest later. When Denny nearly cracked my skull in his faux kidnapping scheme, I thought he was going to hurt Helen. She told me he had a short fuse, and she had a restraining order against him.”

“Hmm, okay, so you think it was real, but you change up the scenario.”

“Yeah. I didn’t want her hurt, even though she was just a pawn in the scheme of things as far as the drugs went, since she was Harvey’s cousin.”

Monica was glad he was one of the good guys. She had thought he was until the story kept flipping around.

Pierre let out his breath. “When I saw you were in the vicinity with another kidnapping case, I thought that maybe, since you had taken care of four kidnapped victims without any harm to them in the past year, you could help save Helen. But Denny told me he would kill her if I called anyone. I knew you would handle it right.”

She didn’t want to tell him about the one she couldn’t save, which still haunted her. “Okay, so I went to get gas in White Bear, and when I was there, Teague cut my brake lines, so I would get far enough into the wilderness that it could be dangerous to me.”

Pierre’s eyes widened, and he ran his hand through his sandy hair. “Hell. You didn’t tell me that.”

“I didn’t learn of it right away. But your girlfriend, Helen, was the one who put him up to it.”

Pierre rubbed his chin, staring at the floor, deep in thought. “Ah, hell. Here I was truly worried about Denny hurting her. I shouldn’t have been.”

“What about them picking up the money?”

“Oh, that. They wanted me to meet them at some isolated location. Lots of money? No witnesses? No way. All that was true. I told them they had to come to the house, and I’d disable the cameras. They weren’t the brightest bulbs in the box.”

“Did you disable the cameras?”

“Hell no. I ensured all the recorded video was in the cloud and turned it over to my handler. I had some fake cameras that looked like they were off, and they yanked them out just to be sure.”

It was good to know that Pierre had documented everything, though she couldn’t take his word for it.

“I guess you’re stuck on this Andy MacMathan.”

She paused the recording. “Yeah, we really hit it off. I met him a year ago when I went through White Bear and had a flat tire. He helped me with it, but I was seeing another guy at the time.”

“The guy you had ditched before I walked in on you at the café.”