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Nathan tried to word it like he was humoring her, but Ripley knew he was genuinely hooked.

What was she trying to do here? Ripley didn’t know.

She was buying time, but infuriating both of her potential killers in the process.

Was there a chance Nathan Taylor would see the light and let her go?

Unlikely. But the longer she stayed alive, the more chance she had of someone finding her here.

‘The obvious, Nathan, is that your dad was damaged. And he passed that damage down to his offspring.’

‘It doesn’t change what we’ve done,’ Sarah said, desperation threading her voice. ‘Nothing changes what we’ve accomplished.’

‘Shut up!’ Nathan screamed. ‘Why didn’t you tell anyone this? How come even the woman who wrote the book on this didn’t even know?’

‘Out of respect for the families. Ironic, right?’

Nathan stormed closer and held up his shovel like he was about to attack. ‘Respect? Are you kidding me?’

‘Insurance doesn’t pay out for suicide.’ Ripley reached out and put one hand on the shovel.

‘We thought murder at first, then the truth became clear. We didn’t want to devastate the families twice, so yes, Nathan, I did lie to you, because it was kinder to let a young boy think his dad was murdered than to tell him his dad took his own life. ‘

Nathan’s transformation manifested physically, the way crisis always did.

Blood vessels in his neck corded like steel cables.

Shoulders bunched. Weight shifted to the balls of his feet.

Thirty years of law enforcement had taught Ripley to read this primordial language fluently.

The human body betrayed intent milliseconds before action, and Nathan Taylor had just crossed the threshold from thought into deed.

He was going to attack her.

And then he exploded into movement, but Ripley was already a step ahead. She reached forward and rested a hand on shovel, and then, in a motion born of pure survival instinct – a motion she didn’t even know her fifty-something body still possessed – she moved .

Ripley yanked the shovel from Nathan’s grip and jumped towards Sarah Webb.

She swung in a violent arc with the shovel outstretched, and the world reduced to a blur.

Her head went light with the sudden rotation, but found its mark with a sickening whack.

Sarah screamed, and the gun in her hand flew towards the ocean just as the tide came in and swallowed it whole.

‘Fuck!’ Sarah yelled. The woman looked like a deer in the headlights, and for a brief moment, Ripley nearly felt sorry for her, because before this monster saw the inside of a cell, she’d be seeing the business end of a shovel.

Nathan Taylor appeared beside her, looking equally as lost as his girlfriend.

He might have taken three lives, but he was clearly out of his element in a clean fight.

And that made Ripley’s job so much sweeter.

‘Two against one. You’re trapped!’ Nathan said.

It was a bad intimidation tactic. A genuine laugh tore from Ripley’s throat. This one was going to be for Max, for her family, for her mentor who’d lost his life to this pair of freaks.

‘I’m not trapped with you,’ she said as she inspected the head of the shovel. She tapped a nail against it. ‘You’re trapped with me.’

Without hesitation, Ripley became a human wrecking machine.

She stormed towards Nathan Taylor with her weapon held high, and while she briefly registered movement on his part, it was futile against a crazy woman with a metal shovel.

She moved with such intensity that it stung her shoulders, and she brought the weapon down at what her subconscious brain guessed was close to a hundred miles per hour.

Bone splintered. Flesh gave way. The rules of physics were in motion; energy must be displaced, and that energy dispersed throughout Nathan Taylor’s skull.

His pupils dilated as blood vessels ruptured beneath his scalp, and created a crimson halo that birthed itself from hairline to jaw in the span of two heartbeats.

His body performed the grotesque choreography of massive neurological trauma: arms splayed outward, fingers hyperextended, legs buckling as opposing muscle groups received simultaneous and contradictory commands from a command center now reduced to fragmenting hardware.

And Nathan Taylor stumbled backward, backward into a hole that had been meant for Ripley. The sand-grave had already filled it a quarter way with water, and if Ripley didn’t intervene, Nathan would drown within the next few minutes.

‘That’s for Frank, you son of a bitch.’

Ripley suddenly broke free from her frenzied fugue state and spun in search of Sarah Webb.

Sarah Webb, who was now a diminishing outline fifty feet ahead. She was running along the beach like wounded prey, even though Ripley hadn’t got to cave her skull in.

She took a breath. Let her go, she thought. The actual killer was at her mercy, and he was the one she wanted.

But then Sarah’s silhouette stuttered to a halt, her forward momentum arrested as if she’d hit an invisible wall. Ripley squinted through salt-laden darkness. The outline of Sarah’s body transformed, arms rising skyward in the universal language of surrender.

What the hell?

The silhouette didn’t remain static. It returned, growing larger with each second, advancing toward Ripley like an apparition pulled by invisible strings.

Ripley’s adrenal glands, already depleted from the explosive violence still reverberating through her shoulder joints, attempted one final chemical rally.

Her vision narrowed to tactical parameters: distance to target, potential weapons within reach, escape routes rendered in urgent mental cartography.

The silhouette’s surrender didn’t compute. Sarah Webb had been running, escaping, with all the desperate momentum of someone who’d just witnessed her boyfriend’s cranium reconstructed by gardening equipment. Voluntary surrender contradicted every survival instinct encoded in human DNA.

Unless –

The silhouette’s outline blurred, bifurcated, then resolved into two distinct shapes; one stationary, arms elevated; the other approaching with the unmistakable forward-leaning posture of law enforcement in pursuit mode.

The second figure grew larger against the backdrop of moonlit surf, and its gait was familiar enough that Ripley’s threat assessment circuits downshifted from red alert to cautious relief.

Ella. Somehow, impossibly, Ella had arrived.

Finally, the two figures came within spitting distance, within shoveling distance. Sarah was shaking like a leaf in a gale. The woman who’d written about murder from the comfort of her computer was now experiencing it for real – and Ripley was loving every second.

‘Brought you a gift,’ Ella said.

Ripley grinned, then inspected the head of her shovel, now coated with the blood of a killer. ‘You’re too kind.’

‘Where’s Taylor?’

‘You figured that out too, huh?’

‘Yeah. Is he here?’

Ripley nodded at the hole in the ground. ‘Drowning.’

‘What?’

‘Don’t worry, we’ve got about,’ – she looked at the oncoming tide, nature’s most reliable timekeeper – ‘two minutes before he dies.’

‘Save him!’ Sarah screeched. ‘Please!’

‘I’ll save him, if you confess.’

‘Yes! We did it all! We planned this out. Nathan killed all of them. I wasn’t there, but…’

A new wave of rage overcame Ripley. She stuck the head of the shovel against Sarah’s neck, staining her with her boyfriend’s blood. ‘You killed three people. My friend, your own dad. Why?’

‘Because we wanted to write the best story ever.’

Ripley felt sick. She spat a glob of phlegm on the sand. ‘I ought to cut your head off right here.’

‘No! Please!’

People showed their true colors when faced with death. To no one’s surprise, least of all Ripley’s, Sarah Webb was a coward.

‘Fine.’ Ripley lowered her weapon. ‘You have no idea how much I wanted to smash your skull in. Right from the second I met you.’

Then Sarah Webb started to cry. She was definitely a good actress, but these seemed genuine.

Behind her, in the hole meant for her eternal residency, Nathan Taylor’s ruined body twitched with diminishing electrical impulses.

The tide had advanced another inch, and now black water now lapped at his shoulders.

Ripley stood at the edge of what could be Nathan’s tomb. ‘What do you think, Dark? Save him.’

‘I say yes, but it’s your case.’

‘No, I’m just the consultant.’

‘Come on. This has been your case from the beginning.’

‘You’re right. This is all mine.’

Ripley reached into the pit, grabbed Nathan Taylor by his shirt and gracelessly hauled him back onto the sand. He coughed up a stream, then opened his eyes.

In that moment, time compressed. The Nathan Taylor before her fractured into dual images: the man bleeding onto Paradise Point Beach in 2024, and the ten-year-old boy clutching a purple paperback in 1998, asking if drowning hurt.

Two iterations of the same person, separated by twenty-six years of rage, obsession, and misdirected grief.

A terrible clarity washed over Ripley. The procedural calculus she’d performed thousands of times in her career suddenly yielded a result she couldn’t compartmentalize:

She had created this monster.

She’d stood on this same stretch of beach and made a decision that altered the trajectory of a ten-year-old boy’s life. One sentence, constructed with good intentions, had metastasized into three deaths.

‘Yes, I did lie to you. Your dad died in agony.’ Ripley let him go. ‘But I know, with absolute certainty, that his last thoughts were about you. I’m sorry.’

Then Sarah’s incessant screeches interrupted. ‘Is he breathing? Make sure he’s okay! He’s a human being. You can’t just-’

The words detonated something primal. A neural circuit-breaker tripped and flooded her system with one final surge of adrenaline. Ripley grabbed her shovel, spun and slammed the flat of the head into Sarah’s forehead before either Ella or rational thought could intervene.

Sarah folded at the middle, all oxygen evacuated from her lungs. She crumpled onto the sand.

‘Jesus, Mia,’ Ella said.

Ripley surveyed the scene. Nathan’s broken form, Sarah’s gasping figure, Ella’s concerned stance.

A portrait of justice and vengeance, indistinguishable in the moonlight.

The shovel in her hands felt suddenly foreign, as if it belonged to another woman from another life.

She spun, and with her last ounce of might, hauled the shovel into the Atlantic Ocean.

Her knees gave way then, not from weakness but from a profound surrender. The sand received her weight as it had received so many others; killers and victims, liars and truth-tellers, all equal before the tide’s judgment.

In the distance, sirens wailed.

Game over.