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“Audrey.”

I looked up from where I cowered behind the island to see Jennifer hovering over me, her blue eyes piercing.

She was freshly showered and dressed in workout clothes, like she was about to go on a run, except for the gun dangling from her right hand.

One of the guns missing from Tyson’s cabinet, I assumed.

“What are you doing here?” There was an edge in her voice, her doe-eyed charm vanished. Yes, this was more like the Andie I’d known.

“Jennifer.” I slipped my phone into my back pocket as I rose with shaking knees and held up my hands. Play dumb. She doesn’t know you know anything . “Why do you have a gun?”

She looked at the gun, adjusting her grip as she raised it and pointed the barrel at me. “For protection.”

I felt like I’d swallowed glass. “Against me?”

“You’re wanted for murder.”

“But you had it on you before you saw my footprints,” I said.

“I saw you coming up the hill from my bathroom window. I waited until you came upstairs so we could talk in private. Why are you here?”

“I didn’t kill Tyson,” I said, dropping my hands.

She flinched. She was definitely jumpy, and she didn’t look like she was used to handling a gun. A dangerous combination. “It sure looks like you did,” she said.

She might be the one brandishing a weapon, but she didn’t know about the cameras recording our conversation in crystal-clear audio and video, thanks to Tyson’s paranoia.

I just needed to get a confession out of her without making her want to pull the trigger.

“Please, put the gun down. I didn’t kill Tyson, and I don’t want to hurt you. ”

She shook her head, keeping the firearm trained on me.

I desperately scoured my brain for anything I could use to compel her to confide in me rather than shoot me.

Treat her like an ally? It was worth a try.

I swallowed. “We have a lot in common,” I said.

“Both of us single moms. Neither of us can go to jail, we have our children to think about. If you’ll just tell me what happened, I can help you. ”

She laughed. “You, help me?”

I softened my face and steeled my resolve. “I did once before, remember? The night of the fire. I kept pressure on your wound until the paramedics could get there. I saved your life, but you still have the scar.”

She choked up on the gun, blinking rapidly. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I always liked you, Andie.” I tilted my head at what I hoped was a sympathetic angle, aware I was taking a risk.

But Laurent was watching the camera feed.

Would he have called the police already?

I hadn’t given the signal, but he might have thought it necessary when he saw the gun.

If he had, I didn’t have much time to get a confession out of her.

“And I like you even better as Jennifer. Sobriety looks good on you. So does”—I gestured to her body—“all of it. Good for you, turning your life around.”

“You’re not making sense,” she said, but there was acknowledgment in her eyes.

“I can help you stay out of jail, if you’ll just tell me what happened.”

“You’re the prime suspect in Tyson’s murder,” she said, her voice unsteady. “Not me.”

“Because they haven’t verified your true identity yet,” I said, feigning confidence. “But they work fast. We don’t have much time to come up with a plausible story. If you’ll just put the gun down, we can talk.”

She didn’t put the gun down, but I could tell she didn’t know what to make of me, which was at least better than her wanting to shoot me.

She’d already tried to kill me once; this time she might succeed.

“I didn’t realize you were pregnant when I ran into you at Goodwill,” I went on.

“But it’s so clear now, that your son is Ian’s. ”

She adjusted her grip on the gun.

“I understand why you wanted revenge on Tyson,” I continued. “You felt he was responsible for Ian’s death—”

“He was,” she snapped, cutting me off. “You know it as well as I do.”

She realized once she’d said it that she’d betrayed herself, but the cat was out of the bag and there was no putting it back in. She was jittery, her finger on the trigger as she backed away from me.

I considered giving Laurent the signal to call the police, but whose side would they be on when they showed up?

Probably not mine. Not yet, even if Laurent had patched them in to the feed from the cameras overhead.

I needed to get more out of her. “I can help you,” I offered, putting my whole heart into it, though I had nothing to back it up. “We can help each other.”

“How?” She was going for derision, but the quiver in her voice betrayed her.

“The police didn’t listen to you back then when you tried to tell them Tyson was involved in Ian’s disappearance, because Tyson was the son of a prominent businessman, and Ian was just another missing drug addict. That must have hurt.”

“You have no idea,” she said bitterly.

“But you were smart. You played the long game, taking on a new identity and worming your way into Tyson’s inner circle so that you could tighten the noose around his neck.”

The fact that she didn’t respond told me I was on the right track.

“What was your plan?” I pressed. All of this had been set in motion long before Ian’s foot washed up. “Your end goal?”

“I wanted to ruin his life, the way he’d ruined mine,” she admitted finally.

The gun began to sag as she paid more attention to her bitterness than to the deadly weapon in her hand, and I briefly wondered whether I could charge her and grab it.

But what good would that do? I hadn’t yet gotten a murder confession out of her, and Cody was downstairs and would surely come to her defense if he heard a scuffle.

“I was the one who alerted the Monterey De-Sal center that their environmental impact report should be double-checked.”

I swallowed my surprise, focusing on the barrel of the gun to keep my poker face straight. A thrashing fish had to be reeled in carefully. “How did you know—”

“I’m not as dumb as I look,” she cut me off. “But when Ian’s shoe washed up, I saw my opportunity to take care of my son in the way that Tyson prevented Ian from ever being able to take care of him.”

“You blackmailed him for five hundred thousand,” I said. “Was that all you wanted?”

She shook her head. “I just wanted the cash as a guarantee he’d play ball. Once I told him what was in the lockbox and threatened to tell the police, he would have agreed to transfer the millions I planned to demand.”

“But how did you know the key to the safety deposit box was still in the lining of the shoe?” I asked. “That wasn’t reported publicly.”

“I knew that even if it was no longer there, Tyson was paranoid enough to respond to blackmail,” she said, confirming my suspicions.

“So you sent him that newspaper clipping,” I said.

She nodded. “And it did the trick, just like I knew it would. I didn’t realize he’d invite you down here, but it ended up working in my favor.”

I wanted to ask why she’d tried to kill me on the boat, but it seemed like a bad idea to remind her of her failed attempt while she was holding a gun that could finish the job, so instead I asked the question that had been bothering me since Tyson had shown me the blackmail note.

“What was in the lockbox, that you were so sure he’d pay you? ”

“Proof that Tyson had stolen the De-Sal technology from Ian.”

I stared at her, my mind suddenly blank. “What?” I choked out.

She cocked her head, surprised. “You didn’t know?”

Shock washed over me as I shook my head. But it explained so much…

“He was working on it in the plastic pools behind the trailer,” she said. “You saw it, I’m sure you did.”

A blurry image formed in my mind. A dead snake on a humid summer night. “The hydroponics?” I managed. “I thought that was for growing weed.”

“I mean, he did intend to grow weed with the water it produced, but the experiment was using the brine left over from the desalination process to power the system.”

I blinked, processing. “Which is what’s made De-Sal so successful.”

Had Tyson simply taken advantage of Ian’s death to use his technology?

Or had Tyson murdered Ian with the intention of stealing it?

Regardless, the fact remained that if Jennifer was right, Tyson’s entire empire was built on a lie.

And the worst thing Tyson could’ve imagined was anyone finding out he was a fraud.

“If you couldn’t get into the safety deposit box, how did you know what was inside?” I asked.

“After I saved Ian’s notebooks from the fire, I made him promise to lock them up there to keep them safe.”

But her logic wasn’t totally sound. “If the notebooks were in the lockbox, then how did Tyson get them?”

“Ian kept an extra key on his keychain. Tyson stole it when he killed him.”

The lockbox must have been where Tyson found the video that Ian had shot of us on the Fourth of July, too. But…“Then there would be nothing left inside, no reason for him to fear exposure from the keys,” I pointed out.

“I don’t know,” she snapped, growing annoyed. “I never got that far. But I do know Tyson killed Ian and stole his technology, and he was scared enough about what might be in the safety deposit box that he took out the money to pay me.”

The triumph of being right about Tyson’s blackmailer not having anything on him rang hollow in the light of all that had followed.

“I don’t understand,” I said, trying to fit together the pieces of the puzzle. “If you had your ace in the hole, why did you decide to kill him?”

She snorted. “I didn’t kill him. You did.”

I paused, confused about why she was turning things around on me now, when she’d confessed everything else. “No, I didn’t.” At her disbelieving look, I raised my hands. “Don’t you think if I wanted his money, I would have come after him with a paternity suit years ago?”

“Maybe you changed your mind.”

I shook my head. “My life with my kids is great. We may not be rich, but we want for nothing. Staying out of our lives was the one kindness Tyson afforded me. I was as surprised as anyone that they were in his will.”

“Then why did you kill him?” she demanded.

“I didn’t!”

“Then who did?”

I stared at her. Did she really think I’d killed him? No, she had to be bluffing, trying to convince me she hadn’t done it herself. “Look, I know you did it,” I said, eying the gun still clutched in her hands. “But I want to help you find a way out.”

“I did not! He was going to give me what I wanted. I’m losing millions now that he’s dead.”

“Then why did you plant that DNA test in my luggage?”

“Because if they found out he was being blackmailed, I wanted them to think it was you, not me,” she said with an exasperated groan. “And I can hardly dive, you think I could have killed him underwater? He was twice my size.”

“But you have a dive compass,” I pointed out. “They don’t even teach you how to use a dive compass until advanced open water training.”

She rolled her eyes. “That was a gift from Cody. I had no idea how to use it, I just wore it to make him happy.”

I thought back to the dive, remembering how genuinely terrified Jennifer had seemed. We stared at each other, both of us wary but quickly realizing we’d each been wrong about the other.

She lowered the gun, placing it on the island between us, a peace offering. “It’s not even loaded.”

I stared at the deadly weapon resting casually on the counter like a discarded cup. By power of elimination, the killer had to be Cody.

But why now, after all these years? The timing with the foot was too coincidental to be chance.

“Does Cody know who you really are?” I asked.

She shook her head. “And he can’t find out.”

“I saw him leave Tyson’s room yesterday before the dive, looking like he wanted to kill him,” I said. “I didn’t think anything of it at the time because people often looked like they wanted to kill Tyson—but I think Cody actually did.”

“No,” Jennifer protested, fearful. “No, that can’t be right.” But her face told me she felt otherwise.

A flicker of movement near the stairwell drew my eye, and a shudder went through me as a hulking figure stepped out of the shadows, his eyes black as night.