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H e whips around to look at me, then darts into the emergency stairwell at the end of the hallway. I run in after him, listening for the sound of his feet on the steps. I hear nothing and search for a light switch on the wall next to the door, but I don’t find one. There are only small red emergency lights in the stairwell, which give very little illumination and don’t break the shadows beneath the last flight of steps. Taking out my phone, I shine the light of the screen under the stairs and don’t see anything.

Putting my phone away, I start up the stairs, climbing cautiously as I look ahead of me into the darkness to see any kind of movement. I’ve reached the landing to the second floor and am considering whether to proceed on this floor and continue to search when something dark suddenly drops from the overhang of steps above me to land on the stairs behind me. Before I can turn all the way around, a hard blow to my hip makes me stagger. I grab on to the handrail to keep from falling completely. The club comes at me again, but I swing a swift kick to block it and throw my assailant off balance. Another kick to his gut forces him down the steps.

He lands hard on the floor, and I come down on him, pressing my knee to the center of his chest as I train my gun on his head. I reach with my free hand and wrench the ski mask off, pulling the blond wig with it.

“Doesn’t that feel better, Jesse?” I ask. “I think it’s a little too hot for all this.”

He struggles on the floor, but the combination of the fall and my pin keeps him from getting up.

“Don’t worry, you aren’t the only one. Officers should have already gotten to Carla’s house to arrest Ander. She called him over there to see her tonight because I told her to. I knew when I called him to come here, it would give the two of you the opportunity you’ve been waiting for. When I was found dead at the headquarters after receiving one of the threatening notes, the police would look at my phone and see Ander’s number. But Carla would give him an alibi. And I’m sure he’s making sure that there is some kind of time-stamped recording or some other evidence to back it up. He’d explain that I called to tell him I thought something was going on at the headquarters, but he had already committed to going to Carla’s house and didn’t think he should be involved in my investigation. Leaving you to come here and stop me from getting any closer,” I say.

I hear heavy footsteps coming toward us, and I shout to them, “In the stairwell!”

The door opens, barely missing Jesse’s head, and four officers swarm in. They’ve been waiting in the back parking lot, giving me just the amount of time I asked for before they came inside. I move away from Jesse and let them flip him over and cuff him before yanking him to his feet.

“Be careful. My leg,” he complains.

“He fell down the steps pretty hard,” I tell them. “You’re going to want to have him seen at the hospital.”

They drag him out, and I follow, encountering Detective Fuller in the hallway.

“Exactly like you said it was going to happen,” he says.

“Yep,” I say. “The two of them have been working together from the beginning. When Carla broke up with Jesse right around the same time that Ander found out his wife had gone behind his back to take out her IUD and might already be pregnant, it created the perfect storm. They met through Gideon and somehow ended up finding kinship in their misery as their lives spiraled out of control. They already knew that people had major problems with Tracy Ellis and her ministry. She received death threats and hate mail regularly. All they had to do was latch on to that.

“With Gideon figuring out the affair between Jesse and Carla, he knew he would have to go. But it would be far too suspicious for Gideon and Marshall to both be killed as well as Sabrina Ward. There would be easy links between Ander and his wife, and Jesse and his roommate and lover’s husband. It had to look like there was no possibility they were involved. So they worked together. They concocted the plan to send out the threats and wait for a while to act on them. Then Ander killed Gideon and cut Jesse so that he was obviously not the one who did it. That was the only attack that involved a knife.

“Then Jesse lit Ander’s mother’s shed on fire and killed Sabrina while Ander was very visible to a variety of law enforcement. Ander attacked Marshall while I was on the phone with Jesse. I believe he would have attacked Carla too, if she had been home. I don’t think he would have killed her, but the fact that she wasn’t home saved her from being injured to further the narrative. The planned attack on Mila was to shift the focus away from that group. I believe they could have killed others just to keep their tracks covered. Including me.”

The detective puts out his hand to shake mine. “Thank you, Agent Griffin. I’m glad you were here.”

“I have to admit, they were pretty meticulous in their planning,” I tell the family as I sit down on the couch beside Sam and rest my head on his shoulder. “They really paid attention to details to make sure that people saw the crimes the way they wanted them to. Like Ander knowing his wife had the fitness tracker bracelet that she always wore. He knew that would record her heart rate and pinpoint the time of her death, which would completely exclude him. No one would be able to suspect that he could have killed her before he left the house to go to his mother’s if they had proof she was still alive until a time when he was talking to police in the next town over.

“Then making sure that he was seen on his camera picking up the mail after the note was dropped off. They checked the fingerprint on the seat adjuster, and it came back to Jesse. He cleaned off every other surface in the car but didn’t think about that one little knob.”

“And the wigs,” Dean says, reaching toward the coffee table to swirl a carrot stick in a container of hummus.

“That was a pretty ingenious detail. Both men are very similar in size and build. They knew if they could make a defining feature really obvious, people who happened to see them would report it when they were asked. They went with blond wigs so that it would look like a man with long blond hair. It probably didn’t occur to them that fibers would fall out of the wigs in the apartment and in the car. But honestly, it was the protest at the hospital that really pieced it all together for me.

“Ander didn’t anticipate Marshall to fight back so hard. He thought he would be able to get the best of him pretty easily and then knock him out so he could kill him without a lot of difficulty. But Marshall did fight. He managed to get in a couple of good blows, including stabbing his assailant in the leg during the attack. That’s what really saved his life. Then Tracy Ellis called Ander to come with her to the hospital after she did her live stream. He couldn’t get out of it, so he wore a hat and stayed outside. He started a fistfight with one of the protestors and purposely let the guy get a couple of good punches in to cover up the effects of the attack on Marshall.

“Later, Marshall told me about stabbing the assailant in the leg, and it occurred to me that I saw Ander shifting his weight a lot at the hospital and during the memorial at the headquarters. His leg was hurting, and he was trying to take pressure off it.

“I had been suspecting for a while that the threats were a ruse. No entity was taking responsibility for them. There weren’t any specific calls for action against Tracy Ellis. It just seemed too neat and tidy, as far as death threats can go. It felt like it had to be personal. They tried really hard to make either of their involvements look impossible. Just not hard enough.”

“Well, that’s another case solved,” says Sam. There’s a twinkle in his eye. “Wanna click on the live stream and see what Tracy has to say about all of this?”

I gag. “Absolutely not. I’ve heard enough out of her for a lifetime.”