Detective Beckett reached for the phone.
“Do not respond.”
My own father smashed a brick into my face because my fiancé refused to leave me for my younger sister
But I was staring at the photograph.
Something was wrong.
Melanie looked terrified.
Yet beneath her fear, I saw something familiar.
Control.
Her mascara was smeared too perfectly.
Her face was angled toward the camera.
And the hand pressed to the glass showed no restraints.
“This is staged,” I whispered.
Wyatt looked at me.
“How can you know?”
“Because Melanie never cries without checking how she looks.”
Detective Beckett enlarged the photograph.
In the reflection of the car window, a man’s face appeared faintly.
Walter Pike.
I stared at it.
“That’s impossible. Walter is in the hospital.”
Beckett’s expression hardened.
“He was.”
“What do you mean?”
“He disappeared twenty minutes ago.”
The room seemed to shrink around me.
The frightened old man.
The hidden witness.
The loyal accountant who had preserved my grandfather’s secrets.
The person who had mailed me the key.
