“What?”
Eve touched the laptop’s screen with one hand and used the other on the trackpad to scroll through the pages.
“There are five here, but we were only ever able to find four records.” She stopped at one file. “We nixed this one because when Toby landed, he used a rental car that took him in the opposite direction for a golf tournament.”
Lana leaned in a little to look at the file in question.
“And why do we care about Toby?” she asked.
Eve opened her mouth to point out that, as Scott’s right-hand man, he was someone that needed to be cared about.
But she stopped herself short.
“You never saidright-hand man,” Eve said instead. “You just saidright-hand.” She felt her eyes widen as it finally dawned on her. “And you never saidToby. You just saidSanderson.”
Eve scanned the document she had once dismissed.
The same name was on all five.
Apparently, she had also overlooked someone.
TOBYSANDERSON WAS DEAD.
His wife, Maria, stepped over his body wearing heels.
Darius watched as she made her way over to him, smile rimmed with dark red lipstick.
“Honestly, I can spin this just as easy as the soap-opera storyline Scott has been trying to play out since we got to this horrible little town,” she said. “Except, I’m not going to waste my time waiting for all of you to do your parts.”
Maria didn’t have a gun in her hand, but she did have a Jon.
He was leaning against one of the four large steel beams that had been holding up the warehouse since the last time he and Darius had been there.
Now instead of a rotary tiller, he was cuffed to a metal pole sticking out of the concrete. Whatever it used to be attached to had long since been sawn away.
“It was you who engineered the attacks on those towns—on Seven Roads—through the years,” Darius said. “Not Toby.”
That had become glaringly clear the second Jon had walked him inside and around the socialite’s dead body. They had gotten the wrong Sanderson, and now the right one seemed to be tickled by the mess-up.
“To be honest, it’s kind of nice to get the credit for once.”
Maria paused next to a crate covered in dust. With her heel she hooked the handle and managed to flip it onto its side. Shewas elegant in the action of sitting down on it, but Darius could still see her husband’s blood on the bottom of her shoes.
She caught his gaze and gave her shoe a once-over before smiling again.
“See, I’ve always had a knack for breaking things,” she said. “Rules, boundaries, people. And wouldn’t you know it, towns too.”
Darius recalled Eve’s notes on the first town she had suspected that Scott had purposefully crippled.
“The corruption case in Culver,” he remembered.
Maria snapped her fingers, smile only widening.
“Who knew a few whispers here and there could detonate the entire infrastructure of that little no-nothing town,” she said, clearly delighted. “Truthfully, I didn’t even mean for it to happen. It was like playing dolls.”
“Your version of dolls destroyed hundreds of innocent lives, one way or the other,” Darius pointed out.
Maria waved her hand through the air, as if shooing an annoying fly that was buzzing around her.
