"Sarah Winters," Victor replied, his hands still raised, palms forward.
"Why should we believe you?" I kept my fake weapon trained on him, unwavering. "Your own history with violence doesn't exactly inspire trust."
"I'm not asking you to trust me, Agent Thomas. I'm warningyou." His silver ring caught the light again as he slowly lowered his hands to waist level. "Sarah Winters is not who you think she is."
"We know exactly who she is," Matt said, his voice taut with suspicion. "What we don't know is why you're really here."
Another gust of wind buffeted the boathouse, sending ripples across the water beneath us. The moonlight filtering through the broken windows cast long, distorted shadows across the warped wooden floor, giving Victor's substantial form an even more menacing appearance. Yet something in his demeanor had shifted—a subtle change in posture that suggested vulnerability rather than threat.
"I've been watching you," he admitted, confirming what I'd already known. "But not for the reasons you think."
"Enlighten us," I said, ignoring the growing ache in my arm as I maintained my aim. "Quickly."
“Could you lower your weapon, please?” he said.
I lowered the pipe and put it in the pocket of my jacket. “No funny business.”
Matt tensed beside me, ready to intercept any sudden movement. Water dripped steadily from a leak in the roof, marking time in the tense silence.
"Sarah hired me months ago," Victor explained, his voice dropping lower. "Said she needed security, protection from a stalker. But that wasn't the whole truth." He looked directly at me. "She wanted me to watch someone for her. Richard Collins."
The name of the murdered accountant sent a chill through me that had nothing to do with the damp night air.
"And now she's hired me again," Victor continued, urgency threading through his words. "To find you. To finish what she started."
I narrowed my eyes, searching for the lie in his statement. But what I saw instead was fear—genuine fear in the eyes of a man whose file described him as pathologically incapable of remorse or empathy.
"She killed that second woman," Victor said. "She told me about how she shot her in the back of the head. She placed the bodydowntown at night in a parking lot where it would be easy to find. She left your name on the body in a letter confirming your guilt and remorse, having you ask to be stopped, that you know you’re out of control. And she's not finished."
The boathouse creaked around us, timbers protesting against the strengthening wind. I was weighing his words against everything we'd discovered about Sarah Winters—her obsessive wall of news clippings about me, her secret connection to Collins, her carefully constructed façade of normality hiding something deeply disturbed beneath.
"How do we know you're not working with her?" Matt challenged, still positioned protectively between us.
Victor's scarred face hardened. "You can’t," he answered simply. "But I’m here, aren’t I?"
The wind howled louder, rattling the loose boards of our shelter. In that moment, I had to make a choice—trust the violent man with a history of threats against me, or dismiss his warning and potentially miss crucial information about the woman who was systematically destroying my life.
Chapter 33
"If I wantedto hurt you, I wouldn't have announced myself. I would have come in with my weapon pulled."
In my experience, trust had to be earned, especially from a man whose file contained three years for assault, several restraining orders, and a history of explosive violence. But something in Victor's eyes—a haunted quality I recognized from interviewing witnesses who'd seen things they wished they hadn't—made me curious enough to listen, if not to lower my guard.
"Keep talking," I instructed, "but stay where you are."
Victor nodded once, accepting my terms. "Sarah Winters contacted me when I got out four months ago. Said she needed security work—discreet surveillance, no questions asked." His fingers brushed against his silver ring, turning it absently as he spoke. "She claimed Collins was obsessed with her, that he was following her, texting her, leaving notes at her bookstore. I thought it would be easy money."
Matt shifted beside me, his prosthetic leg making a barely audible adjustment on the warped floorboards. "And you believed her?"
"She paid well," Victor replied with a shrug that conveyed bothdefensiveness and shame. "And she had evidence—photographs of him that she said were taken outside of her home, copies of emails he'd supposedly sent. It looked legitimate enough."
I studied Victor's body language as he spoke. The slight downward cast of his eyes when mentioning the evidence suggested embarrassment—not at lying now, but at having been fooled then.
"What kind of surveillance did she want?" I asked, keeping my voice neutral despite the growing knot of tension in my stomach.
"Standard stuff at first. Where he went, who he met with. She said she needed documentation for a restraining order." Victor's face hardened. "Then things got weird. She wanted me to plant things in his apartment—receipts, movie tickets, even women's underwear."
My mind immediately connected this to the emails we'd found in Collins' account—the ones from an apparent stalker claiming to know intimate details about his life, his habits. "She was creating evidence that he was the stalker," I murmured, more to myself than to the men in the room.
