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Okay, so Holly’s gone slightly off script, but hey, if it works. Please work.

He pulls open his eye and pops the contact in. “Another one? No more cookies for me. I can’t eat any more peppermint. Look, I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

“No, now!” Holly screams into the phone. I love her so much for committing to the bit.

“I’m… in the bathroom,” Ron says, taking Holly off speaker. “Too much eggnog!” There’s a pause before he apologizes. “No, you’re right, that was too much information. Wait, hold on! I’m not in my room. I’m in the lobby bathroom. I’m coming down—over. I’m coming over. Excited for those cookies. I did love the ones you told me about.”

Lies! Why are you lying, Ron?

I roll my eyes. It’s always the ones who try to charm who aren’t to be trusted.

I hold my breath when Ron comes back to drop off the solution and contact pack. And then he does something very unexpected. He pulls the tip of his pinky off.

A prosthetic finger? So that’s what the skin adhesive is for.

He grabs the side of the box, and that’s when I see it. The tip of his real pinky finger is missing.

I think I leave my body. I’m no longer hiding behind a chaise in a Plaza Hotel suite. Instead, it’s New Year’s Eve three years ago and I’m saying thank you very much when instead I just very much don’t want the man I love to be shot. I’m back on the boat, making polite conversation with a man at the bar. But that guy was Arnold Rossetti, not Ron Doty.

And Ron looks nothing like Arnold. At least not anymore.

The box snaps shut. Arnold brushes past the Bergdorf bag, but he’s too irritated to notice. When the door slams shut, a text message from Holly comes through.

Target is on the move. Well, he should be. Fingers crossed he is!

I don’t care what Nathan says, this woman picked up something from her time as an FBI kid.

I wait a minute for Arnold to clear the floor.

Midnight’s nearly here. It’s time to take Sadistic Santa down before it’s too late.

Chapter 37

SCARLETT

1 hour and 3 minutes until midnight

I burst out of room 1708 and into someone’s chest.

Nathan.

“Arnold’s here!” I say at the same moment he says, “It’s Arnold!”

“How do you—”

“When did you—”

“Wait, why are you here?” I ask.

“Once I figured it out, I couldn’t leave you alone in the room,” he says, launching into his anagram discovery.

On our way back to Santa Takedown HQ, I tell him about the blue eyes, the finger, and the ink.

“Ron is Arnold. Arnold is Sadistic Santa.” Nathan shakes his head. “So whose background report have we been looking at?”

“A made-up Ron Doty?” I guess. “But now we have the who, what, when, and where.”

As we walk into the HQ, Meyers already has something queued up on her monitor.