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“What did you give Bonnie?” Bowman asks.

“A box that Sadistic Santa provided us. It was a figurine key chain. There was no key on it.”

Bowman shakes his head. “Did you try pulling Santa’s leg off? What you had was a key. To the locked jewelry box.”

Scarlett and I exchange worried glances.

“I’m giving you a chance to explain yourself, Lambros,” Bowman says. “While you still can. While we can still help you.”

I know this mind game. The one where suspects are made to feel like someone’s on their side.

“The evidence points to Arnold,” Scarlett interjects. “He’s the one behind all of this. The judge, Ron Doty, checked out a second room as Robb C. Ginsby to trick us, but really, he’s Arnold Rossetti. Also known as Sadistic Santa. He’s framing Lambros. Arnold, Ron, Robb, whatever, he’s had it out for Lambros since the day he met him. I saw it with my own eyes.”

Bowman shakes his head. “I need proof, Payne. What proof do you have?”

“He’s allergic to peppermint, and he had medicine for it. There were the calligraphy pens! It’s… in the room,” she says, catching herself. “You’ll find it when you get the warrant. Oh! And he had ink on his hands. If we can compare that DNA to—”

“DNA on a napkin you stole and on pens we don’t have a warrant for?” he asks.

Scarlett simply says, “The napkin was surreptitiously collected.”

“Its relevance is still up in the air,” Bowman says.

“Okay, then let’s use the pens to show that he wrote the letters,” she says. “We’d have to match the ink on the pen and the paper, but it would be a connection. It’d be something! And maybe the handwriting, too—”

“It might be enough to say that he wrote the riddles, but ink is ink,” Bowman says. “Anyone with a calligraphy pen would probably use whatever ink this guy’s got. Where’s the proof? And what, exactly, does medicine prove?”

“He’s Arnold Rossetti!” Scarlett says desperately.

“The dashcam,” I add. “There was a message from Sadistic Santa.”

“Okay, where is it?” Bowman asks.

“We couldn’t record it in time, and it only played once,” I share. “But if we can get that cam, can’t analysts search it for IP? Do something to take the filter off the voice?”

“Sure, we’ll try it. Look, I don’t like this either. Help me out here,” Bowman says. “What can tie Arnold to this? We don’t have footage of him, and we don’t have his DNA on anything.” He turns to me. “We did, however, find your plans.”

“Plans? What plans?” I ask.

“The ones you had hidden at your apartment,” Bowman says. “For all this.”

Now I’m mad. “You searched my apartment?”

“Better to be up front, son. This won’t end well for you if you try to run from the truth.”

I scoff. The truth. Here’s the truth: I’ve given way too much of myself to an organization that will turn its back on me at the first sign of misunderstanding.

Scarlett sits back like she’s been slapped. “With everyone we had to look into here, you spent time and money to search Lambros’s place? He’s one of the good guys. This whole time, you’ve been thinking he’s the guilty one?”

“We had to cover our bases,” Bowman says unapologetically. “It’s not personal.”

Yeah, it apparently never is.

“I didn’t do this.” I can’t believe I even have to say that. I may have pretended to be a criminal in deep cover, but I never would have done something like this. “You have the wrong person.” And now I sound just like the criminals I’ve worked with. If I’ve heard every excuse in the book, so has Bowman.

Scarlett’s eyes widen. “This is why Sadistic Santa wanted us to get to the end. We were everywhere he needed us to be while also buying time for alerting the police. This is the most blatant setup I’ve ever seen… and we walked right into it.”

“Those plans aren’t mine,” I say, even though I know it’s useless. I’ve been here before.