Page 128 of Conrad

“It was an accident.”

“Setting a fire doesn’t sound like an accident to me?—”

“It was an accident!” He hit the steering wheel. “He lied to me!”

Oh.

Franco took a breath. “It wasn’t supposed to go down like that. I was just trying to get him to change his mind, go back to Quantex instead of taking the MetaGrid deal.”

MetaGrid?“The company that wanted to buy his program?”

He nodded. “He told me he was just using the MetaGrid deal to entice Quantex to sell. I knew that when Quantex acquired Axiom, the stock price would soar, so . . .” His mouth tightened, and he shook his head. “I invested everything I had into Quantex. And then he betrayed me.”

“He didn’t betray you. Quantex couldn’t acquire it?—”

“He was going to cost me everything. And he didn’t care. He didn’thaveto care—he was marrying Tia.”

She looked out the window.

“And then they broke up, and he signed with MetaGrid and . . . my stocks were tanking and I was hemorrhaging money—” He turned off the highway onto a county road, the snowdrifts dark and grimy from the dirt that kicked up. “I just wanted to talk.”

“With a 9mm.”

He said nothing.

“So, why the fire?”

“That was . . . that my father’s idea. Burn the place down. And maybe it would have worked, but Holden Walsh got suspicious.”

“How?”

“Sarah betrayed me. She told her new boyfriend that she thought Edward was murdered.”

And it hit Penelope then, all of it. “You killed Sarah. You were the unforced entry, the masked man.”

He said nothing.

“Wait. How did you cover up the murder with the wrong forensic report?”

His mouth tightened.

“Your brother. He was in law enforcement.”

“He quit a few years ago. Went to work at Turbo.” His mouth pinched. “But yes, he knew the right people, and my father did the rest.”

His father. “Vincent knew about this?”

He glanced in the mirror, and a tiny, eerie smile played on his lips.

What—

“How did you know about Holden’s forensic report?” she asked quietly, trying to sort out the smile.

“Sarah told me. Said that she thought Edward had been killed and asked Holden to hire an investigator since he owned the building.”

“And he discovered the bullet holes and knew the autopsy was faked.”

“He would have caused trouble.”

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