Page 115 of Double Take

“I’ll tell you, but don’t think the whole ‘if I keep him talking I can escape’ thing is going to work. This is the day you’re going to die, but I figure I can give you a few answers before we make that happen.”

Lainie wanted to scream, to cry, to struggle to get away. All of it. Instead, she stayed frozen, keeping her gaze locked on his. “Do you really have a scar there?”

“No.” He pulled his shirt down, and flawless skin stared back at her. “But it was a good representation, wasn’t it?”

“You said this was about money. What money? I don’t have any money.”

“Actually, you do. You just have to be dead for me to collect it.”

“A life insurance policy,” she whispered. It hit her. “That draftfrom Myles and Adam’s account. It’s not for your mother, it’s on me, isn’t it?”

“Wow, you got that on the first try. That’s impressive. You’re smart.”

“But ... why now?”

“Because being in prison threw my timeline off.”

“Prison.”

“Yeah. About three weeks after you killed Adam, I, with my usual luck, got arrested.” He blew a raspberry and shook his head. “I used to deal in drugs, but it’s just too risky once you go to jail and have a record. And I never want to wind up back there again.”

“Tell me. From the beginning. I want ... need ... to understand.”

He held up the gun, looked at it, then her. Then shrugged. “Why not? I’ve never minded telling someone how brilliant I am. Too bad you’re the only one I can tell.” He grabbed a chair and pulled it around to sit in front of her. “Adam and I used to hang out on a regular basis. It was our little secret. Our dad and my mother never did know that Adam and I knew each other. But when I was seventeen, I overheard an argument that my mother and father had one night. She was begging him to leave his wife. He was saying he couldn’t pay her if he did. She told him she didn’t care about the money, that she just wanted the three of us to be a family. And he responded with, ‘What about my other kids, huh? Adam and Nick? I’m supposed to just leave them?’ And she ran out of the room crying. But it wasn’t hard to find Adam Williams. I called him and we started hanging out.”

“Adam, but not Nick?”

“Adam said Nick was very protective of their mother, and if he learned of our father’s affair with my mother, he’d tell. Ruin everything. So, we kept our mouths shut and got to know one another. We’d meet at a little bar downtown, drink and talk for hours while we flirted with the ladies.” He held up an imaginary glass and tilted it toward her. “Cheers, love.” His grin looked eerily like Adam’s, and chills skittered up her spine while nausea swirled. “People thought we were twins,” he said. “Since I didn’t have any siblings, I thoughtit was pretty cool. One night Adam told me about this girl he’d met. Her name was Lainie Jackson. He laughed and said he had you wrapped, that you’d do anything for him.”

Lainie grimaced. He wasn’t wrong.

“Then not long after you were engaged, he told me that he’d convinced you that it was the responsible thing to get life insurance policies.”

“He was a lawyer,” she whispered. “I thought that was just his way of making sure he was taking care of me in the event of his death.”

“Because that’s what he wanted you to think. He said you were worth more dead than alive. Then laughed and wondered if he’d overpriced you. At that moment, I knew that I was going to get my hands on that money. All my life, I’ve watched my mother take money from my father. Adam’s father. I’ve watched him have the perfect life while my mother had to scrounge for every penny. Adam was okay to hang out with, but when he told me this, I started planning. I had it all worked out and then you killed him.”

“I can’t say I’ve missed him.” She spoke the words absently while her mind spun.

He looked almost amused. “No, I can’t really say I have either. But you did throw a kink in the plans by shooting him. I was there, you know.”

“What?” She blinked. “The night I shot him?”

“Yes. He and I had been talking and he said you broke up with him. He was furious and I could tell he was going to do something drastic, and I wondered if I’d be able to use that.”

“Sorry?”

“I had planned for him to die—an accident with his poor fiancée—but decided this might be even better. I thought I would see if I could arrange for an intruder at that point. Once Adam killed Lainie—and I fully expected that he would—I’d simply walk in and finish him off with the gun he used on her. Then walk away and wait for my payday. Families would grieve his loss, of course, paperwork would be filed, the money deposited into Adam and my father’s joint account, and I,using Adam’s information, would have the money transferred to a different offshore account and I would be home free. But by the time I got there, paramedics were—unfortunately—working on him.”

“And Adam died, and I was the beneficiary.”

“Exactly, but I didn’t care about that paltry sum, I needed the money fromyourdeath.”

“But our amounts were exactly the same.” She bit her lip. “All of this for a quarter of a million dollars?”

He laughed. “Not hardly. More like two million, my dear.”

Lainie gasped. “What? How?”

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