This bite in her voice wasn’t bitchiness—it was helplessness. And Nora wasn’t angry at them—she was angry at herself. She didn’t know the difference between the man she loved and the man she was going to marry, and Farah didn’t believe for a second that she wanted Hugh to be alive. She’d bet her job that Nora was hopelessly in love with Trent and in a mental pretzel between mourning him and potentially celebrating his sudden return to life.

  Nora swallowed. “You never saw them together, did you?” There was a rasp in her voice, and she coughed to clear the emotion.

  “No. Not in person,” Farah said. Kevin grunted his agreement.

  She stood up and walked to the window by Kevin, looking out onto the front entrance and hugging her arms tightly around herself, as if to keep her emotions in. “It’s not just their looks. When they speak, it’s identical. The way they kiss. Their . . . anatomy.” She swallowed. “I know that you must think terrible things of me, but my life was like a house of mirrors where my heart didn’t know what to trust and what to fall in love with. And they were okay with that. It wasn’t this horrible, forbidden thing where I was cheating on Hugh. They have shared everything, their whole life. The good and the bad. I was just another . . .” As Farah watched, she pinched her lips together and fisted her hands and straightened to her full height, and it was like a physical buttoning down of emotions. “Another thing.”

  It sounded both horrible and wonderful, to be shared between the two men. Wonderful when you thought of their public personas. Terrible when you realized that one of them—or maybe still both of them—was a serial killer. Could a man who had killed a dozen women have the capacity to love? Could he be loved? Farah couldn’t imagine falling for a man like that and not realizing that something was inherently broken in him.

  Nora turned back to them and sighed. “Honestly, my head is killing me.” She pulled a tube of pale-pink gloss from the front pocket of her jeans and swiped it quickly across her lips. “Is there anything else I can answer for you?”

  It was funny, that she thought this was over. Though they did have to wrap this up now, to get Trent to the station and processed . . . this was just the beginning for Nora. She would be a major witness to help unwrap the last six years’ worth of events. She would have to be cleared as an accomplice and would have to convince the world, again and again, that she had no knowledge of the crimes. Their immunity deal was with Trent, not her, and Farah wasn’t about to trust the woman until she proved her innocence.

  “Is there any way that you can tell the men apart? Anything at all?” Kevin asked.

  “Why don’t you just look at their medical records? Hugh’s got to be a freak show under his skin.”

  Kevin’s and Farah’s gazes met. “Meaning what?” Farah asked.

  “His mother, Momma Beth?” She said the name like it was poison. “She liked to break his bones like they were commandments. Half of the Story Farm scenes had Trent playing both parts because Hugh was always in the infirmary. Hell, they had a hospital room built at the mansion, to keep up with his constant medical needs.”

  Another link, connected. A burned-out room. Medical supplies.

  “The body in the morgue has broken bones,” Kevin said, “but they match Trent’s medical records, not Hugh’s.”

  A smile played across her lips. “You aren’t thinking like Momma Beth. When the injuries were too bad, when she needed a doctor for drugs or X-rays, she couldn’t sell a doctor on a child who was that accident prone or that constantly sick. Didn’t make sense. It would have raised a red flag. So she’d trade their names in and out. Take ‘Trent’”—she put air quotes around his name—“to the doctor for a shattered collarbone and take Hugh the next month for a fractured wrist.” She rubbed the back of her neck. “Did you request Hugh’s records? Put the two of them together, and it will probably equal the body you have. And if it does, it’s Hugh. Definitively.”

  “Momma Beth didn’t hurt Trent?”

  “No.” She shook her head. “She ignored Trent. Wouldn’t so much as touch him. She burned one child with the heat of her affection and froze the other one out. She was horrible.” Her voice dropped in sadness. “Honestly. At least to them.”

  “Trent said he often pretends to be Hugh. Have you ever caught him at it?” Kevin asked, switching gears, though Farah could have listened to Momma Beth stories all day long.

  “Um, not caught him exactly, but there are times when I know he stood in for him. On press events or for certain scenes. Trent is a stronger actor, between the two of them. Some of Hugh’s most famous scenes—Academy Award–winning scenes—were actually Trent. So I wouldn’t be shocked if he continued the charade at times. This house, this lifestyle, the admiration—it’s what Trent deserves; he just couldn’t get past his demons long enough to achieve it.”

  “And you, right? You’re what he deserves?” Kevin prodded.

  Nora gave a small and almost genuine smile. “I’m a lot like him—like both of them. A pretty exterior that distracts and hides a whole mess of crazy.”

  On that note, Farah fully agreed with her.

  CHAPTER 97

  THE DETECTIVE

  While the remaining Iverson sat in a private holding cell in the Beverly Hills substation, Farah and Kevin started back at the beginning and tried to reassemble all the puzzle pieces, taking into account what Trent and Nora had said.

  Surprisingly, everything suddenly fit.

  Farah stood in front of the whiteboard and stared at their notes. “So . . . Hugh was the mastermind and the killer. Trent just came in for cleanup at times—”

  “And covered for Hugh if he needed to be out of town for a kill.”

  “Do we believe that?” Kevin asked. “It seems convenient for Trent to help him after the fact but not actually be involved in snatches or kills. And Hugh isn’t here to dispute his claims.”

  “Actually, I do believe him,” Farah said. “I mean, why admit to it at all? He didn’t need to. We didn’t have any evidence or clues that suggested an accomplice might have helped, and it would have been hard to pin anything on him if we did.”

  “Good point.” Kevin came up beside her and rested his hands on his hips. “I guess I believe him too—at least on that.”

  “That being said, we can have the task force investigate every murder, especially now that they have the full list.” That was another nugget that Trent—after seeing Hugh’s medical records, Farah was finally ready to concede that the remaining twin was Trent—had shared: the list of women killed. As it turned out, Trent wasn’t the only one who had planned on providing for the victims’ families in the afterlife. Trent had gotten the idea from Hugh, who was doing it on a much larger scale—a million dollars had been set up for each child, each in an anonymous trust that would unlock when the child turned twenty-five. Unlike Trent’s money-market account changes, which happened after the deaths, Hugh had set up Miles Pepper’s trust prior to Kerry Pepper’s death, which lent some credence to his suicide after the murder.

  The suicide was still sticking in Farah’s mind. She didn’t like it—never liked it when a crime was pinned on a victim who wasn’t around to defend themselves. In this case, it was a mountain of crimes, all hung around Hugh’s dead neck.

  “How’d Hugh get the victims?” she asked. “Munchausen by proxy isn’t exactly a condition that people are advertising.” She turned to the map, which had a wide scattering of dots where each victim’s body had been found. “I mean, these women are all over. And not all are murders. This one—” She pointed to a dot in Seattle. “I mean, she jumped off her balcony. Both Trent and Hugh were in Los Angeles at the time. Why’s he giving money to her kid? Why’s she on this list?”

  “And we’ve only linked four of them to Make-A-Wish or Protect the Children,” Kevin agreed. He picked up his clipboard and nodded toward the direction of Trent’s cell. “Let’s go ask the man.”

  In the narrow holding cell, Trent was sound asleep, one arm hanging off the metal twin bed. Kevin and Farah stopped at the gate to his cell and looked at each other in amusement. “Nice to see that he’s making himself comfortable,” Farah mused.

  “That’s either innocence or psychosis.” Kevin rattled his clipboard against the bars. “Trent. Wake up.”

  Trent’s eyes opened and he stared at them, then slowly sat up, swinging his long legs to the side of the bed. “What’s up?”

  Kevin held up the list of victims. “How did Hugh identify them? How’d he know they were hurting their kids?”

  Trent let out a huge yawn, then shook his head slightly to wake himself up. “Umm.” He stared at the white brick wall in front of him. “Just a minute, let me think if I ever asked him this.”

  So much for the clear-cut puzzle-solving key Farah had hoped for.

  “I know early on he had a guy. A private investigator who he was having check on the wellness of some of the kids that were passing through Protect the Children. Anyone Nolan found suspicious, this guy would look into.”

  “The guy’s name?”

  “Oh, I don’t know.” He grimaced. “He worked on Lethal Badge as a consultant. You should be able to find him through that. I don’t think the guy had any idea what Hugh was doing with the information, though, so I don’t want to get him in any trouble—”

  “We’ll just talk to him,” Farah said. “See if he can fill in some of our holes.”

  “But then he had something with the internet he was doing. Like an MBP support group he had dialed in on or joined—something like that. I haven’t heard him mention the PI in a while. Like, for years.” He shrugged. “That help?”

  Farah thought of Kerry’s husband and his insistent mentions of her Facebook activity and the woman who had blocked him. She left Kevin and Trent and returned to the room, flipping through the stacks until she found the notes. Kerry had been a member of one Facebook group. A quilting one. She picked up the phone and called Anaïca and relayed the information.

  Hanging up the phone, she turned back to the board and looked at the lines of names. So many dead women. So many affected families and individuals.

  As she stared at them, another note appeared on the screen.

  Brittany Morrens confirmed as “MBP-likely” by doctors and a school nurse.

  Shit. She uncapped the dry-erase marker and put a star next to the name. So far, eight of the twelve women had stars. One of them, Pauline Webb, they had underlined in red. Her child hadn’t been sick—he was deceased, the cause now suspicious.

  As a mother, she didn’t know how to feel about the list. It was like a twist of sadness and relief. She had been in the hall when Kyle Pepper had told his son about his mother’s death. She had heard the child’s cries, the genuine pain and sorrow in his voice. Kerry Pepper had been in a bad situation, a woman who had seemed to be trying, had started to help and not hurt, yet she still ended up a victim.

  Kyle Pepper had turned over a journal, one that he’d found in Miles’s backpack. Rob’s team was going through the contents of it now, and would be sending the scanned pages over shortly.

  As if on cue, another message appeared.

  Kerry’s journal is now in the bucket. You’re going to want to read it asap.

  Farah showed the message to Kevin, and they both sat in front of the monitors and pulled up the new attachment.

  It took Farah twenty minutes to read, and Kevin a few minutes more. Twenty minutes that tied so many loose ends together but also sparked so many new questions. Kevin sat back and looked at her, then picked up the phone. “I’ll call the FBI and update them.”

  This would mean one more investigation added to the pile—one in the federal jurisdiction—and Farah wondered how many group members there were, and how many lives were about to be changed with the follow-up investigations that would occur.

  The FBI would handle that. That and Miles’s kidnapping would be ongoing investigations, and were officially off Farah and Kevin’s workload. She didn’t envy their tasks. The kid’s descriptions of his captors were comic book villains at best, and he almost seemed cheerful about his adventure, at least in his retelling to them. And this Facebook group . . . that was a dark evil that Farah was happy to be clear of. Tomorrow would bring new cases and, in this city, new deaths and investigations.

  Kevin opened the door and looked into the room. “Chico’s tonight? We should be done with the paperwork in, what, three hours? I could have Trish get us a table for four—or five, if Anaïca can make it.”

  Farah turned away from the board and smiled at him. “Kevin Mathis, sometimes I forget how brilliant you are.” She took a seat at the desk and picked up her cell. “I’ll text Ty and Anaïca.”

  She opened up her texts and paused, seeing a new string of messages that had come in an hour ago, from an unrecognized number.

  Farah, this is Nora.

  I just wanted to say thank you for your diligent work and attention to this case. I’m sorry it has been such a mess and hope that Trent is helping to sort through the pieces.

  It’s hard for me to wrap my head around how blind I must have been these last six years. I feel like a fool and it hurts my heart to think that women’s lives could have been spared, if I had only been less blinded by love and my continual pursuit of fame.

  I’m ashamed at myself and can’t imagine how you see me.

  I promise, somewhere inside, I do have common sense and intelligence. I’m going to work on finding that, and rediscovering myself, away from Hollywood and the cameras.

  I’m at your disposal, day or night, if you have any questions or need me to shed any light on Hugh’s activities, mindset, or demeanor in the context that I knew him.

  This is my cell, use it anytime. Thank you again for your service.

  Farah read the message through once, then again.

  All in all, it wasn’t a bad final act.

  CHAPTER 98

  THE LEADING LADY

  On the upper deck, the sky was a sea of stars above Nora and Trent. They lay on the double chaise lounge, their naked bodies covered in a thin sheen of sweat, and she wondered, staring up into the dark clouds, if it was really over.

  “You know why he did it.” Trent lay beside her, his arm under her head, his eyes closed to the view. “You know what he dealt with. He just didn’t want another kid to go through that.”

  Nora rolled toward him and wrapped her leg around his and burrowed into his chest. “I know.” She ran her fingers across the light layer of chest hair and across his abs. “You know I do.” Only four people in the world knew how the twins had suffered, and now two of them were dead. Half the cast of Story Farm—and the show’s dark secret—gone.

  It was amazing, with so many people working on the production, that no one had ever found it odd that, for the entire fourth season, Hugh and Trent were never in scenes together. Their mother blamed it on an alternate school schedule, but the core cast knew the real reason. While Hugh was kept in the medical bay in the Iverson mansion, Trent carried the show, playing both roles and switching skillfully between the two characters’ personalities and mannerisms. That was when Nora really fell in love with him—when she saw his raw talent, the ability for him to change into the skin of the role he was playing. That, and the care and love he exhibited for his brother.

  “I never understood why she only targeted him.” He ran his fingers gently through her hair. “It wasn’t until I was older that I realized it was because she needed me to be healthy so I could cover for both of us. The healthier I was, the more she could do to him. Plus, he was always her favorite.”

  “Why didn’t you just tell someone?” Nora slid over until she was on top of him and looking down on that famous face. His hair was rough from sex, a shadow of unshaven growth framing those kissably soft lips.

  “We did. We told Julie.”

  “Oh no.” Understanding dawned as she realized why their talent manager—the woman who had been a mother to all of them—had been fired unexpectedly, without explanation. “Is that what happened to her?”

  “Mom made sure that she was well compensated for her time in exchange for a strict nondisclosure agreement.”

  “So she sold your safety away for a payoff?” Rage burned deep in Nora’s chest. “I can’t believe I ever loved her. And I did. I remember wishing that she was my mom. Talk about stupid of me.” And she truly had loved Julie. When Julie discovered her camping out on set, she started bringing Nora home with her in the evenings. Nora could still picture the woman’s big fluffy golden retriever and her plaid couch that she made up into a bed. Sleeping on that couch, Nora had dreamed of Julie inviting her to stay for a summer, maybe a year, maybe even adopting her.

  It was unthinkable that that woman, who was supposed to champion the four of them, had found out what Momma Beth was doing to Hugh and taken a payoff to abandon them. When she left, they had gotten that bitch from New York, the one with the pierced eyebrow who hadn’t yielded or cared about anything other than production timelines and state requirements.

  Trent’s hands journeyed up her thighs and gripped her waist, tightening her connection with him. His fingers splayed over her stomach, and she thought of the baby that was growing there. It was, at least in her mind, Trent’s. She had always considered it his and—with what she now knew about Hugh—needed it to be that way. A DNA test would never give her a straight answer, but maybe that was for the best. “Stop,” she protested as he tilted his hips and pressed himself hard against her sensitive pelvis. She grabbed his hands and pulled them away, then shrieked as he flipped her over and pinned her wrists to the lounge on either side of her head. “We need to talk.”

  Dropping his head, he kissed her as he lowered his body atop hers, from torso to feet, and she let out a happy sigh.

  “You wanted to talk?” he asked gruffly.

  Yes, she did. Not about the baby—that could wait. Right now, they had to figure out a game plan and how to implement it. Trent’s arrest and Hugh’s reveal as a serial killer had deposited a steaming pile of dog shit into their laps, and they needed to engineer how and when to spin it into a chapter in their public love story.