"Same amount it is now. Forty-five thousand," I answered flatly.

  He smirked and shook his head. "You have done your homework. See, I knew." He wagged the gun in my direction like an admonishing finger. "I knew you were meddling into your husband's case way more than you should have been."

  What was with men and calling women meddling? I made a mental note to make sure that word never made it into my son's vocabulary.

  If I had the chance.

  Because as much as the feminist in me rankled, part of me agreed with him in that moment. If I'd just left things to Ramirez like he'd wanted me to, I'd be at home in my safe, cozy bungalow in west LA, trying to figure out what compromise I was going to make that night between tasty and healthy for my kids' dinner. Instead of here, facing down the barrel of a gun held by a murderer.

  "So you killed Beth and took the money?" I asked, trying to muster up some bravery as my fingers moved to dial the all-important three digits.

  Willis nodded and took a step toward me. "Her husband was taking the kid to some movie. So she invited me over. I thought it was going to be to finalize our plans to leave town, but…" He trailed off.

  "But she dumped you," I finished for him.

  Even in the shadows I could see his eyes go dark with fury. "Yeah. She dumped me," he sneered. "But you know what? It was the last thing she ever did."

  A chill ran up my spine at the menace behind his words. I could almost feel the house going colder around me, the walls holding the memory of that horrific night. I could feel the fear and confusion Beth must have experienced. Mostly because I was feeling them too.

  "You set the fire," I said. "To cover the fact that you'd murdered Beth."

  "I can't say I did a perfect job," he admitted. "But it didn't much matter, as long as I was the first officer on the scene." Those yellow teeth shown again in the dim light of my phone, his grin practically oozing evil pride. "Amazing how easy it was to whitewash the official reports. Blame some serial arsonist I knew no one would ever catch."

  He hadn't been a lazy investigator after all. He'd purposely left out anything that might have been self-incriminating. Pushed the investigation through, seemingly for the sake of letting the family grieve peacefully. And no one had questioned a thing.

  At least, no one had for the next twenty-six years.

  "Moira DeVine," I said, my voice coming out stronger than I felt in that moment. "You killed her too."

  "Look, I had nothing personal against that psychic nut. Heck, I didn't even know her before all this."

  "But you poisoned her," I accused.

  "I had to!" he shouted, his voice sounding like gunfire echoing in the stillness of the house. "She was digging into things that belong buried."

  "Like Beth Montgomery."

  "Can you imagine how surprised I was to hear someone had checked out that file?" He frowned. "Some clerk in records. When I pressed her about it, she said she'd been paid by some lady named DeVine who did these celebrity medium readings."

  I shook my head. "But there wasn't anything in the file. I mean, Ramirez saw it."

  Willis's expression gave nothing away. "That's what I thought, too. Only, I figured I better go talk to this DeVine lady to be sure. That's when I found out who she was reading and why."

  "Ricky," I said. "Did she tell you what she was going to say?"

  "Oh yeah." His jaw clenched. "I don't know who else she talked to or how she put it together, but she knew way more than she should. She knew the fire was no accident."

  "And the gunshot?" I had to ask. "You told her about how Beth hadn't died in the fire but by a gunshot. At your hands."

  "What?" Willis frowned, shaking his head vehemently. "What kind of idiot do you think I am?"

  I figured it was best I didn't answer that question.

  "No, I didn't tell her that I shot Beth," he said adamantly. "Didn't tell her anything. She already knew too much."

  "And what she knew she planned to share with everyone on TV," I added, wondering if Moira'd had any inkling that she'd been putting the nail in her own coffin by confronting Willis. I suddenly felt sorry for the woman.

  "She did." He paused. "Unless I met her demands."

  I blinked at him. "Wait—she tried to blackmail you?" Some of my sympathy for the dead woman waned.

  "Worse." He snorted. "She tried to make a deal with me. Make me one of her informants, give her access to all the police databases she needed, in exchange for leaving my name out of the reveal episode that Beth had been murdered."

  "A con artist to the end," I mumbled.

  "Indeed," he said. "Oh, I agreed to her terms. But there was no way I could trust a woman like that."

  That was one thing we could agree on. "So you poisoned her?"

  "Not hard to do," he bragged. "I went home, watched a couple of her shows. Saw pretty quickly the opportunity I needed in that tea she drank before every reading. Course, I had to come up with something fast acting so she'd bite the dust before she could talk, but after thirty-five years on the force, you learn a thing or two."

  "Like where to purchase cyanide online?" My gaze flitted to my screen. I had a 9 and a 1. I was almost there.

  He chuckled again. "A couple guys in Cyber Crimes showed me how to get on the dark web. I may be an old dog, but I can still learn a few new tricks."

  "So you went back to her studio later and put the sodium cyanide in her tea?"

  "Again—not hard to do. I just stopped by the studio when I knew she'd be gone. Told that weird assistant of hers there'd been some break-ins in the neighborhood and I wanted to just do a walk through to make sure everything was secure. Kid let me, no questions asked."

  It was scary how easily people trusted a man in uniform. And how thoroughly Officer Willis had exploited that fact.

  "Sounds like the only thing you didn't count on was Moira running late to Ricky's reading," I said, the disgust I felt toward the man seeping into my voice.

  His bravado faded, replaced with a sneer again. "That was bad luck. Had she drank that darn tea before the reading like she was supposed to, no one ever would have known what she was going to say."

  "And no one would have ever known Beth's death hadn't been a tragic accident."

  "And you wouldn't have butted in where you had no place being." He took a menacing step toward me, the gun straight out in front of him.

  Instinctively I took a step back, my eyes flitting to the very closed, very quiet front door, where I feared no one was going to come bursting through in time to save me.

  "I had no idea you were involved," I protested. "I-I just wanted to help Ricky."

  "That stupid brat again!" Willis yelled. He took another step forward. "He ruined everything for me back then, and he's not going to do it now."

  "It wasn't his fault," I defended.

  "As soon as your husband called me to meet, I knew things were going south," Willis ranted on. "And then you—with all your theories about murder and cover-ups." He shook his head. "I knew it was only a matter of time before you stumbled on something you shouldn't."

  If only that time had been before I'd ended up in an empty house with a killer.

  My eyes darted around the dark hallway, looking for any means of escape. Any possible weapon. But the home was neatly plucked clean of all belongings, the walls holding nothing on their smooth surfaces but more incongruously cheery wallpaper.

  "Is that why you stopped by my house this morning?" I asked, trying to keep him talking as my finger slid toward the final 1. "To make sure I hadn't stumbled on anything?"

  His eyes narrowed, gleaming in the reflected light off the floor from my cell phone. "It was clear you weren't going to let this go. I knew you were getting too close. Lucky for you those kids were there with you."

  I suppressed a shudder, unwilling to let myself imagine what might have happened otherwise. "How did you know I'd be here tonight?"

  "I followed you," he said simply. "I'd been watching you all afternoon, thinking of how to dispose of you in a way that pointed the finger away from me."

  The shudder was insuppressible this time, shaking me to my core at the thought I'd been watched by this monster all day in the seeming safety of my own home.

  "And what did you come up with?" Not that I wanted to know. The last thing I wanted to hear was a murderer's plan to get rid of me. But I could tell I was running out of time. And it occurred to me that if I hit send on the emergency number I'd painstakingly dialed, Willis would hear the call. I'd be dead before the dispatcher could even send a patrol car.

  His smile was chilling. "Turns out, you created one for me. Coming here." He let his eyes rove the hallway. "Wiring must be old in a place like this. Prone to fire, wouldn't you think?"

  My heart skipped a beat at the insinuation. He planned to kill me exactly like he'd done with Beth.

  "You won't get away with this," I managed to get out around the fear clogging my throat.

  "No?" He took another threatening step toward me, gun first. "I got away with it once. I don't see why it won't work a second time."

  "Ramirez will never believe you," I said, trying not to let tears leak out of my eyes at the thought of my husband.

  "He'll never suspect me either," Willis countered.

  I had a bad feeling that he might be right about that. I certainly hadn't suspected Willis of anything other than being lazy.

  "Don't worry, darling," Willis drawled in a condescending tone. "I'll send flowers to your wake and sympathy cards to your family. Heck, I'll even console Ramirez on the loss of his young, pretty, and far too nosey little wife."

  The gun rose, and I froze.

  I was out of time.

  All rational thoughts left me as the barrel stared me down, my mind frantically casting about for an escape route. There was no furniture to dive behind. There were no dishes to throw. No fireplace pokers to skewer him with. All I had was the phone in my hand.

  "I'm sorry it had to come to this, Mrs. Springer." Willis took one last step forward.

  All I had was the phone…and the flashlight app. The blindingly bright flashlight.

  My arm shot upward all on its own, landing at eye level, temporarily blinding him.

  On instinct, his hands went up to shield his eyes.

  And I didn't waste a second. I bull-rushed him, staying low in case he squeezed off a shot, catching him at stomach level with every ounce of my body weight, hoping to throw him off balance. His breath left him in a rush of air, but he didn't go down. He didn't even budge. He just stayed an implacable monolith with a gun, blocking my escape route down the hall to the door.

  In a fraction of a second, I realized that if I couldn't overpower him—and clearly I couldn't!—putting distance between us was my best bet at getting out of this alive. Without allowing myself to consider my minuscule chances of success, I dove into the open doorway to the master bedroom on my left. I kicked the door shut behind me, fumbling for the lock just as Willis's girth slammed into it. A whimper escaped me as I hit the send button on the phone still clutched in a death grip in my right hand and scrambled for the window on the far side of the room.

  I heard the call ringing on the other end. Behind me, I could hear Willis putting a shoulder to the door, the wood groaning under the stress. Another few more attempts like that, and he'd be inside.

  My fingers were clumsy with adrenalin, shaking as I tried to navigate the lock on the window. I finally got it unlatched, even as I heard Willis ramming into the door again.

  "9-1-1, what is your emergency?" a tiny, pleasant female voice from my phone said.

  "Help! Someone is trying to kill me! He has a gun!" I yelled, rattling off the address as fast as I could.

  I didn't hear the dispatcher's response as I shoved the windowpane upward, pushing against the screen beneath in a frantic frenzy to get away.

  Just as the bedroom door gave way and Willis burst into the room.

  "Where do you think you're going?" he bellowed.

  "Ma'am?" I could hear the tiny voice asking. "Are you alright?"

  No, I was not.

  I heard myself whimpering again, breath coming hard as I managed to push the screen out of the frame and down to the ground below. I swung a leg upward, over the sill.

  Too late.

  Willis's beefy hand clamped down on my arm. He yanked hard, sending me sprawling backward onto the floor with a thud, my phone flying from my hand and clattering to some dark corner, where I lost the tiny voice altogether.

  "I should have known you'd give me a hard time," he grunted, rearing back and delivering a vicious kick to my thigh.

  I barely felt the impact as I tried to crawl way from him, fear the only thing coursing through me.

  "But there's nothing you can do," he taunted. "You've got nowhere to hide. You should never have gotten involved."

  He was telling me.

  He stood over me, gun held tightly in both hands, pointed menacingly down at my head.

  I felt hot tears running freely down my cheeks now. As I stared down my fate, I expected to see the unspooling reel of my life—my childhood, my career milestones, my wedding to Ramirez, the twins' birth. All the touchstones that made a life worth living.

  Instead I saw a ball of brown fur fly through the air.

  I blinked back tears, confusion mixing with fear as I watched it attach itself to Willis's wrist, teeth first.

  "Screee!" screamed Jerome.

  "Ahhh!" screamed Willis.

  The gun clattered to the wood floor, and I scrambled backward on my backside, trying to put distance between us even as I scanned the floor for where the weapon had landed.

  Willis dropped to the floor, feeling around for his gun. Jerome danced around him, smacking him repeatedly on the head while cackling an evil monkey laugh.

  Willis swatted at him. "Will you knock it off! Where'd you come from, anyway?"

  Heaven, if you asked me. Jerome had just earned himself a lifetime supply of bananas. I'd buy him a plush new carrier and the boxed set of SpongeBob episodes. He could pee in my minivan anytime he liked.

  Well, maybe I wasn't that grateful.

  Jerome stuck his tongue out at Willis and scampered out of his reach.

  "That's it," Willis yelled, struggling to his feet. "As soon as I find my gun, I'm going to—"

  "Freeze!"

  Dana stood in the doorway holding Willis's gun level with his head.

  "No," she told him, doing her best Charlotte's Angels voice. "You won't be doing anything to that monkey or my best friend. Now FREEZE, sucker!!"

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  The next hour was an entire blur. Dana held Willis at gunpoint while I found my phone and the confused 9-1-1 dispatcher, who told me help was on the way. Jerome danced around the confessed killer, taunting him with monkey screeches and the occasional protruding tongue. While Willis sat on the ground, uncharacteristically silent as he held his bleeding wrist and shot daggers at me with his beady eyes. It felt like forever that I stood there watching the bizarre scene as the calm dispatcher on the other phone end of the line continued to talk to me. But in reality it was probably only a matter of minutes before sirens erupted outside and uniformed police officers swarmed the room.

  Oddly enough, none of them seemed to have a terribly difficult time believing our story as we explained what had happened and why we had one of their own cowering in a corner at gunpoint. Maybe Willis hadn't played good-cop as well as he had thought all those years after all.

  We watched them take Willis into custody even as he shouted about needing a hospital and rabies shot, and then they took Dana and me to separate squad cars outside to give our statements. I was just finishing telling a younger guy in a uniform, which I would bet his mom ironed for him, everything Willis had confessed to me for the second time, when I spotted a familiar form pushing through throng of law enforcement.

  Ramirez.

  I didn't wait for the young officer's permission before launching myself from the squad car and into my husband's arms.

  Ramirez held me tight, and I leaned my head on his chest, letting his steady heartbeat soothe me. He asked no questions, which was good because the tears of relief clogging my throat would have prevented any answers anyway. We let the moment flow around us without speaking, silently mourning all that had happened at that sad house and feeling grateful for an outcome to that evening that could have been much different. Not surprisingly, I felt tears start to slide down my cheeks again.

  After what felt like an eternity, I pulled back to look my husband in the eyes. Concern, anger, and relief all mingled there.

  "I'm sorry," I squeaked out. "I should have—"

  But he stopped me with a soft finger to my lips and shook his head. "It doesn't matter now. What matters is you're safe."

  I felt my heart melt, more tears leaking from the corners of my eyes, no doubt taking whatever was left of my mascara along with them.

  His hand migrated from my mouth to my cheek, gently wiping them away.

  "Come on, Springer. Let's go home," he said softly.

  I could think of no other place I'd rather be.

  "Hey," I heard one of the officers yell. "Where did this monkey come from?"

  * * *

  "I'm so proud of my little man," Marco said, sipping rosé from a stemless wineglass. He was dressed for celebration in silver sequins over skinny jeans, and the tips of his spiky hair were coated in a matching shimmery silver glitter. "I've decided I'm going to officially adopt him."

  "You can't adopt a monkey," Ling said, waving her glass at him. "You adopt babies. Not the same thing."

  "You're darned right they're not," Marco agreed. "No baby could have done what he did. He saved my best friend's life." He nuzzled Jerome's chin, giving air kisses in his direction.

  "I was there too, you know," Dana protested with a laugh. "And I was the one with the perp at gunpoint."

  "Perp?" I asked with a grin.

  "It's PI talk," she explained.

  Six weeks had passed since Officer Willis had been arrested for the murders of both Beth Montgomery and Moira DeVine. While the press had been a salivating swarm at first, descending upon Dana and Ricky's home once again in droves as the news spread that the Charlotte's Angels star had "single-handedly" caught the real-life killer of her husband's mother, after a couple weeks of the pair repeating the phrase "no comment" ad nauseam, the tabloids had finally started to move on to other news stories. Thank goodness for the Kardashians. In fact, when I'd pulled up to Dana's place that evening, there'd only been one lone car sitting outside, hoping to catch a glimpse of some lingering sensation with their telephoto lens.