Page 170 of To Die For

Glass was standing by the window. His clothes were rumpled, and if he’d had hair, Devine supposed that would have been in disarray, too. As he turned to Devine, the man looked like he’d aged a decade.

“Sit,” he said curtly.

Devine did so.

Glass took his time coming around to take a seat opposite him. “Tell me why I shouldn’t put a bullet in your brain right now, Devine.”

In response, Devine took out his phone, opened his photos, and tossed it across. “Take a trip down memory lane, Danny. Swipe from the right, last three pictures.”

Glass nimbly caught the phone, but didn’t seem inclined to look at the screen.

“The sooner we get this squared away, the sooner I can get Betsy back.”

“How are you going to do that?” barked Glass.

Devine flicked his gaze at the phone.

Glass looked down at the first photo on the screen.

Devine said, “The Glass family. Short mom, short dad, you at medium height, and your ‘sister’ an Amazon. And a redhead when all of you are dark. Swipe.”

Glass did so.

“Official certificate. Your parents adopted Alice when she was an infant. She’s not your sister by blood, but by adoption. Swipe.”

Glass’s shaky finger moved the screen to the last photo.

“Dwayne’s health record.” Devine paused. “He was incapable of fathering children. And yet there’s Betsy.”

Glass tossed back the phone, his eyes glistening.

Devine said, “I also found out that your family and Perry Rollins hail from the same town in Ohio. When Rollins first approached me, he told me that he wasn’t always from the Seattle area.”

“Stop, Devine.”

“In fact, he was living in the same neighborhood where Alice had moved to. This wasafterAlice married Dwayne, and they were living in the house she had been renting with a roommate. Dwayne was off looking for work when you came home on leave and visited her.”

“I said, stop.”

“That test on Dwayne was done over a year before Betsy was born. They’d obviously tried to conceive, even looked at IVF, but then they found out Dwayne was firing blanks.”

“Don’t go there,” Glass said grimly.

Devine sat back. “Rollins had already been arrested for being a Peeping Tom in that neighborhood. Took pictures of a woman in her bathroom naked.”

Glass looked up at him. “Youdon’twant to go there.”

Devine sat forward. “I don’t give a damn what happened between you and Alice, Danny. But if you’d been straight with me from the beginning, I wouldn’t have been spinning my damn wheelsover Rollins’s murder. Did you have him taken out because he was trying to blackmail you?”

Glass didn’t answer. He just looked away, the crushing stress the man was under heavily stamped into every feature.

“Or did you have him killed because he was trying to sell your secret to someone else?”

Glass now looked up at him. He seemed drained of all fight, of all energy.

“I didn’t need to kill him, Devine, because someone already knew about my secret.”

“Who?”

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