Page 102 of With a Vengeance

The last conspirator left.

After he’s gone, only Kenneth Wentworth will remain. And while it would be nice to murder him, too, it’ll be up to the courts to decide his fate. That should make Anna happy. She deserves at least one victory.

The killer is now right outside Lapsford’s door, twisting the handle until it opens just a crack. They nudge it wider with a foot.A light creaking of agitated hinges. And when the killer looks inside, they see someone seated in the chair by the window.

Not Jack Lapsford.

Anna.

She smiles, like she’s been waiting for hours. Like she’s known all this time what they had planned.

“Hello, Agent Davis,” she says. “Feeling better, Isee.”

7 a.m.

One Hour toChicago

Forty-Eight

Agent Reggie Davisleans against the doorframe, honestly relieved to be found out. It’s been exhausting pretending to be helping Anna, when in truth he was doing the opposite. All this time, he’s had only one goal in mind—kill the people who killed his father.

He was fifteen when it happened. A terrible age to lose your dad.

Unlike Anna’s brother, Reggie’s father wasn’t a soldier being shipped off to basic training. At forty-five, his fighting days were long over. No, his father worked the railroad. An engineer. One unlucky enough to volunteer to drive a brand-new troop train carrying a group of U.S. servicemen to an Army base in Georgia.

“I’m doing my part,” he told Reggie before he left that morning. “When you get to be old enough, I expect you to do the same.”

The war was all but over by the time Reggie could enlist, so he did the next best thing and joined the FBI. For a time, it felt like he was doing right by his late father. He was one of the good guys, catching bad guys, making sure the scales of justice tipped in the right direction.

What he never, ever expected was the opportunity to avengehis father. After all, the man everyone thought was responsible had been dead for a dozen years. But Reggie knew that had Arthur Matheson still been alive, he would have killed him with his bare hands if given the chance.

Then, miracle of miracles, he got it.

Reggie couldn’t believe his luck when he learned not just who really killed his father but that all of them had been gathered together by Art Matheson’s daughter. He didn’t know what he was going to do about it. Not even once he’d boarded the train. But as everyone else—the porters, the conductors, even the other passengers—quickly disembarked, he realized something else was going on.

“I thought you brought them here to kill them,” he tells Anna.

“That must have been a surprise when you realized I didn’t,” she says. “Is that when you decided to do it yourself?”

Yes. Although he wasn’t in the lounge when Judd Dodge allegedly died, Reggie knew he hadn’t been poisoned to death. Unlike what they show in the movies, poisoning is nasty business. Depending on the dose, there’s vomiting, thrashing, spitting up blood. Reggie detected none of that beneath the tablecloth that covered Judd’s supposed corpse. So the first chance he got, he snuck into Room C of Car 13 to see for himself.

“Are you going to tell everyone?” Judd asked in a panic when he’d been caught.

“Not if you agree to do everything I say,” Reggie told him.

What that entailed was to pick the others off one by one. Edith and Herb, Jack Lapsford and Sally Lawrence. The order didn’t matter. Just as long as they all died.

“How’d you put it together?” he asks Anna now.

“Piece by piece. Starting with your shirt.” She eyes it now, the part not soaked with his blood a stark white. “When you first surprised us in the lounge, the one you were wearing was light blue.”

Reggie had hoped no one would notice. His fault for not bringing along a matching shirt. Then again, there wasn’t time to stop by his place to grab a different one. The white one at the bottom of his desk, kept there for sudden assignments like this, had to do.

“Did it get splattered with blood when you slit Herb’s throat?” Anna says. “Or was it simply wet with snow after you exited through the window?”

“Both,” Reggie says, thinking about the damp, blood-flecked shirt now sitting at the bottom of his suitcase. “When did you realize I’d changed?”

“While checking your wound. How is it, by the way?”

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