Two months after my best friend passed away, his lawyer called me and said, “Thomas, Marcus left you a USB drive with strict instructions. He said you have to watch it alone and don’t tell your wife, Vanessa.” What he warned me about in that final video saved my life.

The next day, Sam pulled Dylan’s financials. What he found changed everything.

“Mr. Harrison, you need to see this,” he said, motioning me back into the study.

He turned his laptop toward me. Bank statements. Transaction records.

“Dylan has two hundred fifty thousand dollars in a private account,” Sam said. “It didn’t come from you or Sophia.”

“Then where?” I asked.

“Margaret Sullivan,” he said, clicking. “And two other women.”

He opened more files. “Jennifer Walsh, seventy-two, widow. Dylan’s been ‘dating’ her for eight months. She already changed her will. He gets three hundred thousand when she dies. And Lisa Freeman, fifty-eight, divorced, isolated. He’s been seeing her for six months. She just took out a life insurance policy with Dylan as beneficiary.”

The room seemed to tilt.

“He’s running his own operation,” Sam said. “Your stepson isn’t just helping his mother. He’s copying her.”

He pulled up another audio file.

“We caught this yesterday,” Sam said. “Dylan on his cell, talking to someone else. He doesn’t know we cloned his phone.”

Dylan’s voice filled the room. “Two weeks. The old man and the old lady. Both. Yeah, both. The house, the insurance, everything. Victor can handle it. No, she won’t see it coming. Trust me. Both. James and Sophia.”

“He’s planning to kill you both,” Sam said quietly. “Take the insurance on you, inherit from you, and eliminate his mother so he doesn’t have to split a cent. Frame it as a murder-suicide, or make it look like Victor went rogue.”

I couldn’t speak for a moment.

“Does Sophia know?” I finally managed.

“I don’t think so,” Sam said. “But she’s suspicious. That pause when Dylan asked about splitting everything? She knows he’s hiding something.”

He pulled up phone records. “We’ve got another problem. Victor’s playing both sides. Sophia hired him to kill you, but Dylan’s been in contact with him separately. Victor’s going to get paid twice for the same job, plus whatever Dylan offers him for Sophia.”

“What does Victor get out of this?” I asked.

“Four hundred thousand total,” Sam said. “Two hundred from Sophia to kill you. Two hundred from Dylan to kill both of you. Victor doesn’t care who lives or dies as long as he gets paid.”

Three scorpions in a bottle, I thought, each planning to be the last one standing.

“We need to bring in Detective Chen,” I said. “Now.”

Sarah Chen arrived that evening.

She was late forties, Korean American, with twenty years in homicide. She wore jeans, a blazer, and the kind of expression that said she’d seen just about everything people could do to each other and still believed in putting them in handcuffs.

We sat around my study table—Sam, Sarah, and me—as they went through the evidence. The audio files. The surveillance footage. The digoxin report. The insurance paperwork. The offshore accounts.

When we finished, she leaned back in her chair.

“This is enough for conspiracy charges,” she said. “Both of them. But if we arrest them now, we might not get Victor. As far as the law is concerned, he hasn’t done anything yet except talk.”

“So what do you suggest?” I asked.

“We let it play out,” Sarah said. “You go to Seattle like they’re expecting. We set up a controlled environment here. When Victor makes his move, we grab him. Then we use him to flip on Sophia and Dylan.”

“That’s using James as bait,” Sam said.

“I’ll actually be in Seattle,” I said. “At Emma’s. Safe.”

Sarah nodded. “We’ll have twenty officers in and around this house. The second Victor shows up, we take him. Then we bring in Sophia and Dylan and play them against each other. They’re already suspicious. We’ll tear that trust apart in an interview room.”

“What about the other women?” I asked. “Jennifer and Lisa.”

“I’ll have welfare checks done,” Sarah said. “Warning them directly would tip Dylan off, but we can get uniformed officers to keep eyes on them. Quietly.”

It was risky. It required trusting the police, trusting the timing, trusting that nothing would go wrong in the hours between a door opening and an arrest.

But Will had trusted me with his last weeks. I could trust this.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll book the Seattle trip. Let’s end this.”

Sarah stood.