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“Okay.” She drew in a deep, shaky breath. “But hurry up, Nico. I need to get out of here.”
“You want to leave the bar clean-up until tomorrow?”
Before he even finished speaking, she shook her head. “No. It’ll only take a few minutes, and I want Madeline’s clean when we leave.”
“Got it.” He took her hands in both of his. Squeezed them. “We’ll get through this, Julia. I’ll be with you every step of the way.”
“I know,” she whispered. She stared at her feet, then looked back up at him and shook her head. “It’s just so hard to believe.”
“We’ll get some answers when Detective Gorowski picks him up.”
“I hope so,” she said.
* * *
Julia watched Nico push through the door into the dining area, resisting the urge to call him back as the door swung gently behind him. They were alone in the restaurant. The doors were locked.
When the door stopped swinging, Julia hurried to the counter where she and Delia had been discussing the new recipe. She picked it up and headed toward her office. She needed to lock it in the safe with the rest of her recipes until she had time to try it out.
She was almost at her office when she heard footsteps behind her in the kitchen. She swung around with a smile on her face. “Finished alrea…?”
She stumbled to a halt and stared at Kent Dawson, standing ten feet away from her with a knife in his hand. “What…? Kent? How did you get in here?” she managed to say.
“Easy. I never left.” He smirked as he shifted the knife in his hand. “Stayed in the restroom until everyone but you and the busser were gone.” He smiled at her, and she’d never seen anything more terrifying in her life. “Hi, little sis I never wanted. Long time, no see.”
“Little sis?” She stared at him, shocked. “I’m not your sister. He’s dead. You don’t look like Jeff.”
Dawson’s smile sent a chill through her. “Two words. Plastic surgery. The best my money could buy.”
Staring at him, trying to find any trace of her brother, Julia said, “Don’t you mean the best Dad’s money could buy?”
Dawson’s smile vanished, replaced by a snarl. “Dad shouldn’t have insisted I pay that money back. I’d earned it. It belonged to me.”
The panic button.
Her phone was in her back pocket. Wrapping her arms around her waist, as if trying to hold herself together, she fumbled for the phone. Pressed the center of the screen several times, hoping she hit the right spot at least once.
“You really are Jeff,” she said at his entitled words. He’d always been that way, she realized. She tightened her arms. She really did need to hold herself together. “And you’re not dead.”
“Of course not. I went to a lot of trouble to make it look like I was, though, and you’re going to ruin all my hard work.”
Julia sucked in a breath. “You set the fire that killed our parents?”
He scowled at her. “It was supposed to kill you, too. I saw you in your bed. How did you get out of the house?”
Julia licked her lips as Jeff walked toward her, the knife now pointed at her. She backed up a step. Angled toward the back door, but it was at least twenty or thirty feet away. “Just… just lucky, I guess.”
Jeff frowned. “I watched that house explode. No one could have escaped.”
“You blew the place up and stuck around to watch?” Horrified and repelled, she took another step backward. Jeff moved closer, and she tried to distract him. “What… how did you do that? How did you manage to set off the explosion and escape the house?”
He laughed, as if proud of himself. “I was pretty pleased with my scheme. Thought I was very clever. I put the homeless guy who was supposed to be me in the kitchen, to make it look like I’d tried to turn off the gas. Bonus, his body would be so damaged that no one would be able to match dental records or recognize his face. Once the gas built up, I lit a firecracker and left it on the floor. By the time it went off, I was almost out the door. I got a few dents and dings, but nothing serious.”
Anger and grief swirled inside her in a painful, aching current. “Why, Jeff? You had all that money Dad gave you for your business. What could you gain by killing them?”
“That business was on the rocks. Going down the tubes and taking all of the start-up money with it. Dad wouldn’t give me anymore.” Jeff scowled, as if he were still pissed off that her father wouldn’t throw good money after bad. “And he expected me to pay him back. Which was ridiculous. That money would have been mine eventually, anyway.
“So I used a lockpick on his desk and got his bank and brokerage account numbers. I transferred most of the money to a Swiss bank and the rest into the Caymans. Then I found a homeless guy who looked something like me. Got him stinking drunk, then hauled him into the house. The firecracker went boom, the house collapsed. Burned to ashes. Then I hightailed it to Canada. Got the plastic surgery and stayed away for ten years on a Canadian identity I paid a fortune for.” He smiled. “The forger had an unfortunate accident when I paid him for it. I came back here a few years ago and applied for citizenship.”
