Mia shuddered beside Izzy. “Souvenirs?”

Lacey smiled at her. “My mementos. I have a razor blade from that night. It has your blood on it, darling.”

Izzy’s stomach rolled, then clenched. Beside her, Mia bent in two, her body heaving as she gagged against nothing. As soon as Izzy shifted to help her, though, Lacey swung the gun on her. “No.”

Straightening, Mia waved Izzy off anyway, before wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. The mask was back in place only seconds later.

“I’m not mad at him, though,” Lacey continued. “At first, I was very angry, of course. Especially when he left the island. But then he came back. And I knew what I was going to do.”

The final pin dropped. “He was bait,” Izzy said.

Lacey’s mouth dropped open in delighted surprise. “Detective, I knew I liked you. Your brain is so clever. I wish you weren’t so easy to toy with.” Lacey batted her lashes at Izzy. “We could have had such fun, you and I.”

“Bait?” Mia asked. “For me?”

“Hmm, yes,” Lacey said, her eyes focused on Mia. “That reporter came and messed everything up. But I like to improvise. I had been trying to figure out a purpose for Sammy, anyway. He needed a bit of direction in his life.”

“Why switch their identities, though?” Izzy asked. She got why it would have been risky to have Peter turn up dead that close to when he’d been staying with Lacey. She would have been the first suspect they would have looked at. But it all seemed unnecessarily complicated to have Sammy lie about the identity of the body. “Why not just kill Robert and use him to get Mia here?”

Lacey’s lip tipped up, and she raised her brows, a teacher waiting for them to figure out the solution.

It was Mia who finally answered. “Because Peter was the one I recognized. He must have told you he tried to contact me.”

“Brava, precious.” Lacey sent her a fond look that had saliva pooling in Izzy’s mouth once more. “He disclosed that little fact . . . right before his very timely death.”

When they simply stared at her, Lacey laughed. “Oh, come now, Detective Santiago. You have to admit that it made you look at our dear Mia here differently. When she recognized the body.”

Izzy couldn’t deny it. Lacey knew she couldn’t deny it.

“Yes, Sammy filled me in on that delicious moment,” Lacey purred. “It set everything in motion. ‘The Unraveling of Mia Hart’—a tragic but satisfyingly logical tale. You, Detective Santiago, acted your scenes beautifully, darling. You are the fruit of my labor.”

Izzy’s skin went itchy and tight, and she wanted to dig her nails in, scratch until the memories of those words were nothing but red track lines on her arms.

“So you killed Peter?” Izzy asked bluntly.