“I flew halfway cross-country to talk to you,” she said. “I jumped through the hoop you sent your attorney to dangle, and put my associate on your sister to protect her. If you want me to find the truth—wherever that truth leads—you need to tell me exactly what you know. Because right now, you’re not even close to convincing me that this plea change is out of guilt or fear. It looks like an orchestrated plan to get out of jail, and if that’s the case, I’m going back to New York and I frankly don’t care what happens here.” That wasn’t true. Max despised not knowing the truth—she didn’t work a case and walk away because someone pissed her off.

She would find the truth, with or without Stanley Grant’s help.

Grant stared at her. “Please, Max, I didn’t kill Victoria. I confessed out of fear for Marie and her boys, but I should have got them out of town and…” His voice trailed off.

“What are you hiding, Stan?”

“In the weeks before Victoria was killed, she was buying a lot of land. It didn’t make sense. The market was good, but we knew December was a better time to buy—for a variety of reasons. We had a plan—and this didn’t fit into the plan. Plus, she was going around Mitch and me. Now, that’s not necessarily wrong, because we all take our own clients, but this is mostly undeveloped land. She was prickly and wouldn’t talk to me about it. And then she was dead and that property was just … gone.”

“Land doesn’t disappear.”

“I saw the contracts, signed. Saw the county stamps. But I don’t think the land was for MCG. I think she was a straw buyer—buying for someone else. Or she was just doing the paperwork.”

“This is all a lot of what-ifs and maybes. I need a name.”

“Harrison Monroe. His name was on the paperwork.”

Max didn’t recognize the name, but she wrote it down. She sat back down. “Why did you recant, Stanley? Why now?”

“Because I haven’t been able to sleep or eat. I confessed because I was scared and worried about my family. If anything happens to them … but then when I did sleep, all I could think about was Victoria. That someone killed her, and that someone was going to get away with it because I was being threatened. I don’t care about me. But Marie is in danger, I know it, and you have to protect her.”

“You were threatened into confessing, but guilt made you recant?” There was something he wasn’t telling her. “I don’t trust you.”

“I told you the truth.”

“You haven’t told me everything.”

“What do you want from me?”