I clutched the grip of my gun harder and fought through the pain. “I know about the inheritance, Miles.”

A few feet away from him, still knee-deep in water, Norton straightened up. There was panic in his eyes.

Miles brought a gloved hand to his heart and gave me his most earnest smile. “You’re confused,” he said. “That’s understandable. It’s a hell of a situation we’re in. Tell her,” Miles said. “Tell the detective she’s wrong.”

“You’re too late. I know everything. You were smart, I’ll give you that. How long have you been planning this, Miles? At what point did you realize Norton was sitting on a gold mine and decide to use him to cash in?”

It was a long game, the con so complex with so many moving parts I had to believe it was months if not years in the making. A marriage to Bebe was just the beginning. She wasn’t his mark, but a means to an end that satisfied two of the man’s deepest cravings: money and revenge.

“Hey.” Miles tossed the word over his shoulder at Norton. “Come over here and tell this poor, confused woman what’s what.”

Maybe it was habit. Philip Norton was accustomed to doing as he was told. More likely, though, the man had an all-consuming yearning to make amends. So he went to Miles. And when he got there, Miles made his move.

It was a boning knife he pulled out, lean and deadly, and Miles held it to Norton’s throat. In the light of my flashlight the skin around the blade was so white it glowed. Miles had hidden the murder weapon in the pocket of his sport coat. The coat he slipped on after strangling Abella Beaudry with the rope Norton left for him in the bathroom.

“Drop it.” My voice wasn’t my own. “For God’s sake, Miles, he’s your father.”

The plea sounded like a line from an insufferable melodrama, even to me—as soon as I blurted it, images of Oedipus Rex and Kylo Ren flashed through my mind. On top of that, what difference did shared DNA make in a place like this, where family members manhandled each other and themselves? But I had to take a shot, and I hoped it was enough to give the man with the knife pause.

The photo on Norton’s bedside table of him with a young boy meant little to me when I first saw it that morning. Combined with Jade’s offhand remark to Tim about her grandmother’s Thousand Islands roots, and Miles’s comment about growing up without a dad, and the way Norton doted on Jade, its significance grew. Crazy as it was, my conversation with Carson about Moonshine Phil and the unfamiliar teen in town clinched it. Philip Norton and Miles Byrd weren’t just partners in crime, but father and son.

The minute I said it, I knew I’d guessed right. Norton made a gurgling sound and Miles grinned at me, all pluck as he pressed down on the blade. Pitifully, Norton croaked, “Miles . . . please . . .”