“You’ve got no right to be pissed off at me. You’re the one who’s using information my sister gave you to make money for yourself. I guess the bottom really has fallen out of the journalism business. Why are you still trying to extort money out of the Thraxtons?”

“You are blundering into everything and making a mess,” Ben said. “You don’t know what you’re doing, and you’re too arrogant to admit it. Caroline wanted me to do this, and I’m going to do it. You’re not going to stop me.”

“How does this help Caro?”

“Her in-laws deserve to suffer. Believe me, they’re going to.” He gave me a dismissive once-over. “All you do is run around and play detective. You haven’t figured anything out yet.”

“I know this isn’t your first try at extortion. You shook the Thraxtons down for money a couple of months ago, and my sister advised them to pay you,” I said. “You two were in a scheme together.”

“Caroline begged me to help her,” Ben snarled at me. “No one else would do it. She wanted to get away from the Thraxtons. Not just Theo. All of them. She said they’d ruin Teddy if they got the chance.”

“You extorted a quarter of a million dollars out of them as a nest egg?”

“It’s tough to disappear these days,” Ben said. “You need a lot of cash to make it happen.”

“What are you saying? You were being a Good Samaritan and helping Caro escape?”

“We were going to escape together.”

For a moment, everything seemed to freeze. He has to be lying, I told myself, but it made too much sense. Caro had used dirty Thraxton money to do good in the world, but at some point she’d realized her son would pay the price for it. Yet, she hadn’t said anything to me. She’d sent me those photographs, but . . . I couldn’t imagine she’d leave me without a word.

“Caro wouldn’t leave me or our father like that.”

“Nothing was more important to her than Teddy,” Ben said. “She was determined to protect him. But she was getting more panicked and anxious every day. I think when Theo showed up without warning, she lost her mind. She immediately wanted to run away with Teddy.”

The real meaning of what he said dawned on me. “But not with you.”

“What?”

“She didn’t want to run away with you, Ben.” I thought of the two fake passports Adinah Gerstein had shown me. One for Caro and one for Teddy. Where did that leave Ben? “My sister was going to run away with her son. You weren’t part of that picture.”

“Caroline needed me. She couldn’t do it alone.”