“Connections. I called the office on my way over here.” He stared hard at Milo. “I suggest you go to the cops and explain everything you know about what happened to your sister. Talk to Detective Bentz when he gets back there. You got that?”

Milo wanted to argue. Jase saw it in the shorter man’s eyes.

“Okay,” he acquiesced, still scowling and rubbing his arm.

“I mean it.”

“I said, okay!”

“Good.” To Brianna, he said, “Let’s go. I think it’s time I met my brother.” He was starting for his pickup when a shadow crossed his path. A premonition of dread tightened his muscles as he looked up to find his father standing on the other side of a live oak.

“Don’t you have unfinished business?” the old man asked as he flicked a knowing glance at Brianna.

“Not now, Dad,” Jase warned.

“No time like the present.”

“I said, not now. Not when the police are about to take down the twin I never knew I had, the sicko who is probably the damned 21 Killer.”

“Always chasin’ a story,” the old man said, unperturbed by this bit of news, that his own son could be a serial killer.

“What’s he talking about?” Brianna asked.

Edward’s old eyes twinkled.

“We’ve got to go.” He rounded the pickup to the passenger door. “Come on, Brianna.”

She looked from his father to him and back again as she followed him. “What’s going on, Jase?”

His old man chuckled. “Tell her on the way,” he suggested, and patted his shirt where the envelope Jase had left him poked out of his pocket. “Jase here knows all about how your sister died.”

“What?” she asked, her eyes, so like Arianna’s, turning on him. He didn’t wait, just grabbed her arm with one hand and opened the door of his truck with the other.

“You’re a bastard,” he said to the man who sired him. “You know that, don’t you?”

“So I’ve heard.” Ed reached for his near-empty pack of Camel straights. “But I’m gonna fix that right now. You think you killed a man, don’t you?”

Jase paused, his hand on the hot door handle of his truck. He remembered knocking a guy senseless with one hard punch.

“It wasn’t you, son. Oh, yeah, you hit him hard. Cold-cocked the son of a bitch. But he didn’t die from it.”

“Wait. What? We buried him.”

“Buried who?” Brianna asked, staring at him in horror.

“Tell her.” Ed lit up.

Jase drew in a deep breath. Wasn’t he the one who’d said there would be no more secrets, hadn’t he vowed as much to himself? But not like this, not for his old man’s amusement. “The man who killed your sister.”

“What?” she cried. “But Arianna drowned.”