“Don’t tell me you didn’t bring it.” Skyler laughed. “Let me guess. All you brought is a picture on your phone.” He gusted out a huge sigh and gave Ryan a hard look. “Well, hand it over. Let me see what you have. I know Conti’s work backward and forward, and if it’s genuine, I’ll pay you what it’s worth.”

If I’d had a thousand years to guess, I would never have come up with what Ryan said next.

“Did you kill Pug Mattock?”

Skyler’s head jerked back. “Did I what?”

“Point a gun at Pug Mattock’s chest and pull the trigger.”

“Look, man, all I want is to buy a Conti. That’s the only thing that matters here, right?”

He hadn’t asked who Pug Mattock was, hadn’t blinked at the accusation, hadn’t denied it. It wouldn’t be proof enough for the sheriff’s office, but it was proof enough for me. Skyler Ellison had killed Pug.

Now we could go talk to Ash and Detective Inwood. We could give them what we’d just learned and they’d do the official law enforcement thing. This would, without a doubt, be the biggest step in the plan to rehabilitate Ryan’s image. A statement from the police, a bit of timely social media posting, and Ryan could get back to his life.

Time to go, I tried telling Ryan via mental telepathy. We have what we need, let’s leave.

But either my powers of mental telepathy were on par with my cooking abilities, or Ryan just plain had other ideas.

“You killed him, didn’t you?”

Skyler looked left and right—though happily not behind him—and shrugged. “What do you care? He had a Conti. I needed it and he wouldn’t let me have it. What was I supposed to do, just leave?”

Yes, I thought.

“Contis are the only things that matter,” Skyler said. “I get another Conti and no one will have as many as I do. No one in the world. That will show my parents that I’m successful. They won’t be able to deny it any longer.”

The primal part of my brain started shrieking a layered warning. Down at the bottom layer was the certainty that Skyler’s obsession with Vittorio Conti and his sculptures was beyond unhealthy. The middle layer of concern was that someone with an unhealthy obsession was likely to behave unpredictably. But the top layer was the biggest and it was yelling the loudest.

Skyler had killed Pug for the sake of a hunk of metal. If he thought Ryan had a Conti in his possession, there was no guessing what he’d do.

Run! I silently yelled. Get out of there!

“Because of you,” Ryan said, “I’ve been on the run for weeks. Everyone thinks I’m the one who killed Pug Mattock.”