“You just told Vikki I’m managing as well as can be expected. Which is a ridiculous lie. I’m a complete nervous wreck. What if something happens? What if he tries to grab Maya? What if this plan of yours goes all wrong? He’ll get away with it, Joe. Get away with killing Tanya, hiring you to kill me. I’m so terrified I feel like I might barf at any minute.”

“Please don’t.”

He gently removed her sunglasses. “I’ll tell you what my sergeant told me when I was in the police academy. Fake it ’til you make it. It’s okay to be scared. I’d be lying if I told you I’m not scared. Only an idiot wouldn’t be scared. But here’s the thing, Letty. We’re prepared. We’ve got the element of surprise on our side. Wingfield doesn’t know where Maya is. He doesn’t know who Vikki really is, and he’s never seen me before.”

“You don’t know Evan,” Letty retorted. “He can sense people’s weakness. It’s like his superpower. When he spotted me working at the diner, he overheard me tell my friend I was essentially homeless. He could tell I was vulnerable, and he preyed on me. Like Midnight hunting one of those lizards on the patio. He did the same thing with Tanya. I watched it happen, but he still managed to gaslight me, make me think I was imagining things.”

“In case you haven’t noticed, I’m not a particularly vulnerable kind of guy,” Joe reminded her. “But you want me to tell you what I think?”

She nodded.

“You might not like it,” he warned her.

“Tell me anyway.”

“I think Wingfield met his match in your sister. You’ve said yourself, she kept secrets, was a liar and an opportunist. She played you, telling you she was homeless so you’d invite her to stay with you in New York, and she played Wingfield, by taking up with him and letting him think he was her baby daddy.”

“Is this your way of telling me Tanya was a bad person, as bad a person as Evan? That they deserved each other and she deserved to have him kill her? Is that supposed to make me feel better about this whole nightmare?”

“No. It’s me telling you what you actually already know, which is that Tanya was kinda messed up. But she didn’t deserve her fate. Evan Wingfield isn’t bulletproof. He’s no evil genius. You were taken in by him because you, Letty Carnahan, are a good and decent person.”

“In other words, a sucker.” She smiled ruefully.

He kissed the tip of her nose and replaced the sunglasses. “Not at all. Me, on the other hand? I’m a professional cynic. Ask my mother, she’ll tell you. I’m convinced everybody’s a suspect, until proven otherwise.”