“Hey, man, I fucked up,” Rowdy said from the other end of the wireless connection.

“How?” James, after working long into the night, was just walking out of the shop, Ralph shooting past him to sniff around the fence in the fresh dusting of snow. He’d been too wired to sleep, so after driving into town and making sure Rebecca’s Subaru was parked behind the hotel, he’d come back to the shop when it was quiet, no saws screaming, no nail guns tattooing, no workers milling, and no music pulsing through the building, to catch up on paperwork. The end of the month—make that end of the year—was fast approaching, and he was way behind.

Crocker was rarely wrong, at least the way he told it, and if he did mess up, he wasn’t going to readily admit it. Mistakes, he’d once said, ruined his “cred.”

He opened the door to his Explorer. Ralph bounded into the cab.

“It’s about your unknown cousin,” Crocker explained. “The kid given up for adoption by your nutcase of a relative?”

“Yeah?” James climbed behind the wheel and turned on the ignition. “So there wasn’t a cousin?” That would be good news.

“Oh, no. Just the opposite. She didn’t give up one baby for adoption. She had twins. Girls.”

James’s stomach dropped. This was bad news. Otherwise, Crocker wouldn’t be calling. “Okay.” He started the engine, turned on the wipers to swipe away two inches of fresh snow on the windshield.

“It’s kind of the whole separated-at-birth thing; that’s why I screwed up. I found one certificate of live birth and figured that was it. But on further digging, not only did I find another birth certificate, but two sets of adoption papers.”

James still didn’t see how it connected to him. “So I have two unknown cousins.”

Oh. Shit.

“That’s right, but here’s the kicker. One is named Julia Harper, and she’s a dead ringer for her twin.”

“What?” James said, but his mind was spinning . . . “You’re saying that . . . wait a sec . . . a twin of whom?”

“Sophia Russo.”

“No.” Bile rose up in his throat. No, no, no!

“Hell, yeah.”

“You have to be wrong,” he said, more emphatically. Oh, God, NO! “Distant relative” or not, he could not be related to Sophia, not in the least.

“I’m sorry, man, but you’re being played. I think that Sophia chick might really be Julia Harper. The car she drives is registered to Julia.”

What? This wasn’t making any sense!

Crocker said, “I’m still checking, and I’ll keep you posted, but I wanted to give you a heads-up ASAP.”

The cop’s question came back to haunt him as he stared out the window, his thoughts muddled. “Is she related to you?” they’d asked him. Because they knew. Damn it, the cops had known.