“She was here a bit ago,” he said. “Been gone most of the day. Just dropped off some donuts. Want one?”
“No, thanks,” I replied. Casually, I said, “Matt’s dead.”
Greg blinked three times. “I’m sorry, what?”
“He died a few hours ago,” I told him. “In the woods, where he’d buried Brie.”
Greg laughed nervously. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. Matt who? What woods?”
“You called him,” I said. “When you thought Brie might have returned. Wondered whether he’d actually done what you’d hired him to do. Freaked him out, too. So he took me along, had me dig her up just to be sure.”
“Honestly, Andy, nothing that you’re saying makes any sense to me.”
“But you can rest easy,” I said. “He did what you paid him to do. That Brie who showed up this week was a fake. But I’m guessing you know that by now, too.”
“What?”
“Did you see her by chance, too? Just like Tyler did? Followed her back to her place and killed her before you realized you had the wrong person?”
“Okay, now I’m really confused.”
I had no doubt that he was. At least about the most recent accusation.
“It’s only been a little while since I found out it was you who wanted Brie killed, so I haven’t had long to try to figure out why, but I’ve got a couple of ideas,” I said. “I’m guessing it had something to do with the business. Something Brie found out.”
Greg said nothing, but his silence spoke volumes.
“You son of a bitch,” Isabel said.
Greg licked his lips. “Look, Andy—”
“What always seemed weird, but I never really thought about until today, was how Brie encouraged me to take that fishing trip with you. She wanted me to spend time with you. That wasn’t like her, you know? Because she was never your biggest fan. I remember her asking me what we’d talked about, when I chatted with her on the Saturday night. Like she was waiting for some specific topic of conversation to come up.”
Greg’s eyes were darting about, as though looking for an escape route.
“Remember that time when you kind of made a pass at her? Had a bit to drink, acted stupid. Brie told me about it, and I took your side.” I shook my head regretfully. “I made Brie feel like it was her fault. Not that she’d brought it on, but that she was making too big a deal about it. I think, after that, Brie felt there wasn’t anything to be gained by pointing out your transgressions. I wouldn’t take them seriously.”
I took a breath. “What I’m thinking is, maybe you did something else, something bad, certainly worse than patting Brie’s backside. But instead of her telling me, she twisted your arm and told you to confess. And that if you didn’t, she’d have no choice but to tell me herself.”
Greg appeared to shrink before my eyes. His head dropped, his shoulders slumped. He kicked at a piece of debris with his boot.
“They were going to kill me,” he said, barely loud enough for me to hear.
And to his obvious surprise, I said, “The bikers.”
“What?”
“Matt told me a few things at the end. You ripped off some bikers.”
Greg appeared to deflate. I didn’t know everything, but I clearly knew more than Greg would have guessed.
“You know I was never one to say no to something that fell off the back of a truck,” he said. “If something found its way into my hands, hey, I was happy to take it. Remember that VCR I scored back in the day?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s a habit I should have given up. Remember when I broke my leg? Said I’d jumped from some scaffolding?”
I nodded.
“That’s not exactly what happened. You know Beaver Meadow Road?”
“Vaguely.”
“South of Middletown? Nice stretch of road through the Cockaponset State Forest, east of Route 9, on the way to the Connecticut River. Remember that old MG I used to have? The convertible? Got it for a song because it wasn’t in the best of shape? And didn’t keep it long because I couldn’t afford the repairs?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“I was taking it for a spin up that way. On my own, riding along behind this biker guy. A Harley, handlebars up in the stratosphere. A fucking deer runs into the road and he swerves and wipes out. I pull over, you know, see if he’s okay, and he’s out cold. So I put in a call, 911. Didn’t give my name, just told them where to send an ambulance.”
I wanted him to move it along, but I’d waited six years to hear this. I guessed I could wait a little longer.
“Anyway, I finish making the call and I notice this satchel the guy’d been carrying. It’s kind of opened some, and there’s some cash that’s spilled out. A lot of cash. I mean, like a hundred grand in cash, although I didn’t know it was that much until later, when I counted it.”
“Jesus,” I said.
“The guy’s still unconscious, the ambulance hasn’t arrived yet. And there hasn’t been another car along that stretch for a while, but you never know when one’s gonna show up. So I had a decision to make, right?” He paused. “I made the wrong one.”
“Did the guy live?” I asked.
“Yeah, he made it. I guess he’d made some kind of drug delivery and was coming back with the cash when he wiped out. He’d been ripped off but it wasn’t like he was going to tell the cops. But he and his buddies figured it had to be whoever made the 911 call.”
“You didn’t leave your name, but there was a record of your number.”
Another nod. “I don’t know how they got it, but they did. And once they had the number they were able to track me down. Paid me a little visit. I hadn’t spent much of the money, just a few hundred. Gave it back, but my apology didn’t cut it.”
“That’s when they broke your leg.”
“Yeah. Held me down, went at it with a sledgehammer.”
Isabel winced, but there was no sympathy in her eyes.
“They weren’t done. They said, you rip us off, you pay us back double. They wanted another hundred grand. Or the next time, we hammer your skull, they said.”
“You could have gone to the police.”
Greg rolled his eyes. “Yeah, tell them I ripped off some bikers, could you help me out? And if they had someone inside who could trace my call to 911, maybe they had someone inside who’d tell them I’d tattled.”
“The hundred grand,” I said slowly. “Let me guess. This is around the time we started losing all those jobs.”
Greg grimaced. “This is hard to talk about.”
I waited, feeling the gun at my back like it was a huge stone in my shoe.
Greg moved the reciprocating saw from one hand to the other. It had to be getting heavy. “Believe me when I tell you I never wanted to do this. I felt sick about it, still do. It was a shitty thing to do. At the time, I didn’t see any way out, you know?” He paused, then said, “I sold us out.”
“How?”
“I went to our competitors. Leaked our bids, allowing them to undercut us, even offer more for less.”
“And they paid you off,” I said.
He nodded. “They were big projects. It was worth it to them, slipping me twenty or thirty thousand to get those jobs. They’d recover it all on the back end. I fucked us over on enough bids to get almost all of it, then sold the MG to get the rest. I got the hundred grand I needed to keep the bikers from bashing my head in.”
“You destroyed our company. All that we’d worked for.”
He broke eye contact with me, and when he did I took a second to adjust the gun at my back so it wasn’t digging in quite so uncomfortably. Greg might have missed it, but Isabel didn’t.
I couldn’t believe he’d done this to us, sabotaged our entire enterprise, and yet I knew there was an even greater betrayal to be told about.