I did. They tried to break us up at every turn. Jennifer claimed I slept with her. Heidi said she’d seen me out with other girls. Lisa plied me with booze and stuck her hands down my pants.” Kyle shivered at the memory, but his gun hand remained steady.
“Is that true, Lisa?” Ronan asked. She’d done everything but stick her hands down his pants as she pulled him away from Tennyson earlier. The bitch had known damn well that he was a married man.
“Are you fucking crazy, Detective? He’s pointing a gun at me, and you’re accusing me of being a criminal?” Lisa clutched her wristlet to her chest as if it could protect her if Kyle pulled the trigger.
“I want to get to the bottom of this as much as you do, Kyle,” Ronan said softly, “but we’re not going to be able to do that until you put the gun down. Can you do that for me?”
“She’s gotten away with this for thirty-five years. Isn’t that enough?” Kyle gritted out from behind clenched teeth.
“More than enough. But if you get a confession out of her at gunpoint, it’s useless in court because it was coerced.” Ronan took a step closer to Kyle. He raised a hand and set it on Kyle’s wrist, lowering his hand and the gun to the floor. “That’s it. Now let me take the gun.”
With a heartbroken cry, Kyle did what Ronan asked. “I didn’t kill Skye, Ronan. I swear to you.”
Taking the gun, Ronan breathed a sigh of relief. Now they could get down to business. “I know you didn’t, Kyle.” He turned to Lisa in time to see her pull a gun out of her small purse and point it at Kyle.
“I’ve waited thirty-five years for this! All you had to do was love me and no one had to die!” Lisa screamed. Her hand shook as she pointed the gun at Kyle.
“Who had to die, Lisa?” Ronan asked, trying to angle his body in front of Kyle. This wasn’t good. Half the gala crowd was still in the room, not to mention his husband, while this stone-cold woman held a gun on him.
“All of them!” Lisa started to laugh. She sounded as if she were having a break with reality, but the gun stayed pointed at Kyle.
“Tell me about it.” Ronan was holding Kyle’s gun by the barrel and trying to maneuver it into the proper position without drawing Lisa’s attention to the movement.
“I’d loved him for years, but he only had eyes for Skye! That fucking slut! She knew how I felt and went out with him anyway.” Lisa’s eyes blazed with anger and decades-old bitterness.
“You’re right, Lisa, Skye was a bitch for treating a lifelong friend like that.” The last thing Ronan wanted to do was make Lisa angrier than she already was. “What about the other girls? Whose side were they on?” Jennifer and Heidi played a role in this thing somewhere. Ronan wasn’t convinced Heidi’s death letter was one hundred percent truthful. He assumed she was taking the fall, but Lisa was the only one who could prove him right.
“They all were!” Lisa hissed triumphantly. “Skye never had time for us anymore. She spent every free minute she had with him!”
“What happened that night, Lisa?” Ronan was so close to the end of the case he could taste it. All Lisa had to do was confess, and this would all be over. With the amount of people who’d seen the guns, he was sure multiple calls had gone out to 911. Cisco and the cavalry would arrive soon.
“Kyle was grounded. That was the only reason Skye agreed to come out with us that night. I wanted her to sleep over at my house, but she had some plans with her mother the next day. Skye was always doing shit with her mother.” Lisa rolled her eyes. She looked and sounded like that long ago wounded fifteen-year-old girl. “We were going to do it at the sleepover, but there was no sleepover.”
“We?” Ronan asked. He knew Ten had seen a vision of Heidi holding a bloody knife, but Lisa was making it sound like all three girls had a hand in this murder.
“Jenn and Heidi hated that bitch as much as I did. We all wanted her to pay.” Lisa laughed again.
“You had to settle for Plan B, right?” Ronan coaxed. Jesus Christ, all three of them planned this out, and then carried through the murder of their