"You might be the only person who hated Prentice Sawyer as much as I do," Forrest said.
"Maybe," Griffen agreed. "Did you kill him?" he asked casually as if the answer wasn't relevant but he was curious anyway.
Forrest's eyes flared wide and he recoiled until his back hit his chair. "No! I wanted revenge. I wanted the bust of Vitellius back. I didn't want to kill anyone."
"His alibi checked out," Hawk added.
Parker turned her head to pin Hawk with an icy glare. "So, you investigated him enough to know he didn't kill our father, but you couldn't figure out who he really was? I thought you were the best of the best?" Her glare pivoted to include Griffen. Made sense.
While Griffen wasn't head of security, he'd hired Hawk and had worked side by side with him on the family's security plan. I'd also gotten the impression from Tenn that Griffen had been Hawk's boss in some way before they'd both come to Sawyers Bend. Hawk moved to speak, but Griffen cut him off.
"We went back to high school. Everything about Forrest Powell checked out. And before you ask, he didn't hire a hitman either. No suspicious financial activity of any kind." A tiny smile cracked his face as he looked at Forrest. "That's what we call playing the long game."
Forrest returned his smile with the smallest curve of his lips. "I'd love to say I'm a mastermind who's been planning this since I was thirteen, but I never thought about coming back here until I was in my twenties and my mother mentioned something about the bust of Vitellius. My grandparents were both sick and their medical costs were killing her and my stepfather. I tried to help out, but I had student loans and I was just starting out, so I wasn't making much. She said if only my father hadn't told Prentice Sawyer about the bust, we'd have all the money we'd ever need."
"So, there is a puzzle," I said under my breath. "Prentice wasn't lying to Bryce?"
"He wasn't lying." Forrest stopped, appearing to struggle with his next words.
Looking around the room, he said slowly, "I broke your trust. I came here with a vague plan to find the bust and steal it back, and maybe make you pay for what your father had done. I wasn't expecting all of you to be so different from Prentice. And once I was here, I remembered how much I liked being in Sawyers Bend. How much I liked your family before everything went bad."
He looked right at Sterling, waiting until her eyes rose to meet his, drawn by a force stronger than her broken heart. "Looking back, I can think of a thousand times I should have come clean, but I didn't. I lied to you. I don't know how to fix that except to tell you the truth and hope you don't use it against me."
Sterling looked away without saying a word. Forrest gave a slight nod of acceptance before turning his attention to West. I'd almost forgotten he was there, he'd been so quiet. "You have the bust?"
"Not here. It's locked in my office safe."
"Who has the combination?" Forrest asked.
"Only me."
Forrest nodded again, this time with more conviction before he looked my way. "You were right. The bust isn't worth that much as a work of art, or as a historical artifact. It isn't the bust itself that's valuable…"
He hesitated, and I wondered if he was finally going to tell us the truth.
Chapter Forty-Five
SCARLETT
"It isn't the bust that's valuable," he said slowly, "it's the numbers engraved on the base."
I thought back. "I don't remember any numbers on the base."
"They're almost impossible to see without a magnifying glass, and they're not in a place anyone would examine closely."
"Account numbers," Griffen guessed.
"Coded account numbers. My father was brilliant, but he was paranoid. He sold his first company for millions and put almost every penny into investment accounts he kept from everyone, even my mother. He protected them by putting the account numbers and access key in a code. He engraved the code into the bust, saying no one would ever know how to get to the money except him. He always promised my mother the money was there to protect us. Until he told Prentice about the bust, and then, when things went wrong, there was nothing."
It wasn't my business, but I had to ask. "Do you know how to break the code?"
"I guess I'll find out after your police chief verifies that I'm the rightful owner."
"So, you came all the way down here," West said, "just to find out Prentice had sent the bust up north to auction, and then you had to buy back your own property only for Scarlett's ex and then Bryce to steal it out from under you?"