All Night Long

you weren’t there whe arrived. I didn’t want to risk hanging around for what might have been hours waiting for you, so I left. Later, it was obvious you knew nothing about the video or who had shot your parents, so I decided no o worry about you. To tell you the truth, Irene, I damned near forgot about you over the years. Obviously that was a mistake on my part.”
    “How did you find out that Pamela planned to go public with the accusations against Ryland?”
    Victor gave her a thin, humorless smile. “She called me the day before she planned to meet you.”
    “Of course,” Irene whispered, suddenly understanding. “She knew that what she was going to do would rip the family apart. She felt she owed you, the head of the clan, some advance notice and maybe an explanation.”
    “I tried to talk her out of it, but it was clear that she had made up her mind. So I came up here t unsley to take care of things.”
    “She opened the door to you, didn’t she?”
    Victor snorted. “No, as a matter of fact, I let myself into the house very late that night. She was aslee n bed. I injected her with a lethal dose of a certain pharmaceutical. She woke up and struggled for ew seconds, but the drug works fast.”
    “And then you set the stage to make it appear that she had OD’d. When did you find out about the little wedding dress?”
    His face worked in remembered fury. “The drug worked a little too fast. She laughed at me at the very end. She actually
laughed.
Told me I’d never find the wedding dress that Ryland had made her wear,
    said it was on the video and that it had DNA evidence all over it. I looked for it that night, but I couldn’t find it.”
    “Later when you watched the video, you realized that the dress was potentially a huge problem. You had to get rid of it. So you went back the next night and burned down the house in hopes of destroying it.”
    “It never occurred to me that Pamela might have hidden the dress off-site,” he admitted.
    “How did you find out that Hoyt Egan was blackmailing Ryland?”
    He shrugged. “When Pamela called me to tell me what she intended to do, I demanded to know ho he could be sure that Ryland was still screwing little girls. She said she had pictures that had bee aken on some of Ryland’s foreign junkets. She told me they had been taken by Egan. He accompanied Ryland on several of those trips. Somewhere along the line he figured out what Ryland was doing on the side. That’s the problem with aides.
    There’s a tendency to let them get too close to the center of power. Ryland got careless.”
    “What did you do the night you killed my parents? Ambush them?”

    “In a manner of speaking. I used a boat that night, too, just as I did the night I got rid of Pamela an gain when I torched the house. Tied up at the dock behind your parents’ place and went to the back door. Your folks had finished dinner and were sitting in the living room, talking about the video the ad just watched.”
    “I don’t understand. They were killed in the kitchen.”
    “They both came into the kitchen when they heard me knock on the back door.
    They recognized me, naturally, and let me in. I told them I’d heard about the video and explained how shocked I was to discover that Ryland had a little problem.”
    “A little problem?” Irene stared at him. “Your son is a monster. So are you, for that matter. Talk about bad genes.”
    Victor ignored that. “I told your folks that I had made plans to put Ryland into a psychiatric hospita or treatment. Asked them to keep the whole business quiet for everyone’s sake. But Hugh looked ou t the dock and my boat. I could see that he was starting to get suspicious, wondering why I had com y way of the lake. I had my gun inside my coat. It was the same make and model that he carried o he job. He wasn’t wearing his gun in the house, of course. I moved up right beside him and shot him before he had a chance to turn around. Your mother screamed and launched herself straight at me like some kind of wild animal. I shot her, too. It was all over in an instant.”
    Rage-induced adrenaline flowed through Irene. She wanted to do what her mother had done and fling herself on Victor Webb. She yearned to slash him to pieces with her nails. But she knew that if she rushed him, he would cut her down before she got close enough to claw his face.
    She flicked a disgusted glance at the gun in his hand. “Do you really think that killing me will fix