All Night Long (38 page)

“Who was that?” Gladys Thornhill mumbled.

“Webb.”

“What did he want?”

“He was worried about the girl. Called to see how she was getting on.”

“At four-thirty in the morning?” Gladys asked.

“He said he had just heard the news.”

“What did he want, Bob?”

“I told you, he was concerned about the Stenson girl. Asked if there was anything he could do.”

“I know him.” Bitter resignation laced Gladys’s words. “Sooner or later, he always wants something. Someday he’ll make you pay for what he’s doing for me, mark my words.”

“Try to get some sleep.”

Irene shuddered. In light of what she now knew, it was obvious that Webb had called Bob Thornhill that night to make sure the daughter of his victims had not seen or heard
anything that might implicate him as the killer. Perhaps Thornhill had unwittingly saved her life when he assured Webb she had not come home for at least two hours after the deaths and that she was in a state of complete shock.

She let herself out the kitchen door and made her way to the edge of the lake. Stepping onto the old wooden dock, she went to stand at the far end. She studied the surface of the lake the way her father had done when he wanted to think things over.

“I know him. Sooner or later, he always wants something. Someday he’ll make you pay for what he’s doing for me, mark my words.”

There had been a disturbing intimacy about the way Gladys spoke, she thought. True, she had lived in Dunsley all her life. She certainly knew Ryland Webb. But Ryland had been many years younger than Gladys Thornhill, a different generation altogether. It was odd that she had spoken of him in such a resentful, knowing way.

“I know him.”

A cold thrill of comprehension whispered through Irene.

In her shocked and dazed condition on the night of the murders, she had assumed that Ryland was the one who called the Thornhills that night. He was the father of her best friend that summer. It had seemed natural that he would call to check on her. But what if it had been Victor Webb who phoned?

Gladys and Victor Webb had been contemporaries. The two had no doubt gone to school together before Victor left Dunsley to make his fortune. Everyone in town knew that Victor Webb had paid Gladys’s medical bills during the last year of her life.

The dots were connecting so quickly now that she could barely keep up with them.

Her cell phone rang, jarring her out of the trance of concentration into which she had plunged. She jumped a little and then quickly opened her handbag, half turning.

She saw him then. He had come from the shadows at the side of the house. He had a gun in his hand.

“Don’t answer that,” Victor Webb said. “Take the phone out very slowly and drop it into the water.”

Her first, disoriented reaction was that he looked so
normal.
He was dressed in a black-and-tan golf shirt, a khaki windbreaker and a pair of light-colored golf slacks. He looked as though he had just come off a fairway.

Somewhere in the back of her mind was the knowledge that she ought to be terrified, but all she could feel in that moment was a rage that was so red and so powerful, it swamped every other emotion.

“I said drop the damned phone into the water,” Victor barked. “Do it now, you stupid bitch. You’re just like your damned parents, nothing but trouble.”

Slowly she reached into the bag. With shaking fingers she fumbled around a bit and eventually managed to extract the phone. She tossed the device over the side of the dock. There was a small splash, and then it disappeared beneath the surface.

“You were the one,” she whispered, barely able to speak through her fury. “You murdered them all—my parents, Hoyt Egan and Pamela. How could you kill your own granddaughter?”

Victor snorted. “Odds are good that she wasn’t my granddaughter. Her mother was a tramp who slept with anything in pants. She suckered Ryland into marriage when my boy was barely twenty. Didn’t take me long to figure out that he had married a woman who was going to be a millstone around his neck. I tried to get him to dump her.”

“But he didn’t,” Irene said tightly. “Because of Pamela.”

“He was obsessed with that child from the get-go. Never did understand it until I found out he had a thing for young girls.”

“You killed Pamela’s mother, too, didn’t you? Everyone thinks she died in a boating accident out on the lake, but I’ll bet you arranged it. Why didn’t you get rid of Pamela at the same time?”

“I gave it some thought,” Victor admitted. “But Pamela
was almost five by then. Ryland was running his first campaign, and the kid looked great in the press releases. The media and the public loved her. After her mother died, voters went crazy for the image of Ryland as the young, noble, committed father, grieving the loss of his beloved wife and determined to raise his daughter on his own.”

“But when Pamela hit her teens, she started to become a liability, didn’t she? Ryland no longer found her sexually interesting, so he stashed her in a boarding school most of the time.”

“In her teens Pamela discovered drugs,” Victor said, disgusted. “She also found out she could manipulate any male who happened to be in her vicinity. The school kept her out of the public eye for the most part. I was concerned that she might prove to be a problem after she graduated, though. I started to make some plans.”

“Instead, after she graduated, she made herself useful in Ryland’s campaigns again.”

“What can I say?” Victor shrugged. “She was her mother’s daughter all the way to her little round heels. Pamela was a whore at heart, but she was our whore and she was damned good at what she did. She was willing to sleep with Ryland’s rivals, enemies and anyone else, male or female, who had information that we could use. She enjoyed her role as a spy. It made her feel powerful to know that she was a critical part of the campaign strategy and that Ryland had come to depend on her. I think it gave her a sense of vengeance. The silly creature probably felt like she was in control of her father at last. But I was always the one who ran the show, right from the get-go.”

“You talk as if Ryland’s success was your own.”

“It is mine.” Anger twisted Victor’s face. “I made my son what he is today.”

“A disgraced pedophile who won’t even be able to run for dogcatcher?”

“You’ve ruined everything,” Victor said, voice thickening with rage. “My son was on his way to the White House until
you came along. The White House, damn you. He was going to be president. My grandsons would have followed in his footsteps.”

“Don’t know about the grandsons,” Irene said. “Ryland prefers little girls, doesn’t he?”

“Shut up. Ryland promised me sons. It was in the prenuptial agreement he signed with Alexa Douglass. It was spelled out that she would produce a male heir within two years with the help of in vitro fertilization if necessary or else accept a quiet divorce. The fact that she had already produced one child meant that she was fertile.”

“You saw Alexa Douglass’s daughter as evidence of her fertility, but your pervert son saw her as a target for future abuse. Pamela’s the one who pulled the plug on your plans, not me. She did what she had to do to save Alexa’s daughter, and you killed her in an effort to silence her.”

“I should have gotten rid of you seventeen years ago,” Victor said. “If you had been in the house the night I did your parents, I would have taken care of you, too. Unfortunately, you weren’t there when I 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 not to 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 to Dunsley 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 asleep in bed. I injected her with a lethal dose of a certain pharmaceutical. She woke up and struggled for a few 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 how she could be sure that Ryland was still screwing little girls. She said she had pictures that had been taken 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 and again 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 they had 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 hospital for treatment. Asked them to keep the whole business quiet for everyone’s sake. But Hugh looked out at the dock and my boat. I could see that he was starting to get suspicious, wondering why I had come by way of the lake. I had my gun inside my coat. It was the same make and model that he carried on the 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 things? There’s no way Ryland’s career can be salvaged.”

“Don’t you think I’m aware of that? Thanks to you, I’ve lost one son. But I’ve got another and I’ve got a plan.”

“Freeze, Webb.”

Luke’s command had the strobe-like effect of lightning on the lake at midnight. For an instant everything and everyone, including Victor Webb, went utterly still.

Luke emerged from the shadows at the side of the
house, moving with the lethal grace of a predator who has had plenty of experience bringing down prey.

He had a gun in his hand.

Sam McPherson followed close behind him, a pistol in one fist.

Webb snapped out of his startled trance. He turned his head and saw the two men approaching.

“You’re both fools,” he said. “Shoot me and you’ll hit Irene.”

He was right, Irene realized. Victor stood directly in front of her on the narrow dock. Once the bullets started flying, it would be a miracle if she wasn’t hit.

“Give it up, Webb,” Luke said, moving slowly toward the dock. “This thing is over. We all know that.”

“It’s over when I say it’s over, Danner.”

Victor suddenly lunged toward Irene, reaching out to seize her by the arm. She realized that he intended to use her as a shield and a hostage.

She dropped her shoulder bag onto the dock and threw herself backward off the dock. The last thing she saw before she hit the water was Victor Webb bringing his gun to bear on Luke.

She landed with a heavy splash and sank quickly. The cold waters closed over her, muffling the roar of the shots.

Her first instinct was to swim away from the vicinity of the dock. She went as far as she could underwater, hugging the shoreline. The weight of her coat and boots tugged at her, threatening to pull her deeper.

When she could hold her breath no longer, she surfaced, gasping for air, and turned to look back. Luke stood at the end of the dock, searching the water for her. Behind him Sam McPherson crouched beside Victor Webb, who lay crumpled on the boards.

Luke spotted her and raised a hand.

“You okay?” he called.

“Yes.” She got to her feet and staggered out of the shallow water. The crisp air struck like a knife, plastering her cold, wet garments around her.