The FBI Thrillers Collection Books 6-10 - Catherine Coulter [237]
Weldon stopped cold. Then he seemed to look deeply inside himself, drew a deep breath, and said, “That’s when he told me he’d had a nice little visit with his grandson. And that’s when I hit him and knocked his chair over. I should have killed him then but I just couldn’t do it. I threatened him, hoped to scare him into silence like I already told you, but I knew that wouldn’t work. After I left, I thought about it and knew I had to kill him, there was just no other way. I failed.”
Dane said very gently, “Weldon, your father visited with your boy and confessed what he was to him?”
“Yes.”
“Weldon, who is your son?”
Weldon shook his head. “Listen, Agent Savich, my son isn’t a murderer, he isn’t.”
“But you believe he is,” Sherlock said, “and it’s eating you alive. You think your son killed the people in San Francisco and in Pasadena, copying the scripts you wrote.”
Finally, Weldon DeLoach said, “I just couldn’t make myself accept that he was like his grandfather, that his head wasn’t right, that something was missing in him.”
Dane said, “We’ve got to bring him in, Weldon, you must know that. You can’t let him continue doing what your own father did for so many years.”
Weldon was shaking his head. “Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t figure it out until just a couple of days ago. And even then I didn’t figure it out for myself. The old man actually bragged about how he’d finally gotten a real man in the family, how he didn’t have much to teach his grandson, because—like his granddaddy—he was born knowing what to do and how to do it. He told me that his grandson came to see him, brought a Christmas present, a nice tie with red dots on it. And how perfect that was, and so he told the boy he was going to die soon and he wanted to tell him all about himself. And he laughed and laughed at how stupid everyone was, the cops especially.”
Weldon fell silent, looked at them again. He said at last, “I haven’t known what to do. I just knew I had to kill that obscene old man, get him buried, and gone.”
Sherlock said very gently, “But what were you going to do about your son?”
“Get him help. Stop him from doing any more harm. Turn him over to the police if I had to.”
Sherlock said, “We’re the cops. What’s his name, Weldon?”
But Weldon just shook his head. “I couldn’t let him continue, not like my father had done. He was a good boy, really. I know something must have happened to make him snap, to turn him into a monster like his grandfather. I don’t know what it was, but there just had to have been something. He was doing so well. He’s very smart, you know, extraordinarily talented. But then there were some signs—he struggled when he was in high school, didn’t like his teachers, couldn’t make friends—it was enough to make me pay attention. He was violent once, when he accidentally killed a girl in college, but it could have happened to any guy, you know? Things just got out of hand. It was involuntary manslaughter. I got him help. They made him well. My son promised me he was just fine, and I wanted desperately to believe him.
“Something happened. The old man did this to him, somehow.”
He looked up at each of them in turn. “Do you know I still don’t know how many people that old monster killed? There were people he killed that were never found by anyone. Oh Jesus.”
He put his head in his hands and sobbed very quietly.
THIRTY-TWO
“Wait! You can’t go in there!”
As she pushed past him, Sherlock said, “Jay, it’s time for you to go away now. It’s time to take your custom suits from Armani, get another job, and pay off your credit cards.”
“But he’s meditating! He specifically told me he didn’t want to be bothered. And I love Armani. When I wear Armani everyone knows