by Desiree Holt
Owen opened his mouth to speak, but Diane put her hand on his arm.
“No.” Her voice sounded tight and scratchy. “This is all on me. Let me tell him.”
“But—”
“For god’s sake.” Peter wanted to smack both of them. “One of you tell me, whatever it is, and do it now.”
Diana inhaled a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Owen wasn’t driving the car that night. I was.”
Kendrick had thought that by now he was shockproof, but he was wrong. Her words froze his blood and for a moment he thought his heart had stopped beating. It took him a long moment before he could speak.
“Could you please say that again? I’m not sure I heard you right.”
“I said I was the one who ran down the Hollisters, not Owen.”
“What the hell?” He tried to find the right words to say, but his brain felt frozen.
Owen started to say something then stopped.
Kendrick looked from one to the other. “We’d better start at the beginning, wherever that is, because I’ve got a lot of questions. Let’s start with where you got this crazy idea and why you thought it was a good one. Was it some misguided notion of protecting Owen? Didn’t you think I could get him out of whatever vise Kellerman had him in?”
“I didn’t want her to,” Owen began but Diane interrupted him.
“Owen wasn’t the one in trouble,” she told Kendrick. “I was. I was in debt to Kellerman over gambling losses. It was me they were threatening.”
Peter had thought he’d had the worst shock of the day, but apparently not.
“How the hell have you hidden all this?” His glance slid from Owen to Diane and back again. “And why? Jesus, Owen. This is a huge mess here.”
“It was my idea,” Owen blurted out. “After it was all over, I figured better it should be my mess, not hers. Besides, I was pretty sure you’d pull out all the stops for me, but I was afraid you’d throw Diane to the wolves.” He took Diane’s hand in his. “You know I’m right. I didn’t even want her to tell you now, but she insisted. Said I was throwing away my life to protect hers.”
Peter still felt as if he’d been run over by a train. He wasn’t sure if he should praise his son for being so noble and protective or shoot him for fucking up his life. The political campaign was looking more and more unreachable. Political campaign? Hell, he’d be lucky if they didn’t all end up in jail.
Diane sat a little straighter in her chair. “I couldn’t let him do this any longer. Throw away his life like that.”
Peter got up and refilled his mug then returned to his seat at the table. As he stirred cream into it, he realized what he really wanted was a shot of bourbon in it. It was only the discipline he’d built all these years that kept him from screaming his head off then throttling both of them.
“First of all, you’d better tell me how you got hooked up with Kellerman and his Tampa Mafia to begin with.”
“I’ll tell you.” Rage flashed across Owen’s face. “After you refused to represent them, they targeted her and waged a seductive campaign. Before she realized it, she was trapped.”
“I don’t understand.”
He listened while his son told him a story that chilled his blood. How Owen had been swamped with work for new clients, leaving Diane to her own devices a lot. How she’d received an invitation to a luncheon supporting a local organization and been swarmed by Hayden Kellerman’s wife and her friends. Of course, she had no idea who Kellerman was, so nothing seemed out of place to her. How they’d sucked her in and begun inviting her to afternoon cocktail parties, flattering her, making her feel welcome. Then, when Owen was out of town for a week on behalf of a client, she’d received the invite to a card game.
“It was slow at first,” Owen said. “They told her sometimes they bet just for fun. But before long the card games became more intense and the stakes higher. She thought it was fun, never realizing she had a latent gambling addiction. Suddenly she found herself in debt for thousands of dollars and unable to pay. They thought for sure she’d come to me and I’d come to you. Then they could use it as leverage to get you to represent them. Instead she kept it all to herself.”
“What about those pictures?”
“A disaster out of the blue. I didn’t know a thing about it until I got a call to meet a supposed new client at Maritime Drilling on Gandy Boulevard one day. That’s where Kellerman’s goons gave me the news and threatened me. Either pay up her losses, get you to represent them or they’d take their revenge in other ways. Jesus, Dad.” He raked his fingers through his hair. “I didn’t know what the fuck to do.”
“They’ve done shit like that before,” Peter pointed out. “With them it’s all about leverage, and apparently you gave them plenty.”
“I would have come to you at that point and begged you to help us,” Owen told him, “but I never got the chance. It was fucking bad luck that Brianne Hollister happened to be driving by at the time and caught those goons with me. Her photographer’s eye told her something was up, so she snapped some pictures and showed them to Dane.”
Kendrick knew what had happened after that. Dane had come to him and the whole mess had exploded. Fucking shit. He wanted to beat his head against the wall.
“Diane, what in god’s name made you decide to run over Dane and Brianne? That’s the stupidest thing I’ve heard. What were you doing that night, anyway?”
He watched the two of them exchange nervous glances.
“We’d gone out to dinner,” Owen told him. “Just the two of us. But Diane was feeling like shit and was drinking way too much. She was scared to death that Dane would keep sticking his nose into the mess with Kellerman and it would all come out. I guess she thought she was protecting me.”
Diane looked ready to cry. “Yes, I did. I was scared our whole life, his career, everything would be destroyed.”
Peter stared at the woman. “So you thought killing the Hollisters would solve the problem?”
“I don’t know what I thought,” she cried, her face pinched with distress. “I just wanted to get rid of them because they were going to ruin Owen’s life. Our lives.”
Peter clenched his hands so he wouldn’t reach out and throttle the woman. “You really must have been damn drunk to concoct this.”
Her knuckles whitened as she intensified her grip on Owen’s hand. “Yes, I was. Really drunk by the time we got home. Owen went into the den to do some work and told me to go into our bedroom and lie down. I just kept running it over and over in my head, though. I knew the Hollisters were going to dinner at Calypso, because Owen overheard Dane talking about it at the office. They were celebrating some new client Brianne got. It was a late dinner because Dane had a client meeting before then.”
“So you, what, jumped in Owen’s car and went off to run them over? What the hell were you thinking?”
Diane looked down at her feet. “I wasn’t thinking. Obviously.”
“And why take Owen’s car?” He wanted to tell her it was a stupid move that had put them all in jeopardy, but again, he swallowed his words. Accusations weren’t going to solve anything here.
“I certainly hadn’t planned on it.” She tried to lift her coffee cup, but her hands were shaking too much. “I grabbed his keys instead of mine and I didn’t want to go back and exchange them. I was afraid Owen would hear me.”
“I was out of my mind when I discovered she’d left the house.” Owen looked at his father. “I knew she’d had too much to drink, but I never expected her to go out. I was about to go looking for her when she got back. Dad, she was a sobbing mess, shaking, hysterical. She could hardly get the words out to tell me what happened.”
“I have no doubt. And you hadn’t had anything to drink at all? Don’t lie to me.”
“One with dinner. Period. I swear. I wasn’t drunk at all. When she told me what happened, I didn’t know what the hell to do. I knew, though, if I put myself in the spotlight, you’d do whatever it took to bury it. I
spilled liquor on my clothes and rinsed my mouth with it before I came to see you. I wanted my confession to be realistic.”
Peter wasn’t sure what to say anymore. This just kept getting worse. Bile surged in his throat as he thought of all the illegal things he and Sulzberger had done to bury this. All the favors they’d called in. All the dirt they’d shoveled. Now it was all for nothing. Owen was right, sick as it made him to admit it. If he’d known the truth, he’d have played the whole thing differently.
But now what the fuck did he do? Where had he gone wrong here? How had he missed the signs that Diane was in trouble? Why hadn’t he pursued the situation where Kellerman’s people had come down on Owen? Was he so arrogant that he—
Enough. No time for that now. He’d have to be the responsible adult here, but the ramifications if this got out sent unfamiliar panic racing through him, like a shot of ice water.
“We have some big problems to face here,” he told the couple. “Owen, you know we have new players in the game. Men Peyton West hired who aren’t going to be deterred or bought off.”
“Whatever you were going to do for me, do it for Diane.”
Kendrick wanted to throttle his son. Throttle both of them.
“The first thing I have to do is get both of you out of town now until I figure out how to fix this. These people Peyton West hired aren’t your run-of-the-mill investigators. They’ve dug up things I thought were permanently buried.”
“Can’t you fix it?” Owen’s voice was edged with strain. “You have a lot of power. So does Warren Sulzberger.”
“If only. My plan when I thought it was you and the shit was about to hit the fan again was to act like you weren’t involved at all. That’s why I wanted you both here, so you could act normal and I could bluff the whole thing. And pray these new assholes couldn’t find anything we’d buried. Jesus, Owen, we even got rid of your car. Told people the lease was up and we were getting you a new one. We’ve done everything we could to bury this.”
“You wouldn’t have done this for Diane.” Owen’s tone was rife with accusation. “I had to decide how we would handle this.”
“Yeah? How’s that working out for you?”
He needed to take a minute and think this whole thing through. Then he’d call Sulzberger to make sure everything was really buried so no one could find it. Not even these hotshots who seem to scare the shit out of Sulzberger.
“Go home. It’s the weekend. Don’t go anywhere or do anything. I have to make some calls and figure out how to get these Galaxy guys off our backs.”
Diana lifted her chin. “I was just trying to protect Owen, but I’m ready to own up to it. I don’t want this to fall on him.”
“No!” Owen practically shouted the word. “That’s not happening. We’ll leave the country first.”
“No one’s going anywhere except home.” Kendrick gave them each a hard look. “Let me figure out how to fix this.”
“How is that even possible?” Diane asked. “Owen said Brianne Hollister is still in a coma and her sister is rattling every bush she can find.”
“Just go home.” He stopped, took a deep breath and lowered his voice. “I have to decide the best way to play this out. They don’t have proof and all the witnesses have been taken care of. We’re going to ride this out and hopefully put it behind us.”
Owen swallowed hard. “But what about the sister?”
“I’ll work on that. You both just go home and stay there. From now on, you do only what I tell you.”
As soon as they had left, he punched a number on his cell.
“Warren? I know I’m the last person you want to hear from, and guess what. You’ll want it even less after you hear what I have to say.”
“This is just fucked.” Sulzberger’s voice over the phone was thick and scratchy. “How the hell did everything get out of hand like this?”
“We can argue that later. Right now, I need your help again.”
“Really? Good luck with that. I can’t put my neck out there anymore. I have to stay under that bastard Hamilton’s radar. He’d like nothing better than to kill my ass. Now that he knows I was involved in the coverup of the so-called accident, he’s probably just waiting for this opportunity to destroy me. You’ll have to take care of this one yourself.”
Kendrick barely stopped himself from throwing the phone across the room. This was no time for anger. He had to come up with a plan. One that worked and didn’t cost him everything he’d strived his whole life for.
* * * *
When Alton Franz handed an envelope to Peyton the next morning, Blaze felt as if it were a bomb waiting to go off. This could blow the lid off a lot of things, and finally, finally, avenge his team members who had been murdered.
“I didn’t want to email it or text it to you,” he told Peyton. “I had to do a lot of maneuvering to get this and too many people are very nervous about this coming out. Anything on the Internet can be hacked. It can also end up in the wrong hands. They don’t want details of the coverup to blow back on them.”
“I appreciate that, Senator, and this will be handled in the right way.” Peyton smiled at him. “Those SEALs will finally get justice. Anyway,” she assured him, “I know just the person I can reach out to with this. None of this will come anywhere near you. Senator, thank you so much for this.”
He chuffed a laugh. “My thanks will come when I see the media coverage. Be sure to let me know when it’s going to pop.”
“I will. Thank you again.”
“Keep the faith, Peyton. I know your sister will come out of this.”
She shivered. “I hope you’re right. I pray you’re right.”
They were halfway through their flight back to Tampa when Blaze’s cell phone rang. “It’s Rocket,” he told her, checking the readout. “I’ll put it on speaker.” He punched the button. “Hey, Rocket. Peyton’s with me. What have you got?”
“A promise from the police commissioner that he’ll reopen the case of the hit and run. And do it right away. I mean like yesterday.”
“Damn! You are good.”
Rocket laughed. “You know it.”
Peyton leaned a little closer to the phone. “Are you sure he’ll keep his word?”
“More than sure. For one thing, after my phone call to him, he had his assistant search the cloud for the CCTV photos. Apparently, the idiot who said they were wiped didn’t know it took two steps to wipe them from this particular cloud. He nearly had a stroke when I showed him the cleaned-up photos. That was enough to have him pull all the reports that were filed. Reports that are skimpy at best.”
Peyton glanced at Blaze. “I’m sure he wasn’t happy with the situation.”
“He was damn pissed,” Rocket told them. “He wants to do his best to prevent this from happening again. I’ll bet there’ll be some changes in procedure, not to mention a few people getting canned. He also made some phone calls while I was with him, to the precinct commander where the traffic detectives came from. Said he didn’t care where they were on assignment, he wanted them in his office the next day.”
Blaze slapped the table. “Damn good work. Thanks, Rocket.”
“Did he say when he might have something?” Peyton asked.
“I’d say based on what he told me and the evidence he’ll have, Diane Kendrick will probably be arrested within forty-eight hours. He just has to clean up the shit reports at the precinct so some scummy lawyer can’t muddy the case.”
Blaze was glad to see the frown smooth from her brow. “Rocket, thank you so much. Keep us up to date,” Blaze told him.
“Will do.”
He disconnected the call and reached for Peyton’s hand.
“We’re gonna get it done.”
For the first time since the moment he’d seen her, the strain on her face eased a little.
“Oh, god, I hope so. At least the person who did this won’t get away with it.”
“I’m going to call the hospital just to give the gu
ys another heads up that sometime in the next forty-eight hours, things could ratchet up. I already told them Sulzberger or Kendrick might just be insane enough to take this out on your sister. Now I want them to be doubly on the alert.”
“Yes. Please. Good idea.”
They made a quick stop at the hospital on the way to the townhouse. Blaze reassured both himself and Peyton that everything was in good hands, although he insisted on regular updates. It was early afternoon by the time they entered his townhouse. He was feeling a combination of jazzed and exhausted. They hadn’t slept much the night before, too wound up about what was coming to relax. The sex had been frenetic but hardly satisfying. Now, the high-octane desire simmered just beneath the surface like an underwater bomb ready to explode. The news from Rocket had only added to the high.
“How soon do you think you can get this to one of your reporter friends?” he asked Peyton.
“I’ll go through my contacts right now and see who would be the best one.” She already had her phone out and was scrolling her list. “I have a good relationship with all the ones I’ve used as sources and resources, but there’s one who will really make the big deal out of this if he’ll help us.”
“Good. That’s what we want.”
“I just have to figure the best way to get this to him. He won’t move forward without this written proof.”
He watched her sitting there, forehead wrinkled in concentration, thumbing through names.
“We can always have Saint fly it to him.”
She looked up. “You’d do that?”
“I’d walk it there myself if I had to. Peyton, this man was responsible for the murder of most of my team. I’ll do anything I can to make this happen.”
“Okay. Then I think I have just the right person.” She opened the contact name and hit the button to dial the number. “Dawson? Hey. This is Peyton West. Long time, no see.” She chuckled at whatever he said. “Yeah, yeah, I know. Well, you always told me you wanted to be in one of my books so you’d be famous. I’ve got a better way if you’re interested. It’s the hot story of the year and I can’t think of a better person to run with it than you.”