AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Richard jolts at the name of the man who was supposed to be chief of police before Richard was hastily installed into the position instead. Color drains from his face and he turns a sickly shade of gray. Maisy huffs and a humorless smile twists my lips.
“Yeah. The one who was supposed to have your position right now.” I grab him by his silk tie and jerk him against the wall. “Funny, he had a heart attack about two months after you were sworn in. Shocked his family, since he was healthy before that. Weird, right? I have the obituary.”
“You shouldn’t be looking into this. You don’t understand,” Richard warns when I go for my phone.
Maisy turns away from us and I listen as she plugs the flash drive she brought into Richard’s computer. I drag him away from the wall and sit him down at one of the seats in front of his desk while she turns the monitor around. All the evidence we’ve gathered is on the big screen. He releases a sound as if someone punched him in the stomach, shaking his head.
He’s pathetic, unable to face what he’s done. All the years I’ve spent imagining retribution, I never pictured him blubbering like this. The Richard Landry I remember from my childhood had a backbone, but it seems to have been whittled to nothing in the last decade. The single family photo is next to the screen, but I focus on him.
“Here’s how this will go,” I say, deceptively calm with an undercurrent of deadly fury lurking beneath the surface. “Resign, or this gets out. Everything you’ve done, the bribes you’ve taken, the blood on your hands—the people of this town are going to find out exactly who you are and your precious reputation will be ruined.” We point out each piece of damning evidence we have against his years of being a crooked cop. Grabbing him by the collar, I lean down to snarl, “Your bosses don’t like scandal, do they? And to be clear, I’m not talking about the taxpayers of Ridgeview. They might pretend to operate like a corporate investment firm, but we both know that’s not what they really are.”
“You’re in over your head,” he says hoarsely, picking up the photo I don’t want to look at. Staring at it, his shoulders tremble and his throat bobs with a swallow. He turns to me with dead eyes. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Don’t I? You put me in the fucking foster system after my parents died, Rich!” I drag a hand through my hair as bitterness pricks my throat. “You signed off on the incident report, closed the case for the crash. You had to have seen the coroner’s report. You knew my mom was pregnant. You helped cover up their murder.”
Richard explodes from the chair, the photo clattering on the mahogany desk. He turns into a different person, shedding the flimsy remorse. Grabbing fistfuls of my leather jacket, he gets in my face.
“You’re not walking out of this fucking station. I’m charging you with assault and then you’re going to go away.” His voice shakes with rage. “You’ll never see my daughter again and poison her head with your lies. We’ve worked too hard to have it go up in smoke because you doctored proof.”
I catch Maisy’s disgusted expression from the corner of my eye as I stare down a man so different from the one I remember as a kid. His spittle hits my chin, eyes bloodshot and angry graying brows drawn into a deep wrinkle. This is not the same man who taught Holden and I how to hold and throw a football when we were seven at a bloc
k party in our old neighborhood.
“Dad!” Maisy shouts, coming around the desk. “Stop!”
He swipes an arm behind him and catches her off guard as she stumbles back, grabbing the corner of the desk to keep her balance. From the shock on her face, I guess he’s never raised a hand to her before. I jerk, wanting to kill him for it.
“You think you solved the mystery?” Richard laughs, the sound dark and chilling. “You’ve got shit. This will go away. No one will believe biased testimonies.”
Releasing me, he snatches the flash drive, drops it to the floor, and crushes it beneath his heel. Triumph has him standing tall against us.
“That’s not the only copy, Dad. We’ve got backups of the proof. You can’t run from this.”
“Proof? Sweetheart, I know you’re smarter than that. Don’t be an idiot. Having your friends sign letters without witnesses to corroborate the story isn’t proof of anything. There’s no hardcopies of anything.”
“What’s your soul worth, you greedy bastard?” I ask coldly, stopping him in his tracks when he rounds the desk.
Confusion crosses his aged features until I throw down the final nail in the coffin, the payment buried in the Landry’s financial records from an offshore account. Colton and Connor came through when they uncovered it after months of searching.
“Three quarters of a million.” Richard’s shoulders stiffen. I set my phone on the desk with a photo of the statement. He stares down in horror at the damning evidence. “Not a bad payout for murder, but you’re still scum. Resign. Go away silently, or I’ll make sure what the guys at Stalenko have threatened you with to keep you obedient will sound like a goddamn island vacation.”
“How did you get that?” His voice is barely above a whisper. To himself, he stumbles over his words. “They swore no one would find it. Couldn’t trace it back to us.”
“It doesn’t matter. If you don’t resign, we’re going to the press with this,” Maisy says. “Step down, Dad. It’s the right thing to do.”
“Maisy,” he says brokenly when he sees her clenched jaw. “Sweetie, I didn’t… We had no choice. If we didn’t follow orders, they’d kill our whole family.”
“So you let them kill Fox’s parents?” Her features twist in an appalled expression. “How did you justify that to sleep at night and look Holden and I in the eye for ten years?” There’s only a faint tremor in her voice and I’m proud of her for standing up to him. “You’re nothing more than a pawn and a coward. So you’re going to do this, because if you don’t I won’t stop until you’re behind bars where you belong.”
Defeated, he sinks into the expensive desk chair and drags the discarded family photo, tracing his thumbs over the frame. The emotions flitting across his face sour the satisfaction I get seeing him knocked down to his knees. He touches my mom’s side of the photo and my stomach revolts. No.
I snatch the photo from him and toss it aside. “What’s it going to be, Richard? Do you have a shred of decency left in you?”
With a sigh, he begins to type. I move to stand over his chair from behind when he pauses to look at Maisy.
“Do the right thing,” she says as she picks up the photo. “I remember this day,” she whispers, gaze flickering. Richard flinches. “It seems like it was the last time we were all happy before…”
Before my parents died and everything changed.
