Isabel watched Delia’s expression, but she remained stone faced. “He said he called you and you came to his hotel room with everything he needed to dress the wound.”
“Uh—well, um—I didn’t know it was Evan that shot him. He just said he’d been shot. I assumed, with his work in the FBI, it had something to do with one of his cases.”
Emily sat silently, her arms crossed and her lips pressed tightly together, fighting against the urge to say something.
“I’m not sure your story is lining up with Jerry’s,” Isabel said. “Let’s play the video, shall we?” Isabel reached over and pushed the play button.
Delia watched as her pale and sickly father reclined in his hospital bed and confessed to trying to kill Evan—David Gerard—several years ago, and why he did it. He told how he had called Delia to bandage his wound after David shot him in the shoulder.
In the video, Isabel’s voice could be heard asking questions and moving the confession along to the night Evan was killed.
“Tell me what happened the night David Gerard died,” Isabel was heard to say.
“I made an appointment with him, pretended to be someone who wanted to hire him for a job. I showed up at his office that night, and we chatted for a while about this and that. We’d never worked together in Washington, so he didn’t know me—but I knew him. I knew he was the reason my Natalia was dead.”
Delia watched the computer screen as Jerry’s voice cracked and his eyes grew moist. He ran his hand across his eyes to wipe the tears then continued.
“I’d hated that man for so long, I couldn’t help myself.” His voice quivered with emotion. “I didn’t care what he was calling himself at the time, I wasn’t going to give him another opportunity to wrestle the gun out of my hand. When David went to get something from the file cabinet, I jumped on the chance to put a bullet in the back of his head.”
“Did you act alone?”
“Yes, completely alone.”
“You’re saying your daughter, Delia, knew nothing about what you had done.”
“You think I had something to do with that?” Delia shrieked, her eyes wide, shooting a questioning look at Colin.
“That’s right. She had nothing to do with it. It was all me,” Jerry replied on the video.
Isabel paused the video play.
“Is that the gun?” Delia asked, casting a glance at the bagged weapon that lay on the table.
“Yes. That’s the gun that was used to murder Evan Parker.” Colin leaned forward in his chair, studying her face. “And you just heard your father confess to doing it.”
“You aren’t going to charge him, are you?” Delia’s eyes widened as her hand slapped the table in Colin’s direction. “He’ll be dead long before he comes to trial. He’s given his life to the FBI, sacrificed his own family for this country.”
“You want us to believe you don’t know anything about this, Delia?” Emily snapped, then looked sheepishly toward her lap. “Sorry,” she whispered to Colin.
“Of course I don’t, Emily. Don’t be ridiculous!”
“I have a file here with the results from the lab.” Colin patted the folder as he said it.
Delia sucked in a gasping breath and her eyes flickered in surprise for a moment. She quickly regained her composure and calmly folded her hands on the table in front of her, meeting Colin’s gaze with a steely one of her own.
“The fingerprint results came back on the gun—because it sat in the river mud for a year and began to rust, no usable prints could be taken from it.”
Emily noticed a faint look of relief in Delia’s eyes.
“However,” Colin continued, “there was one bullet left in the gun and it had a well-defined thumbprint on it that belonged to Ricardo.”
“You think my late husband killed Evan?”
“We considered it, but no,” Colin said. “Your father insists he did it. He says he’s dying and he wants to clear his conscience. So I believe what happened is that Ricardo had loaded the bullets in the gun at some point, but who knows when that might have been. It could have been months or years before. I don’t believe he’s the one who pulled the trigger.”
“Why not?” Delia asked.
“Because Evan was investigating him,” Colin explained. “If Ricardo knew Evan was onto him and came to his office to kill him, to cover up what Evan had discovered he’d been doing, it doesn’t make sense Evan would ever have trusted him enough to turn his back