Spooky Business (The Spectral Files #3) - S.E. Harmon Page 0,101
a little glassy as he sat back in his chair. “That’s more than enough.”
“And it all started with Thomas Kane.” I shook my head. “When Joseph started coming to the shop, it wasn’t to get Walter groomed, was it?”
“No,” he said quietly. “He’d gotten that list, that stupid fucking list, from the PI. In vintage Joey fashion, he wanted to make amends. To make everything right. But how do you make something like that right?”
“When did he tell you who he really was?”
“On our sixth date. I could tell he’d been holding something back, but I never imagined that.” His brows drew together as he remembered. “Here’s this amazing guy that I have so much in common with, and he’s telling me that his father murdered my mother. It was almost… surreal.”
“Why did you continue to date him?”
“Because I thought I could get over it. It wasn’t his fault, after all. He never even knew his father.”
“But Thomas Kane’s blood runs through his veins and you couldn’t forget.”
He blew out a shaky breath. “I tried. But then I found the letters in the false bottom of his drawer.”
“What letters?” I asked.
“Letters from his father. They’d been writing each other for a few months.”
Fucking Kane. From the start, he’d given me nothing but half-truths and false leads. I wasn’t surprised in the least. “Did you read any of them?”
“Of course, but they weren’t what I expected.” He pitched his voice deeper. “Good to hear from you, son. What do you like to do in your spare time? Oh wow, social work is such an important job. What do you like to watch on TV? Have you met anyone special, son?”
I nodded in perfect understanding. “Like everything was perfectly normal between them. And that was wrong.”
“Of course it was,” he exploded. “Joey told me that Thomas Kane disgusted him as much as he disgusted me, and fool that I was, I believed it.”
“What did you do then?”
“I stewed about it for a little while. I decided….” His gaze skittered away from mine as he hesitated, clearly debating on whether he should say the rest.
“Decided what?” I prodded.
When he met my eyes again, it was with a cold look that made him seem a lot older than he was. “To let the sins of the father be the sins of the son.”
“Tell me what happened,” I urged.
“Joey picked me up for a date, and I got in the back seat. He laughed and made a joke that he’d chauffeur me around like a big shot. I went along with it.” Now that Milo had crossed the hump of admitting the crime, the words seemed to flow easier. “I told him I’d planned a special picnic and gave him directions.”
“Was he suspicious?”
“Maybe. I think he could tell I was in a strange mood,” Milo said quietly. “He kept looking back at me in the rearview mirror and asking if everything was okay.”
“And then you took him to the place your mother disappeared.”
“I took him back to the place where my mother lost her life,” he snapped.
He wasn’t wrong. She may have died in Kane’s basement, but the moment Bee Williams got into that car with Kane, she was a dead woman. “Zappa Fair,” I said softly.
He gave me a short, jerky nod. “He knew the moment he drove past the sign. When he looked in the rearview, I already had the gun out. I told him not to turn around unless I said so.” He scrubbed damp palms down his jean-clad thighs. “I expected him to plead for his life, but he didn’t. He just gave me this slightly sad look. It was almost like… he wanted me to.”
“He felt a lot of guilt for what his father was,” I said softly. It was probably why he’d communicated with Kane in the first place. “Did he say anything?”
“He said… if it’ll make you feel better, go right ahead.” Milo’s voice was soft as well. “So I did.”
I sat back in my chair, feeling a little sick to my stomach. I could almost picture Joseph sitting there, eyes squeezed shut, head bowed, knowing he was about to die at the hand of someone he loved.
“Well, did it?” I asked, my voice a little gruff. “Did it make you feel better?”
It was a few minutes before he answered, so long that I thought he might not answer at all. When he spoke, his voice a little hoarse. “Not as much as I’d hoped.”