Private Justice. Marie Ferrarella
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kept plowing his way through the human throng, making progress by inches. He needed not only to get away, but to find somewhere he could go and think. What was happening was not a coincidence.
But why now? Why this?
He needed answers.
After what felt like an eternity embroiled in an endless journey, he finally made it to his car. The driver, Joseph, was standing holding the rear door open for him, waiting. He was quickly ushered in, his useless lawyer diving in right behind him, and the door was secured.
Exhausted, relieved, he leaned back and exhaled a sigh filled with anxiety.
“Where to, sir?” Joseph asked after sliding into the driver’s seat and slamming the door.
Both sides of the somber, black customized vehicle were besieged by the relentless reporters, still trying to get a sound bite, a single damning word.
“Anywhere,” Hank cried. “Just away from here.”
The car was already in motion, burrowing through the throng. “You got it, Senator.”
“Damn fool idiot!”
Bonnie Gene Kelley was walking by the den where her husband of forty years, Donald, could occasionally be found when he wasn’t up to his elbows in yet another barbecue sauce, trying to create one to top the one he’d breathed life into the time before. All created to be used at his very successful chain of steak houses.
The sound of Donald’s voice stopped her in her tracks and she peered in.
“Talking to yourself again, dear?” she asked. It was getting to be an unfortunate habit, she thought. People were going to think he was losing his mental faculties if he wasn’t careful. “You know, if you want some company,” she told him, walking into the room, “all you have to do is ask.”
Donald continued scowling at the TV.
Glancing toward the flat screen, she asked, “What are you watching?” before she had a chance to focus on the face of the man on the monitor.
Her eyes widened. Oh my God!
“Donald, is that Hank?” she cried, completely stunned.
Donald was still communing with the image on the screen. “Damn stupid idiot,” Donald retorted angrily. With a snap of his wrist, he made the picture disappear, shutting off the set just as the words recorded earlier scrolled across the bottom of the screen. “He never could keep from messing up a good thing!”
“Donald, why was Hank in the middle of that ugly crowd? Is something wrong? Why was he on the news?”
Bonnie Gene turned toward her husband, expecting him to give her an answer or at least to share in her confusion as to why Hank was the subject of a news story.
Donald didn’t want to talk about it. Not yet. Not until he got his temper under control.
Shaking his head, his asymmetrically cut, shaggy white hair—that he insisted only she cut—moving about independently, he acted as if he hadn’t heard any of her questions and announced, “I’m going back to the restaurant. That barbecue sauce isn’t going to create itself.”
“Donald,” Bonnie Gene cried, raising her voice as he strode past her to the den’s threshold, “talk to me.”
“That was talking, Bonnie Gene,” Donald said as he walked out. “Thought someone who’s always doing it would recognize it when she heard it.” He didn’t bother turning around.
Bonnie Gene, frowning, picked up the remote and turned the set back on. But the news had moved on and cut to a commercial. A bright, smiling blonde with way too many teeth was extolling the virtues of her shampoo.
Disgusted, Bonnie Gene turned off the set again and, with an annoyed sigh, left the room, promising herself that she was going to get the information out of her husband when he came home for the night. She wanted to know what was going on. The senator from California, Hank Kelley, was Donald’s younger and, for all intents and purposes, estranged half brother. But family was family and she intended to get to the bottom of this.
Donald, she thought, had better come clean if he knew what was good for him.
Chapter 1
Just when I thought there were no surprises left when it came to you, you had to show me I was wrong, didn’t you, Dad?
Several states away, in a prestigious law firm in Beverly Hills, California, high-powered attorney Dylan Kelley was watching the same news broadcast as his much-loved uncle Donald.
Biting off a curse, Dylan aimed his remote at the huge flat-screen TV on the opposite wall and terminated the broadcast. The screen went to black and, for a moment, silence ensued.
Dylan shook his head in dazed disbelief. So much for his father’s straight-arrow image.
“You really outdid yourself this time, Dad,” he muttered under his breath, anger beginning to set in and take a firm hold.
He wondered if either of his brothers or his sister, Lana, knew about this latest turn of events. Worse, what if his mother had caught this bulletin? She was a strong woman, a woman who had, over the years, slowly constructed walls and barriers around herself. He’d been a witness to that, watching the walls as they came up, holding her in.
Holding everyone else out.
He realized now, as an adult, that she’d done it to protect herself against being hurt. As if she somehow knew that this was in the offing.
Had she suspected? Did she know? He felt incredibly bad for her, incredibly angry at his absentee father for having done this to her.
Dylan sighed, sitting back down at his desk for a moment. For just a split second, his knees felt weak. If he felt like this, how must his mother feel?
Just goes to show you, he thought. Fairy tales were just that, fairy tales. They had no bearing on real life. The press and people in general had called his parents’ marriage a real-life, magical fairy-tale. Years ago, he’d stumbled across an old article in a magazine, an interview with his father written when Hank had just been starting out on his political rise—his eye even then on a very lofty prize.
His father had freely admitted, apparently with pride, that he had married an exceedingly rich woman who supported him in every way, eager to make him happy, eager to give him his heart’s desire, no matter what it was. Along the way, she’d also given him the perfect photo op family.
Dylan took in a deep breath as he closed his eyes and remembered being trotted out with his brothers and baby sister, all perfectly groomed, him wearing a suit he’d hated at the time, to stand around his father and mother, big smiles pasted on all their faces for the camera that froze their supposed happiness forever in time.
Or at least long enough to generate a favorable impression with the voting public. His father had been the family-values candidate.
He wondered if his father saw the irony in that now.
Agitated, Dylan dragged his hand through his thick, dark hair, remembering that the creation of those family portraits provided almost the only occasions when he actually got to see his father. The rest of the time, Hank was busy traveling, glad-handing potential constituents up and down the length and breadth of California, professing his undying willingness to work until he dropped for the good of the people of “this glorious, sun-kissed state of ours.”
And the voters had believed him. Believed every single word. They’d sent his father to the United States Senate, confident that he would represent them to the best of his ability, which was definitely good enough for them.
Who his father wound up representing, apparently, was himself, Dylan thought darkly, his mind going back to the jarring news story expounding on the fact that his father was being investigated on charges of illegal activities and criminal