All Night Long

a rage that was so red and so powerful, it swamped every other emotion.
    “I said drop the damned phone into the water,” Victor barked. “Do it now, you stupid bitch. You’r ust like your damned parents, nothing but trouble.”
    Slowly she reached into the bag. With shaking fingers she fumbled around a bit and eventually managed to extract the phone. She tossed the device over the side of the dock. There was a small splash, an hen it disappeared beneath the surface.
    “You were the one,” she whispered, barely able to speak through her fury. “You murdered them all—
    my parents, Hoyt Egan and Pamela. How could you kill your own granddaughter?”

    Victor snorted. “Odds are good that she wasn’t my granddaughter. Her mother was a tramp who slept with anything in pants. She suckered Ryland into marriage when my boy was barely twenty. Didn’t take me long to figure out that he had married a woman who was going to be a millstone around his neck. I tried to get him to dump her.”
    “But he didn’t,” Irene said tightly. “Because of Pamela.”
    “He was obsessed with that child from the get-go. Never did understand it until I found out he had hing for young girls.”
    “You killed Pamela’s mother, too, didn’t you? Everyone thinks she died in a boating accident out on the lake, but I’ll bet you arranged it. Why didn’t you get rid of Pamela at the same time?”
    “I gave it some thought,” Victor admitted. “But Pamela was almost five by then.
    Ryland was running his first campaign, and the kid looked great in the press releases.
    The media and the public loved her. After her mother died, voters went crazy for the image of Ryland as the young, noble, committed father, grieving the loss of his beloved wife and determined to raise his daughter on his own.”
    “But when Pamela hit her teens, she started to become a liability, didn’t she? Ryland no longer foun er sexually interesting, so he stashed her in a boarding school most of the time.”
    “In her teens Pamela discovered drugs,” Victor said, disgusted. “She also found out she could manipulate any male who happened to be in her vicinity. The school kept her out of the public eye for the most part. I was concerned that she might prove to be a problem after she graduated, though. I started to make some plans.”
    “Instead, after she graduated, she made herself useful in Ryland’s campaigns again.”
    “What can I say?” Victor shrugged. “She was her mother’s daughter all the way to her little round heels. Pamela was a whore at heart, but she was our whore and she was damned good at what she did. Sh as willing to sleep with Ryland’s rivals, enemies and anyone else, male or female, who had information that we could use. She enjoyed her role as a spy. It made her feel powerful to know that she was ritical part of the campaign strategy and that Ryland had come to depend on her. I think it gave her a sense of vengeance. The silly creature probably felt like she was in control of her father at last. But as always the one who ran the show, right from the get-go.”

    “You talk as if Ryland’s success was your own.”
    “It is mine.” Anger twisted Victor’s face. “I made my son what he is today.”
    “A disgraced pedophile who won’t even be able to run for dogcatcher?”
    “You’ve ruined everything,” Victor said, voice thickening with rage. “My son was on his way to th hite House until you came along. The White House, damn you. He was going to be president. My grandsons would have followed in his footsteps.”
    “Don’t know about the grandsons,” Irene said. “Ryland prefers little girls, doesn’t he?”
    “Shut up. Ryland promised me sons. It was in the prenuptial agreement he signed with Alexa Douglass.
    It was spelled out that she would produce a male heir within two years with the help of in vitro fertilization if necessary or else accept a quiet divorce. The fact that she had already produced on hild meant that she was fertile.”
    “You saw Alexa Douglass’s daughter as evidence of her fertility, but your pervert son saw her as arget for future abuse. Pamela’s the one who pulled the plug on your plans, not me.
    She did what she had to do to save Alexa’s daughter, and you killed her in an effort to silence her.”
    “I should have gotten rid of you seventeen years ago,” Victor said. “If you had been in the house th ight I did your parents, I would have taken care of you, too. Unfortunately,