All Night Long

that there was no link between tha amned phone call that I made to Victor Webb and the murders of your parents, Irene,” Sam said wearily. “Did a pretty good job of it, too.”
    Luke turned away from the view outside Sam’s office window to watch Irene’s reaction. He wasn’t surprised when he saw the look of mingled sadness and compassion on her face.
    It had been two days since Victor Webb was taken to the hospital that he had financed years earlie nd placed under guard. In those forty-eight hours Irene had changed in some subtle ways. It was a f she no longer viewed the town of Dunsley through a dark lens, he decided. Much of the cautious reserve with which she had treated most of the locals had dissipated.
    Maybe there was something to that old adage about the truth setting you free. Or maybe, in this case,
    the truth had simply made it possible for Irene to give the past a proper burial.
    “I understand, Sam,” she said gently.
    McPherson folded his hands very deliberately on top of his desk. “Later, when the rumors started up about your mom having had an affair with someone in town, I told myself that might have been enoug o push your dad over the edge. I knew that you and Elizabeth were the two most important things i he world to him.”
    “Victor Webb must have been the one who planted those rumors,” Irene said. “It would have been easy enough for him to do, given his connections in this region.”
    Sam nodded. “Got to admit that I had a bad time for a while after I found out that the file on the cas ad been destroyed. I think I knew, deep in my gut, that Bob Thornhill had engineered that littl o-called accident.”
    “As a favor to Victor Webb,” Irene said.
    “It wasn’t a favor.” Luke went to stand behind her. He put his hands on her shoulders. “He saw it as repaying a debt. Like so many other people in this town, he owed Victor Webb. Webb had paid for his wife’s medications.”
    Sam exhaled heavily. “Hell, even if I had tried to reopen the case after I took over this job, I would have been looking at the wrong member of the family. When I did allow myself to speculate on who might have killed the Stensons, I always assumed the most likely suspect was Ryland.”
    “But it was Victor you called that night,” Luke reminded him.
    “Thing is, I never figured him for the killer.” Sam unfolded his hands and spread them wide. His eyes were bleak. “He never acknowledged me, but he was my dad.”
    “Yes,” Irene said.
    Sam scrubbed his face once with his right hand. “I considered the possibility that after I called Victor,
    he turned around and called Ryland to confront him about the accusation of incest.
    There was som ogic to that. I thought it was possible that Ryland had, in turn, rushed up here to Dunsley to get ri f the Stensons before the scandal broke. But that was as far as I got with my theories. Like I said,
    I just didn’t want to go there.”
    Luke looked at him. “I’ll bet Bob Thornhill wasn’t eager to go there, either.”
    “No,” Sam admitted. “He was my new boss, and he had a lot of years of experience.

    I was twenty-three years old, and that was the first killing I’d ever seen. When Thornhill announced that it was a murder-suicide and closed the case, I was more than willing to go along.”
    “As the new chief of police, Thornhill had no problem shutting down the investigation,” Irene said.
    “It wasn’t like there was anyone in town who was going to argue that there was an unknown kille unning loose in Dunsley,” Sam agreed.
    Irene studied him. “You called Victor because you were sure that Pamela was lying about the abuse, didn’t you?”
    Sam nodded. “I just couldn’t believe it. I knew Pamela was angry at Ryland because he’d forced her t o to that boarding school. I thought she was trying to punish him so she invented the tale about the incest.”
    “What about the video? Did you think she faked it?”
    “I didn’t know what was on that video. She wouldn’t tell me. She just kept saying it was bad. I wondered if maybe she’d caught Ryland having sex with someone from Dunsley or something along those lines. I was still pretty naive in those days. Just couldn’t believe that my older brother had abused his daughter. So, yeah, I called Victor.”
    “What did he tell you?” Irene asked.
    “He said he’d take care of things, the way he always did when there was a problem in the family. He reminded me of how he had always