Eleventh Hour

senile, not for a moment, but he’s fooled everyone else. He’s a fine actor.”
    “He’s been mad all my life. So he’s finally done it. I didn’t know whether or not he really meant it.”
    “How old were you when you discovered what he was?” Sherlock asked.
    “I was ten years old. I couldn’t sleep one night, and he’d left early in the evening, supposedly on a call. I waited for him. I saw him drive into the garage. I heard the kitchen door open. I started to go to him, but something stopped me, something that had scared me about him for a good long time. I stayed hidden behind some of my mother’s favorite curtains in the living room.
    “I heard him come in and he was whistling. I crawled to the kitchen. I saw his clothes, saw his hands—he had blood all over him. So much red, and even as I watched, it was turning darker and darker, almost black. His shirt was stiff with blood. At first I was terrified that it was his, but not for long.
    “I watched him scrub his hands in the kitchen sink, watched him strip to his underwear, wrap up his bloody clothes, and tie them up in a neat bundle. It was practiced, everything he did, like he’d done it many times before. He never stopped whistling. I watched him take that bundle of bloody clothes out in the backyard. He paced off six steps from a big old elm tree. He dug down and dumped the bundle in. I saw that there were maybe half a dozen bundles down there. Then he shoveled dirt over all of it. He never stopped whistling.
    “When I was twelve, I wondered if he was the one they called the Zodiac killer. I saw all about the murders on TV, but they weren’t on the same days he was gone. And that insane whistling—it was always the same, always “Eleanor Rigby.” He still hums or whistles that damned song now, only he uses it to fool people, to make them think he’s senile.”
    “What did you do?” Dane asked.
    “Oh man, I was never more scared in my life. I didn’t know what to do. I was just a kid. He was my father.”
    Nick said, “You confronted him, didn’t you? You just couldn’t stand it anymore and you confronted him.”
    “Yes, and do you know what he did? He just stood there, looking down at me, and began to laugh. He laughed until there was spittle on his mouth. Then he just stopped and went cold. Like, with no warning, his body went perfectly still and his eyes were dead. There was no one behind those eyes and I knew it. I was twelve years old and I knew it.” Weldon paused, took a shuddering breath. There wasn’t a sound in that small room. “He told me in this cold, dead voice exactly what he would do to me if I said anything to anyone.”
    “You were brave to confront him,” Nick said. “Very brave.”
    “Turns out I was a coward, turns out when I was old enough to kill the old monster, I didn’t. I just wanted to scare him to keep him quiet. But I knew he wouldn’t. This time I was going to strangle him. Would I have gone all the way until I knew that his heart was no longer beating?” Weldon shook his head, looked down at his bandaged foot, winced. He said finally, “What are you going to do?”
    He looked at each of them in turn. From Inspector Delion to Detective Flynn, to the FBI agents, in a circle around him. The pain meds had finally kicked in completely and there was only a dull throb in his foot. He looked at Nick. “I don’t blame you for trying to protect an old man. You didn’t know.”
    “I wish I had shot him instead,” Nick said. “But if I had, we wouldn’t have learned the truth.”
    Weldon was shaking his head, back and forth, his eyes on each of their faces in turn. “I left home on the day I turned eighteen. I came to LA because I was a good writer and I wanted to write TV and movie scripts. I met a girl, Georgia, and we fell in love. I got her pregnant. We got married. A drunk driver killed her when our son was only three years old.”
    “You raised your son alone just like your father did you?”
    “Of course, but I wasn’t like my father, I really loved my boy. I would have done anything for him. It wasn’t long before I got work writing for a TV sitcom and started making enough money so I didn’t have to worry about it all the time.” He paused a moment. “I kept up with the old man. Do you know that long after he was in his sixties, the people still wanted him to stay on as sheriff?”
    “Why?” Dane asked.
    “The old man was so mean he could face down drunk bikers. Once, I