Eleventh Hour

heard he’d pistol-whipped a man for hassling a woman, all the while yelling at him, ‘No one fucks with my town!’ That’s what he always loved to say, and then he’d spit out a wad of tobacco.
    “I’ll bet you’re all wondering why I’ve kept him in such a nice place for the last ten years.”
    No one had actually really thought about it yet, but Nick knew they would have, sooner or later.
    She said, “Why did you?”
    Weldon said simply, “He told me if I didn’t keep him sitting real pretty until he kicked off, he’d contact the press and tell them where bodies were buried that no one even knew about, tell them where his gun was hidden, tell them all about the bundles he’d buried beneath that elm tree. There’d be so much proof, they’d have to believe him.
    “I agreed. What else could I do? There was my own growing career to think about, but most important, there was my boy, my own innocent boy.”
    Nick said slowly, “I guess I can understand that, but was he still killing people? Didn’t you realize you had to do something once you were an adult and out from under his thumb?”
    Weldon said, “I tried never to think about it. He’s right. I was a coward, and he knew I wouldn’t say anything once I had my boy. He was still the sheriff thirteen years ago when something went wrong with an arrest, and a car ran over him, smashing his legs. He’s been confined to a wheelchair ever since. So I knew the world was safe from him.”
    Savich started to say something, but Nick shook her head, said, “He started his threats recently, didn’t he? He knew he was getting close to the end and he wanted recognition for what he’d done. He wanted the world to know just what had walked among them for years and years.”
    Weldon nodded, his hands clasped, so pale, so deadened, that it broke her heart. “Yes. After he told me what he was planning to do—you know, make his announcement to the press, tell everyone everything—I didn’t know what to do. I reminded him that he’d sworn to keep quiet for as long as I kept him in that home. He just laughed, said he was going to croak pretty soon so it didn’t matter. I knew his madness was beyond control then.”
    Weldon stopped cold. Then he seemed to look deeply inside himself, drew a deep breath, and said, “That’s when he told me he’d had a nice little visit with his grandson. And that’s when I hit him and knocked his chair over. I should have killed him then but I just couldn’t do it. I threatened him, hoped to scare him into silence like I already told you, but I knew that wouldn’t work. After I left, I thought about it and knew I had to kill him, there was just no other way. I failed.”
    Dane said very gently, “Weldon, your father visited with your boy and confessed what he was to him?”
    “Yes.”
    “Weldon, who is your son?”
    Weldon shook his head. “Listen, Agent Savich, my son isn’t a murderer, he isn’t.”
    “But you believe he is,” Sherlock said, “and it’s eating you alive. You think your son killed the people in San Francisco and in Pasadena, copying the scripts you wrote.”
    Finally, Weldon DeLoach said, “I just couldn’t make myself accept that he was like his grandfather, that his head wasn’t right, that something was missing in him.”
    Dane said, “We’ve got to bring him in, Weldon, you must know that. You can’t let him continue doing what your own father did for so many years.”
    Weldon was shaking his head. “Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t figure it out until just a couple of days ago. And even then I didn’t figure it out for myself. The old man actually bragged about how he’d finally gotten a real man in the family, how he didn’t have much to teach his grandson, because—like his granddaddy—he was born knowing what to do and how to do it. He told me that his grandson came to see him, brought a Christmas present, a nice tie with red dots on it. And how perfect that was, and so he told the boy he was going to die soon and he wanted to tell him all about himself. And he laughed and laughed at how stupid everyone was, the cops especially.”
    Weldon fell silent, looked at them again. He said at last, “I haven’t known what to do. I just knew I had to kill that obscene old man, get him buried, and gone.”
    Sherlock said very gently, “But what were you going to do about your son?”
    “Get him help. Stop him from doing any more harm. Turn him over to the police if I had