Every House Has a Secret - 33

 

 

Brady opened the folder, taking out the papers it contained. With Rand leaning against his shoulder, they read them.

 

* * * *

 

Before I die, which will happen sooner than later because my cancer is terminal, I need to set the record straight.

 

When my beloved daughter, Emila, was murdered, I knew who to blame. My son-in-law, Dennis Hodges. If he had been there when the burglars broke in, she would be alive today. Instead, he allowed his job to take precedence. While he was off tracking down some criminal, a pair of bastards decided to break into his home. From what the police could determine, Emila surprised them in the act and they murdered her.

 

I will never forgive him for that.

 

A month later, he was dismissed from the police force for conduct unbecoming an officer. At that point, my wife and I took his sons under our wings, as he was in our estimation, unfit to bring them up properly.

 

Between the death of my daughter, and our taking the boys, I was able to find out who the murders were. It took time, but with the help of a lawyer I knew with contacts in the police department where Dennis had worked, I learned their identities. Why Dennis hadn't done the same, I can't say. Perhaps he did and was too cowardly to take things into his own hands. Perhaps he didn't know where they were, anymore than the other fools in the department did.

 

As a defense lawyer, I had clients of what I would call less than reputable character. It took me almost a month to find one who knew someone in the city where Dennis lived who might know the men who had murdered my daughter, and where they had gone to ground. I spoke with him, and he was willing to tell me, for a price.

 

I planned it carefully and was about to fly out to deal with them when Dennis went off the rails and beat and almost killed a man he'd arrested for burglary and other crimes. I took advantage of that, deciding it only added fuel to what would seem to be his reason for killing the two men who had murdered his wife—my beloved daughter.

 

The day after his hearing in front of Internal Affairs, which led to his dismissal from the force, I caught a flight to the city, ostensibly to talk with him about our taking the boys for a short time until he was more emotionally stable. I suggested he find a sitter for them so we could talk in private, which he did. I had no intention of meeting him. Instead, I paid visits to the killers and dealt with them, using what is called a Police Special or to be exact, a Smith and Wesson Model Ten exactly like the one I knew Dennis used to carry. It did my heart good to watch the bastards cower before I shot them.

 

With that done, I drove to a phone booth a block from his house and called Dennis, asking him to meet me at a local bar for a drink while we talked. I watched as he left the house, then broke in through the back door, planted the gun I'd used on a shelf in his boys' closet, under a pile of their winter sweaters.

 

Then, I left town. I honestly expected him to be arrested within a day or two of the police finding the bodies of the killers. He wasn't. Instead, the incompetent detective investigating their deaths put it down to a falling out among gang members. 

 

When my wife and I returned a week later to pick up the boys and make the final arrangements for our having custody of them, I took the opportunity to check if the gun was where I'd left it. It wasn't. I can only presume Dennis found it and did something with it. It may still be in the house as he had to know I was the one who left it there. If he hated me as much as I hated him, he may have hidden it, hoping to use it against me to regain custody of his sons. If that was the case, he never did. Instead, a few years later, he remarried and had more sons, before she divorced him and took them.

 

Now he has lost all his children, just as I lost my beloved Emila.

 

I suppose justice was served, although not as I'd planned it.