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Krista DeLong was nearly 70, but she insisted she and her husband, Ralph, have their grandchildren a couple weekends a month. She still wasn’t sure what went wrong with their daughter, Amy, or why she would try to have her husband killed, but it happened. But she and Ralph had nothing to do with it. Thankfully, her son-in-law, Ivan Daniels, had not held Amy’s behavior against them.
She wasn’t a fan of Ivan’s mother, but she had always loved Ivan as if he were her own son. Ralph and Ivan got along great too, going fishing a couple times a year on a boy’s trip, and even though Amy had tried to have Ivan killed, he and Ralph had still gone on their annual sea fishing trip the last three years.
Krista and Ralph had three children, all girls. Ivan was the son Ralph had always wanted and hadn’t gotten. Their other two sons-in-law were less inclined to spend time with Krista and Ralph beyond the holidays. Ivan had a very strong sense of family and had even told them after the trial that he hadn’t just married Amy, he’d married her family as well; and he would ensure that they got to see the kids grow up and spend as much time as they wanted with them, even though his mother was moving in with him to help him care for them.
Krista and Ralph took the kids every other Friday night. They kept hoping it would allow Ivan more time to date, but both knew he usually volunteered to be on call those Friday nights. Ivan and Amy had given them six beautiful grandchildren, but six was a lot of kids, which is why they didn’t keep them the entire weekend. Usually after the kids left on Saturday, they were too exhausted to do anything else the entire rest of the weekend.
Krista had retired from teaching ten years earlier. Ralph had retired from the police department 17 years ago after being shot in the knee with a shotgun. Ivan would talk tough cases through with Ralph, and Ralph appreciated that. He had worked narcotics and Ivan worked homicide, but he was grateful Ivan respected him enough to discuss cases with him.
Ralph had taken Amy’s attempts to kill Ivan much harder than Krista. He had withdrawn into himself during the trial and for nearly a year afterward, and when he saw Ivan or his grandchildren it always reduced him to tears. He had just sobbed over and over that he didn’t understand what was wrong with his oldest daughter. Even as Ivan and Krista had worked out a schedule for ensuring that Amy’s parents still got to spend time with their grandchildren, Ralph had been certain Ivan would want to renegotiate the agreement at any moment and cut them out completely.
It had been Christmas the following year before Ralph accepted that Ivan held no ill feelings toward them for Amy’s betrayal, and that he had no intention of cutting off their connection with the six rambunctious grandchildren. Knowing Ralph was struggling, Ivan had brought the kids over for Christmas Eve and they had all stayed the night, despite only living 40 miles away. Ralph had awoken Christmas morning to find Ivan and Krista cooking their traditional Christmas breakfast and the grandkids around the tree trying to guess what was in their packages. It had been then that he realized Ivan considered himself part of their family even without Amy, and that he would never keep them from the kids.
Krista and Ralph had even invited Ivan’s childless sister and brother-in-law over to open presents and have breakfast with the family. Nadine and Zeke had behaved no differently than on the occasions when they had seen each other before Amy had tried to hire a hitman to kill Ivan. Perhaps that was what had convinced Ralph that Ivan really did consider all of them family. There was no way to know for sure, they all just knew it had worked; and Ralph, who had been angry and in mourning for over a year, seemed to snap out of it.
The killer watched Krista DeLong pull out of the neighborhood in her child-filled SUV and followed her home. He’d been hoping to catch Nadine and Zeke, but Krista and the kids worked almost as well.
Nadine and Zeke had a great relationship with their nieces and nephews. They kept them a couple times a month, but didn’t want kids of their own. They were prone to spoiling them by buying them gifts for no reason or randomly taking the older ones out for meals. He’d followed Aislinn Cain, Lucas McMichaels, and Ivan Daniels to the neighborhood from the crime scene a few hours earlier; and then he’d seen Krista DeLong go into the neighborhood and he’d formed a new plan. Killing Nadine’s clients might get her attention, but killing Nadine’s nieces and nephews would do a better job.
There would be eight people at the DeLong residence. Ralph, a former detective, probably had a firearm on premises, but he would also probably be the one to open the door and therefore the first threat neutralized. He parked down the road from the DeLong faux Victorian. He could still see their “Protected by Daniels’ Security” placard near the front door. Ralph had obviously requested one of the oversized placards; most were smaller than theirs. He wondered if Nadine charged them for the service and decided she probably did. Maybe she’d give their descendants a refund after he killed their parents and the children. That would be the nice thing to do, but he doubted she would. Most likely she’d whine and cry about how there was nothing she could do. Maybe she’d do it in a press conference, or maybe the SCTU would decide she or Ivan were responsible for the murders, that would be best. While Nadine was his ultimate target, taking down Ivan Daniels along the way would be an added bonus. Maybe he should have found a way to poison the DeLongs, that would look more like Ivan’s handiwork and it wouldn’t be traced back to him. But then his destruction of Nadine Daniels wouldn’t be complete; better to do it this way.
As he walked to the door, he heard a phone ring inside the house and Ralph answer it. The older man’s voice seemed to boom from within the house, trying to be heard over the noisy children. Outside, he couldn’t understand what was being said, but he knew he needed to wait for Ralph to get off the phone. He needed to be the one to answer the door. The call was short, and soon he heard Ralph say something akin to goodbye. If only the old man knew how accurate that sign-off was.
The noise increased and he rang the doorbell. A shadow appeared in the side window and then disappeared, and he heard Ralph tell whoever had been near it to wait, he’d get it. He rang again. The door opened and there stood Ralph, gun in hand! It took him a moment to react and when he did, it wasn’t what he had intended. He fired a shot, but despite how close he was to Ralph, the older man didn’t collapse. He returned fire. He felt the pain shoot through his arm and he turned and ran back to his car as more shots rang out in the darkening twilight. He peeled out and sped away from Ralph DeLong’s gun and the house he’d thought just minutes earlier would be an easy target, with just two old people inside to subdue before he could kill the Daniels’ children.
He drove to his office and parked the stolen car around back where it wouldn’t be seen. He’d eventually get rid of it, but first he needed to check his arm. The old man had a tremor that was really more of a shake caused by a proliferation of medications, otherwise he might have hit more than his arm. The man didn’t normally walk around the house carrying a gun, so he didn’t know why Ralph had been armed tonight with his grandchildren inside. Usually when the grandkids were there, the gun safe where he kept his firearms was not just locked, but the door to the room where the gun safe was located was also kept locked. It would have taken a while to get to it, much longer than what Ralph had taken to get to the door. It was as if he had known he was coming, but that was impossible. If the SCTU had figured out his identity, he’d already be arrested.
He let himself into the back room of the office. The entire building smelled of antiseptic, despite not being as clean as he would have liked. It was also deadly quiet. He sat on a table and adjusted a mirror on an extendable arm so he could look at his own arm better. He took off his shirt and found the bullet had gone clean through the muscle of his upper arm, which was good. His arm would be sore and he’d need to stitch it up, but it wouldn’t require an ER visit or an explanation to anyone. He had the tools to do the stitches and ease his pain on his own. He’d been holding up his own gun and the bullet had gone through at such an angle that he could sort of see the exit wound, which was slightly bigger. Staples would be easier for it than stitches.
He drew up a syringe of anesthetic and prepared dissolvable stitch thread as well as getting out the medical stapler and staples. He got everything ready before he injected himself. He knew it would numb it, but he didn’t normally treat people, so he hoped the dosage was correct. If not, he might pass out when he stapled the hole in the back of his arm closed. Using multiple mirrors, he managed to get the hole stapled. Then he stitched the front and he was still numb when he finished. He would inject more after he got rid of the car, mask, and gloves.
As he drove to the disposal site he’d picked out for this car, he considered searching for a different house to hit. His arm was still numb and wouldn’t bother him for a few more hours. But he had a mess to clean up at the office and that would take time. He was rethinking investing in a Kevlar vest. He’d hit three houses and been shot twice. Both were flesh wounds, but more people were armed than he had expected. Didn’t the average person get a security system like the ones Daniels’ Security offered because they were safer and less demanding than owning a firearm? He needed to be more careful from this point on; he didn’t want to end up with a bullet to the head. If Ralph had been ten years younger, it wouldn’t have been a flesh wound to the arm.