Page 128 of To Die For

“Funny way of showing it. He was never around.”

“He told me your father wouldn’t permit it. That he’d sent money and clothes and other things, but your father returned them and wouldn’t let him visit or help you in any way.”

She nodded, looking thoughtful. “Dad really didn’t like him.”

“Your uncle said the same thing.”

“My… my mom liked him, though. She said he took care of her when she was young. Their father was, well, an asshole, I guess.”

“I’ve met a lot of them in my life. I’m sure you have, too.”

“Why did this RICO thing go away?”

“I’m not sure,” Devine said delicately. He couldn’t tell Odom things that might get her and him in trouble. But he could sense how vulnerable she was right now. And he didn’t want to lie to her, because the bond of trust he had delicately formed with her could easily be destroyed with any misstep of his.

“I think your uncle has some really good lawyers, and like I told you before, the government lost some witnesses that they really needed. So maybe they didn’t have enough evidence to keep going.”

“You think he had those witnesses killed, don’t you? You mentioned it before.”

With what he now knew, Devine wasn’t so sure about that. “Betsy, I can’t say one way or another, but if your uncle is guilty of the things they say he is, then, yes, he certainly could have had those people killed.”

“Are you going to keep looking for who murdered my parents?” she asked.

“Yes, and I am going to find them, I promise.”

“And then they’ll go to prison, right? I mean, you can’t kill people like that and get away with it, can you?”

“No, you can’t,” said Devine, even though he was thinking that, in this instance, that could happen.

“Do you… do you think my uncle had anything to do with it?”

Devine was on increasingly shaky ground here. Yet he answered as truthfully as he could.

“Ididthink that.”

“But you don’t think that anymore?” she said.

“Your uncle came to meet me after the court hearing. I asked him that very question, accused him of it really.”

Odom stared at him with such intensity that Devine wanted to look away but didn’t.

“And what did he say?”

“It wasn’t so much what he said as how he said it. The bottom line is I believed him when he denied any involvement in their deaths. He was… shattered, I guess is the word. Like you, he loved your mother very much.”

“Then who could have done it?”

“Do you remember anything else from that day? Anything at all?” Devine thought of what Dr. Coburn had told him about the cyanide combined with the DMSO. “I know this will sound weird, but did your parents touch something that you didn’t? Or were they touched by people who didn’t touch you?”

She stared at him in confusion. “Touched?”

He decided to be straight with her. “Your parents may have been poisoned, with cyanide. If inhaled, it can be deadly in less than a minute. But absorbed in the skin it takes a while to kill someone, unless it’s combined with another substance that can make it quickly absorbed into the bloodstream.”

“Is that what you think happened?”

“Yes. So is there anything you remember along those lines?”

She looked out the window and sighed. Then she closed her eyes and appeared to be concentrating, perhaps taking herself back to that awful moment in time. She opened her eyes. “I remember seeing that the two men who gave my parents the duffel shook hands with them.”

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