Chapter 4
“How did you get in here?” Kelly demanded, asking the most inconsequential question first.
“It’s not that hard in this kind of place. One of your maintenance men is sweet on you, and he now thinks your mama is surprising you for your birthday.”
Kelly swallowed hard as her body swayed. Her knees were weakening. This was just one blow too many for the day.
She carefully walked over to sit on an upholstered chair across from the couch. “I thought you might be dead.”
Maybe the words sounded heartless, but this was the woman who’d left her own daughter for no good reason.
“Not yet,” her mother said, still clipped, emotionless.
“So what are you doing here?”
“I’ll get to that soon enough.” She glanced at Kelly’s leather bag, which she’d dropped on the floor. “You were meeting a client?”
“Yeah.”
“You’ve made a success of yourself, which can’t have been easy with such a silly line of work.”
Kelly shrugged, finding it hard to be pleased at the approval when her mother was studying her like a pinned insect. “I do all right.”
“Your client didn’t show up?”
“No, he—” She broke off and sucked in a sharp breath. “How do you know he didn’t show up?”
“Because I was the client.”
Kelly was too dazed to put any pieces together. None of this made sense. “I spoke to a man on the phone?—”
“An acquaintance of mine since the voice needed to be male. But I arranged for the meeting in the park.”
“But why? You didn’t show up there.”
“No. I didn’t intend to.” Her mother folded her hands in her lap in an ironically ladylike gesture. “But you met someone else there, didn’t you? A man with a German shepherd?”
Kelly gasped again, her mind whirling helplessly, trying to figure out what was happening. “Yes. How did you?—”
“He always goes to that park on Saturday mornings with that dog of his.”
“You wanted me to meet him? Why? Why do you give a damn what I do?”
“You’re my daughter, aren’t you?”
“Am I?” There was bitterness in Kelly’s tone now—a bitterness she couldn’t hide.
She’d had no fantasies about her mother being here for any sort of peacemaking or family bonding.
She’d never really thought her mother was particularly fond of her as a child, and she’d been sure of it after her father died.
An obsessive need for vengeance had consumed the woman, hardening her softer feelings, until she’d completely tossed her daughter aside.
Kelly had learned that lesson well, and any maternal feelings her mother had ever had were deadened now.
“You’re my blood,” her mother said, pinning her with a cool gaze. “And that’s more important than you think.”
“Okay, fine. I’ll hear you out, but I’m an adult now, and I make my own decisions about my life.” Kelly was pleased when she sounded calm and confident since she felt nothing of the kind. “Who was the guy in the park?”
“His name is Caleb Marshall.”
If Kelly expected the identity of the sexy, arrogant man to be significant, she was sorely disappointed. She blinked. “Am I supposed to know who that is?”
“Yes. If you loved your father at all, you would know who it is.”
Kelly actually jerked in response to the brittle words. “What is that supposed to mean?”
“It means justice for your father was never important to you and now you’ve wiped it all from your mind completely, as if it never happened.”
Justice was important to Kelly, but she was too jaded now to believe any such ideal was possible in the world.
And her mother was right about her wiping the trauma with her father completely out of her life.
She made a point of never thinking about it—any more than she had to—since it simply hurt too much.
But it wasn’t gone. It was still happening to her.
Today had proven that, if nothing else did.
“What good would it do to dredge it up now? And what does Caleb Marshall have to do with it?”
It was strange to associate a name with the man she’d fucked a little while ago. He didn’t feel like a Caleb to her, although she wasn’t sure what name would suit him better.
Her mother’s face was ice-cold as she bit out the next words. “Caleb Marshall is a DiMauro.”
If she’d been slapped across the face, Kelly couldn’t have been more stunned. She saw white for just a moment as her brain tried to process what she’d just been told.
The DiMauros had killed her father.
Her father had worked in the finance department of a shipping company.
He’d been a careful, hardworking man who had never broken the law in his life, but his company was owned and operated by Reliant Industries.
The head of Reliant was Arthur Marshall, who had married a daughter of the DiMauro crime family in Baltimore, but there was supposed to have been no overlap between Arthur’s well-respected, legitimate businesses and the DiMauros’ shady operations.
Even when other DiMauros took positions in the Reliant companies, it was supposed to have been because they wanted to go straight.
Kelly had been far too young to know anything about it back then, but her parents had both believed the cover story. The DiMauros were criminal, but Arthur and Reliant were not.
Until her father had questions about the contents of certain imported shipping containers. He’d been worried by what he found. He’d looked into it further.
They killed him for it.
“Yes,” her mother went on. “Arthur Marshall was Caleb’s father, and his mom was Marie DiMauro. He runs all his dad’s businesses. CEO, they call him now.”
“He’s too young,” Kelly gasped, clinging to the threads of reason. “He’s too young. Seventeen years ago, he’d have been—he’d have been in his twenties. Way too young to be in charge back then.”
“He took the reins after Arthur died.”
This piece of information allowed Kelly to take a full breath. “Then it wasn’t him. It wasn’t him who killed Dad.” She was leaning over in her chair with her arms hugging her stomach.
If she’d just fucked the man who gave the order for her father to be killed, then she might have to submerge herself in her bathtub and never come out.
“Are you really so naive? You think only one man was responsible? Marshall wasn’t the CEO then, but he was working for the business. He was one of your father’s bosses.”
Kelly lost her breath again and leaned over farther. “So what are you saying?”
“I’m saying he was the one running the operation that got your father killed. The order must have come from him.”
Kelly thought about Caleb, the man who had just fucked her hard and rough against a tree. That man was powerful. Ambitious. Frighteningly intelligent. Used to getting anything he wanted.
He wasn’t what she would have expected from the DiMauros. As a child, listening to her mother’s hate, she’d imagined them as stereotypical mobsters from movies. Caleb wasn’t like that at all, but appearances always lied.
She could fully believe Caleb would be ruthless if something stood in his way.
Her father.
She raised her hand to her mouth.
“You see it now too,” her mother said. “It’s in his nature.”
“Do you have… proof?” Kelly had trouble speaking since her throat was closing up.
Her mother handed her a sheet of paper.
It took Kelly a few moments to focus on the words, but then she read what was evidently a memo.
It came back to her then. She’d seen this memo before. It was the piece of evidence that her mother had used to try to get the police to make a case against the DiMauros.
An interoffice email written by her father, questioning the contents of a shipment of industrial crates.
Kelly stared and stared and stared at the name on the To line: Caleb Marshall .
“This isn’t real proof,” she said at last. “It doesn’t mean he had him killed.”
“Of course it’s not real proof. If I had real proof, I would have gotten the police to do something. They wouldn’t believe me now any more than they believed me back then.”
The police had closed the case quickly, calling it a random mugging since her father’s wallet had been taken.
Her mother had believed differently from the very beginning and had gone through every avenue available to make the DiMauros pay through the justice system.
But no one believed her. With nothing else to do, she’d spent months filling Kelly’s head with bitter hate for the DiMauro family and Reliant Industries, making her listen as her mother scoured her father’s computer records and boxes of files, searching for concrete evidence to implicate the crime family in the murder.
Kelly had believed her mother, turning all of them into monsters in her mind.
Even now, their name caused a chill to break through her spine.
But there had never been any proof. No one believed her mother. And finally the woman had just walked out on everyone.
Including Kelly.
“Then why do you think it was Cal?—”
“Because it’s his name on the email. He knew what your father knew, and he knew your father wasn’t going to let it go.
He and his father had the most to lose, and he was the one who gained the most from the murder.
His entire legacy was at risk. Use your brain!
Arthur probably made the final call, but it was Caleb who made it happen. ”
It did make sense. Kelly couldn’t imagine circumstances where Caleb, being that involved, wouldn’t have known about the hit.
Her mother handed her a file folder of papers, and Kelly opened it with trembling hands, staring down at it blankly until the words unblurred again.
It was a dossier on Caleb. His picture—grinning smugly at the camera—and the details of his birth, his childhood in DC, his education at fancy private schools and then the Ivy League for college on an accelerated track and a joint graduate degree in business and law.
He’d climbed the corporate hierarchy quickly and was well respected in both local and international business circles.
Even so, he was indeed a DiMauro, which meant he had only a loose relationship to legalities.