Chapter 21 - THE MAN MY FATHER FEAREDBellamy’s arrest did not solve everything.
He had spent decades building protection.
Judges.
Attorneys.
Police officers.
Businessmen.
Some guilty.
Some merely compromised.
The investigation became enormous.
Dorian was subpoenaed.
Again.
So was I.
Again.
I was beginning to hate courthouses.
Bellamy offered prosecutors a deal.
He would reveal every corrupt official he had protected.
In exchange, he wanted reduced charges.
Reed hated it.
I hated it.
But justice is not the same thing as revenge.
The government accepted limited cooperation.
Bellamy gave them twenty-three names.
Then thirty-one.
Then one name nobody expected.
Caleb Morgan.
I stared at Reed.
“Caleb?”
“He wasn’t only working for Victor.”
Caleb had unknowingly passed information through an intermediary connected to Bellamy.
But the evidence showed he didn’t know.
For once, a suspicious connection was exactly what it looked like.
Coincidence.
Dorian sighed.
“What?”
“I’m becoming emotionally exhausted by everyone having secret employers.”
I almost laughed.
Then Reed turned another page.
“There is one more name.”
She looked at Dorian.
“Vincent Cross.”
Dorian’s father had secretly cooperated with federal investigators during the final two years of his life.
Not because he became good.
Because Bellamy had become dangerous enough to threaten even him.
Dorian stared at the documents.
“My father was an informant?”
“Partially.”
Julian smiled.
Dorian glared.
“Say nothing.”
“I wasn’t going to.”
“You were.”
“I absolutely was.”
For the first time, their father became neither hero nor monster.
May you like
Just a deeply flawed man who occasionally chose correctly.
Maybe that was harder to accept.
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