Page 62 of Legal Passion
She’d known so many kids in boarding school who had turned to drugs and alcohol, like those substances could replace the love and attention their busy parents denied them.
He rubbed at his eyes, and she realized he hadn’t been partying. He’d been crying. He shook his head, as if too choked up to speak.
“Guess you have billions of reasons to celebrate,” she mused, but she was just pushing now—to see how he would react. How long would it take security to get up here if she had to push the panic button? She was more concerned with getting the truth than she was with her safety, though. So she continued, “With your father in prison, all of his money will be yours now.”
“No!” he shouted. “I told her I wouldn’t do it. And I won’t do it now.”
“What?” she asked.
“I won’t kill my father.”
New York State didn’t have the death penalty. But she refrained from pointing that out to young Mueller.
“Who asked you to kill your father?”
“Bethany,” he said. “That’s the only reason she was sleeping with me. She was trying to turn me against my dad.” He sniffled. And she realized that even though he was twentysomething, maturity-wise he was much younger. Bethany must have realized, and exploited, that lack of maturity.
“She got that gun out,” he said. “She’d stolen the keys from him somehow. But she was careful to use gloves. She made me put on some, too, before she handed the gun to me. She wanted me to use it to kill my dad, to make it look like a suicide.”
“Suicide?”
“Because he knew about us, people would think he was so devastated that he took his own life,” Kenneth explained. “But that wasn’t the truth. He was going to throw her out on the street. So she wanted me to kill him. She said that it was the only way we could be together and have all his money.”
He sniffled again. “That was all she wanted. The money. Not my dad. Not me...” His voice cracked with sobs. “And she thought that I would do it...that I would kill him. And instead I turned the gun on her, and I just pulled the trigger...” He stared down at his hand as if he could see the gun in it yet, and he looked as shocked as he must have been then.
He shuddered.
And Hillary found herself shuddering in sympathy. She couldn’t imagine what it must have felt like for him to take a life. But she felt as if she had nearly taken one herself for getting that guilty verdict for an innocent man. With the sentence he was bound to have received, Byron Mueller would have died in prison.
“I didn’t know I was going to do it,” Kenneth murmured. “But she kept pushing and pushing for me to do it. And, in that moment, it felt like it was her or my dad.”
She found herself reaching across her desk to pat the back of his shaking hand.
He looked up at her again and tears overflowed his eyes. “I—I couldn’t kill my dad,” he said. “He’s been so good to me—my whole life. He’s given me everything I ever wanted. And he even helped out all my friends...” His voice cracked again. “He’s such a good guy...and I already betrayed him withher.”
He turned his hand over and clasped hers, squeezing. “Please, don’t let him do this for me. Don’t let him go to prison for something I did.”
“Why didn’t you come forward earlier?” she asked.
“Because he was sure his lawyer could get him off.”
That was why he’d offered Stone the two-million-dollar bonus. Not for himself but for his son.
Byron Mueller’s only crime was being a doting father. Regret squeezed her heart even more tightly than Kenneth was squeezing her hand.
“But Stone Michaelsen wasn’t as good as my dad thought he was,” Kenneth bitterly remarked. “He couldn’t even get an innocent man off.”
“Your father wouldn’t help him,” she said. “He refused to tell Stone everything.” But he’d figured it out anyway. He’d been right the whole time.
“Is it too late?” Kenneth asked. “Is there any way for me to fix this—to finally take responsibility?”
“You just did,” she assured him. “We’ll figure this out. First, you need to get a lawyer. And I’ll book you on the charge of voluntary manslaughter.” She already knew that if Stone was representing him, that was the charge he’d get for his client. And given the circumstances, it was probably the right one.
“Can you call Stone Michaelsen?” he asked. “That’s who my father will have represent me. And when can we get my dad out of jail?”
“You’ll have to allocute to the crime,” she said, “and the judge will have to accept your plea before your father will be released.”
“He can’t get out now?” he asked, and he sounded like a child again. His father had probably never made him wait for anything, so he had no idea how due process worked. Or how life worked...
