His voice cracked and his eyes glazed over as he remembered. "They promised the truck hijacking would be a one-time thing. If I turned over the trucking schedule, they'd pick the shipment. They'd let me know with plenty of time to up the insurance so I could make some money off it too." He looked down, shame briefly clouding his expression. "But that was peanuts in comparison to their take when they sold the goods on the street."
Ryan's head began to pound, but he forced himself to focus on what was most important. "Why did you pay Faith to leave?"
Uncle Russ slammed his hand on the desk, making Ryan flinch.
"You're a smart man, Ryan. Use your brain. Faith had a drug habit. She wasn't getting better. Hell, she just didn't care. Living at home, she was destined to repeat the cycle and I was afraid Baldwin's would be in bed with the mob forever, to use a cliché. But I hoped that if she got away from the situation that caused her to turn to drugs in the first place, maybe she'd get better."
"That's the most naive thing I've ever heard," Ryan muttered.
"And stupid. But this was seventeen years ago. What did I know about addiction? As the only person who was thinking clearly about the business and the family, I had to consider the possibility that Faith was on such a destructive path, eventually she'd cause someone in the family to get hurt. We were already involved with the mob. What was next?" He glanced at Ryan, his eyes imploring. "You have to believe me. At the time I thought I had no choice."
Considering what a shock all this was, and knowing his uncle had made a profit off the scheme, at the moment Ryan wasn't sure what to believe. "Yet you lied and told us all that Faith stole money from you to run away."
"That wasn't far from the truth. She stole the key to my briefcase along with false insurance papers documenting a shipment worth more than the actual goods."
Ryan narrowed his gaze, confused. "You'd been helping her. Why would she turn on you before leaving?"
Russ spread his hands wide. "She was a drug addict, Ryan. Who knows why she did what she did?"
"Why did you continue the scam over the years?" Ryan asked.
Russ frowned. "Who says I did?"
"You did. Through your actions." Though Ryan laughed, he recognized the hollowness in the sound. "If you'd done it once to help Faith, you wouldn't have been in a panic when you saw Sam's key. Your actions were screwed-up, but sort of justifiable and eventually forgivable."
"I don't see you believing in me at the moment," his uncle said, his voice laced with bitterness.
"That's because Faith's letter indicated you made money off the scheme more than that one time. It seems she kept those papers in the locker for a year or so, adding to them on occasion."
His uncle opened his mouth, closed it again, then finally said, "How the hell would she have known?"
"Because like you said, she was a drug addict. She needed drugs after she ran away and turned to her 'friend' to supply her before she finally took off for New York. He must have filled her in."
"Good Lord." Uncle Russ turned toward the window.
"Yeah," Ryan muttered. "So what the hell was going on?"
Russ faced them again. "It was supposed to be one time. Then a year later, they called on me again. Between their veiled threats to reveal my insurance scam and the fact that the extra money in my pocket helped my lifestyle— "
"You're hardly hurting for cash from the business," Ryan pointed out.
"And neither is your father or brother and they don't work nearly as hard as I do. After a while, it seemed like I wasn't getting what I deserved from Baldwin's," he admitted. "Who was it hurting?"
"How about the small-business owner who sees insurance rates skyrocket year after year?" Zoe said, making her presence known.
Not that Ryan had forgotten.
Uncle Russ scowled, but the slight incline of his head acknowledged her point. "I heard from your sister from time to time."
"What?" Ryan asked in shock.
"She'd call collect or drop me a note. She'd remind me of what she knew and I lived in abject fear of her revealing all. But then after a while the threats stopped. It seemed as if she was cleaning up her act and I was able to justify sending her away. But then it was silent for too long. I was petrified of her going back on drugs, or exposing me. That's when I began my investigation into her whereabouts."
Ryan's head pounded and he braced himself for his uncle's next admission.
"I found out she'd died in a drug dispute," he said, his voice cracking.
"You kept that from my parents? From me? You let me investigate and search and hope?"
Russ nodded. "Please hear me out. When I first found out, the guilt nearly killed me. I blamed myself and I stopped my part in bilking the insurance company. It helped that the feds were cracking down and the guys I dealt with wanted to lay low and focus on other things."
"And with Faith gone, so was the threat of discovery," Ryan said.
Russ nodded. "I stayed clean and focused on you, but the guilt never went away. Guilt over sending her away, over her death, over keeping the news from you, but I couldn't see what good it would do to tell you. I couldn't hurt you that way."
"Or deal with my reaction to your role in it."
Russ hung his head. "That, too."
"But then I started investigating on my own. With only partial info rmation to go on, since you withheld the important things, like my sister's death," Ryan said with contempt.
"Guilty as charged," Uncle Russ admitted dully.
Ryan leaned back in the chair, his body heavy with the weight of everything he'd just heard.
"How did you feel when Ryan found out something you hadn't? When he found Sam?" Zoe's voice startled Ryan and he glanced her way. She was face-to-face with his uncle.
Uncle Russ merely shook his head and Zoe continued. "I can answer that. You got nervous that maybe she knew something or had something that could implicate you, isn't that right?"
Ryan's gaze shot back to his uncle. "Is she right?"
Uncle Russ nodded and nausea churned in Ryan's gut. He'd had enough revelations today to last a lifetime, but Zoe obviously wasn't finished.
"You were so nervous this child of Faith's might know something or have something of her mother's that you hired someone to break into my family's home and tear the place apart, starting with Sam's room," she said, accusing him of something that had never even crossed Ryan's mind. While he'd been consumed with the past, Zoe had been focused on the present.