9:00 pm

The frantic calls have been coming in all night.

"Who could have done this? Who would want to kill my husband? He’s never done anything wrong. It doesn’t make any sense." Aunt Margo kept repeating with an edge of hysteria in her voice. She came home this afternoon and found her dead husband’s body. She couldn’t understand it. The police had been to the house, but they wouldn’t tell her anything. I didn’t know what to tell her. Despite our differences, Jonas was my family too. I never wanted to see him dead.

Bennett’s call a few minutes later was more of the same. Neither he nor his brothers could fathom this. I couldn’t tell them that Jonas had almost gotten me killed. I couldn’t bring myself to tell any of them what happened. How do you tell your aunt and your cousin their husband and father was a murderer? Telling them that now would only add insult to their grief. In any case, they will learn the truth soon enough. No matter how I feel about Aunt Margo, she doesn’t deserve this. Neither does Bennett. They too, were deceived. They had no clue that the man who professed to love them was not what he appeared to be.

Jonas fooled us all. To the world, he appeared to be the responsible corporate citizen with the winning smile, whose company was founded on the premise that hoverdrones protect people. He was my ‘father’ for over half my life. I spent years trying to please him, but I eventually learned that he would never approve of his black sheep nephew. It took me a long time to realize that he was a selfish man that only cared about the money he could make. It took me even longer to emotionally separate myself from him, though I never completely succeeded at doing that. But even I didn’t understand Jonas’ true nature. I never thought he was capable of murder. Today I learned he was capable of much more than I ever would have suspected. I didn’t know that people meant nothing to him, that an ex-con was nothing more than a lab rat. I didn’t know that behind that smooth, socially acceptable persona, he had gone straight for the heart of darkness.

This was the man I called ‘Uncle’, the man that I had allowed to intimidate me into believing that I was somehow inferior to him because I wasn’t driven to make a profit. This was the man that made me feel like a failure for not fitting into his view of how the world should be. This was the man that professed to know what was best for me. This was the man that I was never good enough for. This was my uncle, the cold-blooded killer.

My lessons have been coming hard and fast lately. I never thought Eyes Only would be exposing the Cales as the bad guys of the week. And I certainly never expected to be placed in the same position with my Uncle Jonas as Max was placed in with Ben. In fact, my situation is much worse. Unlike Ben, Jonas had no excuses for his behavior. He wasn’t bred and trained to be a killer, and yet he made a conscious decision to kill. Now I know exactly what Max meant when she asked me that question a week ago. ‘If your brother was a murderer, would you want people to know?’ I couldn’t comprehend it then, but now it makes complete sense. ‘If your uncle was a murderer, would you want people to know?’ I’ve been asking myself that over and over again.

I would dearly love to bury this thing and make it disappear forever, but I know I can’t. There is too much at stake. This morning, I was concerned about being dependent on a company that I was philosophically opposed to, but now things have progressed far beyond the philosophical level. Cale Industries is involved in murder. Now I must act.

I know everyone in my family will take a financial and emotional hit. We all have some personal resources, so we will survive, but thanks to Jonas, life will never be the same for the Cales. Bennett and Marianne just returned from their honeymoon. Well, the honeymoon is over for all of us.

Max thinks I’m doing this to prove that I am not just a ‘bored rich liberal white guy’, as she put it. She even asked me about Eyes Only and how I would keep it afloat.

"Somehow," I said.

That was the best I answer I could give her. At this point, I have no idea how I am going to continue Eyes Only, and that does scare me. I only have so much art that I can sell. I don’t know how long I can keep going without an alternative income source or if I can even find a viable source. My broadcast tomorrow may lead to the eventual demise of Eyes Only, but if I do nothing, I will have buried it just as effectively. I will have destroyed every shred of integrity in myself and dismantled the foundation Eyes Only was built on. Even if people never found out, I would still know. I would be the same as Jonas and Bruno and all the others that profit by spilling blood. This is the true test of my principles. It’s as simple as that.