by Linda Ladd
Black chatted with Clyde for a moment, but Claire sat there and said nothing. Clyde placed a thick white mug down in front her and smiled. She only stared at him, mute and disbelieving. How could he have lied to her all these years? Even after she’d moved back to New Orleans and met up with them again, Clyde had not told her the truth.
“What, Annie? You got problems with dat case, dat poor gal got killed down dere on our bayou? Somet’ing messin’ you up?”
“Oh, yeah you could say something’s messing me up.”
Under the bar, Black put his hand on her knee again, tacitly warning her to stay calm. He appeared laid-back enough for both of them. Funniest thing, she did not feel calm. She felt lied to and duped. Clyde leaned both elbows on the bar and leveled worried dark eyes on her face. “What you mean, chère? You okay, ain’t you?”
Well, okay, since he asked. “I mean that I just found out the truth about how Gabe’s mom and dad died. How Sophie died, too.”
The stunned look on his weathered face alerted Claire right off that everything Booker and Holliday had dug up on the LeFevres family was true. Clyde tried to cover up his knee-jerk reaction but wasn’t quick enough or sincere enough to fool Claire. “What’d you mean?”
“I mean that I know they were murdered and all of you have been lying to me all these years. And I know Gabe was probably a victim of some psycho killer, and so was poor little Sophie.” Claire paused there, the idea of such a complicated hoax, so entirely alien to her and to the family she thought she knew so well, that it was absolutely mind-boggling. Her voice clogged with emotion. She swallowed hard and steeled herself. “So now, Clyde, I want the truth, and you’re going to tell me, and you’re going to tell me right now, and then I’m going to go talk to Gabe.”
Clyde looked like he wanted to collapse to his knees and crawl under the bar. “Who done tole you such t’ings?”
“Believe it or not, Jack Holliday told me. He found out and laid it out for me, and now I’m asking you for the truth.”
“Holliday found out what?”
The deep voice came from the doorway, and they both turned and found Rene Bourdain walking toward them. Great, now he was going to get involved. She wished he had not shown up. She had enough trouble.
“Jack Holliday found out something about you, I hear that right?”
“This is a private conversation, Rene. Why don’t you give me a few minutes alone with Clyde?”
That sounded rude, and the hurt on his face was easy to read and made her regret her short fuse. That upset her, too. Everything was in a steep downhill slide, all right.
Black tried to throw her a lifeline. “How about you and I go down and have a drink at the Creole’s bar and let them talk, Rene?”
“Thanks, but I really think I should hear this. Is this connected to the Christien or Rodriguez case, Claire? I’m working those, too, you know.”
“Okay, if you must know, everybody’s been lying to me about what happened to Gabe’s family for years. So Clyde here needs to fill me in on the what and why and when. Right, Clyde?”
Rene and Clyde exchanged a somber look. Somehow Claire knew in that instant that Rene was just as guilty as the rest of them.
“Oh, my God, Rene, don’t tell me you’ve been lying to me, too?”
Frowning, Rene placed his hand on Claire’s back. “Just relax, kiddo, take a deep breath. There’s a lot more goin’ on here than you know.”
“No kidding. Well, c’mon, let’s hear it. You tell me what really happened and what it’s got to do with my case.”
Silence. Then Clyde said, “Gabe don’t need to know what happened to his family, Annie. He t’inks dey died in that wreck.”
“What?” Claire looked at him in disbelief. “Are you telling me that Gabe doesn’t know the truth, either? Oh, my God. How could you do that to him?”
“No, he don’ know, and it gonna kill him to know de truth.”
“Well, guess what? Somebody tried to kill him the other night, and Black and me, too. I think it just might have something to do with this big lie you’ve been feeding him all these years.”
“He okay, right?”
“Maybe. After his dislocated shoulder, concussion, and other injuries heal up.”
More silence and exchanged guilty looks. Wow, and now the phrase family conspiracy took on a whole new meaning. It was even worse than she had originally thought. Suddenly the story had gone from bad to very, very bad, hard to listen to, hard to accept, then lastly, rotten to the core. Claire debated whether they were right, whether Gabe was better off not knowing the truth. Whatever it was, it was going to change him, maybe forever. She felt something nasty move way down in her gut, like a spider skittering across its web to a moth struggling to get free. Who were these people whom she’d thought she could trust? What the hell was going on? She fought the urge to get out of there and never come back.
Black said, “You guys need to tell her the truth. It’s over now. Whatever the reason for the secret, whatever happened, it’s over, and she needs to know about it. So does Gabe.”
As usual, Black’s measured voice and steady presence helped her keep it together. So she took a deep breath, clasped her hands together atop the bar, and looked at each man in turn. “Okay, I’m as calm as I’m gonna get. Let’s take this slow and easy, and hey, maybe we can even throw in some truth, if we try real hard. Jack told me that Gabe’s mom and dad were murdered. He also said that Gabe and Sophie were abducted as children. Is any, or all of that true?”
“Yes,” said Clyde, about as hangdog as a proud Cajun could get. “All of it’s true.”
“Okay. Okay. Now we’re getting somewhere. He also said the same thing happened to his own family. He thinks it’s the same predator, the same killer, and that it all ties together somehow. What do you know about that?”
Sighing, Clyde picked up a dishrag and nervously began wiping up nonexistent spills off the granite counter. “I don’ know nothin’ ’bout Jack Holliday, and nothin’ ’bout his family.”
Claire turned to Rene. “What about you, Rene? Have you been hiding things from Gabe, too?”
“What we did was for his own good.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, how on earth can you say that? We’re talking about how his parents and sister died.”
Rene sat down on the stool beside her. He took her hand and pressed it between both of his. “You need to listen now, just stop with all these questions, and listen to what we say. It was a real ugly thing, what happened to Gabe and his family. It wasn’t long after they took you out of their home and put you with a different foster family. Gabe was just a boy, and injured so severely that he didn’t remember what happened. One of God’s tender mercies to him. So we protected him. Let him grow up without the memory. That’s why we hushed things up.”
“When was it? How old was he?”
“He had just turned twelve. Like I said, it didn’t happen long after they took you away.”
“But what about later? When he was a grown man?”
“It didn’t matter. It’s better that he doesn’t know. Truth is, Annie, back then, when it happened, he got hurt, hurt real bad.” Claire stared at him, waiting, and the expression in his eyes suddenly turned into naked pain. “That man, that monster that took Gabe? He beat him somethin’ terrible, the bastard. When Gabe woke up after we found him half dead in the swamp, he didn’t remember the things that were done to him, and we didn’t want him to. He was just a kid. It would’ve messed up his mind even more than it already was over losing everybody in his family. So we told him it was a car crash. We told him that all the injuries he had incurred were from the accident, from being ejected from the car onto broken glass, and what not, and he believed us. He couldn’t remember anything. Why wouldn’t he believe us?”
There was no arguing with the sincerity on his face. Clyde was wiping his eyes on a dish towel. Weeping. Claire felt her anger begin to ebb, couldn’t help it, but she still wasn’t sold on their story.
“Okay, I can understand that you wanted to protect him. And maybe I won’t tell him, either. But I want to know the truth, every single detail, right now. I need to know for my own case. It’s important that I know everything.”
Clyde’s voice got all thick and raspy, and his cheeks were wet with tears. Claire had never seen him sad before, couldn’t remember a time when he hadn’t been laughing and joking around. She didn’t like him this way. “Don’t make us do it, chère. I cannot t’ink of it without just gettin’ sick inside my belly. I don’t want him to know. I don’t want you to know. You don’t wanna know.”
Rene took over as Clyde’s throat thickened and his voice died away. “Gabe was beaten, very badly, worse than I ever saw anyone able to live through, and then he was dumped in the swamp and left for dead. When they found him, he was unconscious and stayed that way for days. When he woke up, he didn’t remember much about it. The doctor said it was a brain injury or maybe he’d locked up the trauma someplace deep inside because his mind couldn’t handle what was done to him.”
Claire tried to digest that. The same thing had happened to her—at least, the coma and inability to remember things—but it had only lasted for a short time. Unfortunately, she had recalled the bad things, and remembered them anew in frequent awful nightmares. Would Gabe really want to go through the same thing? Did she want him to?
Clyde said, “It happened so long ago. It was the worst t’ing in my life. I had to live with it all dis time. I didn’t want Gabe to know. It was terrible.”
“Tell me exactly what happened to him.”
Rene took over again. “They were on a family picnic out on the bayou. Sophie and Gabe were with them. It was during Mardi Gras week. Gabe was twelve and Sophie was ten. The killer attacked them there. A hunter found Kristen and Bobby lying together on a blanket, Bobby shot in the head and Kristen shot both in the head and in the chest. The children were gone, not a trace. They found their fishing poles about thirty yards upstream.”
“Nobody heard or saw anything?”
“No. We think the killer might’ve been hiding in the bushes, watching them. He probably got the kids when they moved away from their parents to fish, subdued them somehow, and then went back and shot Bobby and Kristen. That’s all we could ever figure, and it haunts me to this day that I couldn’t find the guy who did that to them.” After that speech, Rene looked absolutely stricken himself.
“Anything else? Other evidence found, anything at all?”
“We found some red feathers, like those on some of the Mardi Gras masks but never could trace them to any source. Every shop in New Orleans sells feathered masks. He could’ve gotten it anywhere.”
“Was there an investigation?”
“Yeah, but I petitioned the court to seal it. I’ve still got the murder file, if you want to take a look. There wasn’t much to go on. It’s got the crime scene photos, stuff like that.”
“I do want to look at it.”
“I’ve got it in a safe at my house. Come by, take a look. Maybe it’ll help you understand why we lied to Gabe.”
“I will, but right now, I’m going to go back home and talk to Gabe. If he wants to know about this, I’m going to tell him, and you all will just have to deal with it.”
They all looked upset about that possibility, but Claire and Black left them there to worry about the consequences of their lies and distortions. Gabe had a right to know what had happened to him, and he was tough enough to take it. As they got back into the Range Rover, she turned to Black.
“What do you think?”
“I think they were telling the truth, all or most of it. I think Clyde was sincere about having Gabe’s mental state in mind when they didn’t tell him what happened. But I’m with you on this. I think Gabe needs to know. The gaps in his memory could be what sent him into such a dangerous lifestyle. He deserves to know the truth, but that’s strictly up to you. You know him better than I do.”
After that, he drove straight to their house on Governor Nicholls, and Claire braced herself to tell Gabe. She just hoped he would take it well. It would be a lot for him to absorb all at once, but somehow she knew he would want to know. One thing for certain, she dreaded telling him the ugly details about as much as she had dreaded anything in her entire life.
Chapter Twenty-four
Gabe was in his bedroom, asleep. Julie Alvarez was reading on a Kindle Fire in a chair beside the bed. Black told her to take a break and that they had to speak privately with Gabe. Julie told him that the nurse on duty at his private clinic in the Hotel Crescent had called and said they needed his help with a patient. Apparently, they’d calmed the lady down, but they were waiting for him to order her meds.
Julie looked curiously at Claire but quickly retreated to her guest room and probably some well-deserved shut-eye. Gabe’s head rested on the pillows, and his eyes remained closed. It was probably the first time he’d been fully relaxed and off his guard since he’d started playing games with a bunch of savage bikers. He still wore a thin blue hospital gown. Most of the lacerations on his face and arms were covered with bandages that looked white against his dark skin. His arm was still held immobile against his chest with a blue nylon sling.
Claire stood there for a moment, undecided on whether or not she should wake him. Black went to shower and shave and get ready to see his patient. Truth was, though, he knew that she and Gabe needed privacy so he was giving it to them. She sat down in the chair by the fireplace and contemplated what she should do. Okay, did she really want to disrupt Gabe’s peace of mind with some horrendous ordeal from his childhood? Just now, when he was finally safe and out of danger and in good spirits? He had a right to know, of course, but he should make that decision. So she just sat there and waited. Gabe didn’t wake up for quite a while, after Black had left for the hotel next door.
“Hey, Gabe, how’re you feeling?”
Gabe squinted up at her in the semidarkness, all sleepy-eyed and groggy. When he recognized her, he smiled a little. God, he looked so damn good now that he was clean shaven and without that damn braided beard, man-cara, and long hair. Black’s barber had paid a house call and made him look human again. He said, “It’s nice to wake up to a friendly face, especially yours.”
“I’m just glad you’re here where we can look after you.”
But Gabe knew her way too well. “You look upset. What’sa matter?”
Instead of answering, she said, “Any word on the Skulls?”
“They’re working on the arrest warrants as we speak. Drug trafficking and prostitution. As soon as they’re charged and find out we were undercover cops, they’re gonna send people out lookin’ for Bonnie and me. I’m gonna have to go to ground till the trial.”
“Don’t worry, they won’t recognize you now.” It was a feeble attempt at jocularity that didn’t really pan out.
“What’s wrong?” he said again, this time with a frown.
Claire tried to figure out the best way to broach the subject. “Gabe, if there was something in your past that you didn’t know about, would you want somebody to tell you, even if it was really bad?”
“This isn’t hypothetical, is it?” Gabe had always been intuitive.
“Well, would you?”
“Depends, I guess. What’s goin’ on?”
“I got some information about the killer I’m tracking.” She hesitated, aware that this information might throw him into a tailspin. Gabe seemed to be okay physically and mentally. She was pretty sure he could handle what she was going to say. “It concerns you.”
“I’ve done lots of things while I was undercover. What are you talkin’ about?”
She took a deep breath. “You were abducted by a predator when you were twelve. You don’t remember it, and everybody’s kept it from you.”
“That’s not true.”
“That’s what I thought at first, too. But I have it on good evidence now.”
“Not that. It happened all right. I do remember it.” Dum
bfounded, yes, she certainly was. That was the last thing she had expected him to say.
“They meant well when they covered it up. And I didn’t remember for a long, long time. But I had nightmares for years about being held captive and being beaten, and then one night when I woke up covered with sweat and hysterical, it all came back in a rush. My mind just opened up and let me have it. Maybe it thought I was ready.”
“So you remember everything?”
“I wish I didn’t.”
“Can you tell me about it?” She pulled the chair up closer to the bed. “I think the guy who took you is the guy who killed Madonna and Wendy, Gabe. I think he’s been killing people around here for decades.”
Gabe just lay there and gazed at her. “I thought that, too, sometimes.”
“And you never told Rene or Clyde or anybody that you remembered?”
“No, I really didn’t see the point in bringing it all up again. It was so long ago. And I knew why they kept it from me, but I’ve been looking for that guy in the mask. All these years, I’ve kept my eyes and ears open for the sound of his voice. He disguised it, talked in a hoarse whisper, but I hoped I’d know it if I ever heard it again. I hoped I’d run into him and handle payback in my own way.”
Claire knew what that meant and couldn’t blame him. “Would you tell me about it? Or would that be too painful?”
Gabe got quiet then and leaned his head back against the pillow. He stared up at the folded pleats in the ornate canopy above him. “I guess so. If you think it’s the same guy and it’ll help you get him. I don’t remember everything, but I remember a lot of it. I’ve figured out some things that I couldn’t recall.”
“We’re so close now to getting this guy that I can taste it.”
Gabe licked his dry lips and shifted positions. When he groaned in pain, Claire winced, too. “We were down on the bayou, havin’ a picnic. It was Sophie’s birthday. Mama and Papa were sitting on a blanket talking and kissing, you know how they were. He couldn’t keep his hands off her, and she’d blush and tell him to stop, not in front of the kids.”