by Tami Hoag
“I didn’t press the issue,” he said. “She’s upset enough. I thought you might be able to persuade her to say yes to the exam. We have a nurse available to do the rape kit if she consents.”
“Did she have clothes on when they brought her in?”
“A T-shirt and panties. Something she might have worn to bed. Covered in blood. They’re bagged and ready for you to take.”
He cracked the door open, and Annie looked in. Genevieve Gauthier lay on the hospital bed across the room, the head of the bed raised up. She looked young and small and forlorn against the stark white sheets, her face swollen, misshapen, and discolored in splotches. She was as still as death, the keening sound coming from her the only indication she was alive. The sound rose and fell like a distant siren call, strange and otherworldly.
“No one’s brought the son in,” Travis murmured. “I guess we have to assume the worst.”
Annie nodded and whispered, “’Fraid so. Dead at the scene.”
“Damn, Annie. What’s the world coming to?” He shook his head, his mouth twisting. “I sound like my old man.”
“People been asking that question since Cain,” Annie said. “We still don’t have an answer. I sure don’t.”
“You’re not shoring up my faith in law enforcement, Detective,” he said, joking the way first responders often did in the face of tragedy—wry, sarcastic, a little jolt of absurdity to take the edge off a terrible situation.
“You’ll have to appeal to a higher power on that,” Annie said. “I’m just part of the cleanup crew, catching the bad guys after the fact.”
“I sure hope you get this one,” he said. “Ring the buzzer if you need anything.”
“Thanks, Travis.”
Annie took a deep breath and let it out as she stepped into the room. The woman in the bed seemed not to notice her at all. She stared off at nothing, one eye nearly swollen shut, the other unblinking, and began another long keening note, starting soft, slowly growing louder and then tapering off, fading to nothing.
“Genevieve?” Annie asked softly. She walked to the far side of the bed, stepping into the woman’s line of sight. “Genevieve, my name is Annie Broussard. I’m a detective with the Sheriff’s Office. I’m here to talk to you about what happened tonight.”
No response.
She pulled a rolling stool to the side of the bed and sat down, slipping her phone out of the pocket of her khaki pants. She set it to Record and placed it on the stand beside the bed then looked at Genevieve Gauthier, taking in the bruises and bandages, the IV that snaked into the woman’s thin, pale arm. She had a look of birdlike frailty—small bones, slight frame, hollow cheeks. It wouldn’t take much for someone larger and stronger to hurt her.
“Can you tell me what happened?”
Silence. Annie waited, giving the woman time to accept the idea of reliving the horror of what had happened to her by retelling the tale. A victim was victimized many times over by the system. There was no avoiding it. The crime was only the beginning.
“Where’s my son?” Genevieve asked, her voice barely more than a whisper. “Where’s KJ?”
Annie hesitated, wishing she could get the answers she needed before having to answer that question. To tell a mother her child was dead and then interrogating her about how that tragedy had come to pass was nothing short of cruel. But it was her job to get answers from this woman, and the sooner she got those answers, the sooner she could relay them to Nick at the scene. There was a killer on the loose. Time was of the essence.
“He’s dead, isn’t he?” Genevieve made eye contact for a second and then let her gaze slide away before the answer could come. “My baby’s dead.”
“I’m so sorry,” Annie said. “Yes, your son is dead.”
Tears welled up, making the young woman’s good eye look huge. A fine trembling shuddered through her, and that eerie keen twisted up out of her soul, escaping her body like a wraith to swirl around the room. The ghost of grief. It would slip under the door and float down the hall to touch anyone in earshot and run a chill through them.
Automatically, Annie reached out and touched her on the shoulder to offer the comfort of human contact. “I’m so sorry. I have a son, too. I can only imagine the pain.
“Is there someone I can call for you?” she asked. “Someone you might want to have come stay with you? A relative? A friend?”
The woman shook her head. “No . . . There’s no one . . . Just me and KJ.”
“What about your son’s father? Would you like me to call him?”
“No.”
“Does he live in the area?”
“He’s not part of our lives.”
“You shouldn’t have to go through this alone, Genevieve.”
“I’m always alone,” she murmured, her empty gaze sliding past Annie again. “That’s just how it is.”
“You don’t have a work friend who might come?” Annie pressed. “Someone from your church, maybe?”
Genevieve didn’t answer, clearly tired of having to say she had no one in her life who cared about her at all.
For a second Annie flashed back to her childhood. Her mother had come to Bayou Breaux pregnant and forlorn, no friends, no family. The couple Annie had always known as Tante Fanchon and Uncle Sos had taken in Marie Broussard, had given her a place to live and work.
Annie had been absorbed into the Doucet family from birth even though she was no blood relation to them, as far as she knew. She had no idea what it was to be alone in the world. You couldn’t swing a stick in Partout Parish without hitting half a dozen Doucets. But her mother had been intimately acquainted with that kind of emotional isolation. Her mother had always been alone, even in a roomful of people. Marie Broussard had lived her life in a crystal-clear bubble of isolation, never letting anyone truly know her. She had died by her own hand when Annie was nine years old, a mystery even to her own child.
“How old is KJ?” Annie asked.
“Seven . . . Almost eight . . . He’ll be eight . . .”
But he would never be eight.
Annie sighed. “Genevieve, I know this is hard and you’re in pain, but we need as much information as you can give us tonight so we can find the person who did this to you and your son. I know you ran to get help tonight. I’m it. I’m your help. The other detectives who are at your home right now looking for clues—they’re your help. You need to tell us what happened.”
Some victims opened the floodgates and spilled information in torrents, talking so fast they barely made sense. Others were so traumatized they could barely speak at all. Genevieve Gauthier seemed like she might drift away into a fog of physical pain and emotional numbness and whatever pharmaceutical haze Travis had injected into her veins. Annie rolled her chair a few inches to the left, back into the woman’s line of vision.
“Who did this to you? Did you see? Was it someone you know?”
No answer. Annie snuck a glance at her phone, touching the button to check the time, half expecting to see a text message from Nick, asking for information. There wasn’t one.
“We were asleep. I was asleep,” Genevieve began at last, her voice a murmur. “I was having a dream, a bad dream, that there was someone in the house, someone who wanted to hurt us . . . And then there was . . .”
“What woke you?”
“The pain.”
“What pain?”
“The pain in my chest.”
Travis had said nothing about a chest wound. There was no telltale blood on the front of her gown, though the wound on her shoulder had bled through the bandage. Annie could see the dark stain in the gauze through the flimsy cotton garment.
“Do you mean the cut on your shoulder?”
“No . . . I felt it . . . Here,” she said, lifting her bandaged right hand toward her sternum. “I sat up. I cried out. I heard KJ cry out.
”
She was seeing it in her mind. Her eyes had that glassy glaze that reflected vision inward on the memory. Her respiration rate was picking up, quicker, shallower breaths that came with fear and an increased pulse.
“I heard KJ cry out, and I-I jumped out of bed. My foot got caught in the sheets, and I tripped and fell on the floor. He was crying for me, and I couldn’t get to him. Like that horrible nightmare . . . you’re running and running . . . you can’t get there . . .”
The tears came again, streaming down her battered face. The end of her upturned nose turned bright red.
“He was calling for me, and-and I-I ran into the hall. I w-was scr-screaming his name. And-and-and he came out of the bedroom—”
“Who came out of the bedroom? Your son?”
“No. Him. He-he h-had a knife.”
“Did you see his face? Can you describe him?”
She was quiet for a second, glancing around as if looking for eavesdroppers. Then she looked at Annie and whispered, “He was a demon. A demon straight from hell.”
A visible shudder went through her body as she recalled the image. “His face was twisted . . . eyes empty, black holes . . . his mouth was like a black horseshoe. He had horns. Like the devil.”
“He was wearing a mask?” Annie asked, trying to discern if the memory was real or imagined.
“I was so afraid . . . It happened so fast . . . He came at me with a knife, slashing and slashing.”
She raised her arms as if to fend off the attacker. Annie pictured the assailant’s knife cutting Genevieve’s hands and arms as she tried to defend herself. One stroke had breached her defenses, slicing deep into the top of her shoulder, just inches from her neck. A blitz attack. She would have been frantic, just trying to survive from one second to the next.
The memory seemed to be nearly as real to her as the event had been. She pressed her lips together, squeezed her eyes closed as if to hold back the coming flood of tears. But the wave of emotion was too strong, overwhelming, and it burst out of her in a terrible, wrenching sob.
“Oh, my God! Oh, my God!” she cried, her small, frail body curling in on itself, shaking with the force of her hysteria. “He killed me! He killed my baby!”
Annie reached out again, placing a hand gently on Genevieve’s back, trying to offer some kind of comfort, trying to calm her with words as empty as air. What could she say that could possibly soothe emotions so raw and so justified? Nothing.
She rubbed the woman’s back, and said she was sorry, and waited for the worst of the storm to pass so she could poke a stick in the open wounds with more questions to elicit more terrible memories.
Was he tall? Was he short? Was he black? Was he white? Was he thin? Was he fat? Did he speak? Did he smell? What was he wearing? What color was his hair?
Questions with no reliable answers. Victims of brutal crimes often had very distorted memories of the event. The part of the brain that took over during an attack was the part of the brain where animal instinct lives. Fight and flight, self-preservation. It was not the orderly, logical, problem-solving, list-making part of the mind. There was no time to think and reason, only to react. All energy went to survival, not to making plans and storing memories. Consequently, memories couldn’t always be trusted. Assailants described as massive often turned out to be average-size, black turned out to be white, a cannon of a handgun turned out to be a .22, a machete turned out to be a steak knife.
“Genevieve,” Annie said. “Did he harm you sexually? Did he rape you?”
The answer was too long coming to be believed.
“No,” she whispered.
Annie let it go. Her time for getting information was running out. Genevieve was exhausted from the ordeal, from her injuries, from the emotional roller coaster. She curled on her side in the bed, looking smaller and smaller as her energy ebbed away.
A nurse stuck her head in the door, frowning at Annie. “The technician is here for the CT scan.”
“We’re about done.”
“I should hope so,” the nurse said, her eyebrows pinched low and tight with disapproval.
“Just a few more minutes,” Annie said, earning herself a curt tsk as the nurse disappeared.
“What happened then, Genevieve?” she asked softly, like a child wanting more of a scary bedtime story. “How did you get away from him?”
Genevieve blinked slowly, barely hanging on to consciousness. “I just ran,” she said. “I ran and ran . . . I had to get help, but there wasn’t anybody . . . There never is . . . I’m always alone . . .”
The door swung open, and Travis Benton stepped in with a strapping orderly dressed in purple scrubs behind him. Annie pushed away from the bed and stood up.
“We’re going to take Ms. Gauthier for her head CT now,” he said. “Then she should get some rest. Maybe you can come back later, Detective.”
Annie nodded. She bent down and touched Genevieve Gauthier on her uninjured shoulder. “I’ll be back, Genevieve. You’re in good hands here. And you’re not alone anymore. Myself and the other detectives are going to do everything in our power to find the person who did this to you and your son and bring them to justice. That’s a promise.”
“Take care of my baby,” Genevieve whispered. “Please take care of KJ. Tell him I love him. Tell him I’m sorry.”
“I will.”
* * *
* * *
ANNIE LEFT THE room and went down the hall, past the nurses’ station and the triage desk. She went into the ladies’ room and washed her hands and splashed cold water on her face, trying to wash off the imagined grime of dragging a victim through the gruesome details of the crime that had been perpetrated against her.
As she stared at herself in the mirror, she thought she looked every bit as weary as she felt: dark smudges beneath dark eyes, sallow complexion, a worry line digging deep between her eyebrows. Even her dark hair looked tired and limp. She looked and felt like shit. But she hadn’t been attacked by a madman, she reminded herself, and she wasn’t on her way to a head CT. Her son was safe in bed at her cousin Remy’s house. She had a life full of family and friends.
“I’m always alone . . . That’s just how it is . . .” Genevieve Gauthier was alone, had no one—not a relative to come to her aid or a friend to sit by her side. The father of her child didn’t even warrant a phone call in the wake of this tragedy.
There was a story there. That’s what an investigation was: a story put together piece by puzzle piece until it all made sense. It was not just the story of the crime itself but the stories of each individual involved. All those pieces had to come together and fit in exactly the right way at exactly the right moment in order for the crime to happen. If one of the people in this night’s story had turned left instead of right at some point in time, their paths might never have crossed, and KJ and Genevieve Gauthier would be home, asleep, safe in their beds.
The storm had come and gone, but the heat and humidity remained, Annie noted as she walked out of the ER into the night. Such strange weather for this late in the fall. Though, technically, hurricane season was not quite over; people had usually quit worrying about it by now and moved on to more pleasant seasonal thoughts like fall football and decorating for Halloween.
The parking lot gleamed wet like a smooth black sea under the security lights. A bright white statue of the Virgin Mary stood in the center of the driveway, its arms opened wide to welcome the sick, the wounded, the people who loved them, and the people who worked to save them.
A large two-story brick L, the hospital had been built in the ’70s when money ran as thick as Louisiana oil and philanthropy was a status symbol. Even now, years and economic ups and downs later, Our Lady of Mercy was an anchor of the community, always featured on the cover of the annual Junior League calendar. The broad manicured lawn and carefully tended gardens sloped down to the banks of th
e bayou.
Annie turned away from the parking lot and took the path to the garden. She breathed deep the familiar dark, rich scents of wet vegetation, flowers and earth, and the bayou. The reassuring smell of home, of normalcy. This was the place to come to walk, to pray, to escape the chaos of trauma and the grief of illness and death. The live oak trees were hung with fairy lights and ringed with benches—too wet to sit on now.
Annie stood under one of the trees and pulled out her phone to call Nick just as the phone began to vibrate. His name came up on the screen.
“Where you at, ’Toinette?” His voice was gruff with smoke. Once a pack-a-day smoker, he had curtailed the habit early in their relationship because he knew she didn’t like it. He had given it up entirely, cold turkey, the day they found out she was pregnant with Justin. Nearly six years later, he still never smoked at home, but he would take it up again at work if the case was bad enough. He’d been at it heavy of late. It was a point of irritation between them.
“I’m still at Our Lady,” she said. “They just took our victim away for a head CT.”
“Is she conscious?”
“Yes.”
“What kind of shape is she in?”
“Physically: cuts and bruises. A couple of cracked ribs. She’s got a bad-looking eye—that’s what the scan is for. Emotionally: she’s hanging on to the ragged edge with broken fingernails.”
“What did she say? Did she see the guy? Did she give you a description?”
“Yeah,” Annie said on a sigh. “She said it was a demon from hell.”
Nick was silent for a beat then echoed her sigh. She could imagine the smoke drifting through his lips and curling into the night air.
“Hell, ’Toinette,” he said wearily, “I coulda told you that.”
“It’s that bad?”
He said nothing.
“I’m on my way.”
SIX