by Tami Hoag
“This is going to be hard,” the female detective warned her. “Your son sustained some terrible injuries. You may have blocked that out of your mind. No one would blame you if you had. But I want you to be prepared, Genevieve.”
Genevieve said nothing. In her brain, the images flashed, one and then another and another: the knife, the blood, wide eyes, and mouths torn open in screams of rage and terror. She remembered the heat, the smell of sweat and fear, the taste of tears and blood and bile and guilt.
Her heart was beating too fast. She felt a little faint. A sign on the wall pointed to the morgue.
The male detective appeared again, holding the door open as they neared the end of the hall. He was handsome in the way of a dangerous animal, like a panther: fit, sleek, overtly male, all muscle and sharp angles. His dark eyes were hard and keenly watchful. She felt the heat of his gaze as she rolled past him. Not in a sexual way, but like a predator looking at prey, like she was something to pounce on the second she made a mistake.
The room was white and sterile. Harsh fluorescent lights and cold tile. A stainless steel wall of small doors, like she’d seen on TV. Doors hiding drawers of dead bodies.
Her heart beat faster still as the female detective pushed her toward a gurney in the middle of the room. The small draped figure on the cart would be KJ. Panic formed like a ball in the pit of her stomach and rose up into her chest, into her throat, threatening to choke her. She screamed to let it out as the detective drew back the sheet. She tried to catch the sound with her hand and shove it back inside her mouth.
“I’m so sorry, Genevieve,” the detective murmured, touching her shoulder.
Genevieve struggled to pull herself to her feet, grabbing hold of the gurney. KJ lay there on the steel table, small and pale and lifeless. Her mind wanted to reject the image. He didn’t look real. This was a dummy, some kind of Hollywood prop made to look like her son. And yet, of course she knew it wasn’t that at all.
She reached out and touched his arm, wanting to feel his warmth, wanting to feel life pulsing through him, but he was as cold and unresponsive as a doll. Tears fell from her eyes and splashed against his flesh like raindrops as she bent over him, a storm of emotions swirling through her: love and heartbreak, rage and terror, guilt and blame.
She had made the decision to bring him into the world—against advice, defying threat. She had regretted her choice on many occasions. The weight of that guilt was like an anchor. She had been pelted with shame hurled at her by the judgmental: how selfish, how shameful, what a slut she was. And she had drunk in the accolades given by others: how brave, how selfless, to have a baby on her own and keep him and raise him as best she could, accepting the sacrifices that choice entailed. She had been a bad mother and a good mother, depending on the point of view. Now she was a mother without a child.
Her fault. She should have been stronger, tried harder. She should have controlled herself. She should have protected him. What if she hadn’t taken the pills . . .
“I’m so sorry, Genevieve,” the female detective said.
I’m so sorry, Genevieve echoed in her mind.
“I’m so sorry,” she whispered to KJ, bending down over him, touching her cheek to his body. “I’m so sorry, baby.”
She saw him as an infant, red-faced and screaming, enraged at the ordeal of being born. She saw him at two years old, his face and hands a mess from a half-eaten chocolate Easter bunny. She saw him crying over his first lost tooth, and his last skinned knee. His life passed before her eyes, over too soon, gone like smoke through her grasping fingers. It didn’t matter how sorry she was. All the apologies in the world could never bring him back.
The sobs began as a low siren, a moan from the depths of her soul, a wave that grew to a crescendo and broke on the jagged pieces of her shattered heart.
I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry, baby. I’m so sorry I killed you . . .
TWELVE
My message to the scum who perpetrated this heinous crime is this: You can run, but you CANNOT hide!” Kelvin Dutrow shouted at the camera, his face set in an exaggerated scowl, like a tough guy in a cheesy action movie. “I, Sheriff Kelvin Dutrow, am going to make it my personal mission to see to it that your next hiding place will be BEHIND BARS! I will see to it that every investigative tool at my disposal will be brought to bear in the effort to bring you to JUSTICE!”
He leaned toward the camera, thrusting an accusing finger at the lens. He was dressed in his black tactical uniform, complete with boots and black felt trooper hat. In the background, a row of six trim young deputies in uniform stood pointlessly at attention, the entrance of the law enforcement center behind them.
The TV coverage cut back to the news anchor in the studio, a woman with bright red lipstick and a spray-starched helmet of black hair.
“Partout Parish sheriff, Kelvin Dutrow, added during the press conference that a tip hotline will be set up by noon today. Anyone having any information regarding the crime is encouraged to call—”
Scowling darkly, Nick muttered a string of nasty French only half under his breath. A tip hotline for a murder that happened in the middle of nowhere in the dead of night. What would that get them? A hundred phone calls from the lunatic fringe, people who sat at home listening to police scanners for excitement, people who watched too many fictional crime dramas that bore no resemblance whatsoever to real police work. He would now have to dedicate manpower to chasing down phantom leads that would evaporate into nothing.
“I just love that Sheriff Dutrow!” the waitress exclaimed as she led them to their table. A petite, sinewy woman, her red hair was striped with gray and gathered in a loose pile on top of her head, damp tendrils clinging to the fine sheen of sweat on her forehead. She’d been working in this place for twenty years or more.
“He’s a man of action, him!” she declared, pointing at the television that was mounted on the wall in one corner of the room. A freeze-frame shot of Dutrow filled the screen as news of the homicide crawled below.
Annie elbowed Nick gently. A preemptive reprimand for whatever unpleasant thing he might have wanted to say.
They had come in the back way to Madame Collette’s diner, into the small private dining room where they could talk and strategize away from the eyes and opinions of the restaurant regulars. They were able to park off the alley and slip in unseen. Had they tried to return to the SO, they would have run smack into the media. The longer that could be avoided, the better.
An institution in Bayou Breaux, Madame Collette’s had changed little since the Great Depression. The slow-turning ceiling fans had cooled the brows of generations. The cypress-wood floors were worn in the traffic patterns of legions of waitresses before Miss Crystal.
“I’m your man of action right here, Miss Crystal with a C,” Stokes said, flashing his square, white smile. “You know it’s so. Don’t try to deny it!”
The waitress rolled her eyes and swatted at him halfheartedly. “I know you’re full of something, Chaz Stokes!”
“My love for you,” he teased, taking his seat.
“You gonna settle for grits,” she shot back, filling his coffee cup.
“You wound me, Miss Crystal. Here I been up all night fighting crime. I just need a little sweetness from my favorite waitress.”
“I’ll bring you extra sugar for your coffee. That’s what you’ll get,” the waitress quipped. “You want something more than that, you go up front and flirt with Krystal with a K.”
“Krystal with a K has a boyfriend, I hear tell.”
She arched a finely drawn eyebrow at him. “Since when did that ever stop you, cher?”
“Since he’s the size of a mountain gorilla.”
“And here I accuse you of having no common sense,” Annie remarked.
“Self-preservation is a base animal instinct,” Nick said. “I’ll have the number two platter, Miss Cry
stal, s’il vous plâit.”
“You’re gonna catch the scum what did this terrible thing? Killin’ that little Gauthier boy?” the waitress asked, nodding toward the television. It was more of a directive than a question.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You send him straight to hell if you can.”
The look on her face said she would do the honors herself if possible. She wouldn’t be the only one with that sentiment. An attack on a child in a small town was an attack on family, whether anyone knew Genevieve Gauthier personally or not.
“Are we getting our search warrant?” Nick asked as the waitress disappeared into the hall.
“No, sir, I am sad to say,” Stokes reported. “I begged, I pleaded, I worked up tears. Hell, I did everything but go down on the man. Judge Monahan was unimpressed with our probable cause—or lack thereof. He axed me straight-up did the victim have anything to say against Perez? I told him she was delirious, in and out of a coma. How could we even ask her? He didn’t wanna hear about it. Come back when she points the finger, he tells me.”
“Yeah. Let’s give the man plenty of time to destroy any relevant evidence,” Nick grumbled.
“Did you talk to her?” Stokes asked. “Did she say anything about him?”
“She ran to his house looking for help,” Annie said. “If she thought for a second he was the assailant, she wouldn’t have done that.”
“That doesn’t mean it couldn’t be him,” Nick pointed out. “She said that he yelled at the boy a couple of weeks ago for getting too close to his property. What’s he got going on over there he didn’t want a child to see?”
“I don’t know,” Stokes said. “I’m gonna talk to the guys on the drug task force, see if they have Roddie on their radar for any reason. But if he was the assailant, why didn’t he just kill her?”
“That’s the magic question. That’s the magic question no matter who did this. Why is she still alive?”
“Does this guy, Perez, have any history of violence against women?” Annie asked.
“Ol’ Roddie, he’s got a rap sheet long as an elephant’s dick,” Stokes said. “There’s a little bit of everything on it—drugs, assault, B-and-E. He’s a regular cornucopia of crime. I just spoke to his parole officer. He said Roddie moved back here about eight months ago. He had been living up in Breaux Bridge for a couple of years. According to the PO, he’s been keeping that long nose of his clean since he got out of the can—as hard as that is to imagine.”
“Why’d he come back?” Nick asked. “He doesn’t seem the nostalgic type.”
Stokes shrugged.
“Is he really working at the refinery?”
“Was. He wasn’t lying about that accident. He’s been milking the disability and trying to sue for a year and a half. The company’s gonna try to starve him out on that. They say he lit a cigarette and caused the explosion himself. He’ll never see a dime.”
That nice truck, the TV . . . “So he could have an alternate source of income?”
“Absolutely. And, why not fall back on what he knows best?”
“Drugs,” Annie said.
“Beats chopping sugarcane in the hot sun.”
“Any word about that on the street?” Nick asked. “Him dealing?”
“My CIs are all under their rocks at this time of day,” Stokes said. “I’ve made a couple of calls. I’ll hear back or go digging for them. Did y’all get anything new out of the victim?”
“Kind of a sketchy story at this point. Full of gaps and holes,” Nick said.
“She has a head trauma,” Annie reminded them. “We’re lucky she remembers as much as she does.”
“Somebody breaks into my house and tries to kill me, and kills my kid, I’m gonna remember every second of that,” Stokes declared.
“Good for you,” Annie bit back. “Can I volunteer to be the one to hit you in the head for that experiment?”
“Ha-ha,” Stokes said flatly. “Did you ask her about the drugs?”
“No,” Nick said. “I’ll wait for the tox screen to come back. I want to know the answer before I ask that question.”
“Boyfriends, ex-husbands, lovers?”
“She says no.”
“So this kid of hers was the immaculate conception?” Stokes asked. “There’s gotta be a dick involved in there somewhere.”
“I’ll look up the birth record,” Annie volunteered. “But that’s no guaranteed answer.”
“No,” Nick said. “Give that to Dixon. Call her ASAP. She can do the background on this girl. I need you elsewhere, ’Toinette. Have her check for any record of a marriage or a divorce, too, and any kind of criminal record or criminal complaint made by her. Could be she moved here to get away from the boy’s father. Could be a history of abuse, for all we know. There’s a reason she doesn’t want to talk about him.”
“If the baby daddy did it, why wouldn’t he kill her, then?” Stokes questioned.
“It would be worse punishment to kill my child and leave me alive with the knowledge that it was somehow my fault,” Annie offered.
Nick nodded. “That’s a thread worth pulling. Eliminate a child support payment and have the added bonus of continuing to terrorize the ex.”
“But if I thought my ex did it,” Annie said, “I wouldn’t hesitate to give him up for it. She won’t even say his name.”
They fell silent as the food arrived. As he ate, Nick’s attention flicked back to the television, where Dutrow’s press conference was being replayed for the first of what would be many times in the coming days. Everyone in the parish would be made to feel as if KJ Gauthier had lived next door, the boy who might have grown up to cut their grass or deliver their newspaper.
Dutrow at his podium pointed to a reporter in the crowd, and a faceless voice asked, “Who will be heading up this investigation, Sheriff?”
“Detective Nick Fourcade will be the lead investigator on this case.”
“He’s heading the investigation on the Theriot sexual assault case as well,” the reporter stated. “Is there any reason to believe the two cases might be related?”
Dutrow frowned. “One is a sexual assault on a girl; the other is the murder of a small boy. There’s no correlation between the two.”
“Two cases perpetrated against children. Two instances of an assailant gaining entry to a home—”
“There is no connection between the two that we know of at this time,” Dutrow said curtly.
Another voice came from the other side of the podium. “Has there been any progress in the Theriot case?”
“I’m not here to comment on that case,” Dutrow said. “The investigation is ongoing. We’re here this morning to focus on a murder perpetrated last night. It’s vital that anyone having any information relating to this case contact us immediately.”
“Will Detective Fourcade be available for comment?”
“No, he will not. His attention is focused on investigating the crime. Direct your questions and comments to me.”
“Will you be directly involved in the investigation, Sheriff? You have a reputation for being very hands-on.”
Dutrow pulled one of his authoritarian faces and looked straight at the camera. “Rest assured, I will have my finger on the pulse of this investigation every step of the way!”
Somewhere in the background, applause broke out. Probably Dutrow’s office staff, Nick thought cynically. It wouldn’t have been the first time his secretary and chief deputy had been pressed into service as acolytes.
Stokes made a rude noise. “He can put some K-Y on that finger and stick it right up his ass.”
“Let’s be grateful he and the media can keep each other enthralled,” Annie said. “Maybe we can solve a crime while they’re busy gazing into each other’s eyes.”
“That sounds like a plan,” Nick said, pushing
back from the table. He could all but hear a stopwatch ticking off the seconds in his head. “Let’s get on it.”
THIRTEEN
I saw it on the news!” the office manager said with equal parts excitement and dismay. “I was in a resident’s living room—Alphonse LeComte—and he had the news on. The volume was just blaring loud—Alphonse is deaf as a post, bless his heart—and I was just about to hit the Mute button, and the sheriff came on and said her name, plain as anything: Genevieve Gauthier. He practically shouted it right in my face!”
Her name tag read MAVIS PARSONS in large block letters. She stood behind the counter in the administrative offices of the Evangeline Oaks Center for Assisted Living. With coiffed blond hair and retro cat-eye glasses, she might have come from a bygone era, though Annie put her in her mid-to-late thirties at most.
“I couldn’t believe it!” the woman went on. “I mean, how many times do you hear the name of someone you know on television?” she asked, without pausing to hear an answer. “It just didn’t seem real. It didn’t seem real at all! Poor Genevieve! Is she going to be all right?”
“She’s injured,” Annie said, “but she’ll recover.”
“Thank goodness!” Mavis exclaimed, glancing up at the heavens, literally clutching the pearls at her throat. “But her poor little boy!”
Beside her, Annie could feel Nick’s impatience humming like an electrical field around him. He had no patience for nervous talkers. He wanted answers to his specific questions. For Nick, an interview was a psychological chess match, and he was always three moves ahead of his opponent, manipulating them into corners, tricking them into giving up information. Annie, on the other hand, was willing to let people ramble, willing to sift through a lot of nonsense while mining for a few gold nuggets of truth they might not otherwise have gotten. The contrast made them an excellent team.