The Boy

by Tami Hoag

  And then she was gone. And he wasn’t sure she’d ever been there at all.

  THIRTY-NINE

  With the reporters’ attentions divided with the need to cover the search for Nora Florette, Nick expected the number of them hanging around the hospital entrance to have dwindled considerably, if not vanished altogether. Genevieve Gauthier was yesterday’s news. A possible child abduction had a much greater sense of urgency about it. There was a chance the child was still alive, that terrible things might have been happening to her in real time, and she could yet be found alive and returned to her family. KJ Gauthier was dead on a slab.

  But as he drove past the statue of Mary, he could see reporters and photographers and videographers lying in wait near the main entrance, at least as many as the night before. News of Genevieve’s pending release had leaked.

  He swore under his breath as he parked the Jeep. He could have—probably should have—parked around the back and gone in through a service entrance. But he had a perverse need to hear what they might shout at him today. Better to know than not know.

  He kept his head up and his mouth shut as he walked toward the main entrance.

  “Detective Fourcade!”

  “Detective Fourcade!”

  “Is Sheriff Dutrow keeping you on the case?”

  “What happened to Bobby Theriot?”

  “Is it true Genevieve Gauthier killed her own baby?”

  Who had leaked that information? Who else knew? Dixon, himself, Annie, Stokes, Dutrow . . . Anyone from Genevieve’s past life. Genevieve’s court records might have been sealed, but the story would live on forever in news databases and the memories of people who had known at the time.

  “Is Genevieve a suspect in her son’s murder?”

  “What was the raid on her house last night?”

  “Is there any evidence connecting the missing babysitter to the murder?”

  “Genevieve is being released today. Where will she go?”

  “Will she be arrested for her son’s murder?”

  “Is she the only suspect in the murder?”

  A pair of uniformed deputies stood at the hospital entrance to prevent the mob from following him inside. He passed them without a word, his brain busy prioritizing the questions and the choreography of the interview. He would let Annie ask her questions first, easier, gentler questions. There was no way to soften Why did you kill your baby? Chances were good he would lose what trust he had built with her as soon as the question was asked.

  Annie was waiting for him in the second-floor conference room, sitting at the table with a bag from Po’ Richard’s and a fat lip.

  Instantly, his blood pressure jumped to the red zone. “What the hell?!”

  “I’m fine,” she said. “Don’t freak out.”

  “I’m not freaking out! Who did this to you? I’ll beat his ass!”

  “That’s calm and reasonable.”

  He caught her chin gently in his hand and turned her face this way and that. The swelling went up the side of her delicate upturned nose and halfway across her cheek. The first faint shades of a black eye had begun to rise beneath the skin.

  “Who did this?” he demanded.

  “Dutrow’s fiancée, Sharon Spicer.”

  “Mon Dieu! I thought you said she was a proper lady!”

  “Even ladies have their limits. I went back to her house this morning, hoping I might get her to talk.”

  “She struck you?”

  “I backed her into a corner, psychologically speaking,” she said. “She lost it, and she lashed out, and she caught me.”

  Nick scowled, gently pressing his thumb to the swollen flesh of her cheek. “You should get an X-ray.”

  “I’m fine,” Annie insisted. “She’s a PTA mom, not Mike Tyson.”

  “Mon Dieu . . . ,” Nick muttered again. “And you were worried about her being abused.”

  “She is abused,” Annie said. “Please sit down. I brought you a sandwich.”

  “I can’t eat now,” he said, though he obliged her in pulling out a chair and sitting close enough that he could touch her. She turned her hand over on the tabletop and twined her fingers with his.

  “Her left arm is messed up enough that she isn’t using it,” she said. “Like maybe somebody wrenched it good and hard. And she wouldn’t let me see her son at all. She said he was sleeping in because he has a bad stomach. For all I know, the kid is dead. And all this is courtesy of our boss.”

  “She won’t file a complaint?” Nick asked.

  “She won’t even admit it’s him that hurt her. She’s got too much riding on her fiancé being a pillar of the community. If he’s not that, she loses everything.”

  “There’s not much you can do, then. You can’t prove she’s a victim, and you can’t prove he’s victimizing her or the boy. People have to want help.”

  “If I could get the son alone,” she said, “I think I could get him to talk to me.”

  “You want to put a child in that position?” Nick asked. “Ask him to tell you his mother’s deepest secret, the thing that makes them both so ashamed they would rather live with the consequences of their silence?”

  “He might welcome the chance.”

  “Or fear it.”

  “I can’t let it go, Nick,” Annie said. “I can’t know he’s an abuser and just turn a blind eye. But if he catches me talking to Sharon, he’ll fire me so fast my head will spin. And what will he do to her?”

  “Then there’s naught to do but wait. You didn’t haul her in for assault. You let her know she can trust you. Give her time.”

  “I hope we have time. The press is asking for your head, if you hadn’t heard. Dutrow might just be all too happy to give it to them.”

  Nick pushed to his feet and drew her up with him. “Then let’s go do our jobs while it’s still on my shoulders.”

  * * *

  * * *

  GENEVIEVE WAS SITTING on a chair by the window as they walked into her room, the sunlight casting an angelic glow around her. From this angle, she was beautiful, her profile delicate, her hair a soft cloud of dark waves. Then she turned to face them like something from a horror movie, her left eye still nearly swollen shut, the flesh around it the color of a ripe plum.

  “They’re down there because of me, aren’t they?” she said, turning and looking out the window again.

  “The reporters?” Annie asked. “Yes. They’re here because of you.”

  A wry smile turned the corner of her mouth. “I always wanted to be famous. This wasn’t quite what I had in mind.”

  Slowly, she rose from the chair, adjusting her hospital gown with her free hand as if it was a party dress. Nick moved to help her back to her bed, and she took his arm and gazed up at him like he was her date for the prom.

  “They tell me I’m being released today,” she said. “Released to where? I can’t go back to that house.”

  “No,” Annie said, pulling back the blanket and smoothing the wrinkled sheets, “you don’t have to go back there ever again.”

  “The house is still a crime scene,” Nick said, steadying her as she got back into bed. “We’ve arranged for you to go to a women’s shelter here in town—unless you have friends you can stay with.”

  “I don’t have any friends.”

  “That’s not true, Genevieve,” Annie said. “I spoke to Jaime Blynn this morning—KJ’s teacher. She wants you to know there’s a GoFundMe page up online for you and that people have already donated about twelve hundred dollars to help you cover your medical bills and funeral expenses.”

  “What? For me?” Genevieve said. She looked almost suspicious, as if she was waiting for a bad punch line. “People are doing that for me?”

  “Yep. You have friends you don’t even know.”

  “I don’t know what to say,” she
admitted. “No one has ever done anything for me before.”

  Three days before, she had been a drug-dabbling single mother of questionable background, behind on her rent, and desperate enough to have seduced her married boss. Today she was “famous” with the sympathy of a community she didn’t know pouring into a GoFundMe account. All because someone had murdered her child.

  “Genevieve,” Nick said quietly, “we have a few more questions we have to ask you for the investigation.”

  “Do you have any suspects yet?” she asked, looking from Nick to Annie and back.

  “None that stand out,” Nick said. He glanced at Annie. “Detective Broussard?”

  “Genevieve,” Annie began, “Nora Florette has gone missing. I understand she wasn’t at the Florette house when you picked KJ up the other night. Is that true?”

  “No, she wasn’t there. I called Jojean and complained. I pay Nora to watch my son. She should be there with him.”

  “Is that something that happened a lot? Nora just dumping KJ at the house and not staying there with him?”

  “It happened a few times. She’s not a very responsible girl.”

  “But you kept her for your babysitter anyway?”

  “It’s not easy to find a babysitter. I don’t know anybody here, and I can’t afford to pay much, and the Florettes live right on my way home.”

  “What did Jojean say when you called her to complain?”

  “She said what was the big deal, anyway? There are always people at her house. Her sisters or her cousins or nieces or I don’t know who all. And there are often younger children there for KJ to play with. It’s kind of a crazy place, to be honest. But it was the best I could do. Do you have children, Detective?”

  “I have a son,” Annie answered, as if they hadn’t already had this conversation the day before. “He’s five.”

  “Are you married?”

  “I am.”

  “I wanted KJ to have a father,” Genevieve confessed. “But there aren’t many men interested in having another man’s child.”

  “I’m sure it’s tough to be a single mom,” Annie said. “You work and you come home and work some more. Not much time for yourself.”

  Genevieve laughed without humor. Tears rose in her eyes.

  “Lonely, I expect,” Annie murmured.

  She sniffed and nodded, visibly fighting the need to cry.

  “Genevieve,” Nick said, “you told us last night that KJ was agitated when you picked him up, that he wouldn’t settle down. Do you know what that was about?”

  “No. He gets overstimulated. He gets angry,” she said, as if her son were still alive. “He gets afraid of all the emotions. There’s no consoling him. He just kept running and running and chanting the same thing over and over.”

  “Chanting what?”

  “‘I won’t tell, I won’t tell, I won’t tell.’”

  A chill washed over Annie, but Genevieve seemed unfazed.

  “The other kids get him wound up, and he just goes on and on,” she said. “I know I need to have him tested, to take him to a doctor, but I just can’t afford it. Everything costs money, and I just don’t have it.”

  “Who was at the Florette house that night?” Annie asked.

  “An old man—I think he’s Jojean’s grandfather or Duane’s grandfather. I’m not sure. He’s senile. He just sits in the recliner and watches TV. And the pregnant sister—Darla—and her three-year-old. And Dean. Dean was there,” she said with a note of frustration. “I don’t like that boy. He’s rough, and he uses bad language. KJ always comes home upset if Dean was there.”

  “Did Dean ever hurt him?” Annie asked, her heart beating a little too hard at the thought. Dean was a bully. He had beat up Cameron Spicer, tried to molest Lola Troiano . . .

  Genevieve shook her head, but her expression was unconvincing. “Not that I know of, but I don’t know if KJ would have told me. Not if he was afraid.”

  “I won’t tell. I won’t tell. I won’t tell . . .”

  The words pulsed in Annie’s head.

  “All this fuss for Dead Nora.”

  It was entirely possible Dean Florette could have done something to his sister, she knew. He was an angry boy with impulse-control issues. He had a track record of being aggressive and sexually inappropriate with girls. He was learning about relationships from an angry mother and an absent father and a stash of porn magazines.

  It was entirely possible that he could have hurt Nora and sworn KJ Gauthier to secrecy. But if Dean had done something to Nora, then where was she? Was this going to be one of those terrible tragic stories where the dead girl was found stuffed under a bed or under the house? If that was the case, they should have found her the night before, when they had searched the house. If she was anywhere on the property, the search dogs would already have found her today.

  Nick had moved on to his questions, Annie realized, as she brought herself back into the moment.

  “I don’t want to talk about that,” Genevieve was saying.

  “I’m sure you don’t,” Nick said quietly. “But I have to ask the question nevertheless. You went to jail for killing a baby when you were fourteen. I can’t pretend that didn’t happen.”

  “I didn’t kill her!” she insisted, growing more agitated. “I didn’t kill her. She just died. It wasn’t my fault!”

  “The court found otherwise. You went to jail.”

  “Everyone was against me!” she cried, sounding fourteen all over again, Annie thought. Life wasn’t fair. Everyone was against her.

  “Even your own mother?” Nick asked.

  “Her most of all! She hated me for getting pregnant and having the baby and keeping it.”

  “That had to be a lot of pressure for a young girl.” He kept his voice low and calm and even, never accusatory, never adversarial. “You were barely more than a child yourself. Suddenly you had a baby to care for, and everybody mad at you, everybody against you. Babies cry, they’re demanding, you can’t get any sleep. That had to be overwhelming.”

  Genevieve was crying now. Annie wanted to leave the room. There was no one better at this than her husband. He could find those hairline cracks in a subject’s psyche and exert just enough pressure. It wasn’t a skill Annie particularly wanted to have. As necessary as it was, she didn’t always have the stomach for it.

  “How many babies had you ever held?” Nick asked softly. “How could you know what to do? Nobody wanted to help you. And that baby didn’t know not to cry. That’s all a baby knows to do—cry or not cry. She’s hungry, she cries. She’s wet, she cries. Her belly hurts, she cries. She can’t sleep, she cries. She wants to be held, she cries. It’s always something. Every minute of every day . . .”

  Genevieve was reliving every one of those moments, Annie could see, remembering the stress, the frustration, the terrifying uncertainty of being a first-time parent. And Genevieve had been just a girl herself. Just two years older than Lola Troiano.

  “You lost your patience,” Nick pressed on. “You couldn’t take it. You didn’t mean to hurt her. You just wanted it to stop.”

  “I didn’t kill my baby!” she insisted.

  “The evidence suggested otherwise. The coroner ruled her death a homicide.”

  “I didn’t kill her!” she said, sobbing. “She just died! I didn’t know what to do. I was so scared! I just buried her. I didn’t know what else to do!”

  “It’s all right, Genevieve,” Nick murmured. “You didn’t know what else to do. You were tired, frustrated, at the end of your rope. You just lashed out. You had that thought creep into your mind—how much easier life would be without that crying child . . .”

  Genevieve’s eyes widened in realization and horror. “Oh, my God! You think I killed KJ! You think I did that to him—stabbed him over and over—”

  “I didn’t say
that, Genevieve,” he said quietly.

  “I couldn’t do that!” she cried. “How could you think I could do that?”

  “No one would blame you for getting frustrated, Genevieve. He was a handful. You were all alone. He was all wound up, running around, saying that thing over and over until you wanted to scream, you wanted to shake him—”

  “Stop it!” she shouted, striking out at him with her good hand, balled into a fist. “Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!”

  “Nick . . . ,” Annie said, giving him a warning look. “C’est assez.”

  “C’est tout,” he murmured, and heaved a sigh.

  Genevieve pressed her hand across her mouth and squeezed her eyes shut, trying to contain her emotions. Annie rested a hand on her shoulder in a small gesture of comfort.

  “I’m sorry, Genevieve,” Nick said. “I don’t do this to upset you. My only job here is to find the truth. That means I can’t be on one side or the other.

  “You’ve had a hard life, c’est vrai. That makes for hard questions. All you can do is answer them truthfully.

  “The truth will out,” he said. “It always does. We have to choose for ourselves which side of that we’re gonna be on, yeah?”

  She swiped at her tears and worked to calm herself. Annie handed her a tissue.

  “No one wants this to be harder for you than it has to be,” Annie assured her. “But your little boy is dead, Genevieve. People are going to have questions. People are going to make judgments. The press is already asking about the baby that died. You need to be prepared for that. For every person donating to your GoFundMe site, there will be someone else who wants to condemn you.”

  “We’ll try to protect you from as much of that as possible,” Nick said. “We’ll station a deputy outside the women’s shelter.”

  “Who will know I’m there?” she asked.

  “Us, and the people at the shelter,” Nick said. “We won’t release that information to the press, but that doesn’t mean they won’t get it. I don’t know how they found out about your juvenile record, but they did. It’s hard to keep a secret in a small town.