Mostly Murder (29 page)

“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.

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.” Dumbfounded, 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.”

“Yeah, I do remember that. They acted crazy about each other, and about us.”

“Sophie wanted to catch a fish, she loved to fish, so we walked up the bank a good ways from them. It was warm that day. I remember sweatin' and takin' off my jacket. I went into the woods to find some worms, and that's when this masked man got me and tied me up and put tape over my mouth.”

He paused there, and Claire gave him all the time he needed. But all her muscles were tight when she thought of the little children they had been back then. How much fun they'd all had together and how they'd all been devastated when Family Services people had taken her away. Gabe had yelled and cried and held on to the back of her shirt as they'd dragged her out of the house.

“He went out and got Sophie and tied her up, too. Then he walked down the path and shot Mama and Papa. Point blank.”

“You saw him do it?”

“Yeah. And I see it to this day. He shot Papa once and Mama twice and then he just walked back to us, like nothing had happened.”

Now the pain on his face was visible, and awful to behold. Claire began to have some misgivings about forcing him to tell it. “So you saw his face?”

“No, he put that Mardi Gras mask back on before he got to us, the kind that only covers the top half of your face. Decorated with sequins and red feathers. Looked like a snake. That's when he chloroformed us.”

Claire waited while he took a sip of water. “You don't have to relive this, Gabe. I know it's painful.”

“You don't know how bad I want to get that guy. I wanted a chance to kill him myself but didn't get it. Not yet, anyway.”

“Let me get him for you. I'm going to get him, Gabe. I'll never stop until I do, especially now.”

“I hope you do, and I hope you kill him.”

“Clyde said he beat you.”

“Yeah, he beat me. He liked it. After he got us to his hellhole, he kept us drugged and tied up down in a cellar. But he had this obstacle course thing upstairs, that and a voodoo altar he liked to scare us with. He kept calling it his mini maze of terror. And that's what it was, Annie, that's exactly what it was. It was designed to scare the hell out of us.”

“And you don't know where it was?”

“Out on the bayous somewhere. I think there was a river nearby or some kind of water. We could hear the rushing of the current sometimes when it was really quiet. And he got us out there by boat; I remember that because I woke up a little bit while we were still lying in the bottom of that boat. I remember that he had a flashlight and he carried us up some steps to a porch and then inside a dark house.” He stopped, sighed. “Believe me, I've looked for the place for years. It's all pretty fuzzy, because I only saw it at night, but it was an old house, a big one, creaky and dark and damp and crawling with roaches and spiders. All the windows were boarded up, and he kept us locked up in some kind of cellar or root cellar, something like that. He made us take pills to keep us quiet.”

Gabe stared down at his hands, and Claire watched how his fingers were curling in until his nails bit into his palms. “He got off scaring us. Played all these frightening hide-and-seek games. He'd tell us to hide and maybe he'd let us go home, and then the first one of us he found, he'd take upstairs to what he called his playroom. It had lots of toys and an old four-poster bed. I guess he slept up there. It reeked of cigarette smoke, I remember that. That's where he usually beat me. He put up sheets of plastic on the floor and the wall to catch the blood.”

“Oh, my God, Gabe,” Claire got out somehow, but she felt nausea pushing its way up her throat at the depravity he'd suffered.

Gabe swallowed down some of his own horror. “He was as brutal as any man could ever be, Annie, an absolute monster. You wouldn't believe how cruel he was.”

Claire picked up his hand and held it. “We think he marks his victims with a tattoo. Do you remember anything about that?”

“Oh, yeah, that's very vivid because it scared us so much. He must've gagged us and tied us to chairs, because we already had the tats when we woke up the first time. He bragged about his artwork, told us he did it himself with his own personal tattoo machine.” He turned his wrist over for her to see. “I've still got it, here, on the inside of my wrist. Clyde told me that I'd had it done before the accident, and I didn't remember enough to know any better. I always wear my watch there or a wide leather bracelet to hide it. But I never got that tat taken off. It helps me keep my resolve to find him and kill him.”

Claire stared at his wrist. The same snakes and stars. “It's the same thing we found on Madonna and Wendy. He killed them both. Oh, God, Gabe, how many people has he killed and terrorized all these years?”

The muscles were moving under the skin of Gabe's jaw and she could actually hear his teeth grinding against each other. “He left me more memories on my back.”

“Rene said he whipped you.”

“That's right. I've got plenty of scars to prove it. They told me I got them in the wreck, that I was thrown out of the car onto shards of broken glass and concrete. I believed that for a long time, too.”

Gabe turned on his side and pulled apart the back of his hospital gown. Claire gasped, horrified. The scar tissue was raised and pale against his dark skin, some thin lines, other scars the size of a drinking straw. Dozens of them, made by a whip or belt, crisscrossing his back from neck to waist. He had been beaten mercilessly, all right.

“Oh, Gabe, how could anybody do that to a child?”

Gabe lay back again. “He hurt Sophie, too. He chained me up in the cellar and I had to listen to her screaming from upstairs, calling for me to come help her. But he didn't hurt her as bad as he hurt me, thank God. He didn't beat her. He seemed almost fond of her.”

Claire remembered Gabe's beautiful little sister with her fine wheat-blond hair and wide and trusting dark eyes. She had still been so little when Claire had lived there. They had shared a room, filled with Barbie dolls and books and jump ropes and a giant dollhouse that Bobby Lefevres had built for Sophie.

“Every single day I look at those scars in the mirror, and I swear I'll find that devil and choke the life out of him with my bare hands.”

“Jack Holliday thinks that the man who did that to you and Sophie is the same man who murdered his family out in Colorado. Do you think he could be right?”

Gabe merely shrugged. “Did he mark his sisters with tats?”

“They never found them. Like Sophie. They were just three years old on the night his mom and stepdad were killed in their bed. Jack never saw them again. He's been looking for them for years. He hired a private investigator to find them, and he traced them down here to Madonna, after he found out her parents had been shot in a similar double murder. That's when they discovered the tats on their wrists.”

“Well, he ought to stop looking for them. They're dead and gone a long time ago. He always kills the kids he takes. He told me that himself. That he was going to kill us and everybody else he put in his maze. The only reason I survived is because I didn't swallow that last sleeping pill and managed to pry a board off a cellar window and get both of us out.”

“Thank God, you made it out alive.”

“Sometimes I wonder about that. I couldn't rescue Sophie. I was weak from a beating and not strong enough to carry her out through the swamp. She was still drugged and couldn't keep up after a while, so I hid her, but I shouldn't have. I shouldn't've ever left Sophie out there alone, but when I got a chance to break free, I thought I could get help and get back before he found her. I don't remember much about what happened after that. I vaguely remember wading through the swamp and fighting through undergrowth, trying to find a way out, but I guess I lost consciousness. I don't remember being found or being in the hospital, either.”