The Bourbon Street Ripper (Sins of the Father, Book 1) (44 page)

Sam quickly turned to glare at Rodger, and for a moment, her countenance was that of a predator, a killer’s look, that same inhuman look as before. Rodger was taken aback by the sudden glare and stepped back.
What the hell? That ain’t the Sam I know.

Lowering her head, Sam took a deep breath, then looked back up. All was suddenly normal with her expression. Turning to Fat Willie, she asked, “How can you know anything about my mother? She died soon after I was born. Childbirth complications. You never knew her. She wouldn’t associate with swine like you.”

Fat Willie gave a short laugh and said, “Is that what they told you, sweetie pie, that your mother died of complications from childbirth? That’s funny. Real funny.”

As Sam stared again at Fat Willie, Rodger spoke up, wanting to preserve the peace, as well as Sam’s dignity. “Mary Castille has nothing to do with the questions we’re asking you, Willie.”

Even though Sam again stared at him, Rodger ignored her and continued, saying, “We’ll get your letter from the Nite Priory. Now answer this, if you were the copycat killer, how would you get your victims to their point of execution?”

Fat Willie crossed his hands over his chest, his fat face crinkling up in what looked like deep thought. “Honestly, Detective, I’d lure them there. People are a lot more street-savvy nowadays, so unless you have a series of vacant alleyways to drag your victims along, you need them to come to you. You’d have to convince them to meet you, alone, at a certain time of night.”

For the first time since the interview, Fat Willie seemed serious. He continued, “Once she arrived, I’d drug her, probably with chloroform, but maybe with something more potent. Then I could get her and my equipment set up for the party. When she woke up, she’d wish she hadn’t.”

Nodding, Rodger thought about the two victims, Virginia and Rebecca, as well as how Mad Monty mentioned that at least one of them had been contacted on a pay phone.

“Has your question been answered satisfactorily?” Sam asked Rodger.

Rodger came out of his thoughts and nodded his head.

Sam turned back to Willie and said, “Good. Now you will tell me what you know about my mother.”

The clanking of iron from the hallway signaled the return of Daigle and the prison guards. Fat Willie gave a nasty grin and shrugged, saying, “Them’s the breaks, sweetie pie. Maybe you need to look further into how your daddy met your mommy, and how your grandpappy was involved in all that.”

Sam glared at Fat Willie. Rodger starting getting nervous.

“You know what the worst part about all this is, sweetie pie?” said Fat Willie. “Ain’t no one been honest to you your whole life, girl. You need to question why the Ripper killed your daddy. You really need to question that.”

Just then, Rodger heard the sound of a door opening and closing loudly. Daigle and the guards came up from the hallway, unlocked the cell, and entered it.

“All right, Willie,” said Daigle as the guards helped Fat Willie to his feet. “That’s enough being a dick for one day. Back to your cell.”

As Fat Willie was ushered out of the cell, he turned his head back to the duo and said, “And sweetie pie, if you ever want some real lovin’, come see me. I bet my Boudin link could split you down the middle and soak up your sweet Burgundy. You’ll scream for me, won’t you, baby?” He accented the question by blowing a final lewd kiss.

Rodger felt a strong desire to punch Fat Willie square in the face. Fortunately, the convict was soon gone, and Rodger was left standing there with Sam, who looked both fatigued and disgusted.

As if handling a stick of dynamite, Rodger placed his hands on Sam’s shoulders and said, “Let’s get that note and then get back to your car. You want me to drive?”

“Yes, please,” Sam said from in between her teeth.

It took them only a few minutes to tell Daigle about the note. Rodger was exhausting the last of his favors with his friend, but soon had the note in his hands. Fat Willie had sealed it in a plastic bag. Rodger decided to wait until he got back to the precinct to open it.

Once on the road out of Angola, Sam reached into her glove compartment, took out a notebook and her silver pen, and started scribbling furiously. Rodger, who had one eye on the highway and one eye on Sam, watched her with increasing caution.

Soon Sam had scribbled so hard in her notebook that the pages started to tear. Her jaw was clenched and tears were forming in the corners of her eyes. She was whispering to herself in what Rodger recognized as Haitian Creole, and her eyes once again had that murderous, inhuman look.

“Whoa, whoa, calm down,” Rodger said, reaching over to touch Sam, only to have his hand slapped away. Hearing a truck’s horn, he looked forward again.

What Rodger saw scared the shit out of him.

While dealing with Sam, he had pulled into incoming traffic. An eighteen-wheeler was barreling down on them, the grill mere yards away from smashing them both to pieces. Rodger’s spine tingled as he felt his body unlock from the shock, a burst of adrenaline rushing through his system. His body snapped into action of its own accord, and with a sudden quick turn, Rodger pulled off the road onto the grass, narrowly missing a head-on collision.

It took Rodger a few moments to collect himself, and when he turned to say something to Sam, he saw that she was still scribbling hard, tears in her eyes caused by what he could only gather was anger.

“Sam,” Rodger called out. When he got no answer, he called out again. Then, reaching over, he grabbed her hands and made her stop writing. She looked up at him, her blond hair falling to either side of her face, her eyes filled with tears. Her jaw was tightly clenched and her ears were red.

“Dammit, Sam, we very nearly just died!” Rodger said as he looked down at the page she was writing on, half-torn with the strokes of her pen. He looked back at Sam. “Look, I know you’re upset and everything, but you have got to get it together. If you don’t get your shit together, people will think you’re a nutcase. And if they think that, then they’ll think you’re guilty. And once they think you’re guilty, that’s it—it doesn’t matter if you’re innocent or not. To them, you will always be guilty.”

As Rodger slowly took the pen out of Sam’s hands and the notebook from her lap, Sam looked down. To his surprise, Sam’s tears began to flow freely, and she sniffled several times. To Rodger, Sam looked like that ten-year-old girl who used to look up to him as an uncle—a girl who desperately needed someone to listen to her, to be there for her.

“Do you think I’m guilty?” Sam asked, her voice thick with tears.

Rodger shook his head and said, “No. No, not at all.”

“Do you think I’m a nutcase?” Sam asked, her voice quieter.

Again, Rodger shook his head. “No, I don’t think you’re crazy. I do, however, think you are suffering a lot right now. And that Fat Willie guy got to you.”

Leaning back, Rodger looked at the page Sam was furiously writing on. It was detailed notes of a scene where a character, Big Charlie, was killed in a horrible accident while in prison. All sorts of brainstormed ideas were there—falling and getting impaled on a metal pole, getting burned alive from an explosive furnace, even falling into a laundry press—and those were the less gruesome ones. Turning back to the previous page, Rodger saw a note saying:

“Fat Willie = Big Charlie”

“Okay… ” Rodger said, a touch of concern readily apparent in his voice, “Fat Willie really got to you.”

And then the notebook was gone from Rodger’s hands, Sam having snatched it back. Her expression was stern and hurt, and she held the notebook protectively to her chest. “I can’t kill him in real life, but I can kill him again and again in my stories.”

Rodger cracked a small smile and handed Sam her pen back. “It’s a good outlet, Sam. Therapeutic, right?”

With a sardonic chuckle, Sam put both back into her glove compartment. “Sorry about that outburst. It was that stuff about my mother. You have no idea how hard it was to get any information about her from Father. It was like he was hiding something. Grandfather, too. Grandfather would always say that I was the only important one.”

Sam turned to Rodger and, wiping her eyes, asked, “Did you know my mother?”

Rodger shook his head and said, “I wish I had known Mary Castille. She and Edward were married in a private ceremony at the Castille Estate. And just the Krewe of Comus was invited. Strange, I know. He never talked about her, and by the time you came along, I was told she had died in childbirth.

“I always wondered why Edward kept Mary a secret. Wouldn’t even tell me where he met her, only that she was a singer. I used to joke with him that she was a celebrity, just like I used to joke with him that you got all the traits from her side of the family, since he had dark hair and brown eyes. He never liked that joke. He always told me not to talk about shit I didn’t understand.”

Sam looked down at her lap and nodded, saying, “Thanks for telling me what you know.”

Soon, the two were on their way again, Rodger driving back toward the city of New Orleans. Looking at the clock in the dash, he noted to himself that they still had time before they reached the city. He had gotten so comfortable with this pseudo-closeness with Sam today that he had all but pushed the idea of the “important conversation” out of his mind. He knew, however, that until they actually talked about it, they couldn’t move past it.

“Hey, Sam, it’s going to be a few hours before we get back,” Rodger said, focusing on the road before him. “Anything else you want to talk about?”

“Let’s talk about my father and his death,” came Sam’s curt reply.

Rodger’s expression grew very serious. “All right, the hell with it,” was his decisive reply. He looked over at Sam. “But you go first, Sam. I don’t have the nerve.”

“Very well,” Sam quietly responded, then straightened up and began. “It’s really obvious that you have been avoiding talking to me for, well, close to twenty years. At first, I thought it was like Kent said, that you wanted to put the murders behind you.” Sam wasn’t looking at Rodger. Instead, she was looking outside as the scenery passed by.

“However, as time went on, and you still didn’t contact me, didn’t even drop me a line, it became obvious—painfully obvious—that you didn’t want to talk to me. Hell, you wanted nothing to do with me.”

The bitterness in Sam’s voice had finally started to come out, a strain in the back of her throat.

“You were there throughout all my childhood, Rodger. You’d come over to my father’s townhome for dinner almost every night. You’d sit for me when Father was busy with that Comus stuff. You’d take me to City Park and Pontchartrain Beach. Hell, until I was seven years old and Dad explained it to me, I thought you were my honest-to-goodness uncle. And then, my life falls to shit, everything I ever cared about is torn from me, and you… you… ” Sam quickly turned her head to look directly at Rodger. “You fucking abandoned me!”

Rodger, who had been choking up more and more as Sam talked, and using all of his concentration to avoid swerving off the road, found himself flinching at the end of Sam’s speech. His grizzled jaw was clenched, his old, tired eyes were tearing up, and it was all he could do to avoid letting them spill.

Rodger’s voice cracked, in spite of himself. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Sam. It was just, I… your father… I couldn’t face you.”

Sam’s voice had an incredulous tone. “You couldn’t face me? Rodger, no one blames you for my father’s death! Dad went to confront Grandfather alone. He made his choice, and—”

Rodger couldn’t take it anymore. The gnawing pain that had been eating away at his guts for twenty years became unbearable. A secret pain, one he had hidden from everyone, burst forth. “You don’t get it, Samantha! I’m the one who sent Edward to his death!”

Sam just stared at Rodger. The older man, unable to keep the tears from pouring down the side of his face, had enough mental acumen to pull off to the side of the road before getting into an accident. Once the car was stopped, Rodger rested his head on the steering wheel—partially because his head had never felt so heavy, and partially to hide the tears streaming down his cheeks.

For the first time in years, Rodger’s voice was shaking as he spoke. “The investigation really wore on us, Sam. It was like it consumed our lives. Your father and I. We couldn’t eat. We couldn’t sleep. All we could concentrate on was the evidence, those photos of the crime scenes. After a while, it started to get into our heads. Every time we closed our eyes, we’d see the victims, their faces, the agony, and what was left of their bodies. We became so engrossed in this nightmare that we started to lose track of everything around us.”

Shaking his head, rubbing his brow on the steering wheel, Rodger continued.

“When Aucoin found Maple and Dallas, though, Edward lost it. It was like someone set off the crazy bomb in his head. I had never seen him so angry. He came to me, babbling, saying he had figured it out. He knew who the Bourbon Street Ripper was—your grandfather. His father.”

Lifting up his head, Rodger stared straight ahead, seeing nothing before him but his own obscured vision. Like Sam, the floodgates of emotion, held back twenty years, had opened, and nothing would close those gates.

“No one wanted to believe that Dr. Castille was the Ripper. But your father was convinced. He begged me to go with him, to arrest Vincent. To kill him if necessary. He begged me, Sam! He goddamn begged me!”

Finally Rodger looked over at Sam, his face drenched in tears. Although he could barely focus, he saw that Sam’s face was covered in tears as well.

“I didn’t believe him, Sam! I was so exhausted, so wrapped up in my own bullshit that I told him I wouldn’t go in without proof. He went off by himself. Sam, your father never went to arrest a suspect without backup. But he went to the mansion that one time, alone, and… and… ”

“My grandfather murdered him,” Sam replied, her voice still choked with emotion.

Rodger said nothing at first. He wanted to tell Sam what Dr. Klein had revealed, but decided that this could only hurt the situation more than help it. To Rodger, letting Sam know she had witnessed that murder wasn’t just unnecessary, it was cruel.