flailing limbs.
I want to help Angie, but instead I sit down hard on the love seat.
It’s me. The blood has run down my front and begun soaking my crotch. The gun explodes again, and somebody shrieks, but the women keep fighting.
I can see my purse on the floor, but I can’t bend to reach it.
Stacey Lorio is sitting on Angie’s chest now, screaming at her to stop fighting, but Angie keeps flailing like a crazed little girl. With a loud curse, Lorio turns the gun in her hand and smacks Angie across the face with its butt.
Angie Pitre stops fighting.
Stacey is climbing off her when Sean’s hand rises from the floor and grips her elbow. He must be only half- conscious, because Lorio laughs and shucks his grip as easily as the hand of a little boy. Walking with calm assurance, she lifts the other cushion off the couch and lays it over Sean’s face.
I look down at my purse, willing myself to bend at the waist.
Stacey presses the barrel of Sean’s gun over the cushion, right about where Sean’s forehead would be, and fires.
As I scream in rage, a tiny hole appears between Stacey’s breasts. It looks almost painted on, but within seconds she is sucking for air as though steel bands have been locked around her chest. Sean’s featherweight Smith amp; Wesson is shaking in my hand.
Stacey opens her mouth to speak, but a geyser of blood erupts from her throat.
Angie screams.
Stacey knees buckle, and she falls into a kneeling position beside Sean. She looks down at him, raises the gun over the cushion, then keeps raising it, trying to bring it to bear on me.
I shoot her in the face, blowing a fine red mist into the air behind her.
As Stacey Lorio falls, all I can think of is the terrible irony that it was my grandfather who taught me how to shoot a handgun.
Then everything goes black.
Chapter 66
I spent much of the week after I was shot going to funerals. Two were expected, one was not. Two were postponed until I was discharged from Tulane University Hospital, and thanks to Stacey Lorio, I had to ride in a wheelchair to all of them. The bullet she fired from Sean’s gun tore through my stomach and lodged in a muscle in my back. I lost a lot of blood and also my spleen.
But I didn’t lose my baby.
Sean nearly drowned in his own blood. His head had been turned sideways beneath the couch cushion when Lorio fired, so instead of drilling through his forehead-as she had intended for it to do-the bullet punched through his right cheek a couple of inches anterior to his ear. It smashed five teeth, shattered his hard palate, and pulped part of his maxillary sinuses. Sean owes his life to Angie Pitre, who, instead of fleeing the scene, called 911 and stayed with us until para-medics and police arrived.
Stacey Lorio died instantly from my second bullet. I feel a deep sadness at the childhood trauma that created the hate-filled adult she had become, but I feel no guilt over killing her. She meant to murder both Sean and me in cold blood. Sean blamed himself for not cracking Lorio’s “rock solid” alibis for the murders, but no one else had either. It turned out that her ex-husband was a drug addict. Because Stacey kept him supplied with pills from the clinic where she worked, he would have given her alibis for a dozen more murders and sworn to them all under oath. Lorio’s other alibis had been provided by two women later identified as members of Group X. With hindsight all seems obvious.
Special Agent Kaiser spent a lot of time in my hospital room. The doctors tried to keep him out, but Kaiser can be pretty pushy when he wants to be. He demanded to know every detail of what had happened to me during the case, and of how I had solved the riddle of who was doing the killing. He was obsessed with determining once and for all whether the six murders in New Orleans had any connection to the events in Natchez and on DeSalle Island. Given the link between Ann and Dr. Malik-and in a way, Malik and me-it seemed inconceivable that they were not causally related. But they weren’t. Not really.
Dr. Hannah Goldman put it best when she dropped by to see me and found Kaiser at my bedside. She patiently laid out the connections by drawing a line diagram on the back of a hospital cafeteria menu. The primary link between Natchez and New Orleans was sexual abuse. Nathan Malik first noticed me in Jackson, Mississippi, because I was sleeping with a man twenty-five years my senior. That relationship-a symptom of my childhood abuse-also resulted in my being expelled from medical school, which led me into dentistry and, ultimately, into forensic odontology. Malik’s childhood abuse led him slowly but surely into work with sexual abuse victims. He became the natural end point of my aunt Ann’s quest to find a therapist who could control the terrible fallout of
“The simple answer,” Dr. Goldman concluded, “is that sick people attract other sick people. Psychologically speaking, of course.”
According to Hannah, though, my recent wave of nightmares about my grandfather and the truck had nothing to do with the murders in New Orleans. Those, she insisted, were the result of my pregnancy. The moment my brain knew that I was going to have a child, my subconscious realized that to protect my baby I needed to remember my childhood abuse. “Evolution at work,” Hannah said. “Carrying on the species is the highest priority of any organism. Your brain decided that protecting your child was more important than protecting you from the trauma of your own past. Thus, the flood of nightmares and flashbacks. You were going to remember what your grandfather did to you whether anyone got killed here in New Orleans or not. Take my word for that.”
But not even Hannah could explain what it was about the murder scenes that had clued me in on the true nature of the crimes. Like the FBI, I had been presented with classic evidence of a male sexual predator at work, and I had looked at similar scenes many times before. So what caused my panic attacks? What told me that I was looking at violence that was somehow related to sexual abuse similar to my own? Hannah thought it might have been the sight of naked old men. But in the end, I decided it was the smallest of clues. My first attack happened at the murder scene of the third victim. Eleven days before, at the home of the second victim-Andrus Riviere-I had seen a little girl who stuck in my mind. Her grandfather had just died violently, yet she seemed almost wild with joyous energy. She was racing around the house as if her birthday party were about to start. And knowing what I know now, I believe that it was. Andrus Riviere’s murder had released that little girl from a living hell. And something about her face-something in her too-wise eyes, I think now-sent me a message without my knowing it. As Pearlie had known subconsciously about Ann’s abuse when she was a child, I knew subconsciously that something was wrong in the Riviere house. Something that death had remedied.
Kaiser stunned me by telling me that Dr. Malik had willed all the videotapes and other raw materials for his documentary film project to me. These included his patient records, which were found in Biloxi, Mississippi, cached in the home of my aunt’s third husband. As soon as these materials are released from the NOPD evidence room, they will be delivered to me. At some point I intend to review them all and begin working to finish Malik’s film. I will include no footage of the murders, but I will do all I can to explain their motivation.
