Born to Die - Lisa Jackson [169]
“It’s over!” she whispered. “Our life, the one we knew is over.”
Gerald cleared his throat and kept his tense gaze toward Pescoli and Alvarez. “What can I do for you, detectives?” he asked, leaning forward, hands clasped between his knees.
Alvarez took the lead, asking him a series of questions. Gerald Johnson swore he’d never met the victims, hadn’t known they could be sired by him, hadn’t even guessed it until Acacia had shown up earlier in the day. He had no idea if any of them had any enemies, but he was certain from his children’s reaction earlier that they were as surprised as he.
Pescoli was keeping to herself, observing, though more than once, Alvarez caught her partner studying the screen that had appeared when the television clicked off. Maybe it was her way of calming her aggression, but just listening, not interacting was certainly out of character for her.
Alvarez took another quick look at the TV screen. Nothing out of the ordinary. The current photo was of a family portrait taken years before, with Gerald and Noreen twenty-five or thirty years younger, their children spread around them in matching outfits, the boys in white shirts, navy vests, and khaki slacks; the three girls in red dresses. Someone had added their names to the digital picture.
“We have nothing to tell you,” Noreen insisted, and sent her husband a silent message. She tried, once again, to call one of her children to no avail. “Where are they?” she whispered and closed her eyes. “Don’t they know that we need them?”
Pescoli said, “You had seven children?”
“I had seven,” Noreen clarified, sniffing angrily. “Gerald obviously had a few more.”
“What happened to your daughters? Agatha and Kathleen?” Pescoli asked.
“I’d rather not talk about it.” Noreen’s voice was a whisper. She closed her eyes, her entire face tensed as from pain.
“Agatha was our late in life baby,” Gerald said. “There were complications with the birth and we knew early on that there were issues. She would be mentally ... challenged. But she was . . .”
“An angel.” Noreen glared at Pescoli. “I don’t see what this has to do with anything.”
“How did she die?” Pescoli asked.
Noreen looked like she didn’t want to respond, but then reluctantly said, “It was an accident. I’d run to the store, hadn’t been gone half an hour. Clarissa, she’s the oldest, was supposed to be watching the younger ones . . .” She sighed and looked up, toward the window facing the front of the house, but Alvarez knew she wasn’t seeing the snow falling outside. Her sight was turned inside herself, to a time she would clearly rather forget. “As I understand it, the boys were playing like they do—did—they’ve always been active. Aggie . . . she was supposed to be asleep. Taking her nap . . .” Noreen blinked and shook her head, dispelling the image running through her brain. “Oh, God, I can’t do this.”
Gerald took up the narrative. “We don’t know exactly what happened, but, as Noreen said, the boys were roughhousing, they had a wooden sword and were running up and down the stairs. Aggie woke up, walked out of her room with her blanket and one of the twins—”
“Cam,” Noreen supplied miserably.
“Bumped into her.” A muscle in Gerald’s jaw worked. “She got tangled in her blanket and ... she fell down the stairs. It was an accident.”
Alvarez met Pescoli’s gaze.
It was an accident. Like Shelly Bonaventure accidently took an overdose? Like Jocelyn Wallis accidentally fell to her death over a railing? Like Elle Alexander accidentally slid off the road into the river in her minivan? Or like Karalee Rierson accidentally skied into a tree?
Frightened out of her mind for Eli, Kacey started for the barn.
She’d taken three steps through the knee-high snow, around the side of the garage, nearly at the gate separating the backyard from the barnyard, when she saw movement out of the corner of her eye.
Her heart squeezed.
Eli?
She turned.
No, much too tall, she realized as the dark figure of a man began to take shape, a man emerging from the back porch.
Trace?
Thank