Snakebit

by Linsey Lanier

  Her mind began to race. Was that why Dr. Boudreaux didn’t remember what happened that afternoon? Her hopes began rise again.

  Insanity plea.

  Miranda leaned over the arm of the chair. “Is there a way to prove someone has it? Or might have?”

  “Hypnotherapy is one way. But it takes time.”

  Time was what they didn’t have. “You’ve done that, haven’t you? Hypnosis?”

  “I treat some patients through hypnosis, yes.”

  This could be it. A way to save Parker’s childhood friend and find out what really happened that night.

  She grinned at the doctor. “What are you doing this afternoon?”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  For the third time that week, once again Miranda raced down I-75 to the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification State Prison with Parker, this time with Dr. Wingate in tow, riding along in Estavez’s car.

  It was early afternoon when they marched through the maze of concrete hallways and buzzing iron doors, this time accompanied by a unit manager and a staff psychologist. As they traversed the passageways, Dr. Wingate explained to the officials what she wanted to do and what results might be expected. Repeating what he’d told them over the phone, Estavez said he was working on getting a court order for another psych eval, but time was short.

  Instead of the interview room, they were ushered into a dark narrow chamber with a see-through window. Through it, they could view a larger room below containing the typical metal prison table and several hard-looking stainless steel chairs.

  The unit manager turned to them, arms folded across a broad, uniformed chest. “As I said, this is highly irregular.”

  “And so are my client’s circumstances.”

  He held up a hand. “So you’ve said several times, Mr. Estavez.”

  The prison psychologist scratched his chin. “It is an interesting theory. My advice is to proceed.”

  The unit manager’s loud huff told Miranda he didn’t agree, but he gave in anyway. “I can give you half an hour.”

  “Forty-five minutes,” Dr. Wingate said. “I’ll need at least that much time to ensure Dr. Boudreaux is relaxed enough.”

  He stared down at his shoes and shook his head. “All right. Forty-five. But if nothing comes of this, I want you to sign a waiver taking all responsibility.”

  “We’d be happy to, Sergeant,” Parker said. “And thank you for your cooperation.”

  Giving Parker a dirty look, he and the psychologist led Dr. Wingate and Estavez out of the room, leaving him and Miranda alone for the moment.

  “This is an absolutely brilliant idea, Miranda,” Parker said in his low voice.

  So he’d told her on the phone when she’d called him from Dr. Wingate’s office. “We don’t know if it will work, yet. Dr. Wingate is going along with the theory, but she has her doubts about the condition.”

  He nodded. “As Antonio pointed out, under Title Sixteen, all we need is something to cast a doubt that Clarence was able to distinguish between right and wrong the day of Charmaine’s death. Dissociative identity disorder would certainly fall under that category. And so would dissociative amnesia.”

  All they had to do was wait and see what magic their therapist could perform.

  After what seemed like an eternity, through the window Miranda watched a guard lead Dr. Boudreaux into the room.

  He seemed smaller from this angle, shrunken, as if he were disappearing. The guard eased him into a seat while Estavez introduced Dr. Wingate and explained what they were about to do.

  His face registered the expected shock. “You think I have a mental disorder?”

  “The evidence indicates you may have suffered some type of amnesia,” Estavez said.

  “That’s ridiculous. I know what happened.”

  He thought he did.

  Dr. Wingate stepped forward. “What we’re asking, Doctor, is for permission to find out more of what’s in your subconscious about that day.”

  Estavez reached for his hand. “We simply want to do an examination to verify what happened. If we can find something I can base an appeal on, it will buy us more time. Possibly more than that.”

  The prisoner looked at his attorney with those helpless brown eyes. “What do you want me to do?”

  “I’d like you to let Dr. Wingate hypnotize you.”

  “Hypnotize me?” He shook his head. “I don’t know.”

  “It’s our only chance, Dr. Boudreaux,” Estavez told him flatly.

  Dr. Wingate added, “If you’re not willing to undergo the process it won’t work.”

  He stared down at the table.

  “While you’re under, you won’t be able to say or do anything you aren’t willing to,” Dr. Wingate assured him.

  It seemed to take another eternity for him to decide. But at last his chest heaved as he drew in a nervous breath. “All right. If it’s what my attorney advises me to do.”

  “That’s exactly what I advise you to do.”

  “Very well, then.” Through the speaker in the observation room, his voice seemed weak and far away.

  Dr. Wingate took charge, wasting no time. “Can I ask everyone to leave the room? And I’ll need a pillow.”

  The psychologist and unit manager didn’t like the request, but when Estavez gestured toward the door with a demanding look, they complied.

  A moment later someone fetched the requisite pillow and everyone filed out of the room.

  Dr. Wingate waited until they were gone. Then she dragged a chair over to the wall, sat the prisoner down in it and propped the pillow behind his head. “There. Try to make yourself as comfortable as you can.”

  “I’ll try.”

  She began to speak in a soft, gentle voice. “Now, Clarence. May I call you Clarence?”

  “Of course.”

  “I want you to close your eyes and relax.”

  He did so and let his head drop back.

  “Take a deep breath and let all your muscles go loose.”

  Even with the pillow, it was hard to do that in that stiff metal chair, but so far Boudreaux was going along with it.

  “Now, Clarence. I want you to imagine yourself going back in time. Back, back to when you were a little boy.”

  “What’s she doing?” Miranda whispered to Parker, as if they could hear her.

  “She’s trying to find the trauma that caused the disorder, if there is one.” Parker said.

  “Don’t we just want the real memory of what happened the day of Charmaine’s murder?”

  “That might be too traumatic. Or it might be too deeply buried. Finding the root cause will release the memory.”

  Or at least, they hoped it would.

  “Back, back in time,” Dr. Wingate murmured. “What do you see?”

  Dr. Boudreaux smiled. “My tree house.”

  “Where is that?”

  “In my backyard,” he said in a childish voice. “Wade and Jackson and I are forming a club. No one can get in without the password.”

  “What’s the password?”

  He giggled. “Thamnophis. It’s the genus for the garter snake. I thought of it.”

  Parker pressed a hand to his head. “I remember that now.”

  “No girls allowed,” the voice of young Dr. Boudreaux said.

  Miranda folded her arms. “Oh, yeah?”

  “We were boys.”

  “Yeah, you were.”

  “Are you happy, Clarence?” Dr. Wingate asked.

  “Oh, yes. Mama is making my favorite vegetable soup and Papa will be home from work soon.”

  “Are you afraid of anything? The dark? Small spaces?”

  “No.”

  “Did your parents ever punish you in a way that frightened you?”

  “No. They love me very much.”

  “All right. Relax. Let’s go back further. Breathe. Back, back.”

  Clarence made a gurgling sound.

  “How old are you now?”

  He held up a fore
finger.

  “One?”

  Smiling giddily, he nodded.

  “All right. I want to you think hard. Do you remember something bad happening to you?”

  He cocked his head and frowned. Then he wagged his head from side to side.

  “Did Mama or Papa ever hurt you?”

  He batted an awkward hand at her. “Non!”

  “Was that French?” Miranda whispered.

  “He has a Creole background. I did hear his father speak French to him occasionally.”

  Dr. Wingate straightened her shoulders and asked again. “Are you sure, Clarence? Were you ever very afraid?”

  He opened his eyes and blinked at her as if she were a mirage he couldn’t quite comprehend. He moved his head one way then the other, his face twisting. Finally, it contorted in a terrible expression and his mouth opened wide with a high-pitched scream.

  “What’s wrong, Clarence? What’s going on?”

  Clarence flailed his arms and howled. “Maman. Maman, ne part pas. Ne me quitte pas.”

  Miranda raked her brain from the time she spent in Paris. “Is he saying what I think he is?”

  Parker looked visibly shaken. “He said, ‘Mama, don’t leave me.’ His mother never left him. And she didn’t speak French.”

  Clarence let out another ear-splitting howl. “Ne me quitte pas, Maman. Ne prenez pas mon frère!”

  Miranda felt the shockwave shudder through her like an earthquake. “Parker. Did he say—?”

  Beside her Parker was as stunned as she was. “Yes. He said, ‘Do not take my brother’.”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Miranda paced back and forth between the glass-top table and the glass-top desk in Parker’s office. “How do we know he could even talk at one-year-old? And in French?”

  Parker sat behind his desk, intent on his computer screen. “Clarence was always highly intelligent. And his father was from New Orleans and spoke French.”

  After Dr. Wingate had brought Clarence out of the trance, calmed him down, and he’d been taken back to his cell, she’d given her opinion. It seemed Dr. Boudreaux had suffered a traumatic abandonment caused by his mother’s leaving him at a young age. Whether that incident was real or imagined, and if real, whether the separation had produced a case of dissociative identity disorder, dissociative amnesia, borderline personality disorder, or some other mental illness, she couldn’t determine. Not without a good deal more time with the patient.

  Which he didn’t have.

  Miranda paced over to the window and tapped her foot on the soft carpet. “And what he said. ‘Do not take my brother’? You said he was an only child.”

  Parker’s gaze didn’t leave his screen. “It’s what he told me. What I’ve always believed. Apparently what Clarence believed, as well. I had no idea Estelle was his father’s second wife.”

  “If we can confirm all that.”

  “I’m just about to.”

  She stared at him. “What are you saying?”

  “I’ll be able to tell you in a moment.” Furiously he tapped the keys on his computer. He’d been working for an hour and a half, ever since they’d gotten back from the prison, trying to dig up all he could on Dr. Clarence Boudreaux’s mysterious past.

  Suddenly he stopped and sat straight up. “Dear Lord.”

  “What is it?” Miranda hurried around his desk to peer at his screen.

  He’d pulled up several old legal documents from Louisiana’s databases, displaying each in separate windows. As she read through them as fast as she could, she felt grateful the Parker Agency search programs could access data otherwise prohibited to the general public.

  The first document was a marriage certificate.

  Clarence’s father, Armand Boudreaux, had been married to a woman named Evangeline Rossette about a year before Clarence was born. She had been just nineteen at the time. An employment record from Armand told her the couple had lived in the French Quarter of New Orleans. Another window displayed a divorce decree with a date two years and some months after the marriage. Apparently they separated when Clarence was about one year old.

  “Work records for Armand indicate he took Clarence and came to Atlanta shortly after the divorce. I don’t know who cared for the boy while Armand worked his sanitation job before he met and married Estelle a year later. Clarence attended public school before he got the special scholarship to Westminster.”

  She could tell by his tone Parker was angry with himself for not checking all this out sooner. But how could he have known? “Does Armand have any living relatives?”

  “None that I can find. But I did find these. They were trickier to access.” Parker pulled up a document from Vital Records Office of Louisiana—Clarence’s birth certificate.

  Miranda read the information.

  Clarence had been born in May forty-three years ago at Tulane Medical Center at two-twenty-five in the afternoon—to Evangeline Rossette Boudreaux.

  “And then this one.”

  Miranda had to hold onto Parker’s shoulder to steady herself as she stared at it.

  Another baby had been born on the same date in the same hospital at two-twenty-six in the afternoon. A boy named Jean-Baptiste. And his mother was also Evangeline Rossette Boudreaux.

  Miranda drew in air. “A monozygotic twin.”

  “So it would seem.”

  Feeling as if the room were spinning she made her way around the desk and sank into a guest chair. Her mind raced. Could it be possible? Did Clarence Boudreaux have a brother he was torn away from at one year old? Was that the experience he’d relived under hypnosis?

  Her mind began to clear as cynicism returned. “The documents don’t say if the twins were identical.”

  “No, they don’t.”

  “Even if Clarence does have an identical twin, it still doesn’t prove anything. Clarence didn’t even remember he had a brother before today. How do we know his brother knows about him?”

  “We can’t be sure. Not without more investigation.”

  “Is the mother still living?”

  “I haven’t determined that. But her last known address was near the French Quarter.”

  “In New Orleans?”

  “Yes.”

  She sat up. “We have to go to New Orleans. And fast.”

  Parker gave her a stern nod. “My thought exactly. We ought to drive, even though it will take longer. We wouldn’t be able to get weapons past security at the airport.”

  Weapons. Her nerves went taut. After all, this brother might be a killer. “Right.” She gazed out the window wondering what they might find in the Big Easy.

  Parker was at the keyboard again. “The trip is four-hundred-and-seventy miles. About seven hours. Whom do you want to take with us?”

  She startled out of her thoughts. “With us?”

  “From the team.”

  “Oh.” She sat back in the chair, feeling the usual discomfort at having to manage a team. She had to think about it for a minute.

  Wouldn’t it be better to go alone? Just her and Parker? Becker had three kids and a pregnant wife. She couldn’t ask him to go four-hundred-and-seventy miles away. Fry wouldn’t be interested. He wouldn’t be much good without his lab, anyway. For a moment she thought about Holloway. Then she remembered Gen’s request not to get him hurt. She wasn’t going to tell Parker about that, but she wasn’t ready to bring him into the field now. He wasn’t completely healed from his injury, and besides, he was being a butt.

  That left just one person. She’d be perfect.

  “Let’s take Wesson.”

  “Detective Wesson it is,” Parker said getting to his feet and unplugging his laptop. “Let’s get home and pack. You can call her on the way.”

  Relieved Parker hadn’t argued about her choice she rose and met him at the door. “Sounds good.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  After they caught Wesson up on Dr. Wingate’s session, what Dr. Boudreaux had revealed under hypnosis, what Parke
r had discovered, and their plan to head for New Orleans, Wesson was excited about the trip—until she learned she’d be cramped in the backseat of Parker’s Mazda with an extra suitcase that didn’t fit in the trunk.

  But she decided to be a trooper about it. Besides it was her extra suitcase.

  They got on the road just after five-thirty, and with the traffic plus stops for burgers, bathroom breaks, and refreshing Wesson’s makeup, they rolled into the French Quarter of New Orleans just before one a.m.

  Their time. It was just midnight here.

  They passed under a tangle of bridges, through a darkened section of stores and clapboard row houses, then Parker made a few turns and suddenly they were on Bourbon Street.

  In the backseat Wesson came alert. “Hey, we’re here. Cool.”

  A clanging pierced the air as a red-and-yellow streetcar lumbered past. Under lights from the buildings and street lamps, a noisy crowd milled about on the sidewalks, some carry cups that must have contained booze, and wearing the blank stares of intoxication. The honking of horns mixed with the clicking of hooves on the pavement as police mounted on horseback kept watch over the inebriated.

  Farther down, the music of a trumpet and saxophone playing Dixieland jazz joined the jangle of sound. Miranda peered out the window at the bars and cigar shops, with signs touting those e-cigarettes.

  Overhead partiers stood on wrought-iron balconies, sipping from their cups, whirling beads, and dancing to the music. Down below on the sidewalks, more people milled about. A guy with no shirt talking on a cell phone. A girl in a pink wig showing off a boob to a guy taking her picture. A woman in a doorway wearing little more than a thong, displayed the butterfly tattoos on her rear cheeks to anyone who was interested.

  “Not the modesty capital of the world, is it?” she smirked.

  A brow cocked, Parker eyed the crowd as he drove along. “This definitely isn’t a monastery.”

  It might not be Mardi Gras, but it looked like the party never ended here.

  “I do believe some of those ladies are professionals, though.”