“That brings us to the next generation, Erik’s children,” Stefano said. “Jaspar and Beau were the bastards Taviano talked about. They were living in Queensland on the coast. I believed Eloisa killed them. Why I thought she might be outraged enough to risk her career or at least report the abuse to the Archambaults when she never gave a damn about her children, I don’t know, but when I heard they were dead, I believed, and so did Taviano, that she killed them. I asked my investigators to check if it was possible. They said no. She never left Chicago. As far as reporting to the Archambaults, no investigation was launched into Jaspar and Beau Boutler.”
“How could Brielle possibly know that?” Amara asked. “She didn’t ask them, did she? We wouldn’t want them connecting the dots on this until we know what we’re looking at and how to handle it.”
“Brielle is very discreet. She would never ask questions of the Archambaults, Amara,” Elie assured, keeping his head down as if reading over the report. “We know for certainthe Archambaults did not bring justice to Jaspar and Beau Boutler, but they were killed by shadow riders. At least both had broken necks and appeared to have been killed by an assassin sent out to serve justice to them. The two men were in their forties.”
“Edwin Boutler and his twin, Gef, lived in Laos,” Dario continued. “Like Jaspar and Beau, neither married and they were in their early forties. They had a large farm where they bought unwanted children, paying top dollar for them, which was a real incentive for poor families. The farm produced crops they sold in the marketplace. The Boutler brothers were stabbed and beaten in their home. They were both in the same room. Big men, lots of muscle and well trained in self-defense, yet they were both killed.”
“Rowina, the daughter, left home for training in Greece,” Emmanuelle said. “She ended up marrying into that family of riders. They seemed to have a happy marriage. When her children were eight and five, the boy eight, the girl five, her brothers Edwin and Gef showed up for a visit. About two weeks after they left to go back to Pakistan, Rowina died by her own hand. If her husband knew why, he never said.”
There was a long silence. Amaranthe pushed her forehead into the heel of her hand. Stefano swore softly. “This is one fucked-up family. They got away with abuse for years because in the old days there was little communication.”
“And no one talked about it,” Geno said. “Especially if it happened to boys.”
“Generations in the same family?” Valentino asked. “Is that what we’re looking at? These men sexually assaulted children and eventually someone retaliated?”
“Several someones,” Amaranthe corrected. “We accounted for ten of the twelve deaths eighteen years ago. “Who else died that night?”
Geno scanned the report. A couple of the men had put up a fight, but it didn’t seem as if his father’s severe injurycould have been gotten in either of those instances, and both were too far away for Eugene Ferraro to have survived.
“This is it,” he murmured aloud. “Salvatore. Lucca.” He wanted them to see the significance. “Nate Boutler lived with his two sons, Mitchel and Monti, in Pakistan. They were reputed to be good shadow riders from all the reports by the trainers, yet when they were old enough to be given a territory, they refused to return to Queensland or Pakistan. They migrated to Canada. Given where they grew up, it isn’t surprising they preferred wilderness and ended up in New York, establishing businesses guiding wealthy clients into the West Canada Lakes Wilderness area. They also took troubled teens into leadership and survival programs. Most of the time, they worked separately from different areas around that region.”
“Were they working that night?” Lucca asked. He turned the papers over as if that would answer the question. “Why were they both there?”
“Mitchel had finished a week’s work with a company, so he had a bigger group than usual,” Dario said. His voice had turned grim. “His usual routine was to take a couple of days alone time, but his brother had come to camp out with him. When they found the bodies of Mitchel and Monti, they also found the body of a young boy who had been buried in a shallow grave. He was covered in bruises and had been sexually assaulted.”
Amaranthe slipped her hand into Geno’s. He slid his thumb along the back of her hand, needing the contact.
“Hikers found the bodies,” Geno said. “It looked as if the two men had been in a vicious battle with bears, because they seemed to be torn apart. Around them the ground was saturated with blood. Wild animals and insects had gotten to the bodies. An investigation was launched, and the conclusion was the two men had sexually assaulted the boy, strangled and buried him and then were attacked by an unknown man or men. The axe the brothers used to chopfirewood was missing. Not only did both men have cuts from an axe, but the cuts also matched the slices on the firewood. The police concluded whoever had attacked them had used the brothers’ own axe against them.”
Geno looked at his brothers. “Papa must have had his leg chopped open by the axe. That’s how he got that hideous injury. I don’t know how they didn’t get his DNA. His blood had to be all over the ground along with Mitchel’s and Monti’s.”
“They did get his blood,” Stefano confirmed. “Keep reading. Somehow it disappeared from the evidence room before it could even be logged.”
“That’s the twelve members of the Boutler family who died all on the same night eighteen years ago,” Lucca said. “And now we know what really happened to Papa’s leg.”
“They were part of a conspiracy to take the law into their own hands,” Stefano said. “The shadow riders taking part in the killings must have known these men were pedophiles. The only way they could have known was when they went for training. The riders had to have been assaulted when they were sent out for training.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Brielle searched to see if other shadow riders stepped down that same night or right after the way Geno’s parents did,” Emmanuelle said. “There were twelve couples that ended their shadow-riding careers. Eugene and Margo Ferraro lived the longest of all of them. They’re the only couple from here in the States. The eleven other couples were scattered over other countries. Finland, Switzerland, Germany, Spain, Russia, China, Argentina, United Kingdom, Croatia, India, Venezuela. Every one of those countries had their top shadow riders stand down and turn their leadership over to another family member or someone else. They became greeters.”
“Even eighteen years ago, shouldn’t that have raised an alarm?” Valentino asked. “That should have been considered unusual behavior.”
“It would have been,” Stefano admitted, “but there appears to have been a good explanation in every case. Brielle took the time to check everyone. Health reasons, accidents,failing eyesight: these were all legitimate excuses the International Council would believe. In most cases, leadership was turned over to an adult, so no one had to be sent to the families to be trained. The council wasn’t informed that the leaders stepping down no longer participated in any decision-making.”
Geno pressed his fingers to the hard knots gathering in his neck. Those riders had broken the sacred laws of shadow riders. Breaking those laws was done when there was no time to send for the Archambaults and you had to administer justice, but you informed the council immediately and turned over the evidence you had gathered against those committing the crime. Geno knew Stefano’s family had done so on more than one occasion. He’d even participated. As a rule, they informed the Archambaults after the fact and explained why it had been necessary not to wait.
“Stefano, you said the other couples are all dead. Were they murdered? As far as Brielle or any of the other investigators could tell, did the Archambaults serve justice on them?” Geno didn’t want to look at the report anymore. There was too much there. If his father had been sent to one or more of the Boutlers to be trained as a rider and was assaulted and years later decided to be part of a revenge conspiracy, that meant not only his father but his mother was willing to give up shadow riding, the leadership of the riders and their family to carry out their plot. They’d done all three. His parents had participated in a global conspiracy against a single family, a crime punishable by death.
“There was no investigation or evidence that the Archambaults were involved in the deaths of any of the shadow riders who abdicated their positions,” Stefano said. “The first person to die was in Finland, the woman. She drowned although she was considered a good swimmer. There was no evidence that anyone else was around her. Her husband died two months later. He’d been fishing. There were no signs of a struggle. It appeared as if he’d had a heart attack.”
“They were testing the poison,” Amaranthe guessed.
Geno thought it was a good deduction.
“They would go after the woman first when she was alone,” Amaranthe continued. “They needed to see if it would paralyze her and leave her system so no trace would be discovered. They did the same thing to her husband later. That was the first pair they killed, testing their drug.”
“They must have done the same thing to the next three couples. Each died in a similar fashion, always the woman first and in some accidental way,” Stefano said. “These people were patient. They wanted everything in place before they began to exact their revenge.”
