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“Pendejo,” Xavier muttered, but with unmistakable affection. “You’re stupid.”
“Made you laugh,” Carlos replied, unruffled.
“Yeah, you did. You always do. Thank you.” They bumped shoulders in the way of old friends, and Xavier returned his attention to Gabe. “I thought that I’d imagined seeing the lady murdered after a while. Everyone told me that I’d imagined it, so I started to believe it. Until your father showed up. Knocked on the front door of our house and when I opened it, I recognized him immediately.”
“Xavier fell to his knees,” Cicely said, remembering. “He just... fell down. He kept saying, ‘That’s the man. That’s the man.’ He was sixteen years old, but in that moment, it was like he was five years old and traumatized all over again. But he did calm down, and we went outside to talk to your father. I’d asked Rocky to wait outside while I calmed Xavier down and he was patient with us. I was a recent widow and nervous about inviting a man into my house, and he said he understood. Besides, back then we were the only house on the street. We had one neighbor in the back, but the houses that are next to us now were just being built, so we had privacy on the porch. Rocky started talking and then the story just came out.”
Xavier took up the tale. “He said he’d been looking for me. Johnson was a common enough name, but there were no Angels. Because I’d told him that was my name. Xavier is my middle name and I asked to be called that.” He looked embarrassed. “Because of X-Men. I was only six.”
“Hey, I’m good with that reason,” Molly said with a smile. “But it would have made it hard for Rocky to track you down. How did he find you?”
“Through the check we wrote to pay for Xavier’s mother’s cremation,” Cicely answered. “It took him a long time to find us, though. He confirmed that there had been a dead woman in the house across from Xavier’s that night. He’d seen her with his own eyes. He saw the ligature marks around her neck. But when he went back after the floodwaters started to go down, she was gone.”
Gabe blinked. “What do you mean ‘gone’? She was dead, right?”
“No,” Xavier said. “Her body was gone. Rocky told us that the floodwaters had never reached the bed and it was still in good shape. The room was waterlogged because he broke a window to get in, but he said there was no sign of the body. He reported it and tried to work the case but was told to stop.”
“Told by whom?” Burke asked, frowning.
“By his supervisors,” Xavier said. “He said that every time he brought it up, his bosses would give him other cases. They said he wasn’t Homicide at first, back when he discovered the body. Later, when he was in Homicide, he was told that other Homicide detectives were working it. But he checked around, and they weren’t.”
Gabe turned to Burke. “You were his partner. Did you know about this?”
Burke shook his head. “I knew he had a case that he couldn’t let go, but he’d never tell me about it. We all had that one case we couldn’t let go, so I didn’t pester him. I should have.”
“It wouldn’t have helped,” Xavier said sadly. “He wasn’t going to tell anyone, because it was too dangerous. That’s what he said.”
Cicely patted her son’s hand. “He also had been threatened by his boss.”
“Who?” Burke demanded. “When and how?”
“We don’t know names. Rocky wouldn’t tell us. But he said he’d brought it up again the year before he found us.” Cicely darted a nervous glance at Gabe. “It was the tenth anniversary of Katrina, and he thought someone would care. He was ready to go to the press. He hadn’t told anyone at the beginning that he had an eyewitness because he couldn’t find Xavier to corroborate, but Rocky had seen the body. He knew she was dead. By the tenth anniversary he was so eager to solve the case that he told them he did have an eyewitness who could identify the killer through his scar. But then his boss told him that if he continued ‘blathering’ about this case, he’d lose his job, and wouldn’t that be bad for his wife, not to have health insurance? So he quit asking. Publicly, anyway.”
Gabe felt the color drain from his face. A warm hand grabbed his. Molly.
“Sonofabitch,” Burke cursed.
“You okay?” Molly asked very softly.
Gabe jerked a nod and did the math. “My mother was diagnosed with cancer a year before the tenth anniversary of Katrina. She was still undergoing chemo a year later. If she’d lost her insurance, she would have died then.”
Carlos was shaking his head. “That’s wrong.”
“So wrong,” Manny agreed in his gravelly voice.
“That poor man,” Willa Mae said sadly. “Talk about being stuck between a rock and a hard place.”
Burke stood up and began pacing the room. “I wish he’d told me. Why didn’t he tell me?”
“It wasn’t because he didn’t trust you,” Cicely said. “He thought about bringing you in once you were partners, but he didn’t want to drag you down with him. He figured that the cover-up went pretty high up. He told me that it was a hard decision, but he liked you. He was protecting you.”
Burke sighed. “That’s sounds like him. Stubborn man.”
That was fair, Gabe thought. His father had been the most stubborn man he’d ever known.
Cicely made a noise of agreement. “He really was. By this point, though, he knew that the rot had burrowed deep. He didn’t know who he could trust. When his boss blocked his investigation on the tenth anniversary of the flood, the man also demanded to know the eyewitness’s name. Rocky was terrified that they’d come after Xavier, seeing as how they were threatening his wife. He gave his boss a fake name.”
Gabe stared. “A fake name? You mean he lied?”
