Gabriel - Jessie Cooke Page 0,17
one that had a picture of a huge, brick home with pillars in front. It was surrounded by iron gates, and in the photo a lush green lawn and thick rows of rose gardens could be seen stretching along a brick wall that matched the exterior of the home. “This is it, I looked it up for you because I knew you’d ask.” Logan smiled and popped a French fry in his mouth while Blackheart looked at the photo. After he chased it with a drink of his sweet tea he said, “It sits on two acres: six bedrooms, four baths, a disconnected three-car garage, and a mother-in-law house in the back. The cemetery has ten plots according to what’s filed with the parish clerk. Six of them are full, I reckon the other four are waiting for the rest of the family...don’t know why nobody lives there now though. It’s been empty for about ten years since the old woman, the matriarch, died.”
“Whose name is on the deed?”
“Cindy Leboux.”
Patrice’s aunt, the one who had raised her. Why the hell was she living with her family in that $40,000 house in Baton Rouge when she owned a four- million-dollar estate in Lakewood? “So if somebody wanted that body re-examined by the coroner’s office, what would they have to do?”
“It would have to be requested by the family and if everyone in the family didn’t agree to it, there could be a court battle which would take some time...and it would be up to the judge to decide if it was necessary or not.”
“What about the police?”
Logan frowned. “They could get a court order for it, but only if it was an open case...or if some new evidence turned up. But they closed this case pretty tightly a long time ago. I doubt anyone has even looked at this file in years.”
Blackheart nodded. Something was bugging him about the whole thing, and he really wished it wasn’t. He would like to walk away, believing the young woman had killed herself, and his daughter...if she was his daughter...had grown up to do okay for herself despite it all. But he rarely left things alone that he worried might come back to bite him or the club later...and this one gave him the feeling that it might. When Patrice met him at the coffee shop she’d had copies of pages out of her mother’s diary. Blackheart had just skimmed through them, but it wasn’t hard to tell that the woman had spent time trying to articulate her feelings and pouring them out onto the pages. It bothered him that a woman who would write in a diary every day, pouring out her heart, would simply up and decide to kill herself one day without leaving a word behind. Sally was right, the fact that she hadn’t even left a note for her daughter was just too weird. Wouldn’t she want her family to know why she’d done what she’d done, especially her daughter who was going to grow up without her?
Blackheart pulled the copy of the police report out of the coroner’s file. Patrice said she saw it, but he wanted to see it for himself. She was right, they’d barely done anything that could be called an “investigation.” It was one page long, and by the end of the typed summary the cop had concluded it was a “probable suicide.” An addendum written three days later listed names of “witnesses”—three people on the street when she landed, and a woman in the room next to hers who heard her scream right before she would have jumped. No one saw anyone other than Kasey. No one saw anyone come in or out of that room before the police broke down the door and found the screaming baby inside. By that time the coroner’s report was done, and the manner of death was concluded to be suicide by the coroner himself and the case was closed.
“This address in Maine, that was her home address?”
“Yeah. The report said she was home for her daddy’s funeral. Not sure why she was at a hotel and not that big, fancy house her mama and daddy lived in, especially with a baby.”
That bothered Blackheart too. He couldn’t be sure, but something in his gut told him there was more to Kasey’s rift with her parents than having a baby out of wedlock. She’d been in Maine for over a year by that time, she must have had a