Family Murders: A Thriller by Henry Carver Read Free Book Online Page A

terrified. But so much of the fear she had felt at that moment was the fiery desire for safety, to survive. This was much colder. She was resolved. One way or another, there had to be an answer about what was going on, about what it all meant. And she was going to find it, with or without the help of the police.
    Cooper had only yielded one more small detail before hanging up, but it was the most important one of all, a name. It made the search so much easier. Angela approached a librarian sitting at a desk set back behind the stacks.
    "Excuse me, I'm trying to find a group of old newspaper articles all pertaining to one subject."
    "What's the subject?"
    "A murder. From ten years ago. November 1980."
    "Do you know the name of the victim?"
    "Gabrielle Fallows."
    After that it was easy. News doesn't stay current forever. Stories have waves of popularity, so nearly all the articles were grouped around the time of the murder and arrest, and then again around the time of the trial. They were on microfilm, but the librarian was more than happy to pull the appropriate rolls and set Angela up at a reader in a back corner.
    At this time of day the library was nearly as empty as the streets outside, so there was no one to hear her gasp when she saw his face. It had only taken a few twists of the knob and there he was, much younger, but already in possession of that lean and handsome face.
    "Gabe," Angela said under her breath.
    There was no question he was the boy in the locket, but he looked so different now. It was the eyes, she thought. In the newspaper picture he was being pushed toward the open back door of a boxy sedan. There was a caption underneath: Eric Fallows, the primary suspect in the rape and murder of his younger sister, Gabby Fallows.
    "Jesus Christ." Whatever she had expected—an accident, negligence, coincidence—an incestuous pedophile sex murder wasn't it. Somehow she had thought the locket and its owner would be just the first clue in a long line of clues, part of a chain. But here was the connection, immediate and plain as day.
    Eric Fallows. Gabe had never seemed like the right name, but this explanation was far worse than she could have ever imagined. Masculinizing and taking his own dead sister's name, the seven-year-old sister he had raped and murdered, seemed inexplicably sick. The thought of Julie sitting alone with him on a soccer field made her want to throw up.
    The coverage was extensive. She had never heard of the case, but she wasn't from here. This was Ted's home town. They'd met while Angela was still in college and had moved back after Julie was born. Ted thought a small town was the right place to grow up. He'd never mentioned anything about this, but ten years ago would have been just around the time he had left himself. It was good he'd held back—knowing it now was hard enough.
    For just a second, it seemed like enough. This was what she'd come for, to confirm or deny the lead that dropped into her gut every time she conjured up his smiling face. And here it was: confirmation. He was everything she thought he could be and more. Much, much more.
    "I could leave now," she thought, and almost did.
    Instead, she started reading. She read for a very long time.

8
    November 11th, 1980, was a Tuesday. At just before four in the afternoon a call to 911 was placed by a person, later determined to be eighteen-year-old Eric Fallows, reporting the discovery of a body. Even then the town was small, and with nothing so big as a child murder to attend to, having not seen a murder in the previous ten years, the police—all of them—came as quickly as they could.
    They found Eric Fallows covered in blood and catatonic, cradling his sister's body and sitting in a rocking chair on the front porch of his house. In early stories the details of the actual crime were sketchy, presumably the result of a small town's police force attempting to preserve the dignity of its citizens. It was reported that some veteran