The Death Factory by Greg Iles Read Free Book Online Page B

killed, Rosabel never saved the money to get out. Napoleon Square had been built as a seventies swingers’ haven. Thirteen swimming pools, a disco. Now it was wall-to-wall immigrants with shops on the lower floors, and paleteros everywhere—Salvadoran ice cream vendors on bicycles.”
    “How did the mother react when she saw you?”
    “Rosa broke down the second she opened the door. Praying and crying all at once. Then she warned me not to show any reaction, and led me back to Maribel’s room. The girl was in rough shape, but she was still strikingly pretty, which was probably what had drawn Conley to her. She’d gotten some kind of associate degree in accounting, then gone to work at the trucking company. She was trying to fulfill her father’s dream of getting her mother out of Gulfton and into a real house somewhere. She tried to put up a good front for me, but I saw through it. Rape is a weird crime, Jack. People handle it different ways, but it always scars you for life. I figured that photo would be scaring her, the idea that it would turn up on walls all over town, but she wasn’t even thinking about that. Vargas had got it wrong about the internal damage. There was apparently some question about whether Maribel would be able to have kids. That was all the poor girl was thinking about by then. Old school, you know? What good man would want her if she couldn’t have kids?”
    “And the other siblings?”
    “Two older girls. Both had moved away, one to L.A., the other to Miami. The eldest was doing okay, the middle child had drug problems. Maribel had been given her notice at the trucking company by this time, of course. She and Rosa were already eating through her savings.”
    “Did she tell you her story?”
    I nod once. “Every word was gospel. It was another version of the horror I’d heard far too many times during my years at the office. I’d listened to a lot of victims and witnesses in my time, and heard all kinds of lies. Exaggeration, shock-induced memory distortion, outright deception. But Maribel’s story was straight from the abyss. Soul-withering truth. She never varied in one detail. That Conley bastard had been furious that a Latina girl had rejected him, and he went back to hurt her. If I’d been the prosecutor, I’d have taken it to court and put her on the stand.”
    “Even without the DNA evidence?”
    “I think so. She was that compelling. But Mitch Gaines was immune to that kind of emotion. For him, it came down to a simple calculation. Could he win the case on the merits or not? Purely on the evidence.”
    “So what did you do?”
    “I gave Rosabel some money and told her I’d look into it. I didn’t promise anything. I really didn’t think I could do much. The thing was done. Gaines would have been livid if he’d known I even visited that apartment, and Joe Cantor, too. I was way off the reservation. But like Felix Vargas, I couldn’t let it go.”
    At the northern edge of the Garden District, I start up the long, gradual incline that leads to the high ground of the Natchez City Cemetery. To our right, in a low hollow, an oil well pumps lazily in the first shadows of dusk, but then we crest the hill and break back into the sunlight, where the redbrick pile of the Charity Hospital once towered over the vast cemetery like a factory providing corpses for the hungry fields below. As an overly imaginative boy, I had nightmares of orderlies shoving newly dead patients into the old-fashioned tubular fire escapes and sliding them down to waiting gravediggers, or worse, body snatchers. As crazy as it sounds, I was almost relieved when an arsonist burned down the antebellum hospital in 1984.
    Passing the empty slab that once supported the massive building, I drive down to the second of four wrought-iron gates that offer access to the cemetery. This is the place where real life and my novels meet, deep in the overgrown shadows where the small stones of the anonymous dead trail out