Total pages in book: 137
Estimated words: 126060 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 630(@200wpm)___ 504(@250wpm)___ 420(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 126060 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 630(@200wpm)___ 504(@250wpm)___ 420(@300wpm)
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.”
Emmanuelle tapped her fingers on the end table. “Brielle thinks that’s when they started experimenting with drawing in locals, using various means. It changed from region to region, but there were reports of unrest in the shadow rider territories before the greeters died. All of them died by accident until those in Croatia.”