Read an Excerpt
1
Moonlight on black water, shining like dark glass in the night. Tree branches reflected on the surface, silhouettes on shadow, silent sentinels of the swamp, draped in moss that swayed in the whispered breeze.
A shallow boat glided over the surface, the engine barely running, its low, throaty purr swallowed up by the wilderness with only nature there to hear as the boat slipped deeper into the night.
Fingers clutching the steering wheel, the mother sat in her car, staring at the house. A narrow, rickety little shotgun shack that had somehow stood there for more than a hundred years. A sagging roof to match the sagging, postage-stamp front porch. Narrow clapboard siding that hadn’t seen a fresh coat of paint in a generation. The front windows were not quite square in the wall. No light shone through the dirty glass.
How had it come to this?
Her son's life had begun in comfort and security. A big house in a good neighborhood. A respected family. A bright future. Little by little that foundation had eroded, corrupted by things she knew now were beyond his control-mostly-though she had judged him and blamed him. Fought him instead of fighting for him, which would be a stain on her soul for the rest of her life, no matter if he forgave her or not-which he did, or so he said. Sometimes she thought he only said it because he was too weary of the battle to say anything else.
Her heartbeat quickening, she got out and looked all around, still clinging to the car door, just in case. This wasn't a good place to be. On the ragged outskirts of town, this was a neighborhood that quickly gave way to dirty blue-collar businesses-a welding shop, a scrapyard, a rusty corrugated metal warehouse that housed Mardi Gras parade floats. The old abandoned sugarcane processing plant was just down the road.
A row of small houses like this one squatted like toadstools, side by side on weed-choked lots, forgotten by everyone who didn't have to live this way. Those were the people who lived here-people not wanted anywhere else, people without the means to live anywhere else, the marginalized, the outliers, the forgotten. Her son.
There was no one around that she could see, although she was sure she felt the crawl of eyes on her. Just her imagination, she tried to tell herself. A train whistle wailed in the distance, a mournful sound echoed by an owl in a nearby tree. The sound of the owl unnerved her and stirred a long-dormant memory of a timeworn superstition that she would have said she didn't believe in. A folktale about owls being harbingers of death. Her stomach clenched, and a chill ran down her back just the same as she hurried to the front door.
She knocked and waited. And waited . . . And waited . . .
The mother's trembling fingers tightened on the doorknob.
The owl called a second time.
The wife reached out with trembling fingers and pinched off the blackened wick of a candle. Happy birthday to me-a thought steeped in sarcasm and sorrow. She was angry and sad and alone. Nothing new there.
This wasn't what her life was supposed to be. This hadn't been part of the deal. Not at all. She had fallen in love with the man of her dreams-handsome, smart, full of fun and promise. They had planned and plotted a life in a better place with a brighter future. They had had so much to look forward to, so many promises their dreams had held out for them, like shiny brass rings on the beautiful carousel of youthful romance.
But there she sat, alone in her kitchen, drinking warm chardonnay in the glow of the under-cabinet lighting, in a backwater town in south Louisiana. A place she didn't belong. A fact she was reminded of daily by people she didn't like and who didn't like her. People who had pulled her husband back here on the leash of obligation and loyalty, dragging her along, an unwanted accessory. She often wondered if he thought of her the same way and resented her for it. Was she the constant reminder of what he could have had, could have been, if he hadn't come back here and settled for so much less?
Of course he resented her.
No more than she resented him.
This was what her life had become, and she was sick of it, choking on it.
She didn't want to live like this anymore.
She wouldn't.
She wiped away the tears that clung to her eyelashes and reached across the kitchen island for her cell phone.
Happy birthday to me . . .
A predator attacked. Prey screamed. The swamp was alive at night, a tableau for the drama of life and death, survival and loss. The circle of life turned continuously, naturally, without sympathy or sentiment. One life fed another, which fed another, which fed another. The choreography of nature was graceful, brutal, and honest, a dance carried out in moonlight and shadow.
The engine died. A spotlight swept low across the water.
Eyes glowed back.
The apex predator had arrived.
The lovers’ hands pressed palm-to-palm, fingers intertwined as they slow-danced barefoot on the cool, damp grass. Black water and the gilded moon painted the backdrop, the bayou shining like polished obsidian in the moonlight.
The warm, smokey voice of a favorite singer set the mood with soulful lyrics-an intimate, heartfelt confession, a pledge of love and wonder. "You're as smooth as Tennessee whiskey . . ."
Their hips swayed together, touching, pressing into each other. His breath stirred loose tendrils of her hair. His lips brushed across her skin, traced the shell of her ear. She smiled. He sighed.
Whispered words. Breath caught and held. His mouth found hers. Her tongue touched his. Desire rose like a flame, burning, licking, igniting a deeper need, driving them indoors to the privacy of their bedroom.
The curtains billowed in the night breeze. Clothing fell, sheets whispered. His hand swept down the curve of her side. Her fingers dug into his shoulders. They moved together, slowly and gently, then with strength and passion. The pleasure built to a crescendo and took them both over the edge on a wave of bliss.
The lovers fell asleep one tucked into the other, wrapped up in each other in every way, his hand holding hers pressed against her heart.
The alligators came like Pavlov’s dogs. They thrashed and snapped and devoured what was thrown to them, churning up the water, stirring up the smell of mud and blood and decay.
The pieces were small, bite-size, alligator fun-size, meant to be eaten in the moment rather than dragged away and tucked under a log to rot and tenderize. A heart, a liver, a foot, a hand.
And then it was done, the evidence gone. The spotlight went out.
The boat started back the way it had come, leaving nature to itself, as if nothing had happened. Leaving nothing but moonlight on black water.
2
"Ain't no reason on God's green earth anyone should ever find a murdered body in south Louisiana," Chaz Stokes proclaimed.
He lit a cigarette and took a deep pull on it as he leaned back against the side of a black Dodge Charger and surveyed the area through the dark lenses of his aviator sunglasses. A light-skinned Black man, he was tall and lean, built like an athlete and dressed like a jazz musician in loose-fitting gray slacks and a black-and-white straight-bottomed Cuban-style shirt.
"Umpteen gazillion acres of swampland, marshland, woodland, rivers, bayous, and backwaters, and this genius dumps a body at the end of a road," he said, exhaling twin streams of smoke through his slim nose. "This is just pure damn laziness."
He pointed toward a sign that had been posted by the state just off the end of the road: illegal to feed or harass alligators. "Could'a fed that body to the gators with none the wiser."
"If they were geniuses, we'd be hard-pressed for work, mon ami," Nick Fourcade said. He slid his backpack off his shoulder and set it on the trunk of Stokes's car.
"Still . . ." Stokes said, making a dismissive gesture with his cigarette. He frowned within the frame of his neatly trimmed mustache and goatee. "This ain't even sportin'."
"Unless you pull a suspect out your ass, that remains to be seen."
They stood near the dead end of a gravel-and-crushed-shell road a mile or so outside the drive-through town of Luck, where the wild began to swallow up what passed for civilization hereabouts on the western edge of the Atchafalaya Basin. The road petered out a dozen or so yards from a shallow slough choked with hackberry and willow trees. It was the sort of place where the occasional drug deal was made and where lovers came to escape scrutiny for a steamy tussle in a back seat or in the bed of a pickup truck. Kids came out here to drink, smoke dope, and bait gators, as was evidenced by the number of crushed beer cans and scattered, crumpled Sonic and Popeyes take-out bags.
Recent rains had left the ground soft, and a set of muddy ruts indicated someone had nearly gotten themselves stuck venturing too far off the gravel. Beyond the tracks, hidden by tall grass, a body lay waiting.
The morning was young and clear, with sheer scraps of clouds as thin as gauze contrasting the electric-blue fall sky. Too pretty a morning for a murder, Nick thought, watching a squadron of ducks flying toward the Basin, though he knew all too well that nature made no concessions for human tragedy. The world turned; the seasons passed. Death was just part of the deal. The man lying dead at the edge of the slough made no more matter to the natural world than a rabbit snatched up by an owl in the moonlight. The sun would still come up the next day and the day after that.
The world of mankind was another matter altogether.
Dressed for a court appearance in a shirt and tie, he had been on his way to the sheriff's office to start the workday early when the call had come. He ran the detective division of the Partout Parish Sheriff's Office, a squad of six detectives, covering 816 mostly rural square miles, investigating everything from burglary to homicide. He had hoped to get some paperwork done before heading to the courthouse.
He checked his watch and frowned.
"Nothing like starting a Monday off with a murder," Stokes remarked.
"So what's the story?"
"It's a dump job," Stokes said. "Looks like the victim ran into the wrong end of a shotgun-elsewhere. I'd say the killer backed in, thinking to dump the body in the water, sank down to his rims, said fuck it, and chucked the body into the weeds. Like I said: pure damn laziness."
"Any chance we might get a cast of a tire track?"
"Maybe. It's pretty squishy over there right now, but there's one or two might set up enough to be worth a try if we wait a bit for the sun to do its thing."
"You have a plaster kit?"
"I've got one in my trunk. You got any?"
"I think I might have two. Who called this in?"
"Swamper," Stokes said, nodding in the general direction of the blue-and-white sheriff's office cruiser parked a short distance ahead of his car. A bald, stocky deputy sat back against the hood of the cruiser, chatting animatedly with a small, wiry man in overalls and green waders, the pair of them smiling and laughing like old friends catching up at a Sunday picnic.
Nick hitched his backpack over one shoulder and headed toward them.
"Bonjour, Sergeant Rodrigue. Ça viens?"
He had grown up in a household where Cajun French was the default language of his parents, people proud to keep that language alive even when that idea had been unpopular in the mainstream. As was the case with many people in these parts, even his English was seasoned liberally with French.
"Our newly minted Lieutenant Fourcade!" Rodrigue boomed, his usual broad grin lighting his face beneath a bushy black mustache of epic proportions. "Bonjour! Ça va. I'm good, me. What a fine day we have in God's country, no?"
"Mais oui. That it is."
"Fourcade?" the swamper asked, squinting hard beneath the bill of a worn, dirty green Bass Pro cap. "You related to the Fourcades down Abbeville? Coy and them?"
"No, sir."
"Fourcade-that's not a Cajun name, but you a Cajun. I can tell," he declared.
"Through and through," Nick conceded. "And you are . . .?"
"This here's my wife's third or fourth cousin or something like that," Rodrigue said with a chuckle. "Alphonse Arceneaux. My wife, Mavis, she's an Arceneaux on her mama's side. Alphonse, he found the body, him, and he called me."
"Why you didn't call nine-one-one?" Stokes asked, joining them.
Arceneaux looked at him like he was a fool, lines of disapproval creasing his narrow, weathered face. He might have been seventy or forty-five. It was difficult to say. His skin had been turned to tooled leather by years working outdoors in the harsh Louisiana weather.
"That's for emergencies!" he declared. "This ain't no emergency. That dude, he's dead dead, him. He as dead as dead gets. What's the hurry?"
"We'd like to catch the bad guy."
"Bah!" Arceneaux scoffed. "I told you, there wasn't no bad guy. There wasn't nobody but me, and I gotta stay here for y'all. I might as well call a friend, no?"
"You didn't see anyone?" Nick asked. "No car or truck?"
"Mais non, no nothing."
"How'd you come to find the body? You got a boat out there?"
"My bateau." Arceneaux pointed in the general direction of the water, though the boat was hidden from view by the tall grass.
"And what brings you out this way?"
"Running my traplines. Me, I lease this land. I come this way first thing in the morning and try to get my nutria before they get stole. This here land's too close to town. Lazy-ass town boys come out here and steal my nutria. Y'all need to do something 'bout that!" Arceneaux said, as if the raids on his traplines should take priority over a murder.
"We do dead people, not dead rodents," Stokes grumbled.
"Stealing is stealing," Arceneaux said. "Six bucks a tail this year. That's my livelihood they messing with!"
"I don't disagree," Nick said. "But you have to take that up with the Wildlife agents. That's their jurisdiction."
"Me, I'm gonna catch them rascals red-handed this year," Arceneaux promised, clearly relishing the idea. "Give them raggedy-ass thieves some Cajun justice!"
