Chapter 2

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 mattered no more 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 humankind 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. ?a 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! ?a 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!”

“Dude, don’t promise violence on your fellow man in front of cops,” Stokes cautioned.

Nick had already lost interest in the conversation. “Show me your boat.”

Arceneaux led the way. “You don’t wanna see that body first?”

“He’s not going anywhere, is he?”

Even as he said it, a trio of stray dogs emerged from a thicket of trees, noses scenting the air.

“Goddamn it,” Stokes muttered, moving off, pulling his sidearm. “I’ll stay with the body. Git, you mangy mutts!” he shouted at the dogs. “Go on, git!”

He pointed his weapon off to the side and discharged a round, sending the dogs scurrying back toward the trees.

Nick followed Arceneaux and Rodrigue, glad for the boots he kept in his vehicle as they pushed through the weeds and the tall grass that had faded from green to blond with the approach of winter. There was no bank to speak of, just softer and softer ground that gave way to water.

They broke through the vegetation where Alphonse Arceneaux’s snub-nosed bateau floated, a shallow, flat-bottomed aluminum boat as weathered as its owner’s face. A pile of dead nutria lay in the nose of the boat—ugly, orange-toothed swamp rats bigger than cats. They were the scourge of the wetlands, non-native invaders devoted to tearing up the root systems of the marsh grasses, creating erosion in the delicate ecosystem that seemed threatened at every turn these days.

A rifle lay propped near the morning’s harvest.

“You hunting with a .22?” Nick asked.

“When I need it. Me, I’d rather use ol’ Black Betty and save the ammunition,” Arceneaux said, reenacting clubbing something. “I run a hundred fifty traps, me. Not going ’round filling the swamp with shot when there’s no need.”

“You got a shotgun on board?”

Arceneaux laughed and tipped his cap back on his head. “What kind of damn couillon hunts nutria with a shotgun?! That’s a good one! Talk about!”

Rodrigue laughed along as Arceneaux pantomimed shooting and exploding a nutria to kingdom come.

“How’d you come to find the body?” Nick asked.

As expected, the corpse wasn’t visible from this spot, nor was the road. Nothing but a waving sea of grass and the occasional glimpse of Stokes’s dark head a dozen yards away.

“I had me a bad oyster last night,” Arceneaux confessed, “and I got me a touch of the fwa this morning. Got out the boat to relieve myself and that’s how I come to find a dead dude. How ’bout that?”

Rodrigue shook his head. “We got us a case of the diarrhea to thank for the discovery of a murder victim! I been doing this a long time, and that’s a first for me!”

“Did you recognize this dead man?” Nick asked.

“ Mais non ,” Arceneaux said, shaking his head. “That dude, his own maman ain’t gonna recognize him. You’ll see. It’s bad. Pauvre bête ,” he murmured. “May God rest his soul.”

He crossed himself, picked up the small crucifix he wore on a chain around his neck, and pressed a kiss to it with chapped lips.

“Closed-casket bad,” Rodrigue said. “Somebody was mad mad at that guy. Maybe a drug thing or some kind of feud. Something personal.”

“You don’t know him, either?” Nick asked the deputy as they made their way back through the grass toward the body. “He ain’t your fourth cousin twice removed?”

“I wouldn’t know him if he was my own brother,” Rodrigue said. “We gotta hope he’s still got his wallet in his pants. Only God gonna know him now.”

Ran into the wrong end of a shotgun , Stokes had said. There was no pretty version of that.

“Did you touch the body?”

“No, sir.”

“Did Stokes?”

Rodrigue laughed. “He’s just here for show, ain’t he?”

“I heard that!” Stokes shouted. “You know I leave the bodies for you, Nicky. You get so testy otherwise.”

Dressed in jeans, socks, and nothing else, the decedent had landed on his back with his arms outflung in a pose reminiscent of da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man . He was a tall Caucasian male, over six feet, Nick reckoned. Fit, broad-shouldered, narrow-hipped. His left hand and wrist were blown to shreds. His right hand was damaged as well, but less so. Defensive wounds. The hands had probably been held up in a vain attempt to shield his face from the shotgun blast.

His face and head were almost completely destroyed, a bloody, unrecognizable mess of shattered bone and pulverized tissue. The small remaining portion of the right side of his face was speckled with the tiny red stippling caused by the impact of the fine plastic filler used in buckshot loads. Judging by the damage, the shooter had been standing maybe six to eight feet away from the victim. Personal, Rodrigue had said. Indeed.

It didn’t look real, what was left of this person. Absent the life force, and so badly damaged, a body ceased to seem human. The reality was so shocking, so hideous, the observer’s mind automatically wanted to discount what it saw.

The man’s right eye stared up at him, brown and cloudy, hopeless, lifeless. Flies had begun to swarm on the wounds to feed and lay eggs, but the maggots had yet to hatch. He couldn’t have been lying there more than a few hours, Nick reckoned.

He pulled on a pair of purple latex gloves from his backpack and squatted down beside the corpse in the damp grass. The body was cold to the touch but not stiff. The greenish discoloration of the skin on the abdomen and the beginning of bloat told him the man had been dead for a while. A day or two, perhaps. Decomposition was under way. Rigor mortis had come and gone.

Buzzards had begun to circle overhead. Thank goodness for Mr. Arceneaux’s bad stomach. If he hadn’t come along when he did, the corpse would have become a feast. Mother Nature recycling her own.

Nick glanced up at Arceneaux, who was staring off into the distance, pointedly not looking at the body. The reality was beginning to set in.

“ Merci , Mr. Arceneaux. We’ll need to have you come into the sheriff’s office and make a formal statement. Later today, if possible. Finish running your traplines, then come in and see Detective Stokes here.”

Stokes stepped forward and handed the man his business card, instructing him to call first.

Rodrigue walked Arceneaux back to his boat. When they were out of sight, Stokes said to Nick, “I’m gonna tell you what right now: I know exactly what happened to our dead friend here.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” Nick said, walking carefully around the body, snapping photos with the digital camera from his backpack. “Do you have evidence to back up this theory?”

“This guy here got caught doing some other dude’s lady. I’ll bet you a hundred bucks.”

Nick looked at the body and its state of semidress, jeans half undone. That was probably a sucker bet, but preconceived ideas were dangerous things in a homicide investigation.

“You know what they say about an assumption,” Nick said. “It’ll make me kick your ass.”

“That ain’t what they say.”

“It’s what I’m telling you.”

“Whatever. You mark my words,” Stokes promised. “This here is all about a chick. If I’m lying, I’m dying.”

“Let this be a cautionary tale, then,” Nick remarked.

“I don’t know what you mean by that.”

“Really, Romeo? You standing here in the same clothes I saw you in yesterday. And how is it you came to arrive at this scene before me when you live a good twenty minutes in the other direction?”

Stokes frowned. “I was visiting a friend in the area,” he said stiffly.

“Mm-hmm. At the crack of dawn. Mrs. Who-was-it-this-time?”

“That is not your business, my friend.”

“It’d be good if I had a starting place for the investigation when you go missing thanks to a jealous husband,” Nick said, squatting down beside the body again to search through the man’s pockets for any indication of identity.

“And might I say for the nine hundreth time, this judgy side of you is not appealing, Nicky,” Stokes complained. “Oh, wait. There is no other side of you.”

“Good thing you don’t want to date me, then, yeah?” Nick said dryly. “And I’m married and everything. Just your type.”

Stokes, ever the ladies’ man, had, in the last year or so, shifted his love-life strategy to affairs with married women, on the theory that they were only starved for great sex and weren’t out to snag him for a husband, as most of the single women in his dating pool were—or so he claimed. Though any woman who thought Chaz Stokes was husband material needed her head examined as far as Nick was concerned. The apple of his own eye, Stokes was as faithless as a feral tomcat.

“Ha ha,” Stokes said, irritated. “All this sassy-ass humor. You’re a regular comedian today. You must have gotten laid last night.”

Ignoring the remark, Nick carefully pulled out the contents of the dead man’s right front pocket. Nine cents, a gum wrapper wadded around a hard knot of chewed gum, and a felted piece of lint that had been jammed down in the pocket corner for a very long time. He slipped the items into a plastic bag and handed it to Stokes, then slid his hand under the man’s hip and felt for the shape and bulk of a wallet.

No such luck. Not that he was surprised. A man dressing that hastily, not even managing shoes, his wallet was likely sitting on a dresser or nightstand somewhere. But he slipped his fingertips into the hip pocket anyway and was rewarded with a business card he worked gingerly out of the pocket and into the light of day.

Mercier & Sons Salvage

673 Canal Road

Luck, Louisiana

Handwritten in the upper-left-hand corner was an amount: $2,875.

“Got a name?” Stokes asked, peering down over Nick’s shoulder.

“No, but $2,875 could be a motive, if there was cash that went with this card.”

Nick had certainly known people to be murdered for a lot less. A man walking around with a big wad of cash, flashing it in the wrong bar…

Mouton’s roadhouse wasn’t far down the bayou from here. The kind of place where brass knuckles were a common fashion accessory and every man—and most of the women—carried a gun or a knife. People looking for trouble looked at Mouton’s. Poachers, thieves, drug dealers—all made themselves at home there.

“Could be he picked up a hooker, got wasted by her pimp,” Stokes speculated.

“Could be.”

“I’m telling you, my friend, this’ll end with a woman.”

Nick arched a dark brow. “You know the only difference between you and this guy?” he asked, nodding to the faceless corpse.

“Fashion sense?” Stokes quipped.

“Timing.”