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  “Last I checked, the Mechant Loup Police Department owned several boats,” I said slowly. “And you can drive all of them. So…do you really want me for my boat, or do you want me to have a look at the dead body?”

  Susan shoved her fists into her hips and frowned. “You know how it’s sometimes necessary to force-feed a dead rat to a snake that stops eating?”

  I nodded slowly, not knowing where she was going.

  “Well, I figured if I’d force-feed a dead human to you, you’d want to get back into homicide investigations.”

  “Wait—do you think it’s a homicide?”

  “Nah, it’s probably just another drowning,” Susan’s face brightened up and she stabbed at my chest with her finger, “but did you notice how excited you got there? You want to come back, I just know you do.”

  Frowning, I explained—yet again—that I’d lost the right to wear a badge when I did what I did last year. “It was dishonorable.”

  “You were cleared of any wrong doing. It was a justified shooting.”

  I opened my mouth to argue, but she pushed her fingers against my lips.

  “The people in this town need you, Clint Wolf. Who are you to deny them?”

  We’d had this discussion before, where I’d tried a different tack, saying it wouldn’t be proper for me to work for my future wife. “It wouldn’t be ethical,” I’d argued.

  “I’ve already spoken with Mayor Cane and she cleared it with the ethics board,” Susan had countered. “She’ll hire you as the town investigator and you’ll work directly for her, same as me, and there’ll be no issues with nepotism. We’ll be separate, but co-equal, branches of the town government. I’ll be the chief of police and you’ll be the chief of detectives—only you won’t have any other detectives under you.”

  She had laughed at the last part and I’d only grunted.

  Not wanting to rehash the argument now, I grunted again, but trudged to my truck. “I’ll take you to the body, but only because I love you—not because I want to work cases again.”

  Giving a triumphant yell like she did when she wins a cage fight, she hurried to her Tahoe and backed out the driveway, heading for the boat launch. I checked on Achilles—he was still trying to figure out how to get up the tree—and closed the gate to lock him in the back yard. After getting back in my truck and firing up the engine, I pulled out of the driveway and headed toward Main Street.

  While I didn’t want to admit it out loud, there was a surge of adrenalin running through me as I sped down the highway. It felt like the good old days, when I would rush out to a death scene, wondering what I’d find when I arrived. One thing was certain about death investigations—no two scenes were the same and no two cases were alike. There might be similarities, but there was no such thing as identical cases.

  The sun was sinking low and shining directly in my eyes as I made my way down Main Street. I shoved the visor down and glanced to my left as I drove by the barren concrete foundation that used to be the police department. I remembered well the gun battle that had ensued there, rocking the quaint little town to its roots, and robbing us of some fine people—civilians and officers.

  As I reflected on that fateful day, the raw feelings of fear, loss, and rage came pouring back over me. My heart began to pound as though I was back in the moment…bullets whizzing by, people screaming, ears ringing. Although I’d come very close to death during that shootout, I suddenly realized I felt more alive back then than I did just now.

  I sighed. Maybe Susan was right. If the town needed me, who was I to deny them? Besides, I probably needed them more than they needed me. Giving swamp tours was a great gig and it was fun being out on the water and meeting people from all over the world. But, deep down, that’s not who I was and I couldn’t be a swamp guide forever. I was a cop. I was meant to do the job.

  CHAPTER 3

  A cool breeze was blowing off of Bayou Tail and droplets of water rained down on us intermittently as the front of my boat rocked up and down when we hit waves from other boat traffic. My mind raced faster than the boat was traveling, wondering what we would find once we arrived at the scene. A body on the water held many possibilities, most of which involved drowning, but something nefarious could also be amiss. I felt alert. Excited, even. While I didn’t like the fact that people had to die, I was passionate about resolving death investigations. If it turned out to be a homicide, I would be doing God’s work, because homicide investigators work for God.

  “I’ll do it,” I said, raising my voice to be heard above the noise of the wind and the boat motor.

  “Do what?” Susan asked, leaning closer.

  “I’ll take the job as the town investigator.”

  Susan gave a bounce for joy and hooked her arm under mine, causing me to jerk the steering wheel to the right. She quickly let go and I righted the boat. We both began to laugh. She appeared as relieved as I felt.

  “Thank you so much!” She was beaming. “It’ll take a load off of me. What with the everyday chief duties, trying to get the shelter in order, and training for my fight with Antonina Ivanov”—she shook her head—“the last thing I need right now is a death investigation.”

  I frowned. As Susan racked up the wins in her mixed martial arts career—she had twelve wins, zero losses—the competition became tougher…and Ivanov was as tough as they came. The Russian champion was undefeated in her mixed martial arts career, as well as in her career as a professional boxer. Rumor had it she even fought men in Russia—and she’d never lost. It was going to be her first fight on American soil and we had no idea what to expect. I had faith in Susan, but I was also worried about her.

  “Whatever I can do to help, Love,” I called back, trying to conceal the worry I felt as I turned right onto Westway Canal. Her fight was a month away, so I pushed it from my thoughts and concentrated on the task at hand.

  Westway Canal was narrower than Bayou Tail, but it was still about fifty feet wide. It was lined on both sides by dense forestland. The trees would open up in places to cow pastures or patches of marshland, but those were narrow strips of land. We’d had a few weeks of dry weather and the tide was lower than usual, exposing the soft mud at the edges of the bayou.

  We had traveled about a mile when Susan pointed toward our right. “Look, there’re some boys at the edge of the canal. They must’ve called it in.”

  The boys were immersed in the shadows of the live oaks and bald cypress trees that littered the bank of the canal, and it was hard to make them out until we idled closer to their location. I couldn’t reach the bank because of the shallow water, so I cut off the engine when we were close enough to make contact. Two of the boys were tall—had to be six foot each—and the other was shorter. One of the taller boys was muscular and the other appeared weakly, while the shorter one was average build.

  “I’m Chief Wilson,” Susan announced, waving her hand in the direction of the boys. “Which one of you called it in?”

  The more muscular of the tall boys raised a hand. “I did.”

  “What’s your name?” Susan asked.

  “Burton Vincent.” After identifying his buddies as Paul Rupe (the weakly one) and Kegan Davis (the short one), he pointed across the canal. “We think there’s a body over there in the mud.”

  Susan nodded and we both looked where he pointed. I used a hand to shield my eyes from the setting sun and squinted against the brilliance. Sure enough, there was a humanoid figure lying in a supine position in the soft mud near the opposite bank.

  “How long ago did—”

  “Burton, are you okay? What’s going on down there?” called a masculine voice from the trees above where the boys were standing, cutting off Susan’s question. “Your mom said you found a dead person.”

  Susan and I turned our attention to the man, who wore khaki slacks and a button-down dress shirt. He was picking his way down the embankment toward the boys, trying not to slide in the soft grass.

  “Yeah,” Burton called, wa
ving his dad forward. “It’s down here, across the canal.”

  The man ducked under a low-lying branch and stood beside the boys. He was shorter than Burton and a little heavier. A green leaf was stuck to his thick brown hair and Burton laughed as he removed it.

  “Where is it?” the dad asked, directing his question toward Susan. “I’m Rick Vincent, by the way. I’m Burton’s father. Is it a real body?”

  Susan nodded and pointed toward the location. “Your son and his friends made quite a discovery. Once we’re done here, we’ll need to take a formal statement from them.”

  The man nodded. “Sure, absolutely.”

  “Can we watch?” asked Kegan.

  Susan cocked her head sideways. “I can’t make y’all leave, but we’ll be here for a few hours processing the scene.”

  “We don’t mind waiting,” Paul said, his eyes wide with excitement. “I’ve never seen a dead person before.”

  “No, boys,” said the elder Vincent. “We’ll head back to the house and wait for them.”

  “Before you head out,” Susan said, turning her attention to the boys, “who was the first to spot the body?”

  “Paul saw it first, but Kegan was the first to realize it was a body,” Burton said.

  “What’d y’all do next?”

  “I called nine-one-one and then I called my mom and told her what we found,” Burton explained. “It was kind of scary. We’ve never seen a dead body before and we didn’t know what happened and—”

  “But we were ready,” Kegan interrupted, lifting a tomahawk in his hand. “If someone would’ve shown up to start trouble, we were prepared.”

  I turned my head away so they wouldn’t see me grinning. Susan thanked them and asked for their addresses and a contact number. “If it’s too late when get done out here, I’ll swing by in the morning. Or”—I felt her staring at me—“our new investigator will be in touch.”

  After telling Susan where each of the boys lived and providing her with his cell number and the numbers of Kegan and Paul’s parents, Rick ushered the boys up the embankment and they disappeared into the deep shadows of the forest. The boys were grumbling out loud and questioning why they had to leave.

  “Because that’s official police business and it’s none of our business,” Rick said, but the boys were having none of it. They grumbled until they were out of earshot.

  “Is that what we have to look forward to if we have boys?” Susan asked.

  I cranked up the boat motor and grunted. “Let’s hope we never have a son like me.”

  “And why’s that?” Susan rested her hand against the side of the boat as I guided it gently toward the opposite side of the canal, careful not to disrupt the water much.

  “I gave my mom fits. I climbed every tree I could find—the taller the better—and would hang upside-down from the highest branches.”

  “How’d you do that?”

  “I’d throw my legs over the branches and just hang there.” I eased back on the throttle as the front of the hull scraped the soft mud about ten feet from where the body had been marooned. “I’d also climb our house and the neighbors’ houses just to jump off.”

  Susan’s eyes were on the body, but she was listening to me, and shook her head. “You’re right…I don’t want a son like you.”

  I killed the engine and watched as Susan grabbed the push pole and tested the mud. “It’s too soft to walk on. We’ll sink to our waist in this mud.”

  “What do you want to do, Chief?” I asked, enjoying my last day of freedom.

  “I’ll call Melvin and have him bring some creosote boards out here so we can make a bridge around the body.”

  While she made the call, I leaned forward and looked toward the body, wondering what it would tell us.

  CHAPTER 4

  Forty minutes later…

  I looked up when the roar of the airboat sounded from the south but had to wait another ten minutes before Melvin Saltzman came into view. He was perched atop the elevated captain’s seat and wore dark glasses and thick earmuffs.

  Melvin was my height, but weighed two-fifty. His face was thick and tanned and it immediately lit up when he saw me. He killed the engine and allowed the airboat to drift in our direction. He dropped down from the captain’s seat and tossed a rope in our direction. I tied it to my boat while he eased an anchor into the water.

  Once he straightened, he stripped the earmuffs from his smooth head and smiled big. “Damn good to see you again, Chief.” He cocked his head to glance past me at Susan. “And you, too, Chief.”

  “Stop calling me that,” I said for the millionth time. Even though I’d been gone for a year, he still called me “chief” every time he saw me.

  He shrugged. “It’s a habit now, and I like the way it rolls off my tongue.”

  I leaned across the water that separated my boat from his and shook his hand. “Well, it’s always good to see you, too.”

  Melvin looked toward the body and frowned. “What do you think happened to him?”

  “Hard to say from here,” I said, “but he’s definitely been in the water for a while.”

  “Do you think he floated in from Bayou Tail?” Melvin asked.

  “It’s a thought.” From where we were positioned, I could tell he’d been in the water for several days. His stomach had swelled to the point that it had popped the buttons on his purple button-down shirt. The skin around his mouth and nose had been gnawed away by marine life and one arm was folded at a ninety-degree angle at the elbow and was suspended in the air, held there by rigor mortis. Since rigor mortis could remain fixed for up to seventy-two hours, it was possible we were looking at a three-day window of death.

  Below the swollen belly, the man wore a pair of blue jeans. The fabric around the waist was taut and it looked like the flesh was about to rip. The fronts of both pant legs were dry from exposure to the hot sun, but the groin area and the entire back of the jeans were still wet. There was a belt around his waist that bore a fancy buckle, but I couldn’t identify what it was from my position.

  The man’s left shoe was missing, but there was a white sneaker on his right foot. His left foot was covered by a white sock, but it looked like the sock was barely hanging on. To me, it appeared the shoe had been ripped off and it almost took the sock with it. What did it mean? At that time, I had no clue.

  Knowing the body had floated here, we didn’t have to worry much about our approach to the scene. Melvin moved to the port side of the airboat and removed a ten-foot plank from the narrow space beside the bench seats. He carefully guided it in my direction and I took it from him. Susan and I then slid the plank forward until it was near the left side of the body. We took the next plank and slid it toward the right side of the body.

  “Do you think it’ll hold our weight?” Melvin asked.

  “Only one way to find out,” Susan said, stepping out of the boat and slowly putting her weight onto the board on the left. It sank about an inch, pushing up black water and releasing marsh gas, but then it stopped. She shrugged. “Looks like I’m okay.”

  After handing Susan the crime scene box she’d taken from her Tahoe when we were at the boat launch, I went next, placing one boot at a time on the board and slowly lowering my weight onto it. My board sank a little more than Susan’s, but it held. I twisted at the waist and reached out as Melvin handed me another board, which we laid across our two boards and slid forward until it was directly beside the body. Getting on her hands and knees, Susan crawled out over the cross-board and began visually examining the body.

  Since I wasn’t officially a part of the police department yet, I mainly handed her things—the camera, several pairs of gloves, swabs for DNA samples, bags to cover the victim’s hands, and on and on—and offered bits of advice when she asked for it.

  After thoroughly examining the front of the body, she glanced over at me. “I don’t see any signs of trauma. You?”

  The sunlight was waning and mosquitoes were already out in
full force. I wiped sweat from my brow and shook my head. “Nothing that I can see.”

  Susan asked Melvin to turn on his spotlight and aim it at the body. Next, she asked him to throw us the body bag.

  Once we had it, we unzipped it and stretched it out over the cross-board beside the victim’s body. I pulled on a pair of latex gloves and scooted to the end of my board, which was near his head.

  Susan grabbed his feet and glanced up at me. “Ready?”

  I nodded and she counted down from three. On one, we both rolled him over and guided him over the body bag. We had to force his arm straight to get it in the body bag. Once he was positioned on his face, Susan turned her attention toward his back.

  “Oh, shit!” she said when she took in the back of his shirt. “This is a homicide.”

  She was right. There were six bullet holes in the back of the man’s shirt. While the fabric was wet and muddy, we could still make out blotches of red where blood had oozed from the wounds.

  After Susan photographed the outside of the shirt, she gently lifted it so we could examine the bullet wounds. The shot pattern wasn’t remarkable. There was a sixteen-inch spread between the farthest two wounds, with the other four scattered within that area and no two holes were closer than five or six inches apart. An average cop could easily fire that size of a group from twenty-five yards, but I didn’t know what type of training our killer possessed—if any. As far as I could tell, there was no fouling or stippling on the shirt, so the shots were fired from several feet away.

  “Depending on our shooter’s proficiency with firearms, the victim was shot from as little as three feet and as much as several yards away,” I said. “Judging by the lack of penetration depth and the size of the wound, I’d guess a small caliber handgun was used—maybe a .38 or .380.”