Touch of Evil (3 page)

“They’re good,” Ross said, and not simply out of loyalty. “My cousin’s the lead singer.”

And not only the lead singer, he realized as his stomach knotted, but the last surviving member of a band called Hangman’s Bayou.

One good thing about music, when it hits—you feel no pain.

—Bob Marley

A simple thing, the tying of a slipknot. Easy and expedient. But for all that, there’s something lacking in it. History, maybe, and I’m not just talking about a bunch of redneck fools in sheets, trying to shove terror up the ass of progress.

A hangman’s knot takes more practice to master. Practice to get the N shape just right. Practice to figure out how many coils you like. For my taste, eight’s the perfect number—enough to make it good and strong without getting too unwieldy.

Trouble is, your practice has to be in secret, for just the sight of this knot causes strange reactions. Fear in some, hate in others. Enough hate to break folks out in a rash of bloodshed. But a lot of others get excited—world’s full of fucking rubberneckers out looking for a show.

But to give them their due, there’s hardly any better spectacle than the sight of a grown man led as helpless as a little child to the waiting noose. Only thing I can think of any finer would be a woman’s hanging, but I haven’t tried that…

Or I haven’t tried it yet. Not yet, but perhaps soon.

The ball is in her court now.

(I hear the creak of your rope, stretched taut. See one sandal, tumbling, the second catching on a toe.)

Justine started awake as the curtain zipped back noisily. Before she could complain, she heard: “Doing all right there, Sheriff?”

Stripped of her usual defenses, she responded to Savoy’s voice with a reflexive snarl that would have done Pavlov’s dogs proud.

“Well, at least you’re smiling.” He sounded positively cheerful. “That’s more than I’d do if somebody laid a five iron upside my head.”

“Laid a…a what?” She understood his good mood all too well, but his words floated in the air like pieces of a jigsaw, the most critical of which spun out of reach. Or maybe
she
was the one floating, thanks to the medication. Feeling vulnerable, she pulled up the sheet to cover her thin, cotton gown.

“A golf club,” Roger told her, the black hole of his mouth oozing blobs of sound. “Someone hit you with a golf club.”

A golf club?
That couldn’t have been what he’d said. She blinked and squinted, struggling to focus.

“Looks like somebody might’ve laid in wait. When you walked past the spot where they were hiding,
whack
—right to the side of your head.”

“They fingerprint you yet?” Justine tried to laugh, but the sound caught in her throat like a hunk of dry bread.

Savoy stared at her as if he had been the one struck.

“I was kidding, Roger,” she said.
Sort of.

He smiled briefly, looking as green as she felt. “We are—um—we’ve got somebody looking at prints on the club as we speak. Deputy Caruthers says he’s finding plenty, but the larger ones are pretty smudged.”

Frowning at the news, Justine changed the subject. “Who’s watching Noah right now?”

Without a single window or clock in sight, she had no idea what time of day it was, but the stubble shadowing Savoy’s jaw hinted that it had been hours since she’d left the LeJeune scene by the lake.

“Marianne Crane went over,” he said. “Larry says she’s got you covered.”

“Thank God for both of them.”

“And your father’s on his way, too,” Savoy added.

“I wish you hadn’t worried him about this,” she said, more sharply than she had intended. In truth, Justine was grateful that her dad would come at all. Or maybe
surprised
was the correct word, considering their last conversation. Ed Truitt, the legendary, longtime sheriff of Morton County, had labeled as “bullshit” her claim that she had no idea how forty thousand dollars’ worth of wire transfers from an offshore company had landed in her bank account this past spring.

She felt sick to her soul recalling the disappointment in his dark eyes. Felt even more disappointed in herself for lying. To him. To everyone. But what else could she do?

“The man wants to be here for you and Noah,” Savoy said solemnly. “Any father would.”

Justine imagined that was half right about her dad. Her father loved Noah, at least, unequivocally.

Had it been that way for her once, when she was younger? Innocent? She reached for a pleasant memory but found only another patch of quicksand.

Roger shuffled his feet and asked her, “Do you remember anything about what happened this afternoon? The doctor said you might—”

“I was on my way to Dee LeJeune’s.” Justine exchanged a festering, old worry for something more pressing.

“Dee knows, Justine. She said you told her how Caleb killed himself.” Roger studied her, his blue eyes narrowing.

“I told her…
what
?” Justine struggled toward the recollection. Her head throbbed, protesting the effort until she gave it up.

“She said you sat down with her, held her hand,” Savoy said with a rare note of approval, probably due to the fact that he considered hand-holding an appropriate female jurisdiction.

Justine closed her eyes and exhaled, relieved she’d handled that, at least. “So who hit me, then?”

“I was hoping you’d have some idea. Any thoughts on that?”

“I…” She fought harder, only to sink deeper in the muck. “I guess I’ll be relying on your investigative skills. Because I can’t remember a damned thing.”

Roger puffed up a bit and straightened, proud of what even Justine grudgingly conceded was a well-earned reputation. It was the second most important reason she hadn’t fired him.

“I talked to those LeJeune kids,” he said. “They claimed they didn’t see a thing, but I’m not so sure about that. Could be somebody they knew, some loser from the neighborhood who saw his chance to even the score for getting himself arrested,” Savoy said. “But we’ll get him, sheriff. Don’t you worry. More than likely he’s already running his mouth, bragging to his buddies, who’ll turn in his sorry ass the minute we put up a reward.”

“You’re offering a reward?”

“Damned straight we are.” Roger’s words were heated, his expression fierce. “Can’t have criminals thinking they can get away with attacking our people. The Crime Stoppers program is putting up the money.”

“Sounds good.”

“You just leave it all to me,” the deputy said. “Rest up as long as you need. You gave us a big scare today, and we’re all worried about your health—”

“About this latest hanging,” Justine interrupted, in no mood to listen to false sympathy. “Do you think this is the last of them? Or should we be worried there might be more? What about the singer? Laney Thibodeaux’s the last of the group left, right?”

More clearly than today’s scene, she remembered a conversation with Savoy a few days earlier about what experts called “suicide clusters” and his theory that the Willets hanging had been related to that of the victim’s friend, Hart Tyson. Justine had been skeptical, thinking the “suicide-as-contagion”
phenomenon was most often reported in hysteriaprone high schoolers, but the death of a third member of Hangman’s Bayou seemed to prove the deputy had been onto something.

Savoy shrugged. “Maybe it’s already over. Hanging’s a man’s way out. Too violent for the ladies.”

Though statistically, he was right, Justine wasn’t convinced. “You think they could’ve had some kind of weird pact? Like if they didn’t make it big by a certain deadline, they’d go the way of their band’s name?”

Had the members of Hangman’s Bayou imagined that such deaths would immortalize their music? God help her and her department if some reporter from one of the network affiliates caught wind of the connection and decided the deaths would make for an eerie Halloween story on the evening news.

The deputy’s gaze snapped to Justine, as if her idea—or the fact that she had had one—took him by surprise. “I’m not sure any of ’em was serious enough to come up with something like that. Hell, LeJeune spent as much of his time sleeping off benders in the jail as he did playing. And the other two weren’t much better.”

“I wouldn’t exactly lump Tyson and Willets in with Caleb LeJeune,” Justine countered. Neither had been in any trouble outside of some garden-variety high school foolishness back in the day.

Savoy crossed his arms, his expression unhappy. “We’ll send someone over, have a talk with that girl.”

He snorted, adding wryly, “I remember her now. The sweet young thing Deputy Miller called a spicy little lagniappe when she came to the office.”

“Miller’d better watch his damned mouth,” Justine shot back, though she couldn’t decide whether Paul’s calling Laney “a little something extra” was any more offensive than Roger’s “sweet young thing.” Both offended Justine, steeped
as she was in memories of the sad day she’d broken the news of Laney’s boyfriend’s death. “Miss Thibodeaux’s grieving for a loved one. She should be accorded the same respect you’d give to any—”

“Paul didn’t mean anything by it,” Roger said defensively, protective as always of the old-boy status quo. And clueless as ever that sexism was something more than a figment of her imagination.

He’d hated her ever since she’d marched in, an outsider whose experience had been in a distant county, and “stolen” a job he had assumed would fall to him. A job he had been working toward for nearly thirty years. A job he’d cost himself by ruffling too many feathers. The wrong feathers.

Sucks to be you, Savoy,
she thought before she asked him if he’d mind the store until she recovered. “I don’t expect I’ll be out long,” she said, despite the thumping pain in her head. “Maybe just a day or two, but someone needs to call Miss Thibodeaux back in and reinterview her about her fellow band members. Someone with the experience and judgment to tell if she knows more than she’s been saying, or if she could be a suicide risk herself.”

His brows rising, Savoy scrubbed a hand over his mouth in a clear attempt to cover his surprise…and pleasure. Probably crafting a new campaign slogan for their rematch a year from next month:
Experience and Judgment.
“I’d be glad to take over,” he said.

“Not take over,” she corrected. Not yet, anyway. “Act on my authority. Report to me personally before each shift for instruction.”

His hand dropping, he stared at her, his contempt unmasked. Naked. Brutal. It was a stark reminder of the most important reason she hadn’t fired the annoying SOB.

She preferred to keep her enemies close at hand, where she could watch them.

Before Ross caught sight of Kenneth Fleming in his white coat, he heard the charge nurse’s scathing, “Fashionably late doesn’t cut it in this ER, Doctor. Especially not with Dr. Bollinger just back from being out sick.”

“I’m fine,” Ross put in firmly.

“Sorry, Ross. I can explain,” Kenneth said, staring past Debbie at Ross, who was finishing a chart at the counter while the waiting room remained clear.

Kenneth, an emergency room doctor in his early forties, looked flustered, his thin, gray-threaded hair disheveled, his lab coat rumpled, and his small hands jerking their way through nervous gestures. A good sign, since Kenneth, already on probation following drug rehab,
should
be worried. Ross would have been more concerned had he dragged in looking cool, a sure sign he’d been hitting the painkillers once again.

“So what happened?” Ross crossed his arms over his chest to face the prodigal.

Kenneth looked up, his chubby cheeks and mottled flush making him look disconcertingly like a child explaining a missed curfew to his parents. “I was running the kids back to my ex’s in Fort Worth, and on the way back, my damned front wheel fell off, the right one. Can you believe that?”

Blue eyes blazing, Debbie slid Ross a look that said she didn’t. Waving off the excuse, she said, “I’m taking my break now.”

As she strode off muttering, Kenneth protested, looking to Ross for reassurance. “But it’s true this time. I swear it. I’ve even got the tow truck driver’s card here. You can call him. He’ll vouch for me.”

He whipped a dog-eared rectangle from his pocket and passed it to Ross. “The driver said something about the lug nuts being sheared off. He thought maybe they got overtightened last week when I had that front-end work done. I can tell you, my mechanic’s going to get a call from me as soon as…”

He fell quiet when Ross raised a hand as he inspected the card, which had a greasy thumbprint and the name Carlos penned on it in blue ink. Neither of which proved a thing.

“I’ve got receipts out in the glove box,” Fleming added. “One for the tow, and another for the car I rented.”

“Forget it,” Ross said, “but it’s close to midnight. You should have called so I could’ve gotten somebody to cover.”

Fleming had a long, involved story about a dead cell battery and a lost charger, but Fleming always had a story. His life was an endless series of mishaps, missteps, and minor-league dramas. Ross had learned that months earlier, around the time Kenneth flunked his second drug test.

“That’s all right,” Ross said, more interested in checking on his cousin than wasting what little time he had before his next shift listening to excuses. “I’m taking off now. If you’re definitely okay.”

He followed up the comment with a hard look that had Fleming raising his hands in surrender.

“I’m great, really. Clean as the day I was born.” His face grew even redder. “You can test me if you want to. Blood, urine, whatever you want. Right now.”

“I’ll leave that decision up to Tremont,” Ross said, naming the head of the department, the family friend who’d talked him into coming back from Houston after Anne’s death nearly five years earlier. The same man who’d convinced him to come back this week.

“Listen, Ross. I’m really sorry. If I had realized it was you on duty, so soon after…” Fleming patted his own chest. “How are you anyway?”

Tired after a long day. Preoccupied with thoughts of Justine and worried about why Laney isn’t answering her phone.

“Heart’s just great,” Ross answered, wishing he could roll back time to those days, only a few months earlier, when Fleming would have pumped him for information about one of any number of gorgeous women seen on Ross’s arm.
Amused by the irony of his reputation as a ladies’ man, Ross had never volunteered the information that all of the women were members of his vast network of relations.