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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, smoky 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 noreason on God’sgreen 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.”
