AllFreeNovel
Share Us
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’sVitruvian 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. Thereality 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 halfundone. 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. Thereisno 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.
