by Kara Lennox
That stopped him. “Daniel thinks I’m going to get myself in trouble? In more trouble?” he amended.
“His words were, ‘He’s a bit of a loose cannon right now.’ He doesn’t blame you,” she added hastily. “Anybody facing what you’re facing would be a bit freaked out. But don’t let it affect your judgment. That’s all I’m asking. Please, Mitch. I would be devastated if anything happened to you.”
Finally, she’d gotten through to him. She cared about him. And he was touched.
“I promise, Beth, that I won’t do any more showboating. We’ll look—cautiously—for Larry, and if we find him, or even get a whiff of him, we’ll call Dwayne.”
“Thank you.”
“There used to be a homeless encampment near the bayou. We’ll check that first.”
The original town of Coot’s Bayou had sprung up close to the meandering waterway it was named after. But numerous floods had forced the town to rebuild on higher ground. Still, remnants of the original settlement remained, including a bridge that went to nowhere. So long as it didn’t rain too much, the area was kind of appealing, with mature cypress and live oak dripping with Spanish moss.
This time of year, it was awash with wildflowers and flitting birds—and a smattering of cardboard cartons, tin shacks, tents and old mattresses.
Mitch and Beth had to park on the dead-end road and walk down an incline to get to the encampment. It looked as though maybe a dozen people were living there, mostly men but a couple of women.
As Mitch and Beth drew closer, a dark-skinned man in overalls and no shirt stepped in front of them like a brick wall blocking their path. A skinny, scarred bulldog hung at his heels, growling, and Mitch took an instinctive step in front of Beth.
“Who are you and what do you want?” the man asked suspiciously. Every community needed security, and Mitch guessed he’d just met it.
“I’m Mitch, this is Beth,” Mitch said on an even keel. “We aren’t cops. I’ve been accused of a crime, and I’m trying to find a guy who might be able to clear me. I’m not looking to cause trouble for anybody, including this guy.”
“What guy would that be?”
“Larry. Sometimes they call him Crazy Larry.”
“That’s offensive. Larry’s schizophrenic. He needs help, not labels.”
“He calls himself that,” Mitch explained. “So you know him? Is he around?” Mitch peered over the shoulder of Brick-wall Man to see most of the other transients staring at them with open curiosity. And hostility, from some.
Maybe he’d been wrong. Maybe he couldn’t keep Beth safe. He should have insisted she not come with him.
Brick-wall Man loosened up. His dog relaxed, sitting on his haunches to scratch. “Larry has a crib here, but he ain’t been around since yesterday evening. He said he was in trouble. Looked like someone had beat his face in. He washed up, put on some different clothes, then lit out of here like a chicken with a fox on its tail.”
“Is that unusual?”
“Him getting beat up? No, happens pretty regular. Sometimes he stays out all night, too. But usually he comes back in the morning. So, yeah, a little strange.”
“Can we see his place?” Beth asked. “We won’t take anything.”
Mitch stifled a groan. He wished she would let him handle this. She knew everything there was to know about evidence, but next to nothing about the segment of society they were dealing with.
To his surprise, though, Brick-wall Man agreed. “I guess if you want to just look, that’s okay. But we don’t put up with thieves around here. People look at us, think we’re scum, but we got rules and we take care of our own. You sure you’re not cops?”
Mitch extended his foot and pointed to the cuff on his leg. “I’m sure.”
Brick-wall Man chuckled. “What they got you on?”
“Murder.”
“Damn.” The man stepped aside. Mitch wasn’t sure if it was out of respect, fear or disgust. “Larry’s tent is that red one right over there.”
A dozen pairs of suspicious eyes watched them as they approached the red tent. Mitch squatted and lifted the flap. Inside was a filthy sleeping bag and a military-issue backpack stuffed to the gills. The pack sported strange, disturbing slogans scrawled in permanent marker, like Live to Die and Take No Prisoners. But inside, Mitch found only a few clothes, a disposable razor that had seen better days, some granola bars, a pack of cigarettes and a Bic lighter.
“No weapons,” Beth observed.
“If he has weapons, he probably carries them on his person,” Mitch said. “I can see him leaving clothes behind, but food? And cigarettes? Wherever he went, he planned on returning soon.”
“So he’s on the run,” Beth concluded. “Came back only to change clothes—probably so he wouldn’t be identified by that green hoodie.”
“Why was he at the shack if he lives here?” Mitch wondered aloud.
“He liked to get off by himself, sometimes,” the man answered. “Also, he might’ve had a girl.”
Mitch swiveled around to find Brick-wall Man watching them closely, and listening, obviously.
“Larry had a girlfriend?” Mitch asked.
“I don’t know if she was a girlfriend, but he was meeting someone yesterday. A woman. He put on his best camo pants and a clean T-shirt, and he even cleaned his nails. I’m just sayin’.”
Beth stood and faced the giant. “Thank you. Your information could be very helpful.” She handed him a card. “If you see him, can you let us know?”
He took the card and grinned. “Sure. I’ll call you on my cell phone.”
Beth either didn’t get that he was joking, or chose to ignore the rib.
“If I find out you’re out to hurt him,” the big man said, “I’m not gonna be happy.”
Even Mitch, with his fighting skills, didn’t relish the thought of a showdown with this guy. “We just need his help, that’s all,” Mitch said.
“So,” Beth said as they retreated, “is Larry a lady’s man? Lots of girlfriends and such?”
“No. I mean, he liked to look, but I don’t recall him ever having a girlfriend or even a date.”
“He’s kind of scary. Wouldn’t be high on my list of—” She stopped abruptly.
“Beth? Something wrong?”
She tipped her head back and sniffed the air like a dog hoping to catch the scent of a rabbit. “Do you smell that?”
Mostly all he could smell was the slightly rank sent of the bayou, and the stench of nearby oil refineries. “Nothing out of the ordinary.”
“It’s unmistakable. Once you know it, you recognize it immediately.”
Mitch sniffed the air again. “What?”
“Death. There’s something dead nearby.” She held her curly hair back from her face with one hand, sweeping her gaze slowly across the landscape as she spun around in a full circle. Finally she pointed to an area on the other side of the road from where they’d walked. It was overgrown with weeds and scrub, and it looked like someone had dumped their garbage. “There.”
“How do you know?”
“I’ve worked enough death scenes that I know a good body dump area when I see one. Plus…I see flies headed that way.”
“Oh, that’s sick.”
But she didn’t seem put off by the thought of flies and a dead body. She headed straight across the road and forged her way through the weeds and nettles and thick mesquite shrubs that tore at their pant legs.
Then Mitch did smell something, and it turned his stomach. Surely it was just a dead animal.
Beth seemed to know exactly where she was headed. She paused once, read the signs like an expert tracker might, then changed direction.
The odor of death got really strong, and Mitch pulled the hem of his shirt across his nose and mouth as a makeshift mask.
When they found the body, they damn near tripped over it.
“Oh, shit,” Mitch said. There was his old friend, Crazy Larry, with a big hole in the center of his forehead.
CHAPTER TEN
MITCH GRABBED BETH’S hand and tried to drag her away from the hideous scene. “Let’s get out of here!”
“We can’t just leave. We have to protect the crime scene until the police get here.” She would have been faintly amused by Mitch’s revulsion if she hadn’t been so disturbed at finding their witness murdered. She took her cell phone out of her jeans pocket and dialed 9-1-1.
“This is Beth McClelland, and I’ve found a dead body. It’s Larry Montague.” She described their location with a bit of clarification from Mitch, then hung up.
“We should probably move away from the body,” Mitch said sensibly. “We don’t want to contaminate the crime scene.”
Beth knew he was right. But she was in her element; that body could tell her so much, if only she had her plastic bags and a flashlight and tweezers. She could have sent Mitch back to the car for her evidence kit, but she had no legal authority to do anything except contact the police, and it was frustrating as hell.
“Beth, come on.”
She whipped on a pair of plastic gloves, which she’d stashed in her jeans pocket earlier. “I’m just looking. You can go stand by the road if you want, make sure the cops can find us.”
“I’m not leaving you alone with a dead body. What if the murderer is still hanging around?”
“Judging from the insect activity, and the lividity I can see on his neck and his arms, he’s been here for at least a few hours.” She lifted one arm, testing for stiffness, then carefully placed it back exactly where it had been. “He’s already been through rigor mortis. So he probably was killed last night some time. It looks like the gun used to kill him was a small caliber, probably a .22.”
Beth’s hands itched to string up some crime scene tape.
Her gaze traced a path of broken weeds and scrapes in the dry earth that lead away from Larry’s feet. “See those marks? He was dragged here and dumped.”
“So he wasn’t killed here?” Mitch asked. He stood a few feet away, his back facing the body.
It occurred to Beth then that she was being rather callous. To Mitch this wasn’t just a dead body, a pile of evidence. It was his old friend.
“Mitch, I’m sorry. I forgot for a minute that you and he were buddies. First you found out Robby’s dead, and now you lose Larry.”
“Yeah. My mom always said those two would come to bad ends, but I never thought she was right. When you’re a kid, you think you’re immortal.”
He sounded so sad. Beth wanted nothing more than to put her arms around him, to lead him away from this tragic end of a sad life. But she had a duty to perform. The evidence collection guys from the parish lab hadn’t impressed her much with their thoroughness or attention to detail; she might be able to spot something they would miss.
“Keep going, Beth. What else do you see?”
She cleared her throat and got back down to business. “When a body is dumped, it can mean that the actual crime scene was someplace that might incriminate the murderer, like in his house or car. Or, it might just mean he didn’t want the body discovered for a while. But he wasn’t too concerned about that, or he would have buried the body or thrown it into the bayou.”
“So maybe he needed enough time to clean up, dispose of evidence, but he wanted the body found— because the police will naturally suspect me.”
That thought had crossed Beth’s mind. If Larry had witnessed Robby’s murder, the murderer had a good reason to get rid of him. But the police still assumed Mitch was the actual killer.
“Fortunately, you’re wearing that cuff. The GPS history will prove you were at your mom’s house when the crime was most likely committed. Right?”
Mitch didn’t answer.
“Right, Mitch?”
“I might have gone for a drive last night.”
Beth closed her eyes. “Tell me you’re kidding.”
“I couldn’t sleep. I was restless. I took my car and tore up some back roads.”
“Great,” she muttered, wishing that just once they could catch a break. Not only was their best chance to clear Mitch lying dead, but the police could conceivably find a way to pin his death on Mitch.
“I didn’t come anywhere near here.”
“He wasn’t killed here.”
“But I would’ve had to move his body here.”
“Your accomplice did that.”
“What?”
“Just saying. When the police want to make a case, they sometimes invent a mysterious accomplice to explain a lack of evidence.” She forced her attention back to the scene. “There’s a lot of trash around the body. We might want to tell the crime scene folks to collect it, on the off-chance our murderer discarded a cigarette butt or a piece of gum. But we’ll stand a better chance of finding the perp’s DNA on the victim’s clothes. He was probably nervous when he was moving the body, especially with the homeless camp so close by. He might have been sweating. Or bleeding, even, if there was a struggle. See, there’s a red stain on the sleeve of the victim’s shirt. That could be very significant.”
“Blood?” Mitch asked.
She shook her head. “Dried blood would be more rusty colored. But it’s something.”
“I hear a siren,” Mitch said. “Can we go back to the road now?”
They reached the road just as a Coot’s Bayou squad car rounded the bend, then squealed its brakes to avoid hurtling past the dead end into a tree.
Dwayne Bell climbed out from behind the steering wheel, joined by another officer from the passenger seat.
He didn’t look pleased.
“What the hell kind of trouble have you two gotten into now?” Dwayne demanded.
“It’s Larry,” Mitch said. “He’s dead.”
“The dispatcher told me that much. How is it that you two, of all people on God’s green earth, are the ones to find the body?”
“Because we were the ones looking for him,” Beth said, not liking Dwayne’s tone. “Which is more than the Coot’s Bayou police were doing, apparently. If you’d come to this homeless encampment searching for him like we did, you’d have found the body yourself.” She was pretty sure the police hadn’t been by looking for Larry, or the large man in overalls would have said something about it.
Dwayne glanced at the pathetic grouping of tents and boxes, where the ever-suspicious eyes continued to survey them. Probably ready to run if anybody with a uniform got any closer.
“The body’s in there?” He jerked a thumb toward the makeshift town, not sounding pleased by the prospect.
“No, back in there.” Beth pointed in the general direction of the untamed scrub. “About thirty or forty yards.”
“Then how did you know it was there?”
“You mean you can’t smell it?”
Dwayne and his partner, whose name tag identified him as Gomez, both sniffed the air. “No,” Dwayne said. “That’s a long way to smell a body.”
She shrugged. “I have a good nose. It’s this way.”
Thirty minutes later, the area was crawling with cops. Seemed every officer from the Coot’s Bayou department and the parish force, too, even the ones not on duty, showed up to take a look at the body.
Beth tried to insinuate herself into the crime scene processing, but the CSIs didn’t want her anywhere near it. She hadn’t exactly endeared herself to them at the shack earlier that day, shouting out her suggestions from behind the crime scene tape and pointing out things they’d missed.
Now they asked Dwayne to remove her, and he made one of those impossible-to-ignore suggestions that she leave them to their jobs.
“They moved the body before they took pictures,” she groused. “Who trains these guys? They suck.”
“You’ve got bigger fish to fry,” Dwayne reminded her. “Like, I’m still not clear how you so conveniently found the body. Smelled the body.”
“Ask anyone I used to work with at the Houston P.D.,” she said, tripping on a root and barely catching herself before she fel
l on her face. “I was always the first to smell death. Anyway, I keep telling you, we were looking for Larry. If I had a friend who was missing, and I went to her house looking for her and found her dead in the alley behind her house, that wouldn’t be a coincidence would it?”
Dwayne sighed. “I suppose not. Lieutenant Addlestein wants to talk to you, though. He’s not very happy you two are running around playing cops and robbers. You’ve been making the rounds, asking questions. You’re perilously close to interfering with a police investigation.”
It wasn’t the first time Project Justice personnel had been accused of that, and it wouldn’t be the last. It didn’t scare her.
“Maybe if you guys would do your job—”
“Whoa, whoa.” It was Mitch, who had come out of nowhere when Dwayne and Beth reached the road. “It’s my job to fight with my brother, not yours.”
Mitch was right. She shouldn’t be antagonizing the police, especially the only cop who at least pretended to be on their side.
Beth took a deep breath. “I’m sorry, Dwayne. I’m not trying to be troublesome. But I figured we had a better chance of catching up with Larry than you did. He was going to be avoiding the police.”
Dwayne nodded, conceding the point.
“And now I’ve got a crime scene, my area of expertise, and I can’t even watch it being processed and it’s driving me crazy.”
“It’s better for everyone if you stay away from the evidence,” Dwayne said. “You’re hardly impartial.”
Mitch took a step in front of his brother, blocking his way. “Are you insinuating Beth would tamper with evidence?”
“I’m saying she could be accused of that.”
“Boys, boys, enough. Mitch, Dwayne is right. I’m not impartial, I’m not a cop. We have to leave this to the police and hope for the best. But, Dwayne, could you do me one teensy favor?”
“What?” he asked, suspicious.
“The victim has a reddish stain on the left shoulder of his shirt. Could you get me a sample? On a Q-tip?”
“I’m sure our lab will analyze it.”
