by BJ Bourg
“If I had the authority,” Susan said, “I’d swear you in right now—out here on the water, with God, the dead guy, and Melvin as our witnesses.” Susan straightened on her knees and glanced up and down the canal, frowning as she shook her head. After a year of peace in Mechant Loup, this was the last thing she wanted—or needed.
“What are you talking about?” Melvin called from behind us. “Who’s getting sworn in?”
Susan and I looked at each other, and then turned to stare at Melvin, who waited like an eager child, leaning over the edge of the airboat with his mouth open. When neither of us spoke, he stomped his foot in feigned protest. “What’s going on?”
Susan turned her attention back to the body. “You tell him.”
“Tell me what?” he asked.
“I’m thinking about taking the job as the town investigator,” I said slowly.
Melvin jumped in the air and when he landed, I thought his feet would punch a hole in the bottom of the airboat. “Yes! Yes! That’s the best news I’ve heard all year!”
His reaction made me feel good, and I couldn’t help but grin. “Well, thanks, Melv.”
“No, thank you!”
“Can you two stop ass-grabbing and someone hand me a pair of gloves?” Susan asked good-naturedly. I began digging in the crime scene box and she looked at Melvin. “You screamed so loud you nearly woke up our victim.”
“Hell, I think I wet my pants,” he said.
We all laughed, but it wasn’t for long. We knew we had a killer on the loose and we had to stop him, but we also knew our work was cut out for us. Out in the swamps, there were no video cameras and rarely any witnesses. This would not be an easy case to solve.
CHAPTER 5
8:00 a.m., Tuesday, September 27
Town Hall, Mechant Loup, Louisiana
“I, Clint Wolf, do solemnly swear that I will support the Constitution and laws of the United States of America and the Constitution and laws of the State of Louisiana, and that I will faithfully and impartially discharge and perform all the duties incumbent upon me as the Chief of Detectives for the Town of Mechant Loup according to the best of my abilities and understanding, so help me God.”
It was a surreal moment for me as I turned and looked out over the small group of people standing in the mayor’s office to watch my swearing-in ceremony. I never thought I’d wear a badge again. I glanced down at the shield in my hand and grinned. When I looked up again, my eyes locked with Susan’s and she winked.
“I am honored to present to you our first ever Chief of Detectives,” Mayor Pauline Cain said to the few townspeople, government employees, and police officers, all of whom began clapping.
I wasn’t sure how I would be accepted by the town, because they all knew what I’d done, but Susan had assured me they were all behind me. While I didn’t care what people thought of me, I wouldn’t be an effective investigator if the township despised me.
“We’ve got refreshments in the back,” Mayor Cain said, tucking a lock of jet black hair behind her ear. “Please join us for—”
“I’m sorry, Mayor,” I said, giving a sharp bow of my head. “I appreciate the gesture, but I’ve actually got work to do. You hired me on a busy day.”
Pauline smiled warmly, and I saw her eyes cloud as she remembered how tirelessly I’d worked on her husband’s case. It had been my first homicide investigation as Chief of the Mechant Loup Police Department, and it had been a hell of a case. It had caused a lot of pain and suffering for the town, especially for Pauline, who had suffered more than anyone should be allowed to suffer, having lost a son and then a husband.
She nodded her understanding. “I’ll make a plate for you and send it home with Susan.”
After thanking everyone who had shown up for the ceremony, I shifted the Blackhawk Serpa holster on my belt, hitched my khaki slacks a little higher on my hip, and then headed for the door.
I stepped out into the bright morning sunlight and paused at the top of the concrete steps. My head was spinning a little by how fast things had progressed. Susan had called the mayor as soon as we’d arrived at the boat launch with the victim’s body last night, and Pauline had quickly gone about arranging the ceremony.
“She wants to get it done as soon as possible,” Susan had joked, “before you change your mind.”
I assured her I wouldn’t change my mind. Susan was correct when she said she didn’t have time for a death investigation, and most of her officers had never worked a murder case before, so I knew it would take a load off of her. Melvin could probably handle the case, but he shared the night rotations with Officer Amy Cooke. Pulling him away from his shift would cause Susan to be shorthanded, as there were only two other officers on the department and they were busy splitting the day shift.
Susan had to train every evening for her upcoming fight. Each time she missed a training session, it was padding her opponent’s advantage. She’d assured me this would be her last fight, because she wanted to get married and focus on starting a family. While it thrilled her mom to no end and made me happy, as well, I couldn’t see past this fight.
Ivanov was dangerous already, but the woman’s fulltime job was fighting, while Susan’s fulltime job was being a police chief. We had stayed out until ten last night interviewing the three boys who found the body, so she’d missed yet another training session. Her coach was pissed and he was starting to talk about cancelling the fight, which didn’t set well with Susan and she’d threatened to fire him.
I tried to take solace in the fact that Susan was the best fighter I’d ever seen, and I assured myself she’d be fine. It was just that things had changed once I fell in love with her. I suddenly didn’t like seeing her getting punched or kicked in the face; and the prospect of her getting seriously injured scared the crap out of me.
I shook my head to clear it. While I was taking this position to give Susan more time to train for her fight, truth be told, I was tickled stupid to be back on the job. Standing there in the gentle breeze—my black polo shirt tucked neatly into my khaki slacks and the gold shield and Springfield .45 Model 1911 pistol weighing down my belt—it felt like I was back in the City of La Mort working as a homicide detective again. I’d been very fortunate back then. I’d amassed a 100% arrest and conviction rate for all the murder cases I’d investigated and, while most of my colleagues and supervisors thought it was because I was a great detective, I knew it was part luck, part drive, and a whole lot of prayers from my mom.
For a brief moment, a sense of pride washed over me and I felt useful again, a productive member of society—but then I remembered Michele and Abigail. The ceremony, the job, the memory…all of it conjured up powerful emotions and I bit back the lump in my throat. After all this time, the loss of my only child and wife hurt as much today as it did yesterday and the day before that and back when the incident first happened.
I grunted. They say time’s a healer, but that’s bullshit. Nothing will ever heal this pain.
My best medicine was staying busy, and it looked like this murder case was going to keep me plenty busy—
“Where’re you heading, handsome?”
I blinked the moisture from my eyes and turned to smile down at Susan. “I’m heading to the autopsy first and then I’ll canvass Dire Lane. Maybe someone saw something or heard gunshots one day. As of right now, we have no idea when our victim was killed.”
“Well, I’m coming with you.”
She’d said it as a statement, not a request, but I hesitated.
“What?” she asked.
“I’ll only take you with me if you promise to leave early and get your training time in. I don’t want you getting hurt in the cage.”
She grunted. “Yes, father.”
CHAPTER 6
“Sorry we’re late,” I said to Doctor Louise Wong when Susan and I stepped into the autopsy room that was located toward the back of the coroner’s office. “We got tied up at the office for a bit.”
D
octor Wong turned from the autopsy table, her eyes widening inside of her plastic face shield. Her mouth twisted into a grin. “Clint Wolf—is that you?”
I raised my hand as though to say, “Guilty,” and just nodded.
“I thought you were done with police work.” Her gloved hands glistened brightly from the mixture of blood and slop covering the latex, and the room smelled something awful. There was nothing quite like opening up a body that had been in the water for a few days to ruin your breakfast. “They said you were running some swamp tours or something.”
“He’s been bothering me to come back to work at the police department,” Susan joked. “I finally gave in and talked the mayor into taking him back.”
“I know better than that.” Doctor Wong scoffed and turned back to her patient. “You were in here last year saying how much you missed working with him.”
Susan glanced at me and mouthed, “I was.”
I stepped closer to the autopsy table and watched as Doctor Wong shoved a probe into one of the bullet holes. She indicated with her head toward an x-ray film clasped to the white-light film viewer. “The six bullets showed up under x-ray, but I’m having a hard time getting to the last one.”
I looked around and noticed five plastic containers lined up neatly on the nearby counter. I moved closer and looked inside. Each contained an oblong piece of lead. I scrunched my face. “Are these the projectiles?”
“Yeah,” she said without looking up. “I labeled the side of the container to indicate which hole I pulled each one from.”
I waved Susan over. “Look…they’re shaped weird.”
When Susan was beside me, I pointed out how the lead projectiles appeared stretched. “It looks like they squirted through a narrow hole on the way to the victim.”
“Yeah,” Susan agreed. “Like they went through one of those old Play-Doh squeeze toys.”
“That might account for the reduction in power and lack of penetration, because whatever they squeezed through might’ve slowed them down enough that they didn’t go through and through the body.”
“Still thinking .38 or .380?”
“They’re solid lead, so I’m guessing they might be some old .38 target rounds—remember the wad cutters from back in the day? They didn’t have any copper on them at all and they would gum up the barrels in the worst way. I remember some of the old timers complaining about how they’d have to spend hours cleaning their revolvers.”
Susan placed her hands on her hips and cocked her head sideways. The dimple on her left cheek dug deeper into her flesh as she smiled. “Um, excuse me, old man, but how on earth would I know about wad cutters?”
“We’re the same age.” I ripped a glove from the box on the counter and lifted one of the projectiles to the light. It was so damaged the lands and grooves from the rifling were indiscernible. “I don’t think the lab will be able to match these bullets.”
I gently placed it back in the plastic container and walked by Susan and stood to watch Doctor Wong wrestle the last projectile from the victim’s back. It appeared identical to the other bullets. Once she’d placed that one in a separate container, she removed her gloves and pulled on a fresh pair.
“There were three potentially lethal wounds,” she said. “One of the bullets perforated his heart—it’s the one that actually killed him—another went through the right side of the liver and the third collapsed his left lung. Had he not been shot in the heart and had he received immediate medical attention, he might have survived the liver and lung shots, but since you didn’t find him for several days, he would’ve died from any of these three wounds.”
We stood by and waited while Doctor Wong gingerly scraped the underneath of the victim’s fingernails. Once she was done, I retrieved my cadaver fingerprint kit and we set about trying to recover his fingerprints. Once we’d gotten decent sets from both hands, we set the prints to dry in the back of my new Tahoe and then returned to wrap things up with the coroner.
Doctor Wong said she would run a full toxicology report and she’d get us the results as soon as they came in. She handed us the clothes she’d removed from the body and we placed them in paper bags until we could get them to the office for air drying.
“No wallet or identification?” I asked.
Wong shook her head. “Nothing. He doesn’t have a tattoo or any obvious scars. Of course, the rate of decomposition prevents us from seeing any subtle scarring.”
I sighed and glanced down at my notes. “So, what we do know is he’s a white male, about five-seven, has thinning white hair, was somewhere north of two hundred pounds before he ended up in the canal, and he’s deadly allergic to lead.”
Susan shot a thumb over her shoulder toward the exit. “Once we run his prints, we’ll know if he’s got a criminal record. If not…” She let her voice trail off, because we both knew how difficult it would be to identify him if his prints weren’t on file and if no one had reported him missing.
I pointed to the belt that the doctor had placed on the table and turned to Susan. “That buckle”—it was an American flag in full color with the black shadow of a bear in the foreground—“is unique. If the prints don’t turn up anything, we can get this out to the media. Someone might recognize it.”
She nodded her agreement and I rolled it up to place it inside a bag. As I did so, I noticed an inscription on the back of the buckle. I scowled and turned it so Susan could see. “What do you think?”
“F.U.,” she read slowly and then shook her head. “Right back at you, poor little man.”
CHAPTER 7
After leaving the coroner’s office, Susan and I drove to Dire Lane and began canvassing the neighborhood, searching for anyone who might’ve seen or heard anything suspicious over the course of the past few days. We parked my Tahoe on the right shoulder of the street and began making our way down that side first.
“What the hell?” Susan asked when we reached the back of the street and crossed over to the left side. “Does anyone live in this neighborhood?”
There were fourteen houses on the right-hand side, which included the homes of the three boys who had located our victim, but no one answered when we knocked.
I shrugged. “I guess all the adults are at work and all the kids are in school.”
While it had been a little cooler when we stepped outside this morning, once the sun wrapped its warm arms around our town, the temperature had quickly climbed into the nineties. Sweat had gathered on Susan’s forehead. As for me, I could feel it leaking down the small of my back.
We strode across the concrete surface toward the opposite side of the street. Birds chirped in the trees overhead. It was a typical neighborhood in our little town—quiet and peaceful. If gunshots were to erupt at that moment, it would shatter the tranquility of the place and cause quite a stir. I said so to Susan, but she scoffed.
“What if no one’s around to hear it?” she asked.
That was a good point.
The last two lots on the left side of the street were empty. Dirt had been hauled in on one of the lots and the property had been built up, but it didn’t look like construction would be taking place anytime soon. We crossed the barren lots quickly and walked up the long driveway to knock on the door to the last house on the left. Nothing.
We continued working our way toward the front of the street and met with the same results. There were eight houses on that side and, just like the right side, not a single person was home.
“It would be easy to burglarize every house in this neighborhood,” Susan said, walking idly to the center of the street and surveying the area.
I lagged behind, studying the last house we’d checked, which was the first house on the left side of the street and the largest in the neighborhood. There were surveillance cameras positioned at each corner of the house. It was the only house in the neighborhood with cameras. Too bad this house wasn’t located along Westway Canal.
Feeling like we’d wasted the morning, and know
ing I’d have to return this evening when people were home, Susan and I grabbed a quick bite of food and I dropped her off at the police department.
“Remember our agreement,” I said. “You’re knocking off early and going to the gym.”
“Where are you heading?”
I glanced at the clock on the dash of my Tahoe. It was two-thirty. I needed to find the spot where our victim went into the water. Once I found it, I could hopefully backtrack to the crime scene. While I could take my boat up and down the canal looking for that spot, unfortunately, I was born a city boy and didn’t know an awful lot about tracking.
“I need to find out where our victim went into the water,” I explained, “but I’m not the man-tracker I was in my former life.”
Susan was thoughtful. “Gretchen Verdin and her dog, Geronimo, are the best K-9 team in the state. Call the sheriff and ask if you can borrow her.”
I’d heard of Gretchen. She was a K-9 sergeant with the Chateau Parish Sheriff’s Office and she was three-quarters Chitimacha Indian. Melvin had once told me she could track a roach across the surface of the water.
“Good idea.” I leaned over to kiss her and it turned into a long moment.
When she pulled away, she smiled and rubbed my face with the tips of her fingers. She then shook her head and reached over through the gap between the seats and grabbed the evidence bags. “I’ll fill out the evidence sheets and have these delivered to the crime lab. Maybe the prints will turn up something.”
I then watched as she dropped from the passenger seat of my Tahoe and walked toward the front entrance of the new police department building. After the old building had burned to the ground following the gun battle with the Parker brothers last year, the town council had acquired this piece of property and built the new police department. It was located along Washington Avenue in the downtown district and was a one-story building, but that one story was twelve feet off the ground. Since we lived in hurricane country, the town council saw fit to construct a building that would withstand even the most powerful of storms while also being flood-proof. If the massive concrete pillars and solid concrete walls were any indication of strength, this building wasn’t going anywhere…ever.
