by Tami Hoag
“It’s a free country,” I said. “More or less.”
“I don’t want you here.”
“It’s my vic.”
“You’re not on the job,” he said. “You quit that, too. Remember?”
His words hit me like a fist to the sternum. I actually took a step back at the verbal blow, not able to prevent myself from gasping.
“You are such an asshole,” I snapped back, more upset than I wanted to show. More upset than I wanted to be. “Why should I want to be hooked up with you? You don’t get your way and the first thing you do is fight dirty. You really know how to sell yourself, Landry. I can’t believe women aren’t beating down your door, you fucking prick.”
My eyes were burning, anger trembling through me like the vibrations of a plucked wire. I turned to go back to the body, thinking that the woman below the surface of the filthy water had undoubtedly been put there by some man she shouldn’t have trusted—as if there was any other kind.
The arm seemed to wave at me in acknowledgment, and I thought I was hallucinating. Then it waved again—violently—and I knew instantly what was happening. Before I could react, there was a terrific splashing and thrashing, and water came up at me in a sheet.
Landry shouted behind me, “Jesus Christ!”
One of the deputies called, “Gator!”
Landry hit me in the back and shoved me to the side. As I tumbled onto my hands and knees, a gun went off above me, the report like the crack of a whip in my ears.
I scrambled away from the bank and tried to regain my feet, the worn soles of my riding boots slipping out from under me on the damp grass.
Landry emptied his Glock 9mm into the churning water. One of the deputies ran along the bank on the other side, shouldering a shotgun, shouting, “I got him! I got him!”
The blast was nearly deafening.
“Son of a bitch!” Landry shouted.
As I watched, the perpetrator floated to the surface on its back, a bloody, ragged, gaping hole torn in its pale yellow belly. An alligator about five feet long, with part of a human torso still caught between its jaws.
“Shit,” Landry said. “There goes my scene.”
He swore and stomped around, looking for something to hit or kick.
I went to the edge of the bank and looked down.
Alligators are known for rolling with their prey in the water, disorienting their thrashing victim, drowning them even as the gator bites through tissue and bone, rupturing veins and arteries. This one had jerked his intended meal free of the branches she had become entangled with. The gator may have even stashed the body there himself earlier—another common practice: stuffing its victim away for later, letting the body begin to decompose wedged under a tree trunk.
Nature is cruel. Almost as cruel as human beings.
I stared down into the muddy water, looking for the rest of the body to surface. When it did, I went numb from head to toe.
I mouthed the words “Oh, my God,” but I don’t think I said them out loud. I felt like I was floating out of my body. I sank back down to my knees, and my hands covered my mouth—to stifle a sound, to keep from vomiting—I didn’t know which.
The pale blue face that stared back at me should have been beautiful—full lips, high cheekbones. She should have had translucent blue eyes the color of a Siberian winter sky, but the small fish and other creatures that lived in the canal had begun to feed on them. More of Mother Nature’s handiwork: a death mask from a horror movie.
Over the years when I had been a street cop and a narcotics detective, I had seen many bodies. I had looked down into the lifeless faces of countless corpses. I had learned not to think of them as people. The essence of the person was gone. What remained was evidence of a crime. Something to be processed and cataloged.
I couldn’t do that as I stared at this face. I couldn’t detach, couldn’t shut down my mind as it flashed images of her alive. I could hear her voice—insolent, dismissive, Russian. I could see her walk across the stable yard—lithe, lazy, elegant, like a cheetah.
Her name was Irina Markova. I had worked side by side with her for more than a year.
“Elena…Elena…Elena…”
It registered somewhere in the back of my mind that someone was trying to speak to me, but it sounded as if the voice was coming from very far away.
A firm hand rested on my shoulder.
“Elena. Are you all right?”
Landry.
“No,” I said, moving away from his touch.
I fought to stand and prayed not to fall as I walked away. But my legs gave out within a few steps and I went down on my hands and knees. I felt like I couldn’t breathe; my stomach heaved and I vomited and choked.
Panic gripped me by the throat as much from my fear of my own emotions as it was from what I had seen, or from the fear of aspirating my own vomit and dying. I wanted to run away from my feelings. I wanted to bolt and run just as Goose had bolted and run away with me earlier, bringing me to this terrible place.
“Elena.”
Landry’s voice was in my ear. His arm came around my shoulders, offering strength and security. I didn’t want those things from him. I didn’t want anything from him. I didn’t want him seeing me this way—weak, vulnerable, out of control.
We had been lovers off and on for the last year. He had decided he wanted more. I had decided I wanted nothing. Less than ten hours previous I had pushed him away with both hands, too strong to need him—or so I claimed. I didn’t feel very strong now.
“Hey, take it easy,” he said quietly. “Just try to breathe slowly.”
I pushed at him, wriggled away from him, got to my feet again. I tried to say something—I don’t know what. The sounds coming from me weren’t words. I put my hands over my face, trying to hold myself together.
“It’s Irina,” I said, fighting to regulate my breathing.
“Irina? Irina from Sean’s?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, Jesus,” he murmured. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what to say.”
“Don’t say anything,” I whispered. “Please.”
“Elena, you should sit down.”
He told one of the deputies to call in a crime-scene unit, and ushered me not to my car, but to his. I sat down sideways in the passenger seat, bent over my knees, my hands cradling my head.
“You want something to drink?”
“Yeah. Vodka rocks with a twist.”
“I have water.”
He handed me a bottle. I rinsed my mouth out.
“Do you have a cigarette?” I asked, not because I was a smoker per se, but because I had been, and like a lot of cops I knew—Landry included—had never entirely abandoned the habit.
“Look in the glove compartment.”
It gave my trembling hands something to do, my mind something small to focus on. It forced me to breathe slowly or choke.
“When was the last time you saw her?”
I took a deep pull on the smoke and exhaled as if I was blowing out candles on a birthday cake, forcing every last bit of air from my lungs.
“Saturday. Late afternoon. She was anxious to go. I offered to feed the horses and take care of night check.”
Unlike myself, Irina had an active social life. Where it took place and with whom, I didn’t know, but I had often seen her leave her apartment above the stables dressed for trouble.
“Where was she going?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where might she go?”
I didn’t have the strength to shrug. “Maybe The Players or Galipette. Maybe clubbing. Clematis Street.”
“Do you know her friends?”
“No. I imagine they were mostly other grooms, other Russians.”
“Boyfriend?”
“If she had one, she didn’t bring him to the farm. She kept her business to herself.”
That was one thing I had always liked about her. Irina didn’t burden those around her with raunchy details
of her sex life, or who she had seen, or who she had done.
“Has her mood been any different lately?”
I tried a weak laugh. “No. She’s been churlish and arrogant, like always.”
Not sought-after qualities in a groom, but I had never really minded her moods. God knew I made her look like an angel. She had opinions and wasn’t shy about voicing them. I respected that. And she was damn good at her job, even if she did sometimes act like she was in forced labor in a Siberian gulag.
“Do you want me to take you home?” Landry asked.
“No. I’m staying.”
“Elena—”
“I’m staying.” I put out the cigarette on the running board of the car and dropped the butt into the ashtray.
I figured he would try to stop me, but he stepped back as I got out of the car.
“Do you know anything about her family?”
“No. I doubt Sean does either. It would never occur to him to ask.”
“She wasn’t a member of the taxpaying club?”
I gave him a look.
Undocumented aliens made up a large part of the work force in the South Florida horse business. They migrated to Wellington every winter just like the owners and trainers of the six or eight thousand horses brought here to compete in some of the biggest, richest equestrian events in the world.
From January to April the town’s population triples with everything from billionaires to barely getting by. The main show grounds—Palm Beach Polo and Equestrian Club—was a multinational melting pot. Nigerians worked security, Haitians emptied the trash cans, Mexicans and Guatemalans mucked the stalls. Once a year the INS would make a sweep through the show grounds, scattering illegal aliens like rats being run out of a tenement.
“You know I’m going to call this in and people are going to come out here,” Landry said.
By people he meant detectives from the Sheriff’s Office—not my biggest fan club, despite the fact that I had been one of them. I had also gotten one of them killed in a drug raid three years prior. A bad decision—against orders, of course—a couple of twitchy meth dealers, a recipe for disaster.
I had not escaped unscathed physically or mentally, but I hadn’t died, either, and there were cops who would never forgive me for that.
“I found the body,” I said. “Like it or not.”
Not, I thought. I didn’t want to be there. I didn’t want to know the person who had become a corpse ravaged by an alligator. But somehow this trouble had managed to find me, and there wasn’t anything I could do about it.
Life’s a bitch, and then you die.
Some sooner than others.
Bantam Books by Tami Hoag
THE ALIBI MAN
PRIOR BAD ACTS
KILL THE MESSENGER
DARK HORSE
DUST TO DUST
ASHES TO ASHES
A THIN DARK LINE
GUILTY AS SIN
NIGHT SINS
DARK PARADISE
CRY WOLF
STILL WATERS
LUCKY’S LADY
THE LAST WHITE KNIGHT
STRAIGHT FROM THE HEART
A Bantam Book
PUBLISHING HISTORY
Bantam Loveswept mass market edition published September 1989
Bantam mass market reissue /August 2007
Published by Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved
Copyright © 1989 by Tami Hoag
Illustration by Tony Greco & Alan Ayers
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Bantam Books and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
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www.bantamdell.com
eISBN: 978-0-553-90490-1
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