Wild Man's Curse (Wilds of the Bayou #1)

by Susannah Sandlin

  Tante Eva and Nonc LeRoy weren’t married? That gave a whole new meaning to shacked up, given what she recalled about that cabin. It beat sleeping under a Nashville overpass, however.

  “I’ll be there by Monday.”

  CHAPTER 4

  LDWF Agent Jena Sinclair tugged at the collar of her department-issued shirt, long sleeves cuffed at the wrist despite the suffocating heat of the bayou even at seven in the morning.

  It was her favorite time of day out here on the water, as the things of the night fell silent and the creatures of the day awakened. The humidity was thick and viscous, but the oppressive heat hadn’t caught up with it yet. The waters stirred with splashes and croaks, and the slight breeze caused the heavy Spanish moss dripping from the trees to sway like the skirt of a dancing woman. Birds competed to see which species could out-call the other. The smell of wild things and the ever-present odor of DEET blended with the scents of mud and lilies.

  Even after a long, hard night of work, the bayou made Jena feel alive.

  The long sleeves had been her choice—they were the only surefire protection against the mosquitoes. As bad as the parasitic monsters were in the daytime, they were worse at dusk and at dawn. Just her luck that she seemed especially tasty to them, judging by the number of bites she collected during evening shifts.

  “Don’t you get bit?” She scratched at a welt on her neck and glared at her partner. If he’d been gnawed on during the all-nighter they’d just spent cruising in the waters off Bayou Terrebonne, he hadn’t let on. Of course, they’d been too busy to think about it until now.

  “Guess I’m just not as sweet as you, Red.”

  “Obviously.” Jena pulled at her collar again and slapped the green LDWF baseball cap on her head backward, matching her partner’s. Gentry Broussard was too damned cool ever to admit he was as miserable as she was. “And stop calling me Red.”

  Gentry shrugged. “Dye your hair. Or I could call you Sally.”

  “What the heck is that supposed to mean?”

  “You know that old song, ‘Long Tall Sally’?”

  Great. Lieutenant Doucet already called her Stringbean half the time. Lanky redheads were destined for bad nicknames, especially when they worked with a gang of alpha males.

  “So, Broussard, does that mean you want me to call you Curly in honor of those pretty brown locks?” Or sexy as sin, more like, although she’d never admit her opinions to him. Besides, he was way too moody to get involved with, even if she were interested in anything else, which she wasn’t.

  “Hey, Curly was my favorite of the Three Stooges.” Gentry gave her enough smile to flash a quick sight of rarely glimpsed dimples, but it seemed halfhearted. He’d had a couple of long days. After coming up empty on his initial search for the killer, he’d gone out on a couple of extra shifts. Personnel from all law-enforcement agencies were on the lookout for that boat.

  “Figures,” Jena said. “I’ll just call you Stooge.”

  She didn’t push the banter this morning. Gentry had been quieter than usual all night, even before they’d been pulled into the search-and-rescue operation for a kid who’d fallen off a dock. The dock stretched into a lake behind his family’s house, in a rural area near the road that cut off to Isle de Jean Charles, southeast of Montegut.

  After a couple of hours of searching, a neighboring parish LDWF agent had found the little boy’s body washed up on a spit of land a half mile from the dock. That kid should’ve been asleep at midnight, not wandering around outside. Whether any kind of negligence was involved would be the business of the sheriff’s office.

  In Louisiana it was the wildlife agents, not the Coast Guard or sheriff’s deputies, who served as the primary search-and-rescue first responders on waterways. They’d been among the first on the scene after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, and they were the first ones called out whenever someone went missing on the water.

  This kind of outcome was the worst part of the job, especially when a child was involved. The absolute worst. No competition.

  She didn’t think that was the only reason Gentry had been so quiet, though. He’d been distant and distracted even before the search got called in.

  “Eva Savoie was buried yesterday.” Jena pulled her sunglasses out and settled them on the bridge of her nose. Daylight had come up fast, and bright glints already reflected off the water. Gentry had pulled out his shades ten minutes earlier.

  His expression didn’t change; he gave good blank face. “Yeah, so I heard.”

  “I went.” She looked out over the bayou, still and peaceful, the hunters not yet out in this spot. “Thought you might be there.”

  “I spent the day in Dulac.” Gentry took off his sunglasses and gave her an intense look. “Why’d you go? You hadn’t even met Eva Savoie.”

  Jena wasn’t sure why she’d felt compelled to go to the woman’s funeral, but the impulse had been strong and she’d followed it. At the heart of things, she’d been afraid no one would be there except the woman’s great-niece. Being so old, dying so badly, and then having no one to mourn you—it was sad. “I think I just went out of respect, you know? She was so alone, and her death was . . .”

  No need to say the words. It had been the worst crime scene she’d ever encountered, and Jena had seen some bad stuff in her three years as a street cop with the New Orleans Police Department.

  It wasn’t that she didn’t have the stomach for blood; her degree was in forensic biology. She spent a lot of time looking at dead things—gators, birds, snakes, even nutria, the gross, orange-toothed rodents the size of a healthy housecat. She’d seen her share of death.

  What she didn’t have the stomach for was the violence one human could willfully inflict on another. That was why she’d left NOPD nine months ago after hearing LDWF had a couple of openings. The six-month training academy had been pure hell, but she’d learned why these agents had the reputation as the state’s best-trained—they had to know how to work in all kinds of conditions on land and in water, and almost every person they encountered carried multiple firearms.

  She’d wanted to work in the outdoors, away from the city, and it had been eye-opening to find out how much the problems of drugs and crime had stretched into the rural areas. But at least their violent cases were rare here in Terrebonne, broken up by long stretches of blue sky and fresh air.

  For three months, it had been the best job in the world. Until she walked into that cabin full of blood and found Gentry looking like he’d seen a ghost.

  “Lieutenant Doucet was at the funeral, and a couple of the sheriff’s guys came,” she said. “I think the parish paid for the burial.”

  He didn’t respond, so she asked the question that had been nagging at her since he mentioned his hometown. “Were you looking for the suspect in Dulac? Was it somebody you recognized?”

  Something had felt off-kilter about the way Gentry had reacted to the Eva Savoie murder, almost like it was personal.

  Gentry had been staring into space but looked back at her now—sharply, she thought. “Why would you think that? I was just tending to family business.” He paused, then shifted gears. “Any of the old-timers from down the bayou come to the funeral? Anybody who looked out of place?”

  She frowned. “Out of place like maybe her murderer?” Gentry’s description could fit half the guys in Louisiana: tall, thin, dark-brown hair of medium length, brown eyes, short beard. “There were a few people there. Other than law enforcement, there wasn’t anybody under seventy except Miss Eva’s niece—well, great-niece.”

  “Hmph.” Gentry steered the boat around the curve into Wonder Lake and headed northwest toward their launch on Bayou Terrebonne. “Heard the niece was some kind of entertainer up in Nashville.”

  Jena stifled a grin. He’d stretched out en-ter-tain-er, stressing each syllable, as if it were a criminal activity he needed to put a stop to. “You got something against entertainers, Broussard?”

  “Just not an occupation that
appeals to me.” He relaxed and sped up the boat now that they were on open water. “I can’t see some fancy, high-maintenance woman hanging round Montegut or Chauvin.”

  She smiled. “Or Dulac?”

  “Got dat right.”

  Jena had seen him turn on the Cajun charm before. He’d settle into a heavy South Louisiana patois to fit in and make the people he dealt with feel comfortable talking to him like he was a regular guy. In reality, he’d gone to LSU, same as her, and had worked several years in LDWF’s Region 8, including metro New Orleans, before transferring back to his home parish.

  She still hadn’t quite figured out what made her partner tick. He was single and uninvolved—or so said Stella, the dispatcher and resident busybody, who’d supplied the rest of the biography. Including the fact that Gentry had transferred in three years ago after a case went wrong in New Orleans. Jena had looked up the case and understood a lot more about her partner’s moods once she saw that he’d killed his brother during a drug bust.

  Jena could see other things for herself. Gentry was too ruggedly handsome for his own good and had the potential for trouble written on every muscle, of which he appeared to have many. The man even looked sexy in the LDWF uniform, and their uniforms were about as sexy as a dead swamp rat. Yet he was a loner, and there was an undercurrent of sadness to him sometimes when he had his guard down. Maybe because of what had happened with his brother.

  Still, out of the five-agent LDWF unit assigned to Terrebonne Parish, Jena had to admit the lieutenant had paired her with the right person for her first months of field duty. They’d become friendly, maybe almost friends, without an ounce of real sexual chemistry—exactly how they needed to be as work partners. She was woman enough to admire his looks without wanting to do anything about it. LSU and New Orleans were their common ground, and he didn’t treat her like a rookie.

  Besides, her other potential partner had been Senior Agent Paul Billiot, a solemn-faced, quiet man from Isle de Jean Charles and an active member of the area’s tribe of Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Native Americans. Paul Billiot had a way of looking straight through her as if he could see her soul.

  “Have you heard how Mac Griffin’s doing as Paul Billiot’s partner?” She and Mac, a transplanted rookie agent from Maine, of all places, had started in Region 6 the same week.

  This time, Gentry’s dimples caught and stayed. “Let’s just say I’d love to be a fly on their boat one night. I think we need to start a pool to see which one breaks first.”

  Jena laughed. “That’s what I thought.” Mac was talkative and gregarious and fancied himself a ladies’ man ready to conquer the females of South Louisiana. A full one-eighty from her impression of Paul Billiot, in other words.

  “I wonder—” Whatever Gentry wondered was cut short by his sudden look down at his shirt pocket, from which he fished his phone. He turned off the engine so he could hear and glanced at the screen before answering. “It’s Lieutenant Doucet.”

  Gentry listened a few moments, looked at Jena’s upraised eyebrows, and shrugged. “We’re almost across Wonder Lake headed for Bayou Terrebonne and the boat launch.”

  Jena groaned inwardly. It had been a long, stressful night, and the lieutenant wouldn’t be calling if there wasn’t something he needed them to do before going off duty. Gentry put the phone on speaker.

  “Eva Savoie’s great-niece wants to talk to you,” the lieutenant was saying. “Mostly you, Broussard, since you found her aunt, but you were there too, Sinclair. So as a courtesy, I told the sheriff I’d have you drop by.”

  Well, at least they were headed back toward Houma anyhow. Jena had a small apartment in a generic complex on the outskirts of town, and Gentry had a house somewhere around Montegut. She wasn’t sure of the location; they might be partners but they didn’t socialize. As far as she knew, Gentry Broussard didn’t socialize with anyone, although Stella said he had some kind of big, macho dog.

  “No problem.” Gentry’s mouth spoke the words but his expression looked anything but agreeable. “What’s her name? Where’s she staying?”

  “Celestine Savoie.” Warren paused. “She goes by ‘Ceelie’ or something like that.”

  Gentry rolled his eyes. “Sounds high-maintenance.”

  Jena stifled a chuckle.

  “She’ll meet you down the bayou.” Like the other locals, including Gentry when he was in Cajun mode, Warren’s bayou came out sounding more like buy-ya.

  “At her aunt’s cabin?”

  Ugh. Jena put a hand over her mouth. God, that place had been a disaster when they left, blood from one end to the other, belongings in disarray. It was probably worse now that the investigators had gone through everything a few times. Had they warned the woman what she’d face when she showed up?

  “When do we need to be there?” Gentry’s deep, smooth voice cut through Jena’s thoughts.

  “Told ’em you’d be there by eight. And Broussard?” Warren paused. “I also told the sheriff you’d be polite no matter how big a pain this woman might be. She’s apparently got a temper, and you’ve apparently got a reputation for being a smart-ass.”

  Gentry grinned, a wicked slice of white teeth above his tanned jawline. Those dimples were deep enough to dive into, his expression that of a man who’d been issued a challenge. “I’m always polite, Lieutenant.”

  “No, you aren’t.” Warren said. “So play nice.”

  “He’s got your number—hey!” The rest of Jena’s comment was cut short as Gentry took a curve too fast and she had to grab hold of the seat. She should ticket the jerk—he’d done that on purpose. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d taken her by surprise and dumped her on the floor of the boat.

  At seven thirty, they reached Bayou Terrebonne, and Gentry let the boat idle a moment, looking north and south.

  “You want to go in by boat or drive down?”

  Well, that was a no-brainer. “Drive. I have a yearning for air-conditioning.”

  He throttled up and headed north. “My thoughts exactly.”

  The trip up Bayou Terrebonne to the boat launch near the fire station took no longer than ten minutes, and, after some discussion, they left the LDWF boat with Gentry’s truck and took Jena’s identical department-issued black pickup.

  She stifled a yawn as she pulled onto Montegut Road, aka Highway 55, headed south. Bayou Terrebonne hugged the road on the right. “Reckon anybody got that cabin cleaned up so she doesn’t see it the way it looked after her aunt died?”

  Gentry leaned over and turned the fan on the air-conditioning as high as it would go. “Hope so, but I doubt it. Seems like a bad idea to meet her there. Gotta say, I don’t look forward to going back in there myself.”

  It struck Jena again that Gentry seemed to have taken Eva Savoie’s murder personally. When he’d returned from his futile search for the killer that morning, his face had been downright waxen, but it wasn’t because of the brutality of the scene. He’d watched everything the sheriff’s deputies had done, without a flinch. Without any expression at all. In fact, he hadn’t made any attempt to leave until the parish guys ordered them to get out of their way, even though Jena had offered a couple of times to take him home and pick up his boat the next day.

  Then again, one didn’t often find eighty-year-old women dead of blunt-force trauma that the coroner said had been preceded by more than a dozen nonlethal stab wounds. Torture; there was nothing else to call it. The woman had been tortured.

  Stella called just before they rounded the last curve and entered Whiskey Bayou area. Jena turned down the AC fan so she could hear the phone.

  “Y’all out there yet?” Stella wanted details on the cabin; she’d pinned Jena down earlier, wanting to know about voodoo trinkets, and had been disappointed no skulls or crossed chicken bones had been in evidence. They were in evidence, of course, but it wasn’t her place to tell Stella those kinds of details. If the woman wanted to read the reports, she probably could.

  “Not yet, but almost.” Jena
jammed her baseball cap back on her head. “What’s up?”

  “Deputy ain’t gonna make it out there, so Warren says y’all need to go ahead and talk to the niece, Celestine. Use your own judgment in how many details to give her. No point in upsetting her more than she already is.”

  Jena frowned as they rounded the last curve before the highway straightened out for a long run and eventually fizzled into unstable wetlands. She slowed down and began scanning left for the turnoff to the Savoie cabin. “How’s she getting out here, then? She got a rental car?”

  “I asked that very thing.” Stella tsked her disapproval. “She’s living out there, I guess. You’ll have to tell me what it looks like since she moved in.”

  Uh, that would be no. Jena had never been a gossip and didn’t plan to start now. “Almost there. We’ll report in when we leave. Gotta go now—Broussard needs help.” She ended the call before the woman could ask any more questions.

  Gentry raised an eyebrow. “And what exactly do you think I need help with?”

  “Getting me off the phone with Stella.” Jena leaned over the steering wheel and finally spotted the unpaved, rutted dirt drive onto the Savoie property.

  When Jena came to a stop in the drive and killed the engine, Gentry rolled down his window and cocked his head, closing his eyes.

  “What’s wr—”

  “Shhhhh.” He held a finger over his pursed lips, and Jena opened her senses to whatever had caught his attention. The truck wheels had made no noise on the hard-packed dirt of the drive.

  Finally a sound reached her: a voice.

  And what a voice. Deep, throaty, but not in a sexy way. In a haunted way. A voice full of heartbreak and ghosts.

  I won’t go back, I won’t go home,

  ’Cause in this place, the dead still roam,

  ’Cause this time, Whiskey Bayou won’t let me go.

  “Is that her? The singer?” Jena looked back when her fellow agent didn’t answer.