The jester’s façade dropped a moment, giving her a glimpse of uncertainty that was quickly replaced by what appeared to be genuine concern. “I just want to make sure you’re okay. The lieutenant told me he advised you not to go on patrol for another couple of weeks, even though he eventually agreed to it. And Gentry said he’d beat my ass till I couldn’t walk if I didn’t keep an eye on you.” He paused. “I’d like to say Gentry isn’t capable of beating my ass, but we both know better.”
“I’m okay—really. It was just ibuprofen.” She smiled and, for the first time in months, it didn’t feel forced. She was embarrassed, though. Not only had she been put on junior fishing-license patrol, but everyone was watching her like sharp-eyed cormorants looking for the slightest splash from a fish. First her division lieutenant and now her former partner, Gentry Broussard.
She had probably returned to work too soon, but given the circumstances, it had been the right thing to do. She hadn’t asked to return to fieldwork until she knew she was ready, and the lieutenant had eventually acknowledged that. It didn’t mean he wasn’t watching, or that Gentry and the others weren’t going to worry about her. She just had to make it work, even if it meant being treated like a china doll for a while, until something happened that would let her prove she was ready to be back.
For now, though, she wouldn’t complain about pulling light duty with Mac because it was what the lieutenant was comfortable letting her do. She and her new partner had spent hour after hour this week checking fishing licenses and making sure no one was catching more red drum than the regulations allowed. They handed out life jackets when people forgot them, and issued DUIs and other citations to beer-swilling yahoos who thought it was okay to tear up private land with unlicensed ATVs.
Teenage boys found the combination of mud and big tires almost as irresistible as sex. Probably because it was not as scary and was a lot easier to get for a fifteen-year-old.
The rest of the enforcement agents, including her temporary replacement, an agent named EZ on loan from Lafourche Parish, had been pulled into an interdepartmental drug case headed by the US Drug Enforcement Administration. It was the biggest story to hit Terrebonne since the string of murders last fall, fueled by some new synthetic drug from China that seemed to be flowing into the parish with deadly results.
Diamant Noir, or Black Diamond, was one of those drugs sold legally over the counter as an energy booster until people began dying from it. The state had finally banned its sale, and its usage had waned—except in Terrebonne Parish the last two months. Now, it seemed to be everywhere.
And yet here she rode along the isolated Bayou Pointe-aux-Chenes beside Highway 665, waiting for someone to cruise by with an out-of-date registration decal.
She tamped down the pang of jealousy, reminding herself again that she didn’t need too much stress in her life yet, not after last September. And September turned her mind to Celestine Savoie. Jena hadn’t been the only one hurt by the choices she’d made during last fall’s chaos. She hadn’t seen Ceelie in a while and missed the friendship they’d formed. Jena liked the guys she worked with, but women needed friendships with other women. As soon as she got a chance, she needed some girl time.
In the meantime, she’d serve on fish patrol, and she’d darn well enjoy it.
Except nobody was fishing today, at least not here in the nooks and crannies of this bayou that ran near the western edge of the Pointe-aux-Chenes Wildlife Management Area, not far from the Lafourche Parish line. Wednesday had fallen dreary and gray, and rain clouds boiled up from the south.
Her quiet contemplation had even turned Motormouth Mac silent as he maneuvered the patrol boat around a turn and into a narrow branch of the bayou made gloomier by the overgrown marsh grass on either side. It swayed in the rising wind, reaching higher than Jena’s head before the water tapered off to what looked like a dead end and a short row of houses a half mile or so ahead.
She stood up so she could see over the mounds of grass. Who the hell would want to live out here? Talk about isolated.
Mac glanced back at her. “See anything?”
“Only a few houses; this inlet dead-ends just ahead.” Jena’s height gave her an advantage at lookout duty. At almost six feet, with shoulder-length, dark-red hair, she had earned her LDWF nicknames: Stringbean, Stretch, Agent Amazon, Red.
Make that her former nicknames. She’d fallen out of the nickname league since she’d been shot and come back with her face splotched by irregular, fading scars from the glass of a shot-out truck window. Her life had become a world filled with pity and eggshells nobody wanted to step on. But she’d survive. If she’d learned nothing else from the last few months, it was that she was a survivor.
“Hey, Sinclair! Looks like somebody lost his pants.” Mac, at least, was consistently cheerful. “Wonder what he was up to for that to hap—oh, shit.”
He trailed off about the time she saw the muddy jeans snagged onto a branch near the bank to their left and realized there was a boot protruding from one of the legs. Or part of a boot. Or a foot turned in a direction a human foot had never been intended to turn.
She frowned. “Nobody ever found the Grummond guy that went missing on Saturday, did they?” For a couple of shifts, she and Mac had joined the search-and-rescue teams that had mostly covered areas way down the bayous and branches southwest of here, where his girlfriend said he usually fished. The man had disappeared without a trace. Nobody had looked this far north and east.
“No, but I got a bad feeling we just did. Looks like there might be a partially submerged boat trapped in some grass farther upstream that fits the description of his ride.” Mac eased the patrol boat toward the jeans, then killed the engine so they could edge in as close as possible without destroying or dislodging any evidence.
Jena moved to the front of the boat ahead of Mac as he nudged the vessel against the nearest end of the log. The body was distended and swollen from three days in the water, but the cold water temperatures had helped preserve what hadn’t been nibbled on and had kept the winter-lazy gators from feasting on the rest of him. It was definitely a young, dark-haired male in jeans and a jacket, which also fit the description of the missing Dave Grummond.
“I’ll call it in.” Jena reached for the radio transmitter on the collar of her dark-green uniform, then thought better of it and grabbed her mobile phone instead, walking the length of the boat and leaving Mac to watch over the body. No way to keep anything quiet using the radio.
“I need to talk to Warren,” she told Stella after her first call to the lieutenant’s mobile phone went to voice mail. Warren’s recently retired aunt, a former dispatcher for the Terrebonne Parish Sheriff’s Office, handled calls from the office in Warren’s house most days, just to stay busy. The district office was farther north, in Thibodaux, so Warren’s home office passed for unofficial parish headquarters. “I think we found the fisherman that went missing last weekend.”
“You need an ambulance?” Stella’s heavy parish accent made ambulance rhyme with pants. “Warren’s in a meeting with Sheriff Brown. You want I should disturb ’em?”
Jena sighed and tried to avoid the dead man’s open-eyed stare, visible from just under the waterline. “This man’s beyond the need of EMS. Call it in to the sheriff’s office, though, and the medical examiner. Let them decide who to send. They’ll want to collect evidence and make the final call, but it looks like a gator attack to me.”
Which was weird. Gators weren’t prone to attack humans. Their first option was usually to swim away and avoid contact. But there had been four water deaths since January scattered around the eastern side of the parish, all attributed to alligators. This was the second here on Bayou Pointe-aux-Chenes, and there had been a couple less than a mile away in Lafourche Parish as well.
After giving Stella their location for the sheriff’s office, Jena joined Mac at the front of the boat. He stood with his arms crossed, his gaze fixed on the body.
“This your firs
t one?” she asked. Mac was only five years her junior, but right now he looked like a pale teenager. A wave of guilt washed over her at the realization that, upon finding a man’s body, she felt more alive than at any time since returning to Terrebonne. Finding this poor guy’s remains had finally jolted her out of her massive self-pity wallow.
It was a wake-up call. She was here to do a job, and that job wasn’t about Jena Sinclair. The time for navel-gazing had passed.
“First time I’ve seen a body in the water like this,” Mac said. “If it was an alligator, it must’ve been a big one. Bit the poor guy’s arm completely off at the shoulder.”
“Worse than bitten off,” Jena reminded him. They’d all had basic training dealing with alligators, considering the state’s gator population was estimated at about 1.5 million. “Twisted off.”
Mac blinked. “Yeah, right. Gators bite down, lock their jaws, and then roll until whatever they’ve bitten down on rips off. That is a hell of a nasty way to die.”
Jena leaned over to take a closer look, avoiding Dave Grummond’s face. “I think his foot’s gone too.”
“Maybe half of it,” Mac said. “Or maybe the whole thing is just turned the wrong way, under the water.” He barely got the words out before he lunged toward the back of the boat and retched into one of the empty coolers they kept for confiscated fish. Jena wasn’t surprised; he’d been turning greener by the second.
She gave him a wry smile when he returned to stand beside her, guzzling a bottle of water. He kept his back to the body. The smell was starting to churn her morning oatmeal around in her stomach as well. “Feel better? I wish I could tell you it got easier, but it doesn’t.”
Louisiana Wildlife and Fisheries took the lead for the state in water search and rescue, and Terrebonne Parish was almost half water. Sooner or later, it was inevitable that Mac would see something ugly.
“Hey, Sinclair.” He turned to look at her, trying to give her a flirtatious grin but failing. Jena smiled at him; his pale-green skin told her another trip to the cooler might be pending. “Could you, like, you know, not mention to anybody what just happened?”
Her smile widened. “You mean like if anybody asks who barfed in our fish cooler?”
His face turned the color of the ugly dress her parents had bought for one of her Mardi Gras balls in New Orleans—her father was an officer in the Krewe of Rex, King of Carnival. The dress was a dark, sickly pink that clashed with her hair and had a lot of chiffon with sparkles in it. That particular bit of fashion-backward nastiness still hung in a closet in the room of her parents’ uptown mansion, a few feet away from the bathroom where she’d so carefully arranged herself before making neat vertical slices in her wrist with a razor-edged utility knife, the closest sharp thing she could find.
What had she been thinking?
So she patted his arm. “Don’t worry. We’ll ditch the cooler and never mention it again. Remind me to tell you about the time I puked all over a crime scene when I was with NOPD.”
Life had seemed so simple then.
CHAPTER 2
An hour later, Jena yawned while waiting for a red light to change. She was again driving her own LDWF truck, back in the community of Chauvin, and headed for home.
No, headed for her house.
No, headed for the house. It was hers, technically, but it wasn’t home.
While she’d been stoned on painkillers and suffering the controlling attention of her parents and the New Orleans physicians paid well for her private care, her father—make that Jackson Sinclair Sr., senior partner of the most powerful law firm in New Orleans—had moved into action as soon as the psychiatrist told him Jena needed to get back to her life and her job. Dad had taken it upon himself to pay off the lease on her little apartment in Houma, buy a house in her name in Chauvin, and install her younger brother, Jackson, as a roommate-slash-babysitter. Of course, he filled her in on the plan after the fact.
Her cat, Boudreaux, had been hiding under her bed ever since, making only quiet nocturnal visits to the cat bowl and litter box.
Jena loved Chauvin, as she loved most of Terrebonne Parish, but she hated the house because it was garish and looked like nothing she’d ever buy for herself. She wanted to paint it red and put flamingo statues in the yard to liven it up and make it look as if real people lived here rather than nouveau-riche idiots.
She also loved Jackson, but she didn’t want to live with him. He was a laid-back, computer-wiz pothead that her father hadn’t yet given up on brainwashing. Dad considered Jena a lost cause, or at least that’s how she interpreted the house. He had given in to the inevitable, but he still wouldn’t have his daughter living in a cheap Houma efficiency apartment. The deed to a house was Dad’s equivalent of a hug and a peck on the cheek, and she could appreciate that. She just wished he’d asked for her input instead of handing it to her as a done deal. Then again, at least she had a place to go that didn’t require driving all the way back into Houma.
Turning off the parish highway into a broad drive lined by tupelos and live oaks, Jena ground her teeth, waiting for the white columns of the house to come into view. They stretched across a wide, raised verandah like freaking Tara in Gone with the Wind. What kind of person would build such a house in a hurricane-prone, flood-prone, working-class community like Chauvin, Louisiana, population about three thousand on a good day?
The short answer: some unlucky dude whose business had gone belly-up when the 2010 oil spill almost destroyed the state’s fishing industry and a series of hurricanes had driven storm surge high into the parish, flooding people out. Dad had probably been able to pick it up for a song. Why her brother Jacks had been thrown into the deal, she wasn’t sure.
Like most homes in the parish, the house was raised, with storage on the bottom level tucked behind twin stone staircases that rose to the verandah. Jackson Jr. had dubbed the house the White Rhino because it was more rampaging than a White Elephant. And it was definitely white—a pristine white that practically glowed in the dark even on a night like tonight, when fog was setting in early.
The frantic thump of some insult to music, recorded by a rapper whose name Jena didn’t know, vibrated the first-floor windows. She felt in the pocket of her jacket to make sure the ibuprofen was close at hand.
Jackson had always marched slightly left of center, but this wasn’t his normal taste in music, which meant he probably had company. The kid—although at twenty-four he was hardly a kid anymore—had a genius for computers but no ambition to do anything with his talent except design elaborate costumes for cosplayers, which he then gave away. He was more socially outgoing than his reserved older sister, a trait she envied, but his lack of interest in crafting a future for himself annoyed Jena almost as much as it did their parents, not that she’d ever admit it.
She fumbled with her keys, distracted by the bright lights coming from behind the house, lighting up the sky like a rotating spotlight at a Vegas show. The White Rhino sat in the middle of a large tract of solid land—itself a novelty in water-bound Chauvin—so Jackson must have turned on all the lights around the backyard aboveground pool, nestled inside a natural wood deck that encircled it. Jena would have to talk to him about his electrical excess. Jacks wasn’t the one paying the utilities on this behemoth of a house, and neither was Dad. She made a good salary, but not that good.
She set her pack inside the front door, removed her department-issued SIG Sauer from its holster, and locked it inside the foyer desk drawer. She had just unfastened the buckle to release her heavy uniform utility belt when she glanced up, looked out the living room windows that stretched across the back of the house, and froze.
Whereas Jena was tall, slender, ivory skinned, and red haired like her mother, Jackson was shorter, well built but more compact, and dark haired like their father. And every inch of him was on display, upside down, as he walked on his hands across the top of the concrete wall at the back of the property, naked as the day he was born—a day Jena reme
mbered well because she’d been allowed to skip school.
God, I’ll never be able to unsee that. Jena marched across the living room, which opened poolside, and shut off the music. Its sudden absence filled the house with a heavy silence that itself was almost audible.
“Shit, what’re you doing?” Startled, Jackson lost his balance in the middle of what might have been a naked cartwheel, although Jena was doing her best not to look. She did glance around long enough to watch him tumble headfirst into a row of carefully manicured crape myrtle trees that had already been trimmed back into short spikes to prepare them for spring blooms. “Ow!”
Served the little weasel right. Jena turned her back as he maneuvered himself out of the trees. When he rounded across the lawn and into her line of sight, he’d pulled on a pair of shorts. Bloody red scratches crossed his arms and chest where the tree branches had made their mark.
Too bad. Jena had to get Jacks under control or throw him out. He’d been either sitting on his ass or off somewhere “getting to know the locals” since he’d arrived. He had to get a job. Better yet, he could move back to New Orleans and live with Parents Dearest, who must’ve had an ulterior motive for sending him here. They’d never endorsed laziness from either of their kids. He needed to come clean or go home.
She took a few steps closer to tell him exactly that. “What the hell do you think . . .” A good look at Jackson’s eyes stopped her tirade before she got wound up. His blue eyes looked black, with pupils the size of Mardi Gras doubloons. “What are you on?”
Not pot. He would have had to smoke enough marijuana to be unconscious before he could get that kind of physical reaction, and she didn’t smell any. He sure as hell would not be doing naked cartwheels atop a brick privacy wall from a few tokes of marijuana.
She left him standing there, frowning and trying to focus, and went in search of her own answers. She strode through the living room and opened the bedroom door down the hallway of his wing of the house. A Category 5 hurricane might have blown through his bedroom and done less damage than the mess he’d made in the last month.
Black Diamond (Wilds of the Bayou Book 2) Page 2
