by BJ Bourg
“Attention, everyone, I’m Clint Wolf. I’m a detective with the Mechant Loup Police Department.” I paused to give them a chance to quiet down. The music had remained off—probably because they were too drunk to remember where they had placed the iPhone—but they were all still talking loudly. I decided to be more direct, and turned up the volume. “Shut up and listen!”
It was like a scratched record and full stop. Everyone turned and faced me.
“The party’s over,” I announced. Several people booed, but I shut them down quickly. “We’ve got a dead body in this boat. We also have one person presumed dead and another one who’s missing. Who wants to be next?”
They all exchanged dumbfounded looks. The gravity of the situation finally seemed to be taking hold.
“Most of you are drunk, so no one’s driving out of here. Gather up your personal belongings and get ready to leave. We’ve got two airboats coming to transport y’all to the boat launch. From there, we’ll make sleeping arrangements for y’all at a local motel. Any questions?”
Someone at the back of the crowd raised a hand, as though he was in a classroom. I pointed to him.
“Who died?”
“I can’t give out that information right now.”
He nodded, thinking it over. He then raised his hand again.
“Go ahead,” I said patiently.
“Who’s missing?”
“Camille Rainey and Chrissy Graves.”
“Hey, I know Chrissy,” shouted a boy from somewhere in the middle of the crowd. “She’s that dragon girl.”
“What?” I asked.
“She’s got a dragon tattoo on her leg and it’s holding an American flag. It’s cool—and different.”
Several more people in the crowd—mostly guys—acknowledged knowing her.
“Has anyone seen her since darkness fell?” I asked.
Silence from the crowd.
Behind me, I could hear the approaching roar of jet engines and knew the airboats were closing in. I again told the kids to gather up their personal belongings and prepare to board the airboats. This time, they began scrambling to follow that order. I had counted twenty-seven people, so we would have plenty of room to transport them back to land.
While still near the Boston Whaler, I called Susan again from the SAT phone and told her what was happening. I also asked if she could make arrangements for a coroner’s investigator to meet us at the boat landing.
“We need to get this body on ice,” I said. “It’s not getting any fresher.”
“What happened to him?”
“I can’t be sure. There are bite marks on his body but they appear post mortem.” I shook my head slowly as I watched the young adults who huddled a few feet away, looking to me and Melvin for guidance. “I just pray we find Camille and Chrissy in one piece.”
CHAPTER 8
Once the college kids were all gone, our search team made preparations to scour the banks and the water near where the party took place and where Melvin had found the drag marks. As for me, I traded places with Takecia. She remained with Melvin to search while Amy and I transported the body of the young man to the boat landing.
The airboat was loud, so we didn’t talk on the ride back to town. We were still a few hundred yards from the boat launch when I saw a series of tents strewn out across the park east of the boat launch. As Amy was positioning the airboat against the dock, a strong wind blew in from town and carried on it a strong whiff of fried bacon. My stomach growled.
I jumped to the dock and attached the line from the boat to one of the cleats on the dock. Amy shut off the engine and joined me, where we met the coroner’s investigator. He had already backed his van up to the dock, so we set about loading the body.
“We might not be able to attend the autopsy,” I told the investigator. “I have a feeling we’ll be on the water for a while—maybe even a few days.”
He said he would let Dr. Louise Wong know, and Amy and I watched him drive off. We savored the brief moment of inactivity. Once we got back on the water, there was no telling when we would be back. I glanced toward the tents. The college students had already made it on land and most of them were hanging out where the cooking was taking place. I didn’t blame them. I could see them sitting around with plates of food in their laps and bottles of water on the ground next to them.
“Camille Rainey is from Bay City, Texas,” I said. “I need to make arrangements for Bay City P.D. to notify her family. Why don’t you grab some food while I do that? Lord knows when you’ll get to eat again.”
“What about you?” she asked. “Want some food?”
I shook my head. “I’ll get some later.”
It was a little after two in the morning and the dispatcher from Bay City Police Department said she’d have to wake up the on-call detective.
“Give me your number and I’ll have him call you right back,” she promised.
I gave it to her and then headed for the tents, where I wolfed down a plate of scrambled eggs and bacon. I washed it down with a bottle of ice cold water. It had only taken a few minutes to curb my hunger. When I looked up, Amy was approaching with two large bags of food that she had gathered up. She must’ve seen the expression on my face, because she grunted and shook her head.
“These are for the volunteers,” she explained, holding up the bags. “I’m not pregnant.”
I didn’t even want to touch her comment, and I was saved by the ringing of my cell phone. It was the dispatcher from Bay City saying she would put me through to the on-call detective. Once we were connected, I let him know what was going on. He assured me he would notify Camille’s parents personally.
“I know the family,” he said. “Please take down my cell number and call me as soon as you know anything.”
I agreed to keep him in the loop and we ended the call.
“Ready to go find that girl?” Amy asked.
I pointed toward Otis Williams, who sat alone with his back against a young oak tree. “I want to have a word with him first.”
“I’ll wait in the boat.”
Otis looked up wearily when I approached him.
“Did you find her?” he asked.
I shook my head and dropped to the ground beside him. “What happened between you and Camille?”
“Sir?”
“You left some things out when we spoke earlier,” I said evenly. “I’m giving you the opportunity to modify your statement. You wouldn’t want me looking at you suspiciously, now would you?”
Otis gulped audibly. “I…I told you everything that I remembered.”
“What about Chrissy?” I snapped my fingers. “What was that last name again…?”
“Chrissy Graves?” he asked, as though he was surprised at her mention. “Oh, yeah, what about her?”
“You tell me. I hear you were pretty cozy with her.” I didn’t offer any more of an explanation. I let the comment hang in the air.
He shifted on the ground and stammered a bit before saying he didn’t know her very well. “Sure, we’ve spoken before, but nothing major. We graduated together—me, her, and Camille. That’s how I know her.”
“Was she the reason for your argument with Camille?”
He opened his mouth to speak, but I raised a hand to silence him.
“Before you answer that question, I want to warn you that whatever you say next might change the course of the investigation.” I pointed a finger at him. “It might send me in a new direction.”
He gulped again. His face had taken on a yellowish hue thanks to the glow from the streetlight above us, but it seemed to lose all color when I suggested he might become a suspect.
“Sir, I swear to God I didn’t do anything to her!”
“Leave God out of this.” I studied him with a judgmental expression. “Was Chrissy the reason you and Camille were fighting?”
He let out a long sigh. “I mean, I guess. I might’ve made a comment about Chrissy’s dragon tattoo that pissed he
r off. I thought it was harmless, but Camille seemed to get mad about it. That…and I offered to help Chrissy start the jet ski. Camille was being unreasonable, if you ask me. It’s not like I was offering to go screw her on the jet ski.”
“So, Camille was the one who was being unreasonable?”
“Yeah.” He nodded for emphasis. “She was acting like my wife or my mom. I just didn’t want to be tied down on this trip, you know?”
“Is that why you ran her over with the jet ski?”
Otis recoiled in horror. “I didn’t do that! I would never hurt Camille. I love her. I want her back. Please, go find her!”
I studied the young man carefully. He appeared sincere, but I wasn’t about to rule out foul play just yet. I decided to switch gears.
“What about Chrissy? Where is she?”
“I don’t know.” There was a blank expression on his face as he glanced over his shoulder toward the tents. “I guess she’s with everybody else.”
“It turns out she’s missing.” I watched his facial expression carefully. He seemed genuinely shocked.
“What?” His eyes were wide and they shifted from me to his feet. “This trip has been a nightmare. I wish we wouldn’t have come to this horrible place!”
I wanted to tell him I also wished they hadn’t come here and thrown a party in the middle of the swamps and left such a mess out there on the water, but I didn’t want to kick him while he was down. Thus, I simply walked away and returned to the airboat.
CHAPTER 9
When Amy and I reunited with Melvin, Takecia, and the volunteers at the party location, Amy began handing out smaller bags of food that she had pulled out of the larger bags. I approached Melvin. He was standing over several lengths of rope attaching grappling hooks to one end of each of them. He was working by the lights from the Boston Whaler.
“We’re gonna start dragging?” I asked.
“Yeah.” He straightened. “I want to focus on the area where Chrissy was dragged in and also where Camille went under. Their bodies aren’t floating yet, so they’ve got to be around here somewhere.”
I agreed with his plan and said as much. “What can I do?”
He pointed to several grappling hooks on the ground. “You can tie those on, if you want. I need three more for a total of eight.”
I had counted the boats when we rode up and, counting the two police department vessels, there were eight boats out here helping. We could cover a lot of territory with that number of boats.
“How’s Claire and Deli?” I asked as I worked.
“Claire’s fine,” Melvin said, “but Deli’s as bad as ever. She’s getting to be just like her mom.”
We both laughed. Claire and Melvin had been married for sixteen years and Delilah, who had just turned six, was their only child. While they had married young, Melvin and Claire had waited ten years to have a child. They had celebrated her birthday earlier this month and Susan, Grace, and I had been a part of it.
I finished tying one of the grappling hooks to the rope and reached for another one. “You haven’t mentioned anything recently about Claire trying to get you to quit law enforcement,” I said. “Does that mean she’s given up on you?”
“She’s been chill ever since the robbery at the bank.” He chuckled and shook his head in amusement. “And when she saw how much I’m getting for lieutenant’s pay, she threatened to join the force herself.”
I laid down my rope and watched Melvin work. The town could never pay him what he was worth—lieutenant’s pay wasn’t impressive compared to the pay of supervisors in other occupations—but he didn’t care. He appreciated every red cent he made and he was as happy as he could be working as a police officer. Hell, if you gave him a place to live and fed him and his family, I was convinced he’d do the job for free.
I finished tying off the last of the grappling hooks and helped Melvin hand them out to the volunteers. Melvin then assigned each boat to a grid and we went to work.
I worked with Amy and we spent the next three hours taking turns fishing for the bodies with our grappling hook. We were tired and our stomachs had started to grumble again by the time the sun began its slow ascent beyond the distant horizon, but there was no quit in us. We were equally determined to find our victims.
Amy had removed her outer shirt long ago and had been working in only her tank top and jeans. She had even removed her boots and rolled up her jeans. No one had noticed when she’d first removed her shirt because it was dark, but the men in the other boats had gradually begun to notice. As one of the boats drifted closer to us, I heard a loud smacking sound and looked up just in time to see the man’s wife pulling back her hand. She scolded him for being a pervert and told him to move his boat to the far side of the lake. If Amy noticed, she didn’t let on. She simply kept throwing the hook into the water and slowly reeling it in.
That had been an hour ago, and since I had been throwing the hook for about the past thirty minutes, I reeled it in for the last time and handed it to Amy.
“Your turn,” I said.
She scratched at her face with her fingers to free the tufts of blonde hair plastered to her flesh. They had been glued in place by dried sweat. “I need a shower,” she said, taking the hook and leaning back. She launched it into the air for all she was worth, aiming for an area that we hadn’t covered yet. She glanced at me before beginning to reel it in. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you’re starting to wear out. Fifty ain’t what they promised you, is it?”
I climbed up in the captain’s seat and laughed. She had been messing with me since I’d tried to ignore my birthday last month and each time she mentioned my age, she added a few years to it. I could’ve reminded her that I was only thirty-six, but it wouldn’t have mattered.
As she worked the grappling hook, I scanned the water. The other seven boats had drifted farther and farther apart as we expanded our search efforts. I had spoken with Susan several times throughout the night and we had talked about moving the command post to the lake if we didn’t find the missing girls today.
Susan had also spoken with the detective from Bay City. He had called the police department to say he couldn’t reach my cell phone, so Karla McBride, our nighttime dispatcher, had patched him through to Susan. He said he had notified Camille’s parents. As one might guess, they had devolved into a state of panic. Susan had told the detective to give them her cell number, which he did, and they had called nearly every thirty minutes since first being notified.
Susan had also asked the detective to notify Chrissy Graves’ parents about her being missing. At this point, the detective became indignant and wanted to know what the hell was going on in our swamps.
“What’d you tell him?” I had asked.
“I was polite,” was all she said.
That had been an hour ago and it was the last time I’d heard from her, so I wasn’t surprised when my phone rang.
“What’s up?” I asked.
She took a deep breath and exhaled forcefully. “I’m about to tell the sheriff’s office to lock these kids up. We set them up in a motel in Central Chateau and the deputies have had to respond three times already.”
“What’re they doing?”
“Most of them are still drunk out of their minds. A group of them snuck into the pool and woke up half the guests on that side of the motel.” She paused for another frustrated breath. “Anyway, I got a call from Chrissy’s grandmother. It seems Chrissy’s parents have been out of her life since she was six and the grandma’s all she’s got. The lady didn’t sound surprised. She said Chrissy’s got a habit of disappearing. She likes cigarettes, tattoos, bars, and boys, and not necessarily in that order. She said she experiments with drugs on a regular basis. She called it a failed experiment.”
“Well, I don’t think she ran off to get a tattoo,” I said dryly. “And she didn’t go willingly into the abyss. From the looks of the claw marks in the mud, she fought her ass off.”
I heard a beep
on the phone and Susan asked me to hold on for a second. When she came back on, she told me Camille’s mom and dad—Roger and Odelia Rainey—were en route to Mechant Loup.
“I’ll set up a room in the shelter for them,” she said. “I want them to be comfortable.”
I agreed and was about to ask her if my mom needed to relieve her mom, when Amy let out a whistle.
“I’ve got something!” she said excitedly.
“I need to go, Sue.” I ended the call and shoved my phone in my back pocket. Moving to the starboard side where Amy was slowly reeling in the rope, I asked if she thought it was another tree branch. Throughout the night, we had dragged up enough wood to restock a small forest. We’d also recovered a ripped cast net and a piece of wreckage from a wooden boat. This was a refreshing change from when we would drag for bodies in Bayou Tail, where we were constantly pulling up old bicycles, tires, and other human junk.
Amy didn’t answer me. Her lips were parted slightly as she stared intently toward the spot where the rope made contact with the water. I was staring at that spot, too, wondering if our search was about to be over.
“Shit!” Amy said when the taut rope went limp and began to slowly disappear as it floated toward the bottom of the lake. “I lost it.”
I sighed and was about to turn away when I saw movement in the water just past where the rope had disappeared. I squinted and shaded my eyes. I sucked in my breath and pointed.
“Over there—it’s a body!”
Amy looked where I pointed and quickly began to haul in the grappling hook. The momentum from Amy dragging on the body had caused it to drift to the surface momentarily, where it bobbed a few times and then disappeared again as it began to sink back to the bottom.
I didn’t want to disturb the water, so I grabbed a push pole and maneuvered us closer to the location where we’d last seen the body. The water was choppy and it was possible the body would drift away with the current, so I worked fast.
