He felt an unexpected swell of emotion at the sight of the evidence room in the dark. He and Samba had done a good job the previous week cutting back the hedge so that the place looked less haunted. He’d start with the interviews from the night of the Atchison homicide and work his way back through missing persons, trying to find a match for the guy in the potter’s field. Maybe have some possibilities for Samba in the morning.
Something shifted in the bushes behind him, and Josh reached for his gun. He took a step and someone hit him from behind, a cheap shot cuffing him and sending him to the ground. A man’s face loomed above him in the darkness, something familiar about the sneer, the way the eyes pulled down at the corners.
“What the hell do you want?” Josh heard himself say the words, heard the man’s low laugh in reply.
“The train that’s comin’ for you, boy? You got no idea,” the man said, and hit him again before the words dissolved into something he could not understand, and then everything collapsed into blackness.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
The air above the bayou crackled, ready to burst with the secret of the approaching storm. Inside the house on Cooper’s Bayou, Aurora sat with the locked safety deposit box on her lap.
Royce Beaumont had given her a box full of indexed binders, with a list of all of her grandfather’s assets, but the safety deposit box had not been mentioned, although she had seen it catalogued in her grandfather’s diaries. Papa must have forgotten to include it in the list he’d given Luna Riley. She’d headed to the bank, and after a pleasant exchange with the teller, returned home with the box.
It didn’t seem right to open it without Josh.
She had not heard from him since the previous evening when he’d left them at the morgue. She wondered if it was something to do with his family. Father in jail, sister missing—had one of them turned up somewhere? She’d felt like an idiot, asking to go with him, knowing he would turn her down. But he had hesitated; she’d seen it. All the time since, she’d occupied herself around the house, the thought of him tugging at the back of her consciousness. She’d stopped by the evidence room after the bank, but Samba had no news either. Tomorrow morning, she would call him and make sure everything was all right, and then she would open the box.
Aurora decided against switching on the grand ceiling fan in her bedroom. While it was beautiful to look at, the air it generated was hot anyway, and the noise it produced was akin to a jetliner preparing for takeoff.
She sprawled on top of the sheets, pressing her eyes closed. She would try to sleep for ten minutes, and then if she was still awake, she would do something constructive. Make a list of goals. Floss. Do yoga poses.
Thump.
The first noise could have been an animal. God only knew what critters were out there, with the house practically spilling into the bayou.
Thump.
Aurora fumbled for the tiny silver can of pepper spray that she had brought with her from New York. She’d carried it for years but never used it. It looked almost comically small in her hand. Everyone down South had a firearm. How much time would it really buy her?
Thump.
The Crumplers? Her father?
She was going to have to face this one on her own.
Aurora approached the door slowly, her sweating bare feet sticking to the wood floors. She pressed her eye to the peephole and then slid the deadbolt and threw open the door.
“I’m sorry,” Josh said.
He was almost unrecognizable, peering out from under a stained gray hoodie. His left eye was almost completely swollen shut, the rest of his face cut and bruised. She pulled him into the room.
“Sit on the couch,” she said, her heart still pounding from the fear of opening the door. “First things first. Let’s take care of your face.” She pulled a first-aid kit from under the couch. “I always have one of these around. Habit, I guess. Now hold still.”
“Okay.” He lifted his face to hers, obediently, like a child, and she dabbed at the cuts.
“I’m sorry,” he repeated.
“You got nothing to be sorry for,” she said.
“I wish you’d come with me. But it’s probably better that you didn’t.”
She focused on the cut above his right eye, trying not to let her face betray how stunned she was at this sentence, at the genuine way the words sounded.
“What happened? Who did this? We need to call the police.”
He closed his eyes as she held the gauze pad against the cut. “No police.”
“Josh.”
“I can’t tell them,” he said. “Boone—my partner—I can’t drag him into this.” He was protecting someone again, she could see that. Someone important.
“Is this about Liana?”
He looked up at her in surprise, as though he had forgotten he’d told her the name. “That’s what I thought at first,” he said. “I paid a drug dealer to find her, and the dealer took off with the money. She conned me, and I played right into her hands.”
“You did what you had to do,” she said, surprising herself with this assessment. Dealing with criminals wouldn’t have been her choice, but Josh was the type of person to do anything for his sister, whatever the cost. She could see that now. He would do anything to find someone who was missing.
“So it wasn’t a drug dealer who did this?”
He shook his head. “There was something familiar about the guy, though.”
“Where did it happen?”
“The evidence room,” he said.
“Why did you go back there?”
“I wanted to work on the case. Your case.”
“Why are you doing this, Josh?” The words came out more accusatory than she’d intended, but she had to know.
He turned back to face her, something raw in his expression. “What do you mean?”
“Why are you helping me?” It was the question that had been haunting her since the first day in the evidence room. Everybody wanted something, everybody had an angle, but what could he possibly be gaining from helping her?
“I’m helping you because you can still be helped,” Josh said simply. Aurora added the postscript in her head, and I can’t. She remembered waking up that first morning in Connecticut at Papa’s house, the unfamiliar bedroom, the low murmur of their voices downstairs. There’s nothing we can do except go on, Papa had said, and so Aurora had done just that. And Josh was doing the same thing.
“Thank you,” she said. “For—you know, for all of this.”
“No need for thanks,” he said, but she saw the beginnings of a smile before he turned back to the window. “What’s this?”
“Safety deposit box,” Aurora said, grateful for something else to talk about. She retrieved it from across the room. “The funny thing is, my grandfather didn’t list it on the information he gave the lawyers, but I found the key here at the house.”
“What’s inside?”
“I was waiting for you.” She removed the gold key from the top drawer in the desk.
“Well, here I am.” The smile was back.
Aurora fitted the key into the lock and slid the cover off the box to reveal the contents: two black videotapes sheathed in plastic.
They stood in silence for a moment.
“Any ideas?”
Aurora shook her head.
“Seems like a weird place to store home movies.” Josh frowned. “Well, let’s fire up the VCR.”
“There’s no television in the house,” Aurora said. “And why would Papa have videotapes?”
“No idea.” Josh ran a finger down the list on the desk, the ledger of Papa’s assets, recorded in his perfect handwriting. “Your grandpa was a perfectionist. Recorded everything. So it’s strange that he would leave this off the sheet, yet give you the key.”
“Like he wanted me to find it.”
“Exactly. We can head to the evidence room. There are tons of VCRs there.”
“Wait a second, Josh.” Aurora peeled the backi
ng from a Band-Aid and smoothed it across the cut. “Do you think what happened to you tonight has something to do with me? With my case?”
“I don’t know.” His eyes fell on the open sheaf of papers from Papa’s filing cabinet. “Did you go through all this? Anything there?”
“Just a bunch of articles about alligator laws, that kind of stuff.”
Josh pulled out one of the newspaper clippings, an article about the lifting of the ban on alligator hunting in 1989. Splayed across it was a picture of a man in overalls holding a gator by the nose. Local fisherman Niney Crumpler admires his kill, the caption read.
“That crooked nose,” Josh mumbled. “His nose.”
“What do you mean?”
“The man who hit me. He had to be related to Niney. Had to be a Crumpler. One of the younger ones.” He grabbed both her arms. “This is good, Aurora. This is really good. Do you know what this means?”
“We should go to the police?”
“No,” he said. “It means we’re on the right track.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
“Wish I had a dollar for every unmarked videotape I have in here,” Samba mused, tugging an ancient VCR-TV combo on a dusty cart into the center of the evidence room. “Family vacations, dance recitals, sex tapes. You name it, I’ve catalogued it.”
Somewhere in this warehouse, the surveillance tape from the day of Jesse’s murder was tucked away in a box. Josh had seen it once, watched images of the three of them at the men’s bathroom entrance. Josh and Jesse, hand in hand, walking in silent slow motion through the door while Liana stood just out of frame and watched them go, unaware of what was behind the door waiting for them.
“You ready for this?” Samba hesitated, one hand on the VCR. Josh snapped back to the present, but the question was directed at Aurora. She was the case that mattered right now.
“Roll it,” Aurora said in a firm voice that trailed off at the end. She had to be nervous. Josh sat next to her on the couch.
Samba pressed play and the screen turned a pearlescent blue, then dissolved into zigzag lines that formed a familiar image.
The Cooper’s Bayou Police Department. A time stamp flickered at the bottom of the screen: July 17, 1989. It was amazing how little it had changed. There was the interrogation room that doubled as a break room, an earlier incarnation of a cheap refrigerator nestled in the corner, a warped metal table pushed into the center of the room. A man with a seventies-style mustache and sideburns edged into the frame, adjusted something on the camera. Josh recognized him. Detective Floyd Rossi. He’d played third base on their softball team. Nice guy. He’d retired last year; Boone had thrown the farewell barbecue at his house. Rossi moved out of state, lived near his grandkids by some lake in Alabama.
The image shimmered and then another figure came into focus, sitting at the metal table, and Josh realized what it was they were watching.
A little girl.
Aurora.
“We don’t have to do this now,” Josh said, turning to face her. She sat straight upright, her expression betraying nothing.
She held a hand up to Josh. “No,” she said in a low voice. “I want to see it. We need to see it.”
The girl on the screen was bent low to the table, coloring a picture in furious strokes with a crayon. Rossi appeared uncomfortable, as though he didn’t know how to approach her. Josh couldn’t blame him. Kids were the worst to interview, not because they couldn’t sit still, but because they always told the truth, no matter how much it broke your heart.
“Hi, Aurora,” Rossi began. “Can I talk to you about what happened last night?”
The little girl gave no sign that she’d heard the question, but continued to draw the crayon across the page in careful lines.
“Aurora? Sweetheart? Can you draw what you remember, sweetheart?”
Aurora lifted her head and pushed the crayons aside. “I was on the boat with Mama and Daddy.”
Next to him, Aurora gasped at the sound of her own voice. Josh put a hand on her shoulder. “We can stop anytime you want.”
“No,” she said.
“Great,” Rossi was saying. “And what happened when you were on the boat with Mama and Daddy?”
“Daddy showed me the fishes.”
“That’s great, Aurora.”
“I can catch them too. He teached me how.”
“And then what happened after that?”
“Somebody hurt Mama.” The little voice trembled and then broke. “Somebody hurt Mama and then the lady took me to the steps.”
“Did you see who it was who hurt Mama?”
She nodded. “A monster.”
“What did the monster look like, sweetheart?”
Aurora did not answer.
“Sugar, I need you to think real hard for me. Can you remember what the monster looked like?”
“I want to go home,” the little girl murmured, pushing the crayons away.
“Just a little longer, sweetheart. Was the monster old or young? Tall or short? Black or white?”
“I want to go home,” the little girl repeated, her lower lip quivering. “I want Mama and Daddy.” She bit her lip. “I want Mama and Daddy now.” Her voice trembled, and she put her head in her hands and began to wail.
There was a loud noise offscreen, and a man in a canvas jacket burst into the frame, scooping up Aurora in his arms, Josh recognized him from all the pictures in the house on Spotted Beebalm Drive. It was a younger Hunter Broussard. He murmured something in the child’s ear and glared at Rossi.
“You’re done here,” he said.
“Hunter, please—she saw something. She can help us find out who’s responsible. Our investigation—”
“She’s a kid, Floyd,” Hunter said. “Not now, for God’s sake. Now, go out there and find out who did this.” He turned away, so that Aurora’s face was visible tucked against his neck, and then he left the room.
For a long moment, Rossi stood in the empty room. The face he turned to the camera was full of shame and concern.
He reached out and the screen went blank.
Samba gave a low whistle. “Jesus.”
“Aurora? Are you okay?” Josh moved his hand to her back. She was still staring straight ahead at the empty screen.
“They tried, you know,” she murmured. “After that. A doctor, a policewoman. They all tried. And I just kept repeating the same story about a monster. I don’t know why that’s all I said. I don’t know why I couldn’t help.”
The relentless questions, the thinly disguised irritation of the investigators, the syrupy tone of the in-house psychologists, all of them circling her. He knew what they sounded like. They had circled him too.
“You were a kid,” Josh told her. “It wasn’t your job to remember.” She leaned into him and he put his arms around her.
He looked across at Samba and saw his own thoughts reflected in Samba’s expression.
A monster, Aurora had said.
Not Daddy.
She had seen the killer.
In the circle of his arms, Aurora lifted her head. “Why do you think Papa wanted me to see that? Because I didn’t mention my dad?”
“You didn’t mention your dad,” Josh said. “But you talked about a lady. Who do you think that could be?”
Samba reached for the remains of the file. “Pearline Suggs was the cashier who found Aurora at the mini-mart. Says here she’d arrived early for her shift. She was a kid, a teenager.”
“But Aurora said the lady took me to the steps, not found me. What does it say in her statement, Samba?”
Samba adjusted his glasses. “I got there early because I was opening that day, and Miss Margie Belle likes everything all neat and tidy. The little girl was curled up on the steps asleep. I made sure she was all right, then I ran inside and called the cops and brought her inside with me until y’all got there. She didn’t say nothing.”
Had Pearline seen more than she was telling? She was just a terrified teenager
back then. “So the way she tells it, she didn’t move Aurora, she just came upon her. It doesn’t make sense.”
“You think Pearline is lying? But why?”
Aurora sat up. “Maybe she saw the killer, and she was scared. Maybe she was too scared to do something.”
Josh thought about the bathroom at Fun World, the way the Shadow Man had approached them, pulling the heavy restroom door shut behind him, pushing Josh into a stall. Lock the door. Be a good boy. Josh had slid the latch across, stood there terrified while he listened to the Shadow Man destroy his brother, his only view of the monster the enormous oversized shadow reflected on the peeling yellow restroom wall.
“It’s possible,” he said. “Hang on a second.” He paged through the file and pulled out a thick sheaf of paper held together with a heavy gold staple. “Phone records from Margie Belle’s store.”
He drew a finger down the page. “What time was it when the call came in to the police station?”
Aurora leaned across Samba to see the report. “3:45 A.M.”
“And Pearline said she got there early to open the mini-mart, correct? And she found Aurora there, on the steps as she was about to open up?”
“Yup, that was her statement,” Samba confirmed.
Josh found the call. 3:45 A.M., an outgoing call to the police station. But there was a call above it.
“Someone used the phone at the mini-mart earlier that morning,” he said. “At 2:59. It’s a local call.”
“Maybe someone else was at the mini-mart?” Samba asked.
“Or Pearline lied,” Aurora said.
“Either way,” Josh said, “whoever made that call saw what happened.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
He was too close to this one.
James opened the letter from the Medical Examiners Association, a warning letter that he was overstepping his bounds. It is imperative that all procedures are followed properly. They knew he’d been asking questions about a closed case, and they weren’t happy about it. A month ago, he would have dissolved into a full panic, the thought of his career on the line obliterating any other concern. He had always put faith in the rules, until he saw how spectacularly they had failed Raylene Atchison. It was his responsibility now to do whatever it took to fix it, whether it was approved by the Medical Examiners Association or not.
The Evidence Room: A Mystery Page 17