by Tami Hoag
KJ had started crying, and Cameron had yelled at him, “Don’t tell! You can’t tell! I’ll kill you, too!”
And KJ had run off, and Cameron couldn’t chase him because his mother was coming home, and she was going to be mad because he wasn’t supposed to have friends over after school . . .
He didn’t want to get in trouble. He tried so hard to do everything right.
Maybe he could do this one thing right, he thought, as he rowed his little boat, the dock and the house and his world growing smaller and smaller, just as he grew smaller and smaller inside his body, until there was hardly anything left of him that needed to die.
FIFTY-FIVE
Dawn was a blush-pink promise on the eastern horizon as Nick drove to Blue Cypress. Already the press had choked the street leading into the development, camped out to wait for the story they had picked up in fits and starts on scanners during the night. Their numbers had grown over the past week from local and regional stations and newspapers to include media outlets from New Orleans and Houston, all in Bayou Breaux to cover the “Cajun Country Crime Wave,” as coined by the Times-Picayune.
He couldn’t actually blame them, despite his dislike of having them underfoot. Crime was news. The murders and disappearances of children were news. That kind of crime in particular was an aberration, an attack on the fabric of the local community—and on society writ large. The murder of a high-profile sheriff was news. An investigation, however, could not be “news.” Investigations were by nature and necessity secretive. And therein lay the crux of his conflict with the press.
He was not liable to become more popular with them today. He had blocked the entrance to the Blue Cypress neighborhood with a pair of deputies in big SUVs. No one without a badge was getting within a hundred yards of the Spicer/Dutrow crime scene.
Settling in to wait, reporters milled around on the shoulders of the road, drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, and speculating. Nothing they could come up with in their imaginations would be half as sensational as the truth this time.
Kelvin Dutrow was dead. His fiancée was under arrest. And the girl they had all been looking for was on life support after spending two days stuffed under a bed by a fourteen-year-old boy who was still at large—a boy who may have committed a brutal murder not twenty-four hours earlier.
The deputies pulled back to let Nick pass.
Yellow crime scene tape defined the perimeter of the Dutrow property. The state crime scene van had come and gone. All things considered, it had seemed best and politic to let them handle the investigation of the sheriff’s murder. Nick had made the call and then turned the scene over to Stokes to wait for them, while he followed the ambulance to Our Lady.
Ignoring all orders to the contrary, he had stayed with Annie in the ER, leaving her side only during her head CT scan. She had a nasty concussion, but no skull fracture. That her head was harder than the cast-iron skillet Sharon Spicer had struck her with should have come as no surprise. Nick had threatened to never let her out of his sight again, a deal she had readily accepted—for the moment, at least.
He had spent the past two hours lying with her safe in his arms in her hospital bed, comforting himself as much as her.
He turned in at Dutrow’s driveway and went past the house back to the oversize garage and the dock where Dutrow’s bass boat was moored. He wanted a few moments’ peace before the madness of the day began. The best place for him to steal those moments was by the water.
In Dutrow’s absence, he would have to deal with the press. The state police investigators wanted a meeting ASAP. He needed to refocus the investigation and the search for Cameron Spicer. He wanted to at least begin the day centered and calm.
As he walked out on the dock, he took in the scene in front of him—the layer of fog skimming over the water and blending into the gray sky, the grasses swaying near the bank, the trees in the distance still shrouded in the last shadows before the light of day. Like a painting darkened by age, the images were as yet indistinct, but he could smell the water and the mud. He breathed deep. Inhale. Focus. Calm. Release . . .
A heron lifted off out of the shallows nearby, and Nick called to mind the Wendell Berry poem “The Peace of Wild Things,” which spoke of escaping the despair for the ills of the world by seeking out the quiet solace of nature. He wondered if Kelvin Dutrow had ever considered such things while standing on this dock.
The crime scene in the house behind him, where Dutrow had lost his life, housed the chaos of man-made grief—both before and after the murder. The scene in front of him cleansed his soul with its perfect simplicity.
He breathed deep of the moist, earth-scented air and centered himself.
Inhale. Focus. Calm. Release . . .
As the sky brightened and the fog began to dissipate, his focus went to a boat in the distance. A small rowboat or a bateau—maybe a hundred yards out, with a single figure seated in it.
This waterway curved around the entire Blue Cypress Point and connected to the north and east to Bayou Breaux proper. Anyone determined to get to this property had only to follow the water. Nick pulled his phone off his belt and made a call as he climbed down into Dutrow’s bass boat. He requested a boat from the SO be dispatched ASAP to secure the crime scene from the water side.
He checked the motors then snooped around in the storage compartments until he found a key that started the smaller of the two.
The figure in the bateau could be a local fisherman, or it could be an enterprising photographer or reporter looking for a way to get closer to the scene. Whatever the case, Nick wanted them gone. Dutrow would have said he was being paranoid and ridiculous, but Kelvin Dutrow was dead.
What he didn’t expect was to find Cameron Spicer, but as he closed in on the smaller boat, and took in the look of the passenger, he believed that was exactly who he had found—a boy in his early teens with a shock of bright red hair.
He didn’t look like a killer, that was for sure. He looked young and lost and afraid.
Nick cut the engine and brought the bass boat in gracefully alongside the little bateau.
“Bonjour,” he said. “It’s a fine morning to be out on the water, no?”
The boy just looked at him, wide-eyed. He sat slightly hunched over, his arms close at his sides as if he was cold, like a featherless young bird. At his feet was an odd assortment of belongings—a small bundle of books tied together with string, a baseball autographed with an unreadable scrawl, a framed photograph of the boy and his mother, and a well-loved teddy bear.
“There’s weather coming later,” Nick said. He fished a cigarette out of his shirt pocket, lit it, and took a long drag, as if he had all the time in the world. As he exhaled, he smiled and made a little gesture with the cigarette. “My wife, she doesn’t like me smoking.”
“It’s bad for you,” the boy said.
“C’est vrai. That’s true,” Nick conceded. “But you know, we all do things we shouldn’t time to time. Because we’re angry or we’re scared, or whatever. It’s not the end of the world.
“You’re Cameron Spicer, yeah?” he asked, looking at the boy from under his brows as he picked a fleck of tobacco off his tongue and flicked it away.
“How do you know me?”
“Whole lotta people out looking for you, son,” Nick said. “Me, I’m Nick Fourcade. I’m a detective with the Sheriff’s Office.”
“You work for Sheriff Dutrow?”
“Well, I did. Something happened last night, and Sheriff Dutrow, he’s dead.”
The boy’s eyes widened in disbelief. “What happened?”
Nick watched him for a moment, contemplating. “I should tell you the truth, yeah? You’re old enough to handle that, I think.
“Your maman, she wanted to protect you,” he said. “She was afraid he would send you to prison, and so she stabbed him, and he died.”
&nb
sp; Tears sprang up in the boy’s eyes—not out of love or remorse for the fate of Kelvin Dutrow, Nick thought, but out of fear for his mother or fear for himself.
“She loves you a lot, your maman.”
“They took her to jail,” Cameron said.
“They did.”
“Will she go to prison?”
“She will.”
“For how long?”
Nick shrugged. “I don’t know. Depends. It helps her cause if she had good reason. Maybe you could help her out with that, yeah?”
The boy stared down at his little pile of odd belongings and said nothing.
“Whatcha got in there, Cameron?”
“Stuff,” he mumbled.
Cherished things, Nick thought. Things a boy might take with him if he was running away. But no town kid ran away to the swamp. He wasn’t going far in his little bateau, at any rate. And there were no clothes, no jacket, no food or drink.
“Why are you out here, Cameron?” he asked. “Do you have a plan?”
Cameron said nothing for a moment. Nick waited, letting the silence build pressure.
“I did a bad thing,” the boy said in a small, frightened voice. “I didn’t mean to. But I did a bad thing.”
“I know.”
“I try,” he said, his brows drawing together in distress. “I try to follow all the rules, and everything goes wrong anyway.”
“I know it can seem that way sometimes—”
“No!” he snapped, his chin quivering as he started to cry. “It’s all the time! It’s my whole life! I should have never been born!”
He stood up suddenly, the bateau swaying beneath his feet. His T-shirt was tie-dyed with blood, probably from the Florette boy. He had clearly been on the wrong end of a fistfight—until he’d gotten his hand on the rock he’d used to obliterate his bully. His lower lip was split. His left eyebrow was busted and swollen, the eye below it nearly shut.
“You know, Cameron, if you hit Dean with that rock while he was doing that to your face—that’s self-defense. You have the right to protect yourself. He rode you pretty hard, the way I hear it. Called you names, pushed you around.”
“I hit him,” the boy said, staring down with a glazed look, as if he were seeing a replay in his mind’s eye, horrified by what he’d done.
“I hit him and I hit him and I hit him!” he sobbed.
“These things happen,” Nick said calmly. “All that hate, it builds and builds, like an infection in your heart, and then it comes pouring out. You can’t stop it.”
He glanced again at the belongings in the bottom of the bateau. Cherished things . . .
“It’s not just Dean,” the boy said, shaking with misery at what he’d done.
“Cameron, Nora Florette, she’s alive,” Nick said. “I know you think you killed her, but she’s still alive.”
“You’re a liar!” the boy cried.
“No,” Nick said, slowly getting to his feet. “She’s alive. I don’t know will she live, but she’s in the hospital.”
“You don’t understand! It’s just everything!”
“You can explain it to me,” Nick said gently. “Me, I’m a good listener. And I’ve heard stories to make your hair stand on end. There ain’t nothing can shock me, mais non. You come tell me your story, Cameron. I’ll do what I can to help you.”
“You can’t help me,” he said softly.
“Let me try.”
“I don’t want to be here,” the boy whispered to himself.
“Then let’s go back,” Nick said, reaching a hand out to him. “Come on, son. Get in with me. We’ll tow your boat home.”
* * *
* * *
“NO. NO,” CAMERON muttered to himself, shaking his head.
He didn’t want to go back.
He didn’t want to explain.
He didn’t want to go to prison.
He didn’t want to be here.
He looked down at all his favorite special things in the bottom of the boat. He had meant to take them with him into the water, but he’d forgotten to bring a bag.
He couldn’t even manage to die right.
“Come on, son,” the detective said, reaching out to him.
He looked so far away. He sounded like he was down in a barrel. He was looking right at Cameron, but he couldn’t see what he really was.
He couldn’t see that Cameron was just a tiny being, perched in the eye of a giant, and all he had to do was jump.
* * *
* * *
SUICIDE, NICK THOUGHT, looking at those cherished belongings. The things a boy might want to take with him . . . to the next life. And in the next instant, Cameron Spicer turned and went over the far side of the bateau.
* * *
* * *
HE FELL SO fast. He went so deep. It was like being swallowed by the abyss. Cameron was terrified and thrilled. He would be free of every useless, stupid thing that he was. He would never make another mistake.
* * *
* * *
NICK COULDN’T SEE. The water was murky. He kicked and reached and swept a hand from side to side. His lungs were burning. He needed to surface. He didn’t want to lose this boy, but he had fallen out of reach.
How true that was in so many ways.
But just as he started to turn and was about to kick for the light above the water, he caught hold of the boy’s shirt, and hung on.
FIFTY-SIX
He keeps saying he never meant to hurt KJ,” Annie said, sitting down on the park bench beside her husband. “He says he only went there to scare him.”
This was the place they had come to since the start of their relationship when they needed to decompress at the end of the day. The narrow park ran on both sides of the bayou, from one end of town to the other, ending where they sat, fifty yards past the edge of the SO parking lot. It was quiet and lovely, and just far enough away from work that they felt free to be who they were rather than what they did.
A week after the worst of the case, the weather had finally broken. Fall had arrived with a cool breeze and migrating mallards. The trees had changed their colors to bronze and rust, and rattled like bags of bones in the wind.
On the other side of the bayou, Annie’s running group went by on the paved path like a flock of brightly colored birds in their fall athletic wear. Still nursing her concussion, she was sidelined. Truth be told, she didn’t have the heart for much these days anyway. All she wanted was to hold her family close and feel grateful to have them.
She had just come from visiting Cameron with Jaime Blynn. Jaime, who had taught KJ Gauthier, who had been heartbroken by his death, had volunteered through CASA to help Cameron, who had murdered him. For her there was no conflict in that. Cameron was a broken child in need of help, so she reached out to him. He had no one else.
With Cameron’s mother in jail, Sharon’s parents had been contacted on Cameron’s behalf. Cameron’s grandparents, who were church-going, upstanding members of their community, had been reluctant to step up in any real way. Their perfect daughter had failed them. Her son had become something they didn’t want to acknowledge or be associated with. Annie supposed she shouldn’t have been surprised, but she was disappointed just the same.
“He took a nine-inch boning knife with him,” Nick reminded her.
They had found the knife and the steel-mesh glove—which had left the strange, bloody handprint on the wall of KJ Gauthier’s bedroom—in Dutrow’s workshop, in the big garage where he kept his fishing and hunting gear.
“The only reason he wore that glove that night was so he wouldn’t cut himself if the knife slipped. That’s premeditation, bébé.”
“I know. I just . . .” Annie conceded the point and left the rest unsaid. Nick knew she couldn’t reconcile the two Camerons in her head—the sad boy she h
ad spent time with over the past week, and the masked killer who had invaded the home of Genevieve Gauthier and her son. It just didn’t seem possible the two could be one.
“God help me for speaking ill of the dead,” she said, “but I didn’t have any problem imagining Dean might have done something to Nora, yet I know for a fact that Cameron did, and I just can’t get my head around it.”
“He missed Genevieve’s jugular by millimeters.”
“But he was fighting for his own life at that point,” Annie argued. “In his mind, at least. Genevieve came into the room to save her child. They fought. They struggled.”
The struggle had initiated in KJ’s room and proceeded down the hall into the front room. The friendship bracelet Nora had given Cameron had come apart and fallen off (the tangled mess of colored thread Keith Kemp had wanted to ignore the night of the murder). Genevieve had made it out the front door and had run for Roddie Perez’s house.
“He could have chased her down and finished her off,” she pointed out, “but he didn’t.”
“C’est vrai,” Nick murmured. “He got scared and he ran away, ’cause he’s a little boy.”
And then Cameron had gone home and washed himself, disposed of his bloody clothes, and cleaned off his weapon. He had snuck back into his house, crawled into bed over the comatose body of Nora Florette, and gone to sleep. He had gotten up the next day and gone to school like nothing had happened . . . because he was afraid and he hadn’t known what else to do.
Despite the things she knew he’d done, Annie didn’t want to think of Cameron Spicer as a monster. She couldn’t. He had done monstrous things, but when she sat with him and talked with him, he was just a frightened child who wanted his mother.
Her heart broke for him again and again. He had been raised to be perfect, to follow every rule. He had been so afraid to disappoint his mother, so afraid of embarrassing Kelvin Dutrow, that once he had made a mistake, he had committed another and another, each one worse than the one before in the attempt to cover it all up.