Body of Evidence

by Stella Cameron

  “You okay?” Finn asked.

  “Fine,” she said. She didn’t think she would ever get that ghoulish picture out of her mind. Denise had been very slim, no little rolls of fat anywhere, and the syrup had coated part of her back and shoulders, and the upper sides of her breasts, smoothly. Like a chocolate-dipped marshmallow snow-woman. She shook her head violently. “No, I’m not fine. She was my friend. I’ve never felt so awful, or so helpless. Denise, of all people. Shoved into that thing. She was in there like that, with her body arranged so it wouldn’t fall, before they poured the syrup,” she said quietly.

  “Uh-huh. Try not to think about that.” Finn reached to pat her hand. “Gradually the flashes, vignettes, or whatever they call ’em, fade. It helps if you don’t consciously try to bring them back.”

  Emma glanced at him. “You sound like a shrink.”

  “Not me,” he said. What he sounded like was a man who had been into those screeching, sweating places where terrible visions waited.

  She touched the back of a hand to her lips. “Did you notice anything about the syrup?”

  He gave her an appraising look and nodded. “It wasn’t completely dried up?”

  Emma bit her lip and said, “We just missed the killer.”

  Finn continued to stare at her. “Maybe we didn’t miss him. Maybe he was still there, hiding, waiting for someone to come along and open that door. He couldn’t have planned for her to knock it open the way she did.”

  Emma leaned forward and followed faded green mottling on the chipped floor tile. Air-conditioning blasted, but sweat trickled between her shoulder blades. “He may even have wanted to see the reaction when she was found. He enjoyed it. I just know he did.”

  “If you’re right, he had guts to take a risk like that. Or he’s so crazy he thinks he’s invincible.” Finn paused. “Emma, you’ve got to take a step back from it. It’s early, you can’t just forget, but if you concentrate on it, turn it and turn it in your mind and start into the ‘what-ifs,’ you’re choosin’ a hard road.”

  “You saw horrible things in war, didn’t you?”

  He didn’t say anything, but his mouth tightened, and he looked away.

  “Good coffee,” she said. He wasn’t the only one who wanted to change the subject. “Better than I would have expected here.” She’d never been in the police station before.

  “Not bad,” Finn said. “But if they keep us here much longer, we’re gonna need more than a mug of coffee.”

  All Emma could concentrate on was getting home before Orville.

  “The officers called you Mrs. Lachance,” Finn said. “Did your husband go to school with us? I don’t remember the name, but there were a lot of kids I never knew.”

  “No, Orville’s not from around here.” She didn’t want to talk to him about Orville.

  “What does he do?”

  It was an ordinary, expected question, so why feel mad? “He’s a developer. He’s also the mayor.”

  Finn looked at the floor. He snapped his fingers. “Of course, Orville Lachance. My sister, Eileen, mentioned that was the mayor’s name. And he’s running for governor?”

  She’d forgotten his sister. Eileen Moggeridge as she was now. “Orville plans to run,” she said vaguely.

  “Can I call your husband for you, Emma? He’d want to be here with you.”

  Horrified at the thought of Orville hearing the voice of a man he didn’t know, asking him to take care of Emma, she wasn’t sure exactly what to say. “No… That’s kind of you, but he’s at a meetin’, and I’ll be okay. I’m a bit shaky, but that’s to be expected.” She stumbled over her words.

  He smiled, and his face relaxed a little. “Of course it is.” The toe of one foot pumped up and down. “I don’t want to scare you, but you should probably be more careful than you normally would. Lock the doors if your husband’s out. Lock your car doors as soon as you’re inside. Look around when you park your car or go back to it. I don’t just mean tonight. You need to make a habit of double-checking everything. Always be aware of your surroundings.”

  “Thank you.” She could scarcely breathe or swallow. He was right, but she hated hearing the truth.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “There’ll be plenty of people keeping their eyes on you.”

  Emma nodded. He hadn’t reassured her. “Did you notice the way we were questioned earlier. Separately? So they could compare our stories.” She cleared her throat nervously. “Do they suspect one of us?” She didn’t think he had been involved, but responses to direct questions could be interesting.

  “No,” he said, very serious now. “But you’re right about the reason they interviewed us separately. That’s just routine. We wouldn’t be hangin’ out together now if they thought one of us knew somethin’ more than we’ve said. They will already have noted the things we talked to them about.”

  The door stood open, and voices rose and fell in the reception area. Apart from September Festival, nothing much happened in Pointe Judah at this time of year—not so far as ordinary people would notice—and it was common knowledge that a few folks made a practice of dropping by the police station for coffee while they read any new “wanted” posters on the crowded bulletin boards.

  Emma swiveled in her chair. The noise she heard from the lobby tonight had to be made by a whole gaggle of citizens who would normally be at home at this hour.

  The raised voices made her nervous, particularly the high ones of women who almost shrieked to get attention.

  Emma checked the clock again. She prayed she could get home without Orville finding out what had happened and showing up in Billy’s office with a head of steam on. He never lost his temper in public, but there could be a first time if he felt his reputation was threatened.

  “Was Denise an old friend?” Finn asked.

  “Three or four years. She moved here from Lafayette because she wanted to work for a paper where she’d be a big fish in a really small bowl. There’s just her and Rusty and the people who put the paper out. Rusty owns the News. That means—meant—she got to do things she hadn’t been able to elsewhere. At first she came for a year or so, but she stayed.” Emma’s throat tightened. “We’re both members of a women’s club. Angela’s Secrets of a Successful Life. We just call it Secrets. It’s a place—an established group—where a few women can unwind without feeling judged. We study advances in women’s medicine, the latest ideas on diet and exercises—and just plain fun stuff. If we want to roll in seaweed for an hour, we’ve got the facilities to do that. Denise could make anyone laugh. She was great. And she was a good listener. If one of us just wanted to talk something through, one-on-one, we went to Denise.”

  Finn rolled his eyes, grimaced and said, “Sorry. Knee-jerk reaction.”

  “I forgive you. I think,” she said. “You fit in with the rest of the men around here. They all think Secrets is ‘that silly place for females.’” When Finn didn’t comment, she said, “We’ve been here over two hours. I guess we could just go home if we wanted to.” Emma turned the statement into a question and waited for Finn’s response.

  He crossed his arms and jiggled his very muscular legs. Emma found it hard not to look at them—and other parts of his anatomy. This was a male male, and she couldn’t recall the last time she’d responded as she was doing right now, to Finn. All her time and energy had been taken up with her complex marriage, so much so that she might even have stopped feeling feminine and desirable at all. Now she was overreacting because she was unsure of herself and reaching out for the strength she felt in him, that was all.

  “I don’t think Billy would take a shine to our walkin’ out,” Finn said. “He wanted us to wait here.”

  He got up and prowled. Why didn’t she remember him better from school? True, he’d graduated a year earlier than she had and taken off for some East Coast school—on a full scholarship, if she remembered correctly—but she should have found him hard to forget.

  She guessed fifteen years could tu
rn a teenager into this specimen who showed off the extension and contraction of every suntanned muscle when he walked. Emma looked at his back and drew a shaky breath.

  In truth, Orville’s protracted campaign to undermine her confidence had all but wiped out any interest she had in men. The old familiar burning started in her eyes. How sad to have loved a man so much, only to end up hating him.

  She tented her fingers and tapped the ends together. “Couldn’t we leave if we wanted to?” Orville would hear what had happened soon enough, but she could cut off any scary reaction by explaining the situation herself.

  Emma hunched her shoulders. Orville would be so angry with her for what he would call drawing negative attention to herself.

  Finn had not answered her question. Facing her, he sat on the edge of the chief’s desk with his ankles crossed.

  Emma couldn’t decide where to look. “It’s nasty here,” she said, desperate for something to say—anything to say.

  Finn chuckled. “You mean you don’t like the pale brown walls and ceiling and the brown shutters over the windows? I expect having the windows so high is a precaution against some crazy emptying a gun in here from outside.”

  “Don’t say that.” Emma gripped her throat and shivered.

  “I’m afraid it’s true. Look, Emma, we happened on something horrible earlier, and it isn’t going away very quickly. Can you try to get a little tougher, just to help yourself through this?”

  “I’m not a wimp.”

  “Of course not. Earlier, when you said you’d have a drink with me, you said you couldn’t be out long. What was that about? You’ve been out several hours.”

  “I have a routine.” That much was true. “I go to the shop early, and I need plenty of sleep. Tomorrow we get the new espresso machine.”

  Why bore him with the little details of her life? She propped her face in a hand and closed her eyes.

  When she opened them, her spine tingled. Without moving her head, she glanced at Finn through her fingers…and caught him giving her a thorough once-over. He shifted on the desk while he followed the lines of her legs. It wasn’t a whole lot of shifting, only that kind of readjustment a man made when he was reacting to a woman.

  Just what she needed. Absolutely wonderful. A man she found as sexy as hell getting turned on by simply looking at her, and right when she couldn’t feel more off balance. Come to that, how could he be thinking lustful thoughts when they’d found Denise’s body only a couple of hours ago?

  His study took her in from her feet all the way up, and, mesmerized, she didn’t look away in time when he met her eyes. His smile was slow, but purely unrepentant, showing dimples beside his mouth. He raised his eyebrows, and the look in his glittering hazel eyes said it all. Finn was more than casually interested in her. And it wasn’t as if he hadn’t learned she was married from the first moment the police arrived at the housing development and started calling her Mrs. Lachance. Then there was the ring on her finger.

  His eyes didn’t leave hers. Not even a flicker showed, as if he thought he had a right to nail her like that.

  “Caught,” Finn said, and laughed. He spoke slowly, and his voice was deep, a little hoarse. “You can’t blame me for trying to reconcile Emma today with Emma fifteen years ago. How long have you been married?”

  “Twelve years.”

  “Always to the mayor.”

  “Uh-huh. Only he wasn’t mayor when we met.” She was answering all the questions. “How about you? Are you married? Children?” He didn’t wear a ring, but some men never did.

  “No, on both counts. You married after you finished your second year at Tulane? You’re so bright, Emma, that could be a shame. How did your folks feel about it?”

  “They did everything they could to persuade me to stay in school.” She looked at the chaos on top of Billy’s metal desk. “But not every woman is cut out for a career. Not that kind of career. Bein’ a homemaker is a good thing, and now I’ve got the shop to keep me really busy.” Talking about this set her nerves on edge.

  “What were you studying?”

  “Marketing. In a small way, what I learned is useful for Poke Around.”

  “You have children?”

  Her heart missed a beat. “No.” And it was none of his business.

  “Your Orville sounds like a successful man.”

  “Yes.” She turned her head in Finn’s direction and followed the expanse of a shoulder that could belong to a football player and a solid chest to match before glancing at his face again. “Orville’s been established a long time. We met casually here in Pointe Judah when he was buyin’ a piece of property. It’s the golf course now. Then he came lookin’ for me in New Orleans. He’d decided to make Pointe Judah his home. He wanted me to be close to my folks.”

  “I was going to mention you going back to school, but I suppose you’re too busy being Mrs. Mayor to do that, and if your Orville wins, you’ll be worked off your feet being Mrs. Governor.” He didn’t feel proud of sounding snide. “You must prefer older men.” He tried to sound light.

  “Orville is fifteen years my senior. Now you know everything there is to know about me.”

  No anger radiated from Emma, just resignation. If anything, she grew more listless. Her husband had good taste; she was a beautiful woman, and when she’d been twenty, Lachance must have salivated at the thought of picking her off the tree. “I’m really surprised the mayor’s not here by now,” he said, and knew he was digging to find out what kind of relationship the Lachances had. “I wouldn’t think he’d want his wife hanging around the cop shop.”

  “May I borrow your phone?” Emma asked him.

  He handed it over and avoided watching her place a call. She put in a long string of numbers, and he figured she was listening to messages, only she clicked off so fast there couldn’t have been any. She let out a slow breath. Relief?

  “My dad was police chief before Billy Meche,” Finn said, making conversation.

  “I remember that. Tom Duhon. He…had an accident. Sorry, I shouldn’t talk about it. It’s got to be hard to lose both your parents the way you have.”

  He grunted. Most people would never know how hard. “An accident” was one term for the way his father died. The wrong term.

  He tried to rotate his left shoulder without being too obvious. When he became tense, the scar sometimes pinched, contracted. Stretching from the middle of his back up and around the shoulder, the still-red, knotted welt wasn’t a pretty sight. These days he wore T-shirts rather than tank tops—to avoid frightening small children.

  Billy walked into the room and closed the door behind him. His gray-peppered red crew cut bristled; so did his mustache, and the color of his broad face almost matched his hair. “This is messy,” he said. “You should see it out there.” He inclined his head toward Reception. “We’ve got a houseful, and they all want to tell me what they’ve seen or heard or been told about Denise Steen. Tips to the right of us, tips to the left of us, and I doubt a one of them means diddly.”

  Finn caught a flash of an expression on Emma’s face. She was scared of something. What was that all about?

  “How can people know about it so soon?” she asked Billy. “That retirement development is three miles out of town, and I surely didn’t see another soul—apart from Finn.”

  “You never could keep a secret here,” Billy said.

  “That’s never goin’ to change,” Finn said.

  “An officer went over to see Rusty Barnes at the paper, and he fell apart,” Billy said. “I can’t believe it. Rusty’s too tough for that.”

  “He loved Denise,” Emma said quietly. “He wanted to be more than her employer.”

  Billy looked at her sharply. “How did Denise feel about that?”

  Emma made fists on her thighs. “Denise was independent. I don’t think she was ready for the responsibility of a partner.”

  “Were they lovers?” Billy said.

  Emma paused longer than she should
have. “I wouldn’t know about that. People’s business is people’s business.”

  Sure it was, Finn thought, but he had no doubt this Rusty Barnes and the victim had been real close, and Emma knew about it.

  A very young officer knocked and came in when he was told to. He probably only needed to shave once a week, and this should have been the day. He looked meaningfully at Finn and Emma, and said, “Mrs. Forestier insists you’ll want to read this, Chief.”

  “Would you like us to leave?” Emma asked.

  “Stay put,” was all she got from Billy.

  “Lobelia Forestier,” Billy muttered, taking the sheet of lined paper. “President of the chamber of commerce. Why do we need a chamber of commerce? You tell me that. What commerce? Outside the folks who stop in for an hour to visit the Oakdale development and shop, if we get twenty-five tourists a year it’s a record. And they only come because they ran out of gas on the way to somewhere else. That Lobelia, she sits down there with her bird’s-eye view over the square and holds court. Chamber of gossip, more like. It isn’t even a paid position, on account of we don’t have the money to pay her for doin’ nothin’.”

  The officer cleared his throat and jabbed his head in the direction of the open door.

  Billy, no more than five foot nine but built like a fireplug, shot to his feet. “Were you born in a field, Sampson?” he said to the other man. “Close the friggin’ thing.”

  Sampson did as he was told, and Finn could tell the man would rather be on the other side of the door.

  Back in his squeaky chair, popping little white mints into his mouth while he read, Billy’s breathing grew louder. “I don’t see any place where you could tote a rifle without it being seen,” he said, looking at Finn’s shorts and T-shirt. “Sharpshooter, huh? Maybe I knew that.”

  Finn chewed at a hangnail. “I used to be a sharpshooter—among other things I’ve given up.”

  “Well, you’ll be pleased to know Mrs. Forestier and her cronies have solved the case for us. You shot Miz Steen through the open door of the latrine, then ran around the corner and met up with Miz Lachance here. That would be after you hid the rifle.”