Passion In The First Degree

by Carla Cassidy

She nodded, a sad, resigned smile curving her lips. “You know me, Billy. I’m a survivor.” She sighed, and tears sparkled on her long lashes. “I just wish Tyler hadn’t wanted to wait till the baby was born to tell his parents about us. Now it’s too late…too late for all of us.”

  Moments later, as she and Billy walked back to his truck, Shelby asked, “What’s going to happen to her?”

  “She’ll be all right. The swamp takes care of its own.”

  “How did Tyler and Sissy meet?”

  “Tyler never told me.” Billy paused to hold a low-lying branch out of Shelby’s way. “I just know he came to me one night and asked me if I’d be his best man at his wedding. I’d never seen Tyler so happy. He’d dated around quite a bit but never seemed to make a real connection with anyone until Sissy.” For a moment he looked almost wistful. “Seeing Tyler and Sissy together you couldn’t help but know they were meant for each other…soul mates.” He frowned, as if irritated with himself, then turned and walked on.

  Shelby followed more slowly, wondering if Billy truly believed in the concept of soul mates. Had he once thought Fayrene was his? Or was he still seeking the woman who would bond to him heart and soul?

  She shoved these thoughts aside, cradling the laptop closer to her chest. She had to remain focused on her job as his lawyer; otherwise he’d be seeking a soul mate in prison.

  By the time they got back to Billy’s truck, Shelby couldn’t contain her curiosity any longer. “If the battery is charged, I should be able to boot this up right now,” she said as Billy started the truck.

  Punching the power button, she felt her excitement grow as the motor whirred and the miniature screen lit up. She quickly scanned the list of files, unsure what she sought, but somehow believing she’d know it when she saw it. File names flew by, none of them ringing a bell of premonition. Then there it was. The file was marked simply Serpent.

  She called up the file, unmindful of the bumps and jolts of the truck, her attention completely riveted to the machine in her lap. Notes. The file contained pages of notes on the swamp serpent murders. “This is it. This has to be it.”

  “What?” Billy slowed the truck, his attention obviously torn between driving and the computer.

  “Tyler was working on the swamp serpent murders. He’s got page after page of notes in here. Police reports, newspaper accounts, interviews with surviving family members…”

  “That explains how he met Sissy. A couple of years ago her older brother was a victim of the swamp serpent.”

  “That poor girl,” Shelby said softly, then refocused her attention on the screen. Scanning quickly, she went through page after page of information, amazed at the mass of material Tyler had compiled.

  She leaned back against the seat and stared at Billy, suddenly overwhelmed by the daunting task ahead of them. “Billy, do you realize what this means? If what I suspect is true, then we’re no longer only looking for who killed Fayrene and Tyler. We’re looking for the swamp serpent.”

  Billy sighed, but didn’t speak. Shelby looked back at the computer screen. Her fingers tingled as she paged down and across the top of the screen flashed the words Potential Suspects.

  Chapter Twelve

  Potential Suspects. The words shimmered, luminescent against the computer screen’s dark background. Shelby drew in a deep breath and read the first name. Malcolm Waylon. She vaguely remembered him, the weasel-faced pharmacist whose only son had been badly hurt in a bar fight when a group of town kids had jumped a gang of swamp kids. His name was followed by several others she didn’t recognize, but she gasped as she found another name she did know.

  “What?” Billy asked, apparently responding to her gasp of surprise.

  “Tyler made a list of potential suspects…people he thought might be the swamp serpent. My God, Billy, his father is listed here as a potential perpetrator. Tyler suspected his own father.”

  “Jonathon LaJune has never been particularly secretive in his prejudices toward the swamp community,” Billy replied. “Tyler was too good a newspaper man to let his heart rule his list of suspects.”

  Shelby nodded and looked back at the list. More people she didn’t know or barely remembered from her childhood. As she reached the last three names, her blood turned frigid. Impossible. The word reverberated in her head. Absolutely impossible.

  She closed her eyes and rubbed her forehead, as if in doing so she could obliterate the names shining on the screen. But even with her eyes closed she could see them in her mind. Roger Eaton. Michael Longsford. Big John Longsford.

  “My God, Tyler even suspected my father,” she said faintly. “And Michael and Roger.” She shut off the computer, overwhelmed by Tyler’s suspicions and speculation. She drew in a deep breath. “Well, that’s obviously ridiculous. Tyler was really reaching to include my family.”

  “Was he?” Billy pulled the truck to a stop next to her car in the cemetery parking area. He shut off the motor, then turned to look at her. “Shelby, the members of your family, like Jonathon LaJune, have never been particularly quiet in their distaste for the swamp and its people. Your house is the closest to the swamp and the murder scenes.”

  “Yes, but it’s one thing to be prejudiced, it’s another to be a crazed murderer,” Shelby exclaimed. She rubbed her forehead once again, the heat of the day and the jumble of her brain producing the beginning of a tension headache.

  “Don’t make the mistake of assuming the swamp serpent is crazy. This is a murderer who has killed a lot of people over a long period of time without leaving behind any clues or evidence. This is not a nut. The swamp serpent is a shrewd, cunning killer.”

  Shelby forced a rueful smile. “Then certainly that lets out the members of my family. I don’t consider any of them particularly shrewd or cunning.”

  Billy reached out and gently touched her cheek. The pads of his fingertips weren’t soft and yet the touch was pleasant, too pleasant. “I’m sorry I dragged you back here, into this mess. I should have left you alone, let you keep living the good life in Shreveport.”

  She shook her head, both glad and disappointed when his hand dropped back to the steering wheel. “No, I’m glad I came back. It was time. The years in Shreveport were just an interlude, like an extended vacation. But my home is here, my heart is here and I’m going to stay no matter what happens.”

  Billy’s gaze remained dark, enigmatic. “This could get very difficult, Shelby. As you just stated, Tyler had members of your own family listed as potential suspects in the swamp murders.” His features remained inscrutable. “I wonder what you’ll do if in order to save me you have to sacrifice one of your own family members?”

  “That’s not going to happen,” Shelby stated firmly. “The swamp serpent might be many things, but it’s not a Longsford, by blood or by marriage. My family may be dysfunctional, prejudiced and riddled with faults, but we are not monsters.”

  Billy smiled at her, a gentle expression that caused a twist of her heart. “Shelby, monsters come in all shapes and sizes.” His smile fell away and in his eyes she saw the haunting of monsters past and present. “Sometimes they hide within the people we love.”

  Shelby suddenly remembered the stories she’d heard about Billy…stories about his father killing his mother, then hanging himself from a tree deep in the heart of the swamp. She had never known for sure if the stories were true, had at one time dismissed them as dark fantasies and more swamp myths, but now she wasn’t so sure.

  “I’ve got to go,” he said, breaking their locked gaze by looking at his wristwatch. “I promised Parker we’d spend some time together this afternoon.”

  “And I want to thoroughly read through the material on this computer. If Tyler was killed because he got too close to the swamp serpent, I need to know what he knew.” She started to get out of the truck but was stopped when Billy’s hand closed around her arm.

  “Shelby, whatever you learn from that computer, you bring the information to me. We’re in this together an
d there’s no such thing as heroics.”

  “Of course,” she said automatically, but still his hand held her in place.

  “And don’t share the information with anyone else… especially the members of your family.”

  She hesitated a moment, remembering that she’d already said far too much to her family. She nodded. He released his hold on her and she got out of the truck. He watched as she got into the car, her dark hair sparkling in the afternoon sunshine. Even in funeral black she looked good.

  As she drove out of the cemetery, Billy slumped in the seat, exhausted by the events of the past several days. The murders, his arrest, now the link from Tyler to the swamp serpent all swirled around in his head, and beneath it all a simmering passion for Shelby demanded to be acknowledged.

  He hadn’t been surprised by the revelation that Tyler had suspected members of the Longsford family. It made sense. The Longsford mansion was close to the swamp and the family had always harbored vehement intolerance toward the people who lived in the nearby marsh. It wouldn’t surprise him if the swamp serpent was one of the Longsfords, although it wouldn’t surprise him if the murderer was one of the other suspects on Tyler’s list, either.

  Black Bayou seethed with secrets and sins, both past and present. It was a community built on bigotry and steeped in the tradition of hate. Tyler had been one of the few jewels among the grit of gravel. He’d overcome his privileged background, his breeding and had accepted each person on their own merits, no matter where they’d come from. He’d accepted Billy, first as a boyhood friend, then man to man.

  Billy’s chest ached at thoughts of his friend. When Tyler was killed, something shining had left Billy’s life. Tyler had filled Billy with hope, made him believe in dreams. And when Tyler had fallen in love with and married Sissy, he’d made Billy realize anything was possible.

  Billy smiled, remembering Tyler’s joy when he’d told Billy that Sissy was pregnant. “I know it’s going to be a boy,” Tyler had said as he’d paced the floor of Billy’s shanty. “When he’s born, Dad will forgive me for marrying Sissy. Surely he won’t care where she came from, only that she makes me happy and that our son is a LaJune.”

  They had celebrated long into the night, two friends, brothers despite their parentage and backgrounds. And now Tyler was gone. And buried with him was Billy’s hope that things would ever change between the people of Black Bayou and the people of the swamp.

  He started his truck and drove out of the cemetery, shoving away thoughts of Tyler. And as always when he consciously emptied his head, thoughts of Shelby filled it.

  All those years ago when she’d first left Black Bayou, he’d hated her. First for running away rather than facing him again, but mostly because she was the only one in the world who had seen him weak, seen him completely out of control, his emotions raw and aching with Mama Royce’s death.

  Over the years he’d rarely allowed thoughts of that single night of love to haunt him. It was a night that should never have happened, a night that had just briefly allowed him to forget who he was and where he was from.

  With Mama Royce dead, Fayrene, Tyler…Billy couldn’t afford to care anymore. Other than Parker, he couldn’t let his heart ever be vulnerable again. He could desire Shelby, he could want to possess her physically, but he could never afford to love her.

  Besides, if he found out that one of the Longsfords had killed Tyler, was the culprit responsible for the murders, and for the grief of the swamp community, Billy wasn’t sure what he would do. His hands tightened on the steering wheel as he wondered what Shelby would think of him if he avenged Tyler’s death by killing one of her own.

  SHELBY STOOD at the window in her room, her head reeling with information from Tyler’s computer. She’d read through only half the files, but enough to fill her head with gruesome murder facts for a lifetime of nightmares. Tyler had documented information on fifteen murders, beginning the year Shelby had left Black Bayou. Fifteen murders in twelve years. Fifteen people viciously stabbed to death. Fifteen lives lost forever. If Fayrene and Tyler were counted into that, the number of victims rose to seventeen.

  Without anything more to go on than gut instinct, Shelby knew the information she had in her possession was what had gotten Tyler killed. If it had been a crime of passion, it had been the passionate survival instincts of a madman. A madman she had to find if she wanted to save Billy.

  She turned and looked back at the computer on her desk, the screen glowing eerily in the waning daylight of the room. She hadn’t read anything other than Tyler’s reports of each of the murders. She had consciously stayed away from the page that listed his potential suspects, but the names she’d seen briefly while in the truck still burned in her brain.

  How could Tyler suspect any of the members of her family? It was crazy…ridiculous. The Longsfords might have plenty of faults, but the idea that any of them might be crazed killers was preposterous.

  Turning away from the window, she rubbed her forehead. The headache that had begun in Billy’s truck hadn’t abated, but had instead grown more persistent. Time to call it a night, she thought. She punched off the computer and turned on her bedside lamp. Even though it was relatively early, she’d go to bed and read for a little while then hopefully drift off into a dreamless sleep and start fresh in the morning.

  It took her only minutes to peel off her clothes and pull on a cotton nightgown. She pulled down the blankets on the bed and slid beneath the covers. A scream clawed at her throat and escaped as her foot encountered something alien.

  She jumped out of bed at the same time Olivia burst through her doorway. “Shelby. I heard you scream. What are you trying to do, raise the dead?”

  “There’s something in my bed.” Shelby yanked down the covers and there, looking grotesque against the pristine sheets, was a bouquet of dead flowers. “What on earth?” Shelby picked it up, repelled yet perversely fascinated by the blackened, withered nosegay.

  “Oh, Shelby, what on earth?” Olivia’s eyes were round with fear. Gone was Olivia’s usual arrogance, hidden beneath a veil of terror that instantly permeated Shelby, as well.

  “Why would somebody do this? What is this supposed to mean?” Shelby stared first at her sister, then back at the bouquet.

  “It’s obviously a threat,” Olivia said, visibly shuddering. “Put it away someplace. It gives me the creeps.”

  Shelby opened a dresser drawer and dropped the flowers inside, then sank onto the edge of the bed. “Who on earth would put something like that in my bed?”

  Olivia sat down next to her. “I don’t know, but you must have made somebody very angry.”

  “I’ve been back home less than a week and already I’ve been shot at and received a bouquet of dead flowers.”

  “You’re stirring things up, Shelby. You should have just let Billy go to prison and left things alone.”

  “But he’s not guilty,” Shelby exclaimed. “And what’s more, we believe that whoever killed Tyler and Fayrene is probably the swamp serpent, as well.” Shelby bit her bottom lip, realizing she had done exactly what Billy hadn’t wanted her to. But she had to make Olivia understand that Billy wasn’t guilty, that this was much bigger than the murder of two people. “And please don’t repeat that to anyone,” she added.

  Olivia stared at her in disbelief. “But what makes you think Tyler’s and Fayrene’s murders are in any way tied to the swamp serpent murders?”

  Shelby waved her hands, unwilling to expand further on her mistake. “Never mind, it’s just a theory we’re working on.”

  Olivia cast her an amused gaze. “Sounds to me like a legal eagle grasping at straws to save a doomed client.”

  “Do you really believe Billy is guilty?” Shelby asked.

  Olivia smiled. “My dear sister, in this town anything is possible.”

  “Speaking of endless possibilities, I have to confess I was surprised when I heard you’d married Roger.”

  “What surprised you more?” Olivia str
etched out on the bed like a sleek kitten. “The fact that he’s so much older than me, or the fact that he’s an incredible bore?”

  Shelby laughed, as always half amused, half appalled by her sister’s irreverent honesty and slight naughtiness. “I was just surprised, that’s all.” She studied her sister thoughtfully. “Do you love him?”

  “What’s love got to do with marriage? I married Roger for lots of reasons, but love wasn’t one of them.” One of Olivia’s finely penciled dark brows rose upward. “Oh, honestly, Shelby, I can see by your expression that you’re one of those hopeless romantics who think marriage is some sort of legal soul-bonding between lovers.” She laughed, a harsh, cynical sound. “You don’t really believe Mother and Father have remained together all these years because they love each other, do you?”

  She laughed again and looked at Shelby pityingly. “Good marriages are built on needs. Daddy had new money but no background. Mother knew politically he would go places, but he needed the cushion of her breeding and the good name of the St. Clairs behind him. Roger will probably someday be governor of this state, but he can’t do it without the Longsford political machine supporting him.” She pulled a slender hand through her sleek, shorn hair and smiled at Shelby. “I intend to be the sexiest governor’s wife this state has ever known. Even Big John will be proud if we make it to the governor’s mansion.”

  “There are people who marry for love,” Shelby observed.

  “Only fools.” Olivia got up off the bed and sauntered toward the doorway. “So, what are your plans for getting Billy off the hook?”

  Shelby shrugged. “If I intend to catch the killer, then I’m going to have to retrace Tyler’s steps, talk to the people he spoke with, go to the places he went while searching for the story.”

  “Just be careful that in following Tyler’s footsteps you don’t wind up a companion in his grave.” With these words, Olivia turned and left the room.

  FOR THE NEXT TWO DAYS Shelby scarcely left her bedroom. Hours upon hours were spent reading, assessing and reassessing Tyler’s notes and files on his computer. She took her meals in her room and slept in erratic spurts, completely absorbed in pulling together a defense for Billy, a defense built on reasonable doubt.