As he pulled his phone from his pocket, he saw Jena pulling out hers as well. They held the phones side by side; both screens displayed texts from the wildlife biology lab in Baton Rouge. Mac was closest to the aisle, so he squeezed in front of EZ and slipped into the hallway.
“You guys might want to get up here and get the report about your hard-partying gator; I can meet you in Thibodaux.” Maxie Renaud, the biologist who’d taken possession of the animal last night, was one of the first women Mac had dated after moving to Louisiana. He liked her, but she was too brainy for him. It wasn’t that he disliked smart women, even women smarter than him. He just didn’t want it thrown in his face. Jena was brainy but didn’t feel the need to prove anything.
“What’d you find?” Better be something good for him to drive up to Thibodaux and potentially ruin his shot at getting in on this drug case.
Maxie laughed. “Bring someone from the sheriff’s office if you want to make a bust. I’m still running tests, but I think your gator was stoned. I’m surprised he didn’t have the munchies; probably thought he was hallucinating the old lady and her dog.”
Considering he’d been listening to the hallucinogenic properties of Black Diamond for the past hour and a half, Mac wasn’t amused. “How do you know it was marijuana? Did you find a stash in its stomach? Could it be something else?”
The uncharacteristic sharpness of his tone stopped Maxie’s jokes. “I’ll bring the tox results to Thibodaux and you can take a look for yourself—it’s an odd mix of stuff.” She paused, her voice filled with uncertainty. “Anything in particular you want me to test for before I leave?”
Mac glanced up as Jena slipped out of the muster room and walked toward him, eyebrows raised in question. He had a bad feeling about this whole thing, not that he could possibly be paranoid after the past twelve hours.
“We’re on our way. You got any way of checking our gator for Black Diamond?”
CHAPTER 11
Cole had postponed handling the head and feet of the gator until the guts, meat, and hide were taken care of, but this morning was the day to deal with the bony parts. He had done some research on gator taxidermy when he’d first moved to the parish, but decided it was better to sell the parts to people who knew what they were doing.
Some skills, he just didn’t want to acquire.
The heads and feet had to be tanned, cured, oiled, and sanitized before they could be turned into wall mounts or back scratchers to be sold in the markets throughout the state. Tourists snapped them up. Cole guessed visitors from the Midwest or New England believed owning a shiny polished skull or tooth or claw made them real badasses.
He’d get more for the parts at the taxidermy place up in Theriot if he could scrape out the head pretty clean, which was smelly, tedious work. He’d started after an early-morning fishing trip, and didn’t finish until midafternoon. He put the slivers of already-spoiling scrap meat in another plastic bin, then moved on to his next job: preparing the feet. This had been one huge gator, with feet larger than Cole’s hands, and that didn’t account for the inch-long claws at the end of each of its four toes on the back feet and five on the front.
He cleaned off the first three feet carefully, then set them to dry on a rack before he put them into bags and returned them to the cooler.
One more foot and he could rid himself of the bin’s contents upstream, giving swamp denizens another meal. Tomorrow, he’d drive up to Theriot with everything in the portable cooler that fit in his truck bed. First, he’d sell the head and feet, then stop off at a buyer to sell the hide. He didn’t really need the money, so he’d find someplace in the parish to donate it anonymously.
The midafternoon sun sent trails of light through the open door of the workhouse, and caused something to glitter on the bottom of the fourth gator foot—a right front clawed monstrosity that had probably snagged his poor human victim long enough for Mr. Gator to twist off the guy’s arm.
A stone must have gotten stuck in the webbing between the toes, which would bring down the price if he couldn’t pry it out without damaging the scaly digits. Cole turned the foot over and saw nothing, so he took it to the door of the workhouse. Stretching the toes apart in the sunlight, he got to the webbing between the first two toes and saw it again.
It wasn’t a stone, but what the hell was it?
Even though the day was mild and pleasant, too much air and sun would ruin his gator haul, so he left the mystery foot on the worktable, and made sure everything else had been stashed in individual bags in the freezer. This one foot, he’d sacrifice in the name of curiosity.
He pulled out his knife set again, choosing a small blade along with a pair of tweezers the size of his pinkie. Taking them to the table where he’d left the foot, he pulled over the bright lamp he used to illuminate his work during the gloomy days of winter. Time for a more thorough examination.
There—the light had caught on something orange. A round piece of glass or a . . .
Cole clutched his knife more tightly and leaned in closer, trying to make sense of what he’d seen. The round orange bead—maybe an eighth of a dime in size—blinked at him like an inflamed eyeball. So it was something with a watertight battery. But what? Maybe a transmitter from a child’s toy or a cell phone? Had the gator stepped on it on the bayou bottom?
Cole didn’t think it had contributed to the animal’s death; the treble hook had been enough to do that.
Changing to an even smaller blade, he bent over the foot and cut around the blinking light, trying not to damage the metal base that had been embedded in the webbing. He loosened it enough to remove with the tweezers and held it under the light.
The thing was some kind of electrical device, but it had been embedded too deeply to be anything the gator had stepped on. Flipping the foot over, he studied the webbing between the toes on the top side of the foot and found what could be an imprint or stamp—as if someone had used a stapler of sorts to insert the device.
Another mystery, but one that would have to wait. Tomorrow, he could ask the taxidermist if he’d seen anything like it. Mystery or no mystery, it was too late to make the drive tonight.
A shave and a shower left Cole feeling clean but not relaxed. The fact that every beat of the warm water on his skin had drummed up the image of Jena Sinclair’s shiny dark-red hair spilling from beneath her baseball cap? That hadn’t helped. Nor the scrape of the razor across his jaw that made him think of her long, elegant neck, the peaches-and-cream skin beneath those glass scars, the way she’d blushed when he’d blundered in like a bull gator himself and asked what had happened to her.
For the first time in five years, Cole felt the stirring of an erection, or at least one that biology didn’t push on him upon waking each morning. No, this one was all about her. Of all the women to capture his interest, it would be a fucking law enforcement officer. Yeah, she was a wildlife agent, but Cole knew about the Louisiana Wildlife and Fisheries enforcement division. Those officers went through tough training; the harsh conditions they worked in demanded it.
So Jena Sinclair was smart and strong. She knew how to shoot. She knew how to survive. And damn it, she wore a badge.
She was also beautiful, and she was damaged inside as well as out. He recognized the signs. She was in pain, and it wasn’t just physical.
He’d never been so happy with his decision to not get another phone. The one from his old life lay at the bottom of the Mississippi River at Vicksburg, or at least it had been headed that way the last time he’d seen it. He’d tossed it over the rail at the rest stop when he left his home state behind. People kept looking for him, wanting to talk to him, and he didn’t want to be found. He sure as hell didn’t want to talk.
Now, thanks to that impulsive iPhone toss, he couldn’t do anything stupid and equally impulsive like call Jena Sinclair. Plus, what would he say to her? He could chat about the man’s arm he’d found in the stomach of a dead gator, which he’d decided to bury. He could tell her about fin
ding a flashing orange light in the dead gator’s foot when he was getting it ready to sell.
No, Cole and Jena Sinclair had nothing to discuss.
He pulled on a clean pair of jeans and a black sweater that was snugger than it had been last March—he kept adding muscle from all the manual labor it took to run this place. Then he settled onto his rustic but oh-so-comfortable sofa to read the news.
The tablet computer was one of the few indulgences he’d allowed himself, purchased at a discount electronics store in Houma. He might have cut himself off from the world, but he still needed to know what was going on in it and whether any of those goings-on potentially involved him. Or at least that’s what he told himself.
If he were to be honest, he’d have to admit it provided him with some link, however tenuous, to the human race. It also could have exacerbated that loneliness he hadn’t acknowledged until today. Or maybe that was just his response to Agent Sinclair.
Cole opened the bookmarked Houma Today newspaper. Politicians were doing nothing on Capitol Hill—no surprise there. The feds were making overtures that could further damage the state’s fishing industry. No surprise there either.
The third headline stopped him cold: Black Diamond Epidemic Rises, Results in Teen Suicide. A story about a synthetic drug that officials described as reaching epic proportions in the parish was accompanied by a photo of a pile of powder. It looked like black sand—or coarse black pepper.
It looked a lot like what had been in the stomach of his gator. The gator with a blinking device embedded in its foot.
Cole slammed the tablet case shut and padded into the kitchen, his brain on overdrive as he poured himself a glass of the wine he’d made from last season’s haul of wild blackberries. Why hadn’t he looked more closely at that powder? He’d been so intent on finding the treble hook to see if the meat was edible that he could have overlooked something much more lethal.
He sliced some chunks of dried gator sausage left from last season and set them on a plate with a hunk of crusty bread and a few cold new potatoes spicy with crab boil. He’d become a decent, if rustic, cook out of necessity. The black earth in the small garden out back wasn’t conducive to the cultivation of anything that didn’t enjoy growing in mud, which limited him to mostly what he could raise in pots or other containers. It fed critters that wandered in out of the water as much as it fed him.
He did well enough, though, and at least the food wasn’t filled with chemicals and shit.
That thought brought him full circle, back to the bag of black powder and the orange blinking light. Chewing mindlessly, he reached for the salt and the movement caused a white card to flutter to the table—something he’d stashed between his hand-carved salt and pepper shakers.
Jena Sinclair’s business card.
CHAPTER 12
Jena had changed her ringtone to a wolf howl when she’d gotten to New Orleans after the shooting. It had a dual purpose: to annoy her parents and remind them—and herself—that she was a wildlife agent. Even a couple of bullets wouldn’t turn her into an uptown socialite in the making. She hadn’t changed the ringtone back to something more professional, so when the howls erupted from her uniform pants pocket halfway to Thibodaux, Jena just gave Mac a deadpan look and said, “Not. One. Word.”
She pulled out the phone and frowned at the screen. “Ray Naquin. Wonder what he wants.”
“He wants to get in your pants, that’s what. The guy’s a lounge lizard. Stay away from him.”
Right. This coming from the lips of the LDWF’s own unofficial lounge lizard himself.
She touched the red “Answer” button. “Sinclair.”
She’d forgotten how to answer a telephone with anything other than her last name—another reason she was unfit for a different occupation. Assuming the call concerned a gator, she put the phone on speaker.
“What’s up, Ray? You got a gator we need to know about?”
“I’m truly hurt. I’m calling about that dinner date your partner promised me. Well, he at least said you’d be glad to hear from me if I called.”
Jena shot a beady glare in Mac’s direction. He shrugged and gave her innocence-filled brown eyes. “Oh he did, did he?”
“He did. How about tonight? I know it’s short notice, but we can go up to A-Bear’s in Houma, have a nice meal, and see what happens after that.”
A choking sound reached her from Mac’s direction, followed by a cough wrapped around two words that she’d never been able to resist: “Dare you.”
Damn it. How many times had she gotten in trouble because she couldn’t resist a dare? This wasn’t going to be one of them.
“Afraid I can’t tonight. I already have plans.” Thank God she’d called Ceelie Savoie last night and invited her to dinner tonight. A-Bear’s sounded like a good idea, though. “Maybe another time.”
“You bet, sweetheart.” Ray didn’t sound too disappointed.
Sweetheart, her ass. Jena would rather have her teeth pulled than go out with Ray Naquin, even if she were ready to date again, which she wasn’t. Thanks to her scars, she might never be ready. She’d always ignored Ray’s flirtations, figuring he was all talk. He was handsome in a rugged, he-bear kind of way, but his shtick sounded more like a used-car salesman than a rugged gator hunter.
“You really got plans tonight, or is our gator guy not your type?” Mac grinned.
“Both. I’m meeting Ceelie Savoie for dinner, but this”—she pulled off her baseball cap and whapped Mac on the shoulder—“is for telling him to call me.”
“Hey, I thought you might need to get out.” Mac laughed. “Besides, I was hoping he’d call you a ‘long, tall, sweet thang’ to your face, which is how he referred to you in our conversation.”
God help her. “Well, in the future, leave me out of your conversations, eh?”
The eh got a chuckle out of him, and they continued toward Thibodaux in silence.
She was looking forward to meeting Ceelie for dinner instead of eating frozen pad thai at the White Rhino and feeling sorry for herself, plus she had no doubt Ceelie would go for A-Bear’s. The place had great food.
She and Ceelie had agreed to meet at a restaurant at eight since Jena was on shift until six and Gentry went on duty at the same time. She’d call and suggest A-Bear’s.
Enough about dinner and dates. “We still need to talk to Don Gateau and maybe Amelia Patout—even if Ray’s taking his gators to Gateau’s, other nuisance hunters might still be going to Patout’s. Want to do that tomorrow?” Jena didn’t want another day on the water if she could avoid it, or at least her sore body didn’t. Cole Ryan had been right; she was achy and then some. Not that bouncing around in a pickup on these roads was a big improvement over bouncing around in a patrol boat. At least it jostled different muscles.
What would it be like to have dinner with Cole Ryan? He was the anti–Ray Naquin, closed off and taciturn, but fascinating. Handsome. Really handsome. She’d gone to sleep thinking about him last night, trying to solve the puzzle he presented. He was too tightly wound to be a back-to-the-earth hippie type, too sharp and observant to be a Hard Case. And, yeah, sexy.
Ray Naquin oozed oil; Cole Ryan oozed testosterone.
Back off, Sinclair. The man’s eccentric and he’s hiding something, and so are you. She wasn’t saying she’d never again get naked with a man, but facts were facts, and she was disfigured. Even oily Ray wouldn’t want any part of those puckered scars. At least she had makeup that would camouflage most of the damage on her face.
Eventually, if she could dig up the cash, she’d have plastic surgery, even if it was pure vanity. Her parents would pay for it in a second if she asked; her mom had already offered. Jena didn’t want to encourage them to show love through money, though. For now, she’d have a nice, quiet dinner with a good friend. It would mark another tentative step back into the world of the living.
Mac had been singing over the sound of the LDWF and sheriff’s office radios—some indie/folk/co
ffeehouse stuff she thought all sounded alike. She’d grown up in the city of Dr. John and the Neville Brothers, of Wynton Marsalis and Louis Armstrong and Nathan and the Zydeco Cha-Chas. She didn’t do New England coffeehouse. Finally, he stopped singing and looked at her. “You got the printout?”
She dug in her bag and pulled out a list reflecting the makeup of Black Diamond. Different suppliers might tweak the recipe, but the active ingredients remained the same. Agent O’Malley had promised to have her badge if she didn’t call him the second they got the toxicology report, and he’d have her badge again if the tox lab didn’t get the final written report to him in seventy-two hours, like she had any control over what happened in Baton Rouge.
Warren had been standing next to her when those ultimatums were issued, and the lieutenant had clearly not liked one of his agents being threatened on his own turf by the same DEA guy who’d treated every one of them like half-witted yahoos, including Warren himself and the sheriff.
But Warren had kept his mouth shut, so Jena followed suit.
“I heard Paul Billiot say it acts like heroin in some folks, crystal meth in others, and a few hit the jackpot and go on a hallucinogenic trip swinging from superhigh to suicidal.” Mac was talking and looking straight ahead, so he missed the tears that sprang into Jena’s eyes. She kept her gaze on the passing scenery and blinked them away, swallowing down the image of Jackson locked up in a psychiatric wing. Trying not to think that he might have considered suicide because of what she’d done to herself.
Jackson had shown a devious side, though, so chances also were good he was just using the threat to push their parents’ buttons, and he’d gotten locked up for it. The only bright light in the whole mess was that he might have a real shot at moving past his Black Diamond adventure if the doctors managed to keep Grace and Jackson Sinclair Sr. away from their son long enough.
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