by Tami Hoag
Goose danced beneath me, nervous, skittish, ready to bolt. He ducked his big head and tried to tug the reins out of my hands. I could feel his muscles quivering beneath me, and it dawned on me that this was not excitement he was feeling. This was fear.
He snorted and shook his head violently. I scanned the banks of the canal, the edge of the woods on either side. Wild boar roamed through this scrub. Wild dogs—pit bulls set loose by rednecks who had beat them into meanness, then didn’t want them around. People had reported sighting the occasional panther in the area. Rumors always abounded that something or another had escaped from Lion Country Safari. Alligators hunted in the canals.
My body tensed before I could even process what caught my eye.
A human arm reached up out of the black water of the canal, as if stretching out for help that was far too late in coming. Something—a bobcat perhaps, or a very ambitious fox—had tried to pull the arm out of the water, but not for any benevolent reason. The hand and wrist had been mangled, the flesh torn, some bone exposed. Black flies hovered and crawled over the limb like a living lacy glove.
There were no obvious tire tracks leading over the bank and into the water. That happened all the time—too much to drink, asleep at the wheel, no common sense. People plunged to their deaths in south Florida’s canals every day of the week, it seemed. But there was no sign of a car here.
I took a hard grip on the reins with one hand, pulled my cell phone from my belt with the other, and punched a number.
The phone on the other end of the line rang twice.
“Landry.” The voice was curt.
“You’re going to want to come out here,” I said.
“Why? So you can kick me in the teeth again?”
“I’ve found a body,” I said without emotion. “An arm, to be precise. Come, don’t come. Do what you want.”
I snapped the phone shut, ignored it when it rang, and turned my horse for home.
This was going to be one hell of a day.
A PAIR OF deputies in a white-and-green Palm Beach County cruiser rolled through the gate behind Landry. I had ridden back to the farm to eliminate the complication of a horse at a crime scene, but I hadn’t had time to shower or change clothes.
Even if I’d had time, I wouldn’t have gone to the trouble. I wanted to show James Landry I didn’t care what he thought of me. I wasn’t interested in impressing him. Or maybe I wanted to impress him with my indifference.
I stood beside my car with my arms crossed over my chest, one leg cocked to the side, the portrait of pissy impatience. Landry got out of his car and came toward me, but didn’t look at me. He surveyed his surroundings through a pair of black wraparounds. He had a profile that belonged on the face of a Roman coin. The sleeves of his shirt were neatly rolled halfway up his forearms, but he had yet to jerk his tie loose at his throat. The day was young.
As he finally drew breath to speak, I said, “Follow me,” got in my car and drove past him out the gate, leaving him standing there on the drive.
A short gallop on a fast horse, the location of my gruesome find was more difficult to find by car. It was easier to lead the way than try to give directions to a man who wouldn’t listen anyway. The road bent around, came to a T. I took a left and another left, passing a driveway with a busted-out motorcycle turned into a mailbox holder. Debris from the last hurricane—three months past—was still piled high along the road, waiting for a truck to come haul it away.
Dust billowed up behind my car even as I stopped the vehicle and got out. Landry got out of the county sedan he had pulled for the day, swatting at the dust in his face. He still refused to look at me.
“Why didn’t you stay with the body?” he snapped. “You were a cop. You know better.”
“Oh, screw you, Landry,” I shot back. “I’m a private citizen. I didn’t even have to call you.”
“Then why did you?”
“There’s your victim, Ace,” I said, pointing across the canal. “Or part of. Go knock yourself out.”
He looked across the brackish water to the branch the human limb had snagged on. The flies raised up like a handkerchief in the breeze as a snowy egret poked its long beak at the hand.
“Fucking nature,” Landry muttered. He picked up a stone and flung it at the bird. The egret squawked in outrage and walked away on yellow stilt legs.
“Detective Landry?” one of the deputies called. The two of them stood at the hood of the cruiser, waiting. “You want us to call CSI?”
“No,” he barked.
He walked away fifty yards down the bank where a culvert allowed a narrow land bridge to connect one side of the canal to another. I shouldn’t have, but I followed him. He pretended to ignore me.
The hand belonged to a woman. Up close, through the veil of flies, I could see the manicure on the broken nail of the pinky finger. Deep red polish. A night on the town had ended very badly.
Blond hair floated on the surface of the water. There was more of her down there.
Landry looked up and down the bank, scanning the ground for shoe prints or tire tracks or any sign of how the body had come to be in this place. I did the same.
“There.” I pointed to a partial print pressed into the soft dirt just at the very edge of the bank, maybe ten feet away from the victim.
Landry squatted down, scowled at it, then called to the deputies. “Bring me some markers!”
“You’re welcome,” I said.
Finally he looked at me. For the first time I noticed that his face was drawn, as if he hadn’t slept well. The set of his mouth was sour. “Is there a reason for you to be here?”
“It’s a free country,” I said. “More or less.”
“I don’t want you here.”
“It’s my vic.”
“You’re not on the job,” he said. “You quit that, too. Remember?”
His words hit me like a fist to the sternum. I actually took a step back at the verbal blow, not able to prevent myself from gasping.
“You are such an asshole,” I snapped back, more upset than I wanted to show. More upset than I wanted to be. “Why should I want to be hooked up with you? You don’t get your way and the first thing you do is fight dirty. You really know how to sell yourself, Landry. I can’t believe women aren’t beating down your door, you fucking prick.”
My eyes were burning, anger trembling through me like the vibrations of a plucked wire. I turned to go back to the body, thinking that the woman below the surface of the filthy water had undoubtedly been put there by some man she shouldn’t have trusted—as if there was any other kind.
The arm seemed to wave at me in acknowledgment, and I thought I was hallucinating. Then it waved again—violently—and I knew instantly what was happening. Before I could react, there was a terrific splashing and thrashing, and water came up at me in a sheet.
Landry shouted behind me, “Jesus Christ!”
One of the deputies called, “Gator!”
Landry hit me in the back and shoved me to the side. As I tumbled onto my hands and knees, a gun went off above me, the report like the crack of a whip in my ears.
I scrambled away from the bank and tried to regain my feet, the worn soles of my riding boots slipping out from under me on the damp grass.
Landry emptied his Glock 9mm into the churning water. One of the deputies ran along the bank on the other side, shouldering a shotgun, shouting, “I got him! I got him!”
The blast was nearly deafening.
“Son of a bitch!” Landry shouted.
As I watched, the perpetrator floated to the surface on its back, a bloody, ragged, gaping hole torn in its pale yellow belly. An alligator about five feet long, with part of a human torso still caught between its jaws.
“Shit,” Landry said. “There goes my scene.”
He swore and stomped around, looking for something to hit or kick.
I went to the edge of the bank and looked down.
Alligators are known for rolli
ng with their prey in the water, disorienting their thrashing victim, drowning them even as the gator bites through tissue and bone, rupturing veins and arteries. This one had jerked his intended meal free of the branches she had become entangled with. The gator may have even stashed the body there himself earlier—another common practice: stuffing its victim away for later, letting the body begin to decompose wedged under a tree trunk.
Nature is cruel. Almost as cruel as human beings.
I stared down into the muddy water, looking for the rest of the body to surface. When it did, I went numb from head to toe.
I mouthed the words “Oh, my God,” but I don’t think I said them out loud. I felt like I was floating out of my body. I sank back down to my knees, and my hands covered my mouth—to stifle a sound, to keep from vomiting—I didn’t know which.
The pale blue face that stared back at me should have been beautiful—full lips, high cheekbones. She should have had translucent blue eyes the color of a Siberian winter sky, but the small fish and other creatures that lived in the canal had begun to feed on them. More of Mother Nature’s handiwork: a death mask from a horror movie.
Over the years when I had been a street cop and a narcotics detective, I had seen many bodies. I had looked down into the lifeless faces of countless corpses. I had learned not to think of them as people. The essence of the person was gone. What remained was evidence of a crime. Something to be processed and cataloged.
I couldn’t do that as I stared at this face. I couldn’t detach, couldn’t shut down my mind as it flashed images of her alive. I could hear her voice—insolent, dismissive, Russian. I could see her walk across the stable yard—lithe, lazy, elegant, like a cheetah.
Her name was Irina Markova. I had worked side by side with her for more than a year.
“Elena…Elena…Elena…”
It registered somewhere in the back of my mind that someone was trying to speak to me, but it sounded as if the voice was coming from very far away.
A firm hand rested on my shoulder.
“Elena. Are you all right?”
Landry.
“No,” I said, moving away from his touch.
I fought to stand and prayed not to fall as I walked away. But my legs gave out within a few steps and I went down on my hands and knees. I felt like I couldn’t breathe; my stomach heaved and I vomited and choked.
Panic gripped me by the throat as much from my fear of my own emotions as it was from what I had seen, or from the fear of aspirating my own vomit and dying. I wanted to run away from my feelings. I wanted to bolt and run just as Goose had bolted and run away with me earlier, bringing me to this terrible place.
“Elena.”
Landry’s voice was in my ear. His arm came around my shoulders, offering strength and security. I didn’t want those things from him. I didn’t want anything from him. I didn’t want him seeing me this way—weak, vulnerable, out of control.
We had been lovers off and on for the last year. He had decided he wanted more. I had decided I wanted nothing. Less than ten hours previous I had pushed him away with both hands, too strong to need him—or so I claimed. I didn’t feel very strong now.
“Hey, take it easy,” he said quietly. “Just try to breathe slowly.”
I pushed at him, wriggled away from him, got to my feet again. I tried to say something—I don’t know what. The sounds coming from me weren’t words. I put my hands over my face, trying to hold myself together.
“It’s Irina,” I said, fighting to regulate my breathing.
“Irina? Irina from Sean’s?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, Jesus,” he murmured. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what to say.”
“Don’t say anything,” I whispered. “Please.”
“Elena, you should sit down.”
He told one of the deputies to call in a crime-scene unit, and ushered me not to my car, but to his. I sat down sideways in the passenger seat, bent over my knees, my hands cradling my head.
“You want something to drink?”
“Yeah. Vodka rocks with a twist.”
“I have water.”
He handed me a bottle. I rinsed my mouth out.
“Do you have a cigarette?” I asked, not because I was a smoker per se, but because I had been, and like a lot of cops I knew—Landry included—had never entirely abandoned the habit.
“Look in the glove compartment.”
It gave my trembling hands something to do, my mind something small to focus on. It forced me to breathe slowly or choke.
“When was the last time you saw her?”
I took a deep pull on the smoke and exhaled as if I was blowing out candles on a birthday cake, forcing every last bit of air from my lungs.
“Saturday. Late afternoon. She was anxious to go. I offered to feed the horses and take care of night check.”
Unlike myself, Irina had an active social life. Where it took place and with whom, I didn’t know, but I had often seen her leave her apartment above the stables dressed for trouble.
“Where was she going?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where might she go?”
I didn’t have the strength to shrug. “Maybe The Players or Galipette. Maybe clubbing. Clematis Street.”
“Do you know her friends?”
“No. I imagine they were mostly other grooms, other Russians.”
“Boyfriend?”
“If she had one, she didn’t bring him to the farm. She kept her business to herself.”
That was one thing I had always liked about her. Irina didn’t burden those around her with raunchy details of her sex life, or who she had seen, or who she had done.
“Has her mood been any different lately?”
I tried a weak laugh. “No. She’s been churlish and arrogant, like always.”
Not sought-after qualities in a groom, but I had never really minded her moods. God knew I made her look like an angel. She had opinions and wasn’t shy about voicing them. I respected that. And she was damn good at her job, even if she did sometimes act like she was in forced labor in a Siberian gulag.
“Do you want me to take you home?” Landry asked.
“No. I’m staying.”
“Elena—”
“I’m staying.” I put out the cigarette on the running board of the car and dropped the butt into the ashtray.
I figured he would try to stop me, but he stepped back as I got out of the car.
“Do you know anything about her family?”
“No. I doubt Sean does either. It would never occur to him to ask.”
“She wasn’t a member of the taxpaying club?”
I gave him a look.
Undocumented aliens made up a large part of the work force in the South Florida horse business. They migrated to Wellington every winter just like the owners and trainers of the six or eight thousand horses brought here to compete in some of the biggest, richest equestrian events in the world.
From January to April the town’s population triples with everything from billionaires to barely getting by. The main show grounds—Palm Beach Polo and Equestrian Club—was a multinational melting pot. Nigerians worked security, Haitians emptied the trash cans, Mexicans and Guatemalans mucked the stalls. Once a year the INS would make a sweep through the show grounds, scattering illegal aliens like rats being run out of a tenement.
“You know I’m going to call this in and people are going to come out here,” Landry said.
By people he meant detectives from the Sheriff’s Office—not my biggest fan club, despite the fact that I had been one of them. I had also gotten one of them killed in a drug raid three years prior. A bad decision—against orders, of course—a couple of twitchy meth dealers, a recipe for disaster.
I had not escaped unscathed physically or mentally, but I hadn’t died, either, and there were cops who would never forgive me for that.
“I found the body,” I said. “Like it or not.”
Not, I thought. I didn’t want to be there. I didn’t want to know the person who had become a corpse ravaged by an alligator. But somehow this trouble had managed to find me, and there wasn’t anything I could do about it.
Life’s a bitch, and then you die.
Some sooner than others.
BANTAM TITLES BY TAMI HOAG
The Alibi Man
Prior Bad Acts
Kill the Messenger
Dark Horse
Dust to Dust
Ashes to Ashes
A Thin Dark Line
Guilty as Sin
Night Sins
Dark Paradise
Cry Wolf
Still Waters
Mismatch
Lucky’s Lady
The Last White Knight
Straight from the Heart
Tempestuous/The Restless Heart
Taken by Storm
Heart of Dixie
MAN OF HER DREAMS
A Bantam Book
PUBLISHING HISTORY
Bantam Loveswept edition published June 1989
Bantam mass market edition/December 2008
Published by Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved
Copyright © 1989 by Tami Hoag
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Bantam Books and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
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www.bantamdell.com
eISBN: 978-0-553-90578-6
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