The Evidence Room: A Mystery (14 page)

On the desk, his cell phone began to shriek.

“Hello?”

“Five-car accident with car fire on the causeway,” Ruby shouted in his ear. “Just passing by on my way into work. Two flamb
é
ed on their way to you once they cut them out of the car. You want a chocolate donut or coconut?”

It was a cavalier way to talk about death, but it was the way Ruby handled her job. “Chocolate,” James said.

“Why are you there so early?”

“Oh, you know. Just reading through a few things.” Ruby had a finely tuned bullshit radar, and James winced as he said it.

“Atchison case, huh. Well, don’t wear yourself out. It’s gonna be a long day.”

James ended the call and glanced at Raylene, backlit, staring at everything and nothing. Violet finger marks ringed the snowy expanse of her throat. Wade had strangled her. It was a brutal way to die, like drowning on dry land. Brutal and personal. Raylene was young and strong, a person with a lot to live for—a mother. She wouldn’t have gone down without a fight.

He opened the report and, within a few pages, felt the anger begin to buzz in his ribs like a trapped wasp. It was beyond incomplete—it was ass-backwards. According to the paperwork, the autopsy had taken only two hours, an absurdly short amount of time. James frowned at the loopy, ostentatious signature at the bottom of the final page. It confirmed what he already knew: Gentry was an idiot. James conjured up an image of Gentry in his mind: a tall, sneering man with a caved-in pompadour who thrived on a steady diet of attention.

James pushed the image to the back of his mind and focused again on the report. He had always prided himself on being methodical; he would not sign a report until everything had been double-checked. He never would have signed off on this one. He paged through the police case file, attached to the back of the report.

Wade Atchison had earned his spot as the prime suspect in Raylene’s death. The man’s criminal history stretched back all the way to his early teens. By his early twenties, he’d racked up charges on every misdemeanor out there. Petty theft; vandalism; destruction of property; trespassing. The beginnings of a life as a career criminal. Nothing violent.

And then Raylene had changed all that. The domestic disturbance reports were almost two inches thick. Time and time again, police were called out to the Atchison address. Every time, Raylene refused to have Wade arrested. And then the calls abruptly stopped, two months before the murder. It was a pattern James had seen in files before, a calm before some horrifying conclusion.

James flipped the pages to reveal the man himself in a series of booking photos. Wade Atchison was the personification of the bad-boy stereotype. Tall, lean, and good-looking, he smirked at the camera in every picture, his gaze challenging and taunting James, daring him. He held the placard with his booking numbers on it at a jaunty angle, the weight of it in his left hand.

A detail. A small one, but those were always the most important, weren’t they? He tore back through the other photos, each time looking at the right hand. In every picture he held it at an awkward angle, as though hiding an injury.

A familiar looking injury.

James was willing to bet that Wade Atchison was a shrimper, and the report confirmed this suspicion. Now there was only one more question to ask.

James scrambled to his feet and grabbed his cell. Shrimpers were up early.

“Mornin’, Doc,” Ernest Authement said.

“Ernest, I was wondering if you could help me out with something. You remember Wade Atchison working on your crew all those years ago?”

“For true,” Ernest said. “Can’t forget that son of a bitch.”

“Do you remember anything about him getting hurt?”

“Sure do. His hand got tied up in the winch, as I recall. Lost a couple of fingers. Couldn’t work too good after that.” It was a common injury among shrimpers; it had happened to James’s father. The winch mechanism would draw in your arm, crushing your fingers, rendering your arm half as strong as it used to be. After his accident, James’s dad could barely lift a fork.

“Thanks, Ernest,” James said. With a trembling hand, he held Raylene’s autopsy photo aloft and counted the half-moon finger marks on her neck.

A perfect ten.

Wade Atchison had been a thief, a wife beater, a no-good son of a bitch.

But he wasn’t a murderer.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Sooner or later, all criminal investigations in Cooper’s Bayou led to the Crumplers.

Josh and Samba stood on the scorched riverbank and stared up at the
Sweet Camellia,
a paddle wheeler turned casino riverboat and probably the only place in town creepier than the evidence room. For as long as he could remember, the Crumplers had been running the place. It was listed as Wade Atchison’s last known place of employment.

It was almost unimaginable that the vessel was once seaworthy. With her white layers of lattice railings and a chipped gold smokestack on top, she looked like an enormous melting ice cream cake. She leaned away from the dock, as if one day she might break free of her moorings and collapse, exhausted, into the syrupy brown river.

“At the nickel slots,” Samba explained, “they bring you free drinks just for sitting there. Of course, I always tip ’em. I used to be a waiter, you know. Thankless job.”

“You waited tables in this place?”

“A waiter, a crusader for peace, a musician. It was the sixties, Josh. You had to be there.”

Josh grinned and followed him up the splintered wooden gangplank.

“Were the Crumplers running it back then?”

“Oh, for true. There was all kinds of stuff going on behind the scenes, but I just kept my head down and focused on the bourbon. Jeremiah Crumpler was in charge back then, but he passed the torch to Burdette after that.”

In a flash of memory, Josh saw Burdette Crumpler and his own father hauling out of the front yard of their summer place in Cooper’s Bayou in a sun-battered pickup, Josh’s mother yelling in their wake. They were drinking buddies, and he wasn’t sure where the association ended after that.

The girl at the front desk wore a skin-tight tank top that read
ASK ME ABOUT THE PLAYERS CLUB.
Her glittering eyeshadow had been applied with such fervor that stray sparkles illuminated her cheeks and strands of the hair around her face. There was no way she was eighteen yet. He’d call it in, let Rush know.

After they found out what they needed.

“Good morning, miss,” Josh began. “We need to speak with Burdette Crumpler, please.”

“He’s a busy man.” She turned from them and began to dump change into plastic buckets with the Sweet Camellia logo on the outside.

“Well, I’m sure he’ll make time for us. We’re old friends.”

“Is that right,” she drawled. “Didn’t know Burdy had any friends.”

Josh freed a twenty from his back pocket. “We’d be much obliged, ma’am.”

She took it from him, no change in her bored expression. “He stays for the beginning of the show, but after that, you’ll find him on deck out back.”

Samba leaned in. “Show?”

“Yeah, some psychic medium. Main ballroom, that way.”

“Thank you, ma’am.”

She shrugged and looked past them to the next customer.

Josh followed Samba up the grand staircase to the ballroom, the carpet, thick with ground-out cigarette butts, crunching underfoot. Signs around them advertised Dewitt Vick, psychic medium. In the pictures, a man with slicked-back hair in a shiny gray suit leaned against a tombstone.
YOUR LOVED ONES ARE STILL HERE
—
the ad promised—
AND THEY HAVE A MESSAGE FOR YOU
! Josh’s mother had gone to one of these people after Jesse’s death, a woman with hair-sprayed curls who sat at their kitchen table and told her that Jesse was at peace, that he was watching them. Doc Mason’s plastic bag would be at the state lab by now, some technician putting it into a machine that would spin what they had taken from Josh’s cheek into a thousand pieces.

“We missed the early show,” Samba called back to him, a note of disappointment in his voice.

“Please don’t tell me you believe in this bullshit.”

“Do I think there’s things we can’t understand? Absolutely. Do I think that Dewitt Vick has the key to those things? Absolutely not,” Samba said.

They reached the top of the stairs. The ballroom was almost full; they’d lined up cheap folding chairs on every available inch of space, for maximum profit. Josh tried to conjure up an image of Burdette in his head; a blurry portrait of someone with red hair and missing teeth.

“Burdy, we gonna close the doors soon,” someone shouted.

“Yep,” came the reply, and Burdette Crumpler came into view, propelling a wheelchair up the aisle with two muscled arms sleeved in tattoos. He began a slow glide behind the back row of the audience and disappeared out an exit at the back.

“Let’s go around,” Josh said.

Out on the deck, Burdy smoked with his back to them. His long, red hair was pulled into a ponytail, and stray wisps of it littered his shoulders like tumbleweed.

“Burdette?”

He wheeled around to face them. “Hey, I know you.”

Samba grinned. “Yeah, I used to work here for your pop, a few years back.”

“No, not you.” Burdette pointed at Josh. “You’re Doyle’s kid, right? I loved that guy. He took me fishing, got me drunk the first time. How the hell is he doing?”

So Josh’s dad hadn’t just been drinking and committing crimes; he’d been playing father of the year to someone else’s kid. Unbelievable. “He’s up at Craw Lake.”

“No shit,” Burdette said, but he didn’t look surprised. “Didn’t know he was still locked up. You tell him to come see me when he gets out. I’ll get him a job, get him set up.”

“That’s nice of you. So you’re running things around here now?”

“Sure am,” Burdette said. “It ain’t hard.” He gestured towards the ballroom. “This shit is a real moneymaker, I’ll tell you that. I just get info from the crowd, listen in on conversations so Dewitt can do his thing.”

Samba piped in. “So it’s a trick?”

“Well, sure.”

“Dewitt’s not a soothsayer?”

“A what? He’s an ex-con from Birmingham.” He glared at Josh. “So you’re the cop, right? You here about Dewitt? Because it ain’t illegal, you know. It’s like a magic trick. Entertainment.”

“We’re not worried about that, Burdy,” Josh said. “Just looking into an old case and hoping you could help us out.”

“What case?”

“The disappearance of Wade Atchison.”

Burdy laughed. “Disappearance, huh? They still call you disappeared when nobody’s looking for you? Who wants to find that asshole?”

“So you worked with him, right?”

“My daddy, Lord rest him, he did. Wade worked the shrimp boats, then he messed up his hand and couldn’t work no more. My daddy gave him a job.”

“Working the casino?”

“Hell, no,” Burdy said. “Wade worked in one of my daddy’s other businesses, out in the swamp. Something that was a better fit for Wade’s, um, talents.”

“What business was that?”

“Hunting gators.”

“That’s illegal,” Samba said.

Burdy shrugged. “Like I said, it was a better fit.”

Wade’s father-in-law had been the alligator nuisance man. Hunter Broussard had been a well-liked member of the community, by all accounts a stand-up guy. Had Wade involved him in something shady?

“So you haven’t heard anything about Wade since then?”

Burdy shook his head. “Nope. Don’t know if he’s alive or dead, but I’m hoping for dead.”

“Why is that?’

“Everybody around here knows he done it.” The tone of his voice changed, and he looked away from them, out at the swamp. “Raylene, she was a nice girl. Always sweet to everybody. She didn’t deserve what happened to her. That son of a bitch Wade, he used to beat the hell out of her all the time, for no reason.”

“So you think he’s capable of murder?”

“How do you think I got in this chair?” Burdy slapped the armrests of the wheelchair. “After all my family done for him, he pushed me out of the truck while we were riding down the highway towards Hambone. He done it just for fun.”

He flicked the ashes from the cigarette and watched their descent to the river below. “I think he’s capable of anything.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

“Are you sure you want to do this?”

Aurora nodded and wiped the veil of sweat from her cheeks, where a fresh coat immediately replaced it. She’d been in Cooper’s Bayou a week, and she already knew she was never going to get used to the humidity.

“I’m fine.”

“Everything okay at the house?”

He’d been checking on the place in the evenings, a gesture that she appreciated more than she let on.
I’m sure it was nothing
, she kept telling Josh, as though her determined tone of voice might make her believe it. Something else was going on; she knew it, and so did he.

“Sure, it’s great.” After the visit to Charlsie, she’d taken the gris-gris bags that she’d stuffed away in the closet and put them back where Papa had left them, but he didn’t need to know that. God help her, she was becoming a superstitious Southerner. “Tell me about what happened with the Crumplers.” She’d wanted to go along that morning, but the Realtor had accosted her at the mini-mart to discuss when she might be putting the house on the market. “Anything there?”

Josh turned to face her. “The Crumplers have been raising hell around here for years. Your daddy was involved in some of their side businesses.”

“Drugs?”

Josh pointed to the swamp. “Alligator hunting. Poaching is the more accurate term. It’s been illegal for years, but there’s money in it.”

“And Papa was the alligator man.” She thought about Charlsie and the bad men she had mentioned. “I think Papa was afraid of the guys who were poaching—the Crumplers.”

“Everyone in Cooper County’s been afraid of them at one time or another,” Josh said, “and with good reason. They’ve been raising hell around here for decades.”

“And you think they had something to do with my mom’s murder?” There it was again in Aurora’s chest, a thread of grief, a link to her mother that was being strengthened with every day she spent in Cooper’s Bayou.