The Evidence Room: A Mystery (18 page)

James was a firm believer in answers. It was better to know. This was what Aurora wanted, he reminded himself. Still, this case had robbed him of his greatest attribute, his ability to be neutral. He did not know how to prepare for the information held in the dark and light strips on the paper before him, and even less how to relay this information to Aurora. For the thousandth time since he’d opened the file, he’d gotten the sense that this was just the beginning, that there was much more to uncover. Aurora would have to learn the truth of what happened, no matter how dark. He wished for peace for her, for stillness, not for the pain these revelations would bring.

James had worked in the medical examiner’s office long enough to know there was no such thing as closure, no joy in knowing the brutal details of a loved one’s last moments. There was a reason people closed caskets, sanitized the story for their relatives and friends and the obituaries. James wished that he were not alone in the autopsy suite at this moment, the only noise the hush of the fan overhead.

James trusted Malachi; he was the independent lab’s best tech, someone who knew what he was doing, and someone without the horrifying self-righteousness that characterized the younger generation. Malachi did not make mistakes.

Database hit
, Malachi had scrawled at the bottom of the profile, and then, even more ominous,
Call me
.

The database he was referring to was CODIS, James guessed. A link had been made, Raylene’s case matched to a criminal, known or unknown, in the nationwide catalogue. There were a million possibilities, but the meaning of a CODIS hit was clear; Raylene Atchison’s murder had not been the murderer’s only known crime.

Malachi answered on the first ring.

“Doc Mason. How are you?”

“Doing fine, thank you.” James’s voice was barely recognizable to himself—too loud, too eager. “About those results on the Atchison case.”

“Sure, sure. We got a hit, as I mentioned. I can send you the link.”

James tapped his computer mouse, and the screen shuddered to life.

“Thanks.” James was no good with computers; he usually left these things to Ruby. “Sorry, it’s just been a while since I’ve been on CODIS. Is it pretty easy to navigate, or—”

“It’s not CODIS.”

Malachi’s voice filled the phone just as James clicked on the link and the screen was enveloped in black.

“NamUs,” James said. It was the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System.

A dead man.

It should have been comforting, but instead he felt that familiar twinge, the sense of something cracking wide open inside him. He hung up the phone with a numb thank-you and turned his attention to the screen.

He was familiar with NamUs and its galleries of death photographs and reconstructed faces. It was one of the things that had astonished him in his first year as a medical examiner, the number of people who could remain nameless for so long, discovered along highways, in ditches, stuffed in discarded refrigerators or wrapped in trash bags. Some of them had died accidentally. James remembered a case last year where he’d entered the information of a transient, the Bird Lady, who had been walking alongside the interstate when she was hit by a car. Everyone in Cooper’s Bayou knew her by sight, but in the end, she had belonged to nobody, a woman without an identity. Unclaimed.

Others were crime victims, lives reduced to a bunch of numbers and a picture of a filthy sweatshirt or a faded shapeless back-alley tattoo. It was amazing, the things they found in the unidentified victims’ pockets; little bits of fallout from someone’s life. Bus vouchers, fifteen dollars in Canadian money, a bracelet in the shape of a dolphin, a signet ring with “Valerie Forever” inscribed on the inside. They were the kind of personal details that you’d think would lead to immediate identification, but somehow weren’t quite enough.

He clicked through the profile. The unidentified decedent had been found in Sweetwater Bayou, August 1989, a month after the murders, but the information had not been entered into the database until last year. Gotta love bureaucracy, James thought, moving at the speed of molasses. There was no picture of the victim, just a blurry snapshot of a torn navy work shirt. The body condition was listed as “not recognizable/putrefaction.” That was the swamp for you, unforgiving and cruel. His eyes were missing. He had two dollars in his pocket and a voucher for a soup kitchen, along with a tiny sachet initially thought to be drugs, but later discovered to be a mixture of herbs. Gris-gris, James almost said out loud. The guy had all the signs of a vagrant. Wearing all the clothes he owned, no ID, no missing persons report.

He clicked through to the next page. The man had died from blunt-force trauma to the head.

James sank to a seated position, absorbing this new information. Was it possible that this man was the killer? The DNA under Raylene’s fingernails meant that they had been in close contact, but what was Raylene Atchison doing with an unidentified drifter who’d ended up dead himself a month later? James had been around long enough to know that there was no such thing as a random crime—not in Cooper’s Bayou, anyway. Was the drifter someone Wade had hired to do the job?

He thought about the Hudson case, the man who sat in jail for murdering Josh’s brother, an innocent child, who’d never even had the decency to tell them where the body was. Evil was out there, even in an ordinary town like Cooper’s Bayou.

Outside someone rang the buzzer, the sound sending a shock through James’s veins, reverberating in the cave of his chest. He pressed the intercom button.

“Yes, may I help you?”

“Sorry to bother you, Doc—it’s me, Aurora.”

“Not a bother at all. Come on back.” With a supreme effort, James stood and steadied himself on the edge of the table. So much of him wanted to tell her that everything was all right, that he could close her case.

She appeared in the doorway, the resemblance to Raylene so striking in the half-light that it knocked him off balance, made him question again what he was about to ask, but then his resolve returned and he gestured towards one of the work stools.

“I’m glad you’re here, Aurora,” he said, and it was true. “I need your help.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

“This guy in the database could be the one who killed my mother, but we have no idea who he is?”

Aurora sprawled next to Josh on the bank of the bayou and kicked off her shoes, letting the full meaning of what Doc had said wash over her. She’d called Josh from the morgue, and he’d picked her up without a question and taken her for something to eat at Possum Pete’s. The conversation had been easy between them, music and sports and the difference between New York and Florida, neither of them paying attention to the new knowledge that hung heavy between them. And then Aurora had requested that he bring her here, to the exact spot where her mother had breathed her last, a lush shore blanketed in spotted beebalm.

“That’s what we need to figure out,” Josh agreed, tilting his head back to the sky. “The important thing is, we’ve got eyes on the Crumplers. My partner Boone’s been tracking them. They make a move towards you, or try to contact your dad, we’re all over it.”

“I just can’t believe he’s alive. I mean, he’s still out there.” The shock of it was giving way to terror. Her grandparents had been wrong. Wade Atchison wasn’t in a ditch somewhere. He was alive.

And he knew where she was.

“We’re going to get him,” Josh said.

She wanted to believe him, but Wade had eluded authorities for twenty years; he knew what he was doing.

“So maybe he hired this guy in the grave to help him kill my mother. Or he did it himself. Either way, he’s a criminal.” She had always known it, but had also wondered which part of Wade Atchison was bound up in her bones, deep in the recesses of her heart? She imagined some dark spot, some latent evil waiting to spring to life.

“Welcome to the club,” Josh said.

“Your dad too?” It was the first time he had spoken about his past. She was guessing the bourbon at dinner had loosened something inside him.

“Doyle Hudson,” Josh announced, with a grand gesture of his arms. “Petty theft, fraud, forgery, embezzlement. You name it, he’s done it. Biggest con in three counties and proud of it.” He tossed a pebble at the bayou, where it skipped twice before disappearing beneath the surface. “He was paroled a couple days ago, then got picked up again within the week.”

“Did he leave your mom?”

“Not before he took everything she had. She still didn’t turn him in, though, even after all of that. In the end, it was my sister who did that.”

“Where is she now?”

Josh stretched his bare feet down the bank, and Aurora watched tendrils of earth-colored water fill in the spaces between his toes.

“She’s missing, I guess. I don’t know what else to call it.”

“What do you mean?”

He tilted his head back towards the sky. “She left by choice. When I was a kid, my brother was abducted. When something like that happens, it fucks up your family, makes it something unrecognizable. You know what I mean?”

“Yes,” she said, and she did.

He turned to her, as if hearing her voice for the first time. “I was there,” he said. “When Jesse was taken. Liana was there too. After a while, she couldn’t deal with it anymore, watching my mom and dad destroy each other. She took off when she was eighteen. Legally, she was an adult, so nobody was looking for her.”

“Except you.”

“Except me,” he agreed.

They lapsed back into silence.

On the far bank, tiki torches winked at them, and Aurora could hear the faint tinkle of country music. Someone was celebrating at the Bayou Breeze; a wedding, or a birthday party. Aurora watched the guests, clutching at each other, dancing barefoot in the grass, making lazy circles that edged closer and closer to the opposite shoreline. She strained to hear the words to the song.

“Patsy Cline,” Josh said. “She was my mother’s favorite.”

“Mine too,” Aurora echoed. It was one of the few facts about Raylene that she knew, and so she kept it stored up inside like a treasure. There was a longing in Patsy’s voice, something raw and painful that cut right through to your soul.

“
You don’t know the heartache, or the laughter you’ll forego, until you’ve lost that one love, then you’ll know,
” Josh sang along, unabashedly, the way you’d sing alone in your car.

Behind him, the hillside was choked with kudzu, curling around the skeleton of an abandoned pickup truck. Beyond that, a grove of cypress trees twisted toward the violet sky. These were the last things her mother had seen before she’d died here.
It was quick,
Doc Mason had told her, but Aurora knew better. It took a long time to strangle someone, and strength too, strength that Wade Atchison didn’t have. Had he stood there and watched as the stranger had helped?

Across the water, a tiny light snapped on.

“What’s that?”

“The mini-mart,” Josh replied.

“That’s where they found me.”

“Yes, it is.” He sounded spent, his voice hushed.

“Do they know anything? The people who work there, I mean. Someone found me there, right?”

“They left you on the steps. The place was closed, and when one of the girls came in for her shift, she found you.”

Aurora leaned back, digging her elbows into the soft earth. “So my father—or the killer—dropped me off there to be rescued.”

Josh rolled over to face her. “That’s why everyone thought it was your father. Nobody else would’ve—” He trailed off.

“Nobody else would have left a witness,” she finished. It was chilling, but it was true.

“Do we have any idea who this other person could be?”

Josh nodded. “Miss Bobbie in town, she said someone was bothering your mother. A man. I think he might be the key to this whole thing.”

“So my dad was probably involved, and he’s still out there, watching me.” She shivered. “What if he knows, Josh? He knows we’re looking into this—what if he finds out we’re getting close to the truth?”

He put a warm hand over her own. “We’re gonna find him, Aurora. I promise you. Nobody’s going to hurt you.”

His voice had a quiet power in the dark. Her back ached, and she wanted to lean into the touch, to let this man comfort her. But he had done so much for her already; she couldn’t ask more of him.

“Are we ever going to know what happened that night?”

As if in answer to this question, there was a movement in the undergrowth behind them. Aurora hoped it was another gator, but something told her it wasn’t. Josh was on his feet instantly, grasping the gun in his waistband, inching towards the noise. He gestured to her to stay put, and she stood and followed him.

Silence.

A single sliver of light pierced the mossy blackness a distance in front of them. Aurora watched as the light flickered and then became brighter, illuminating a row of stones, candles, and a dark figure crouched between two of them.

A graveyard?

Josh raised the gun.

“Cooper’s Bayou Police! Make yourself known!”

The figure jerked upright and Josh saw for the first time that it was a woman in a hooded blue sweatshirt, backlit by a lantern, wielding a carved wooden cross like a vengeful angel.

An angel with a familiar face.

“You fucking make
yourself
known! This is holy ground,” Ruby howled, hurtling towards them, arms extended like a furious bird of prey. She shined the light directly in their faces and stopped a few feet short of them, brandishing the cross like a dagger. “Holy shit, is that you, Josh?”

“Ruby? Jesus, I’m sorry,” Josh apologized. “Aurora and I were just out here, and—”

“Didn’t mean to scare ya,” she said, extending a hand to Aurora. “Ruby Contreras.” Behind her, Josh swept his flashlight across the clearing at the neat rows of headstones, each one with its own circle of wildflowers, stubs of candles, and piles of what looked like bird bones and torn pieces of paper.

“Is this a graveyard?” Aurora asked.

Ruby leaned against one of the stones. “Yes. This is a voodoo cemetery, one of the last in Cooper County.”