The Evidence Room: A Mystery (22 page)

“Just a bunch of articles about alligator laws, that kind of stuff.”

Josh pulled out one of the newspaper clippings, an article about the lifting of the ban on alligator hunting in 1989. Splayed across it was a picture of a man in overalls holding a gator by the nose.
Local fisherman Niney Crumpler admires his kill,
the caption read.

“That crooked nose,” Josh mumbled. “His nose.”

“What do you mean?”

“The man who hit me. He had to be related to Niney. Had to be a Crumpler. One of the younger ones.” He grabbed both her arms. “This is good, Aurora. This is really good. Do you know what this means?”

“We should go to the police?”

“No,” he said. “It means we’re on the right track.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

“Wish I had a dollar for every unmarked videotape I have in here,” Samba mused, tugging an ancient VCR-TV combo on a dusty cart into the center of the evidence room. “Family vacations, dance recitals, sex tapes. You name it, I’ve catalogued it.”

Somewhere in this warehouse, the surveillance tape from the day of Jesse’s murder was tucked away in a box. Josh had seen it once, watched images of the three of them at the men’s bathroom entrance. Josh and Jesse, hand in hand, walking in silent slow motion through the door while Liana stood just out of frame and watched them go, unaware of what was behind the door waiting for them.

“You ready for this?” Samba hesitated, one hand on the VCR. Josh snapped back to the present, but the question was directed at Aurora. She was the case that mattered right now.

“Roll it,” Aurora said in a firm voice that trailed off at the end. She had to be nervous. Josh sat next to her on the couch.

Samba pressed play and the screen turned a pearlescent blue, then dissolved into zigzag lines that formed a familiar image.

The Cooper’s Bayou Police Department. A time stamp flickered at the bottom of the screen: July 17, 1989. It was amazing how little it had changed. There was the interrogation room that doubled as a break room, an earlier incarnation of a cheap refrigerator nestled in the corner, a warped metal table pushed into the center of the room. A man with a seventies-style mustache and sideburns edged into the frame, adjusted something on the camera. Josh recognized him. Detective Floyd Rossi. He’d played third base on their softball team. Nice guy. He’d retired last year; Boone had thrown the farewell barbecue at his house. Rossi moved out of state, lived near his grandkids by some lake in Alabama.

The image shimmered and then another figure came into focus, sitting at the metal table, and Josh realized what it was they were watching.

A little girl.

Aurora.

“We don’t have to do this now,” Josh said, turning to face her. She sat straight upright, her expression betraying nothing.

She held a hand up to Josh. “No,” she said in a low voice. “I want to see it. We need to see it.”

The girl on the screen was bent low to the table, coloring a picture in furious strokes with a crayon. Rossi appeared uncomfortable, as though he didn’t know how to approach her. Josh couldn’t blame him. Kids were the worst to interview, not because they couldn’t sit still, but because they always told the truth, no matter how much it broke your heart.

“Hi, Aurora,” Rossi began. “Can I talk to you about what happened last night?”

The little girl gave no sign that she’d heard the question, but continued to draw the crayon across the page in careful lines.

“Aurora? Sweetheart? Can you draw what you remember, sweetheart?”

Aurora lifted her head and pushed the crayons aside. “I was on the boat with Mama and Daddy.”

Next to him, Aurora gasped at the sound of her own voice. Josh put a hand on her shoulder. “We can stop anytime you want.”

“No,” she said.

“Great,” Rossi was saying. “And what happened when you were on the boat with Mama and Daddy?”

“Daddy showed me the fishes.”

“That’s great, Aurora.”

“I can catch them too. He teached me how.”

“And then what happened after that?”

“Somebody hurt Mama.” The little voice trembled and then broke. “Somebody hurt Mama and then the lady took me to the steps.”

“Did you see who it was who hurt Mama?”

She nodded. “A monster.”

“What did the monster look like, sweetheart?”

Aurora did not answer.

“Sugar, I need you to think real hard for me. Can you remember what the monster looked like?”

“I want to go home,” the little girl murmured, pushing the crayons away.

“Just a little longer, sweetheart. Was the monster old or young? Tall or short? Black or white?”

“I want to go home,” the little girl repeated, her lower lip quivering. “I want Mama and Daddy.” She bit her lip. “I want Mama and Daddy now.” Her voice trembled, and she put her head in her hands and began to wail.

There was a loud noise offscreen, and a man in a canvas jacket burst into the frame, scooping up Aurora in his arms, Josh recognized him from all the pictures in the house on Spotted Beebalm Drive. It was a younger Hunter Broussard. He murmured something in the child’s ear and glared at Rossi.

“You’re done here,” he said.

“Hunter, please—she saw something. She can help us find out who’s responsible. Our investigation—”

“She’s a kid, Floyd,” Hunter said. “Not now, for God’s sake. Now, go out there and find out who did this.” He turned away, so that Aurora’s face was visible tucked against his neck, and then he left the room.

For a long moment, Rossi stood in the empty room. The face he turned to the camera was full of shame and concern.

He reached out and the screen went blank.

Samba gave a low whistle. “Jesus.”

“Aurora? Are you okay?” Josh moved his hand to her back. She was still staring straight ahead at the empty screen.

“They tried, you know,” she murmured. “After that. A doctor, a policewoman. They all tried. And I just kept repeating the same story about a monster. I don’t know why that’s all I said. I don’t know why I couldn’t help.”

The relentless questions, the thinly disguised irritation of the investigators, the syrupy tone of the in-house psychologists, all of them circling her. He knew what they sounded like. They had circled him too.

“You were a kid,” Josh told her. “It wasn’t your job to remember.” She leaned into him and he put his arms around her.

He looked across at Samba and saw his own thoughts reflected in Samba’s expression.

A monster,
Aurora had said.

Not Daddy.

She had seen the killer.

In the circle of his arms, Aurora lifted her head. “Why do you think Papa wanted me to see that? Because I didn’t mention my dad?”

“You didn’t mention your dad,” Josh said. “But you talked about a lady. Who do you think that could be?”

Samba reached for the remains of the file. “Pearline Suggs was the cashier who found Aurora at the mini-mart. Says here she’d arrived early for her shift. She was a kid, a teenager.”

“But Aurora said the lady
took
me to the steps, not
found
me. What does it say in her statement, Samba?”

Samba adjusted his glasses. “
I got there early because I was opening that day, and Miss Margie Belle likes everything all neat and tidy. The little girl was curled up on the steps asleep. I made sure she was all right, then I ran inside and called the cops and brought her inside with me until y’all got there. She didn’t say nothing.”

Had Pearline seen more than she was telling? She was just a terrified teenager back then. “So the way she tells it, she didn’t move Aurora, she just came upon her. It doesn’t make sense.”

“You think Pearline is lying? But why?”

Aurora sat up. “Maybe she saw the killer, and she was scared. Maybe she was too scared to do something.”

Josh thought about the bathroom at Fun World, the way the Shadow Man had approached them, pulling the heavy restroom door shut behind him, pushing Josh into a stall.
Lock the door. Be a good boy
. Josh had slid the latch across, stood there terrified while he listened to the Shadow Man destroy his brother, his only view of the monster the enormous oversized shadow reflected on the peeling yellow restroom wall.

“It’s possible,” he said. “Hang on a second.” He paged through the file and pulled out a thick sheaf of paper held together with a heavy gold staple. “Phone records from Margie Belle’s store.”

He drew a finger down the page. “What time was it when the call came in to the police station?”

Aurora leaned across Samba to see the report. “3:45
A.M.
”

“And Pearline said she got there early to open the mini-mart, correct? And she found Aurora there, on the steps as she was about to open up?”

“Yup, that was her statement,” Samba confirmed.

Josh found the call. 3:45
A.M.
, an outgoing call to the police station. But there was a call above it.

“Someone used the phone at the mini-mart earlier that morning,” he said. “At 2:59. It’s a local call.”

“Maybe someone else was at the mini-mart?” Samba asked.

“Or Pearline lied,” Aurora said.

“Either way,” Josh said, “whoever made that call saw what happened.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

He was too close to this one.

James opened the letter from the Medical Examiners Association, a warning letter that he was overstepping his bounds.
It is imperative that all procedures are followed properly.
They knew he’d been asking questions about a closed case, and they weren’t happy about it. A month ago, he would have dissolved into a full panic, the thought of his career on the line obliterating any other concern. He had always put faith in the rules, until he saw how spectacularly they had failed Raylene Atchison. It was his responsibility now to do whatever it took to fix it, whether it was approved by the Medical Examiners Association or not.

James tossed the letter aside and picked up the phone.

Malachi answered on the first ring.

“I’m sending you another sample,” James told him, sealing the evidence bag with the sweatshirt from the grave tucked inside, along with samples of the coffin. “I need an ID on an unidentified vic.” He was going to find out who it was.

On the other end of the line, Malachi exhaled. “You sure about this, Doc? Somebody gets wind of this, and—”

“You get any crap about it, you tell them it was my call.”

“I’m not worried about that.”

“Good.”

“It’s just—I just want to know, what is it about this case, Doc? What’s so important? It’s the first time—the only time—you’ve called in a favor like this. What is it about the Atchison case?”

James turned from the phone to the doorway where Raylene Atchison had stood all those years ago, brimming with light. To his right was the office where he had kept Aurora safe after her mother’s murder. How could it be that so many years had passed since then? It seemed impossible.

“It’s somebody I knew a long time ago,” James said. “Just make sure you take your time with it, Malachi. The first time around, the file was a mess because Gentry was careless. I don’t want any more mistakes.”

“Sure thing, Doc.”

“And, Malachi?”

“Yes?”

“Have you heard anything about those unidentified remains from a few weeks ago?”

“You mean Bayou John Doe?”

“Yes.”

“Nothing yet.”

“Thanks.”

He wondered what news Josh was hoping for. Having his brother’s remains would mean an end to the search, but it was an ending that seemed hollow. James remembered the sight of his father in his coffin, the way the pain and disbelief collided in his chest before splintering into a thousand pieces. How did that compare to the pain of surviving what Josh had?

There was a serious undertone in Ruby’s voice on the intercom, something rare for her.

“Josh Hudson here to see you.”

James stepped out of the autopsy suite. He wished he had news for Josh. “Send him on back, Ruby.”

Josh Hudson had never been what James would call clean-cut, but he looked even more disheveled than usual. He wore the same torn gray hooded sweatshirt from the other night, and appeared to have been on the losing end of a fight, a cut swelling beneath a bandage above his left eye.

James tried to hide the alarm in his voice. “How are you, Josh?”

“Been better.”

“I’m afraid I don’t have any news for you about Jesse. They work at a glacial pace over at the state lab. The minute I know something, I—”

“I’m not here about Jesse,” Josh said. “I’m here about Aurora’s case.”

“Oh, of course!” James opened the door to his office. “Here, let’s sit in here.”

“Thanks, Doc.”

“So, what did you find out?”

Josh ignored the question. “Do you remember that morning? The morning Aurora was brought here?”

The events were scorched into his memory, the mundane and the profound.

“Absolutely. It had been a busy week. I was under a lot of stress.”

“Were you in the office that whole shift?”

“No. There was a bad wreck on the causeway that night. Teenagers out joyriding flipped their pickup. Four fatalities. It took them almost two hours to cut them out. I was on scene that night up until three.”

There was something like relief on Josh’s face.

“Why are you asking me this, Detective Hudson?” James said, puzzled.

“I’m sorry,” Josh said. “It’s just—take a look at this, Doc.” He unfolded a piece of paper, a printout of a phone bill. “This is from the mini-mart, from when Aurora was found.” He pointed to a line just above one highlighted in neon marker.

James recognized the morgue’s phone number.

“I don’t understand,” he said.

“Doc, someone called here at three that morning. Before the police were called.” He slid his finger across the page. “Four times, ten seconds each. Calling and hanging up.”

“That doesn’t make sense. I wasn’t here. There was nobody here.” There were no techs here that night. Just James.

“Well, was there anybody who had a key?”

James remembered his assistant from the pre-Ruby days, a fortyish woman named Dorothy who wore gray jumpsuits and subsisted exclusively on Tab and Wheat Thins. Dorothy, whose aggressive brand of cheerfulness irritated him to no end, Dorothy who lifted pink weights on her lunch break and had a Sandy Duncan haircut—could such a person really be involved in a murder? It seemed impossible.