The Evidence Room: A Mystery (29 page)

Josh leaned over her shoulder. “This one must be her. PearloftheSouth458. ‘My son came home last Wednesday with bloody knuckles, like he’d been in a fight. He freezes me out at every opportunity and refuses to stay in rehab,’” Josh read. “‘Should I be worried that he shows signs of increasing violence? I am a single mom. Please help.’”

“That was the night of your attack,” Aurora said. “Do you think Lionel could have done this, too? To his own mother?”

“He was acting under orders—probably Gentry’s—when he came after me.” Josh said. “It’s one thing to do that, but coming after a family member? I don’t know. He
is
a Crumpler, though, so anything’s possible.”

“Did the police question him?”

Josh nodded. “Boone said his alibi was pretty solid. He hasn’t taken off or anything. I don’t think this is him.”

Aurora clicked on the next window. Cooper County Bank. The session had been timed out due to inactivity. She clicked on the login button.

“What was that name from the message board?”

“PearloftheSouth458.”

Aurora typed it in.

“We don’t know the password, though.”

“Come on, Detective.” She typed ‘Lionel’ in the password box.

“‘Retrieving account … one moment please,’” Josh read. “Damn. Nice work.”

“Whoa.” They both exclaimed at the account summary page. Pearline had almost two hundred thousand dollars in savings, along with fifty thousand in her checking account.

“Maybe we’ve been looking at this all wrong,” Josh said. “Maybe Pearline Suggs is the criminal mastermind here.”

“Legal secretary by day, drug kingpin by night?”

“Like I said, anything’s possible. Let’s look at her last statement.”

There were regular deposits into her account from Royce Beaumont’s law firm, an amount that looked like her paycheck, and then there were regular deposits of a much larger amount.

“Esma Lee Bedgerton,” Josh read. “Who do you think that is? A wealthy relative?”

“Oh, my goodness. Esma is Ash Gentry’s housekeeper,” she told Josh, her voice crackling with excitement. “She said that Esma had been with the family for years.”

“So Gentry’s paying her too. Damn.”

“Hush money,” Aurora said. “She must have seen what happened to my father that night at the minimart.”

“But if she saw Gentry kill your father, why didn’t she tell the police then? Why did she call the morgue from the mini-mart that night? Because they paid her off right away?”

“I don’t know. All I know is, we’ve got to find her, Josh. She knows what happened that night.”

“Let’s go back to the evidence room. Maybe Samba’s got something on Gentry. He’s a hunter. Those guys always have a cabin or something out on the bayou. There are places we could check.” Aurora folded the laptop back up and they both stood. “We’re close, Aurora. We’re getting close.” The shuttered expression that he had worn the day they’d walked past her childhood home was gone.

“I know,” she said, resisting the impulse to grab his hand.

She slipped her phone out of her pocket. Jefferson Gibbs. Sixteen missed calls. Something cold began to spread its tentacles throughout her chest.

“Josh,” she said. He turned in the doorway in front of her. “The house.” Something was wrapping itself around her voice, so that she could only force out her words in staccato bursts. “We have to go. Now.”

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

“I have to tell you something,” Aurora said when they were in the car.

Josh’s mind was ticking furiously, trying to stitch together all of the free-floating pieces that made up this case. In his mind he saw Raylene Atchison’s bloodless face in the autopsy photo, Burdette Crumpler flicking ashes over the side of the steamboat, Doc Mason standing over Wade Atchison’s empty casket. Every day had brought more questions.

“What?”

“The house.” In the passenger seat, Aurora watched him, some unreadable anxiety on her face.

“What is it?”

“The other day. When I went to see Ash Gentry. Someone—I think someone had been at the house.”

“
What?
” It was all Josh could do to keep the car on the road. “What happened? Why didn’t you say anything?”

“I’m sorry. I just—I didn’t want to upset you. It was the day they found Jesse, and I didn’t want to bother you with it. Someone wrote the word
soon
in the dew on my car.”

“It’s okay.” She had been trying to protect him. “I know I kind of fell off the map there for a minute. I didn’t know what else to do.”

“What else could you do?” She reached out and gripped his shoulder. “They pulled your brother out of the bayou, for God’s sake. It’s like you said to me, Josh. You did what you had to do. You survived.”

“I didn’t, though, Aurora. That’s the difference between you and me. I stood there. I could have called for help, I could have tried to fight him. And I did exactly what he said to do.” He was shouting now. They were the words that he had feared she would hear from someone else, and now he was telling her himself. It should have felt like a betrayal. Yet in a strange way, it was a relief.

“I wasn’t a survivor, Aurora. I was an
accomplice
.”

She was quiet for a moment. They were near the turnoff for Spotted Beebalm Drive now; whatever awaited them at the house, they’d see it for themselves in a few minutes.

“Josh. Oh, my God.”

A Cooper’s Bayou police cruiser was parked in the front yard, lights flashing.

“Stay here,” he told Aurora.

“Like hell I will.”

Boone met them at the door, his expression grim.

“Aurora, this is Boone. My partner.”

Boone took Aurora’s hand. “I wish we were meeting under more pleasant circumstances, Miss Atchison.” He paused. “Jefferson Gibbs, the caretaker, called us. He came by the house to fix the burned-out porch light, and that’s when he noticed it.”

“Noticed what?”

Boone gestured for them to follow. “Two of the windows that face the bayou were busted in. Looks like they might have used a rock or something, smashed it in.”

“Was anything taken?”

“I’m afraid you’ll have to verify that for us, ma’am,” Boone told Aurora. “We noticed some papers on the floor in the bedroom. Maybe some of your grandfather’s personal papers.”

Aurora and Josh exchanged a glance, not unnoticed by Boone.

“What?”

“They may have been looking for some of her grandfather’s logbooks. Aurora brought them to the evidence room.”

“For safekeeping,” Aurora added.

“Safekeeping,” Boone repeated. “Well, Miss Atchison, Y’all need to step aside while we secure the scene here and finish writing up our report.”

Aurora stepped in front of Josh. “I appreciate what you’re saying. But the police haven’t done anything about my mother’s—and my father’s—murder for twenty years. Your partner is the first person who got anywhere on the case. So with
all due respect
, Boone, please step aside. In fact, please leave.”

Josh tried to hide his grin. Boone held up his hands in surrender, chastened. “If that’s the way you want it,” he said. “If you could make a list of what’s missing, that kind of thing, that would be helpful. I’ve got two guys out in the yard, just snapping pictures for evidence. I’ll tell them it’s time to go.”

“Thank you. It was nice meeting you.”

Boone nodded at Aurora. “Josh.” He jerked his head towards the door, beckoning Josh to follow, but Josh ignored the gesture.

“See ya, Boone.”

After Boone left, they sat together on the peach-colored velvet love seat in front of the broken window. Without the barrier of the window, the bayou seemed to be even closer, the enchanted landscape like a living, breathing thing reaching for them. Aurora rested her head on Josh’s shoulder and finally, the tears came.

When she was finished, she lifted her head and they stared out at the shadows that were beginning to stretch towards them across the bayou’s surface.

“What are we going to do now?”

“I think Samba’s right. The answers are here, in something that was left behind. We’re just missing something.” The box from the evidence room was seared into his memory, the key tucked into the sleeve of Wade Atchison’s sweatshirt beckoning to him like some kind of charm. He would let her rest, he would go to the evidence room and hold out every fragment, every clue, until something fit.

He opened his mouth to tell her this, but to his surprise, she was already standing in the doorway. Aurora Atchison didn’t need a savior; she was going to save herself. He was just going to help her do it.

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

“So Wade Atchison was traveling light,” Samba remarked. The three of them were gathered around the center table in the evidence room, the contents of Aurora’s father’s tomb laid out before them like an altar.

There was an urgent message from Nicky on Aurora’s voice mail. Nicky had questions: when was Aurora coming back, had she abandoned the city for the bayou, was she safe? Aurora didn’t know the answers to any of them. She was coming to the end of her allotted leave time; even a dead mother only bought you so much goodwill with her boss at the hospital. But there was no way she was leaving. Not now.

Aurora reached for the key and slid it towards herself. Her father had fitted it into the cuff of his sweatshirt.
Concealed,
Malachi had said. Meant for somebody to find.

She held it up to the light and the star-shaped hole in the top winked at her like a tiny eye. It was engraved with a skull and crossbones, the edges of the emblem faded with time, encrusted in a furred black sludge.

“Samba, do you have any acetone?”

Anyone else would have questioned this request, but Samba bounded out of his chair. “Back in a jiffy, Aurora.”

Josh grinned at her. She should have been embarrassed, the way she’d cried on the couch, scared about returning to the house with no front windows, but having Josh here with her gave her a kind of invincibility.

“Bingo!” Samba held aloft a clear plastic bottle of lavender liquid.

“Nail polish remover?” Josh asked him.

“You gotta open your mind, Josh,” Samba said. “This stuff is magical. It can dissolve paint and varnish. You can even use it to make meth or cut coke. Or so I’ve heard.”

Aurora reached for the bottle. She pulled a tissue from her purse and dabbed some of the liquid onto it. With Samba and Josh looking on, she began to scrub vigorously, first one side of the key, and then the other, gradually bringing the image into focus; the border surrounding the skull and crossbones and some letters beneath it. She held it up under the light.

Josh squinted at the design. “Looks like there’s some initials underneath the skull and crossbones. ‘J’ and ‘A’?”

Samba’s eyes widened. “I don’t think that’s an ‘A,’” he said. There was a little twist of excitement in his voice. “I think it might be an ‘R.’ ‘JR.’”

“You know what it’s for?”

“Sure. It’s that boat storage place at the marina.”

Josh gave him a quizzical look. “What?”

“It closed a few years back. Before your time. Jolly Roger Boat Storage. You must have heard stories about Roger Beaulieu. Everyone made fun of him because he wore an eye patch, had some eye condition. Finally he just ran with it and went full pirate. Parrot, gold tooth, the whole bit. Roger was a character.” Samba patted one of the steel evidence lockers. “Before we had these babies, he used to give me extra boxes they had lying around. He was a good guy.”

Aurora stared at him, openmouthed.

“Where was the boat storage place?”

“Right across from Weir Island,” Samba said. “The other side, right near the mini-mart.”

Near the scene of the murder.

Josh and Aurora looked at each other. Samba had just cracked the case wide open.

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

In any other place, the remains of Jolly Roger Boat Storage would have been razed, a soulless strip mall or discount buffet restaurant rising from its ashes.

Not in Cooper’s Bayou.

The skeleton of the building remained, cypress trees poking through its empty windows, kudzu strangling what was left of the painted exterior, its wooden boat ramps leading to the bayou sun-bleached and soft with rot. When the place had first closed down, Roger Beaulieu had shoved whatever he couldn’t sell into the water. Now a fleet of abandoned boats, tilted at dangerous angles, surrounded the entry in a ghostly ring, the bayou slowly pulling their rusted remains beneath its syrup surface.

The key smoldered in Josh’s pocket. There were answers behind the door it opened, he was sure of it. The thought of it propelled him forward, sending a fresh tide of adrenaline roaring through his veins. More than anything else, he wanted to bring Aurora answers, bring her peace, but he knew it would be a hollow kind of peace, the same kind given to him when he had held the threadbare remains of the duffel bag, aware that the browned bones inside were Jesse.

“Wait up,” Samba called, charging up the bayou banks, poking the trash aside with a carved walking stick painted in psychedelic colors.

Josh tore off a
NO TRESPASSING
sign flapping uselessly in the breeze and paused in the entryway to the old building.

Any evidence exposed to the elements out here would be long gone; lucky for them, the red painted roll-up doors on the old units were virtually indestructible, although some enterprising people had managed to open a few. Josh saw the edge of what looked like a striped beach towel poking out from one of the units. It could be a lovers’ retreat, or it could be a meth lab that would blow them sky-high at any moment.

“Too bad they let this place fall down,” Samba called, his eyebrows tilted at an optimistic angle.

Aurora turned and Josh glanced out at the decaying armada of boats and wondered if they were seeing the same thing. He wiped the sheen of sweat from his face. “Beautiful.”

“Well, the good news is, most of these don’t have locks.” Aurora grasped the handle of the nearest unit and jerked it upward, revealing a slumbering family of possums. Josh, Aurora, and Samba stood at a crossroads, a crumbling corridor branching off in three separate directions.