The Evidence Room: A Mystery by Cameron Harvey Page A

woman’s lips curled back, half smirk and half sneer. “This ain’t no good luck charm, beb.” She lifted her chin. “It’s protection.”
    Ernest stepped out of the reeds behind her. “You ready to go, Aurora?” He tugged his baseball cap down low, and his lips tightened. “Is Charlsie here giving you a problem?”
    “ Mais non, ” the woman said in a singsong tone. “You need something from me, Ernest?”
    “I’m a God-fearing man,” Ernest replied. “I don’t need none of that crap.”
    The woman laughed again, as though this were the funniest joke in the world. “Sooner or later, you’ll be wanting something done,” she said. “Just like the alligator man.”
    Ernest scoffed. “Hunter Broussard wanted nothing to do with you. Don’t you be talking of a dead man that way.”
    “I know what I know,” she said, her eyes moving from Ernest to Aurora. She zipped the backpack and swung it over one shoulder, retreating deeper into the graveyard.
    Ernest shook his head and reached for Aurora’s arm, guiding her over the sodden ground towards the skiff. “Don’t listen to that crazy old bat,” he said. “She makes her money selling spells to poor souls down the bayou who don’t know any better. She never knew your grandfather.”
    Aurora nodded, but the woman’s voice haunted her. I know what I know . Had Papa gone to that woman for advice? There were at least a hundred of those tiny bags in the house. If they were for protection, what was he afraid of? He had convinced her that her father was no longer out there, that he could not hurt her. But what if that wasn’t true?
    Ernest drew the oars through the trembling surface of the water, steering them away from the graveyard.
    Aurora made sure to look back.

 
    CHAPTER TWELVE
    There was a surplus of death in Cooper’s Bayou this summer, just like the one twenty years ago. Long after the remains from the duffel bag had been packaged up and sent to the lab, James had stood in his office and thought about it. We’ll get to the bottom of it, Doc , Rush had said at the scene, but a lingering uneasiness had followed him ever since, a sense that this was not the end of the story, but the beginning.
    James prided himself on avoiding seeing patterns or relying on intuition. There was no place for it in his line of work. Life was terrifyingly random, and he acknowledged this while finding refuge in the clear confines of science. But there was something about this summer that he couldn’t ignore, something about heading to these death scenes that felt like walking into a stiff wind. James rarely thought about his previous patients when he was working a case—you couldn’t let the past cloud your judgment of the present—but now they clicked through his brain in a doomed catalogue, the same two people always pushing their way to the front of the line.
    Soon the light would be gone, the nickel-colored sky above the bayou succumbing to inky darkness. A single flashlight ringed by insects flickered inside the wheelhouse of the twenty-eight-foot Lafitte skiff he rode on. There were places out here the bayou claimed for its own, places the morgue van couldn’t reach, so he’d hitched a ride with Ernest Authement, one of the local shrimpers.
    “You want me to take you right on up to the dock at Tee Tim’s?” Ernest hollered from the back of the boat, and beneath his cigarette-stained fingertips, the wheel twisted to the left.
    James felt a stab of mild annoyance. If there were a way to drive the boat himself while working, he would have done it. There was a certain amount of focus and almost a kind of reverence required at death scenes, especially death scenes out here. It was something that was difficult for those outside of his line of work to understand.
    “No,” James called back to him in what he hoped was a curt tone that would discourage any further conversation. “Cut the engine and turn on the floodlight. They said they saw her floating right up