Chapter Fourteen

Once Floyd told her she would go to hell if she snitched on him. She was too young to know any better, so she believed him. The hell Floyd described was scarier than any hell she could imagine, filled with snakes that the devil would make her swallow. He said they’d eat out her throat on the way down to gnaw at the insides of her belly. He threatened that the devil would call her mother out of heaven to take care of her in hell. So she kept silent, and stayed silent until she had enough years on her to disbelieve that a hell like that existed.

Now she wasn’t so sure. Maybe that same hell Floyd imagined bubbled up through the soil of Byrd’s Landing and ate away at your soul with teeth of hatred and murder and grief.

Cameron wasn’t crying anymore as he waited to identify the body. Raven stood on one side of him, Billy Ray on the other. Edmée was there, too, her heavy perfume emanating from her as if she were trying to cover the smell of death, her face white with fear. She was standing next to Billy Ray, too close in Raven’s opinion, but calling Billy Ray on it was a battle for another day.

And there was Detective ‘Shiny Shoes’ Breaker standing off to the side next to a button by the window. His hands were clasped in front, his cufflinks flashing gold on his starched cuffs. He reminded Raven of those southern preachers twirling on stage in their five-thousand-dollar suits while passing the collection plate.

“Tell me when you’re ready,” he said.

Raven glanced at Cameron, now tearless. He had on what he called his chill face, the face that he used when other kids teased him in the foster home, a set mouth, unblinking eyes, and breath so slow it didn’t look like his lungs were working. Raven could only detect the slight tremble to his mouth because she knew to look for it. Anyone else would think he didn’t care.

Like Detective Breaker.

She pictured Breaker’s notes in her head. He would say that the victim’s father cried crocodile tears when he reported his son missing, and then dried up like a plugged pipe when it came to identifying the body. ‘I need you to tell him’ my sweet behind, Raven thought. You just wanted to observe without the distraction of having to tell him the news. Let the patsies, Raven and Billy Ray, tell the father. I’ll just watch. Well, Raven thought, let’s get this show on the road.

“Cameron,” Raven said softly. “You need to say when you’re ready.”

“Yeah, go ahead,” Cameron said in a voice as bland as his face.

Detective Breaker pressed the button next to the glass. The drape moved aside with a low hum. Rita Sandbourne, the medical examiner, stood next to the body still in its black body bag. Rita nodded a brief greeting to Raven and Billy Ray before turning to Breaker. She was thinner than Raven remembered, but Raven was almost certain that Rita wore a Grateful Dead T-shirt under the white lab coat.

Breaker looked at Cameron and said, “Are you sure you’re ready?”

“How can anybody ever be ready for shit like this?” Billy Ray said. “Stop dragging this motherfucker out. Get on with it, man.”

Breaker motioned with two fingers to Rita. She carefully unzipped the body bag to expose the corpse’s face. And waited. For a second or two, nobody moved. Raven finally blinked several times to chase away both astonishment and tears. She felt Cameron’s arm slip from hers. He fell to his knees with one sob. He just stayed there, silent, on his knees, weaving like a drunk. Finally he made a sucking sound as if he were trying to suck up all the air in the room.

“Oh, God,” Edmée said. “Couldn’t they have at least cleaned him up?”

She slapped a hand over her mouth before running to the bathroom on the other side of the small identification room. Raven heard the toilet seat slam up before Edmée started dry heaving. Billy Ray went after her.

Cameron’s lips started moving. He was praying, praying like Raven had never in all of her years of knowing him heard him pray. And Floyd was there again in her head, Well, I guess there is something to that ole saying about atheists in foxholes.

But Raven wasn’t focused on Cameron. The boy’s face on the table captivated her. The eyes were open, and though she knew them to be brown, they looked fogged over, erased. His skin had gone ash gray, and the familiar hair that she could see swirled over his head in caked coils of dried blood. More blood streaked his face, and there was a round, caved-in wound on his forehead.

“Like the rest?” Raven asked.

“Yes,” Breaker said. “Throat slit, exsanguinated.”

“But the body’s not cleaned,” Raven said.

“No.”

“And that wound on his forehead? What’s that?”

“Probably a skull fracture, but we don’t know from what. That’s the thing we’re holding from the press, in case, you know….”

Yes, she knew all right. In case they had a crazy who wanted to confess. If they could tell them about that one strange wound on the forehead, then the cops would take them seriously.

“But, as I said, like the others. Naked, wrapped in a brand new blanket.”

“Where?” Raven said. She turned to face him. “Where did they find him?”

She pretended that she didn’t see Breaker flinch. She had her father’s eyes. Sometimes she knew that they looked as cold as Floyd’s.

“The mayor’s front porch.”

“You should have plenty of cameras there.”

“No,” Breaker said. “The mayor didn’t want them. He’s paranoid. Always afraid of being spied on. Has someone from crimes go over on a regular basis to sweep the place for bugs.”

She held her gaze steady on Breaker’s until he cleared his throat and turned away. If it were her, or maybe Billy Ray, she would have made sure that they had cameras installed everywhere that the killer might elect to display a body. The perp was making no secret of who he was taunting. The establishment, right? Or as Billy Ray would have said, The Man. The killer was sticking it to The Man. If it were her, she’d like to think that she would’ve placed a camera around the mayor’s residence. She turned back to the body. Rita was zipping the body bag closed over those ghostly eyes.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” Breaker said to Cameron, who was on his second round of Our Fathers. When it was the only prayer you knew, it was the prayer that would have to do.

She assessed Breaker; this man with the gold cufflinks made a lot of assumptions. No wonder a killer still roamed the streets of Byrd’s Landing.

Breaker cleared his throat again. “I’ll go get the paperwork.”

“It isn’t him,” she said flatly.

The look of surprise on his face was comical. “I don’t understand,” he said, looking down at Cameron.

“Clyde Darling,” she explained. “A friend of Noe’s. You’ve got another murdered boy and now a missing one, Detective.”

Raven bent down to help her brother stand, murmuring to him that they would find Noe and that it would be all right. She didn’t know or care if she lied, but she would do everything in her power to bring Cameron’s son back to him, Floyd’s made-up hell and the very real one of the BLPD be damned.