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  “Anything?” Adelaide asked, moving to his side.

  “Nothing that looks suspicious. He probably brought her here by skiff, or a small flat-bottom fishing boat. He’d have been seen if he’d used the highway.”

  A piercing whistle cut through the sound of the rain on his slicker, and he turned around, guiding Adelaide back to where Wendy Davis lay on the ground in a ring of mostly dissolved salt. Eyes wide open, hair spread out around her face, open wallet next to her, and the index finger of her right hand pointing, just like Missy Stuart.

  He knew it was the last place Adelaide wanted to be.

  Chief Danbury stood at the head of the small group of police and CSI, wearing the same dark blue slicker plus the title Incident Commander on the front and back in bold white letters. “Listen up, people. The water is coming up fast, and this dirt will be covered within the hour. The coroner is en route to remove the body. I want everyone to clear the area immediately, but beware, this flooding will push some nasty creatures our way. Stay alert for anything with teeth. Alligators. Snakes. You know the drill.”

  Everyone nodded, and the group broke open, some moving to the boats docked on the sliver of land for a ride to higher ground.

  Gina Gantz and her team continued to process the body and scour for evidence that would soon be covered by water and lost forever.

  Royce saw Gina wave him over, and he caught hold of Adelaide, bringing her with him.

  Gina pointed at Wendy Davis. “See her eyes?”

  He leaned closer, noticing that they weren’t the same color. One was brown, the other light hazel. “Yeah.”

  “It’s heterochromia, could be hereditary, or the result of disease or injury.”

  “Her missing person’s report specified that her eyes were brown,” Royce said.

  “She probably wore a single brown contact lens,” Gina said, making a notation on a soggy piece of paper attached to a clipboard. “We’ll never find the lens out here.”

  Royce glanced around the terrain and had to agree. Something as minuscule as a contact lens could easily vanish or simply blend in with the bayou mud.

  One by one the boats filled as personnel finished their assignment, and shoved off.

  Only a single boat remained with a hooded, slicker-clad boatman huddled in the back next to the motor. “Beckett.”

  Royce turned toward the chief. “Yeah.”

  “You two take the last boat. Gina and I will ride out with the body and the coroner.”

  Royce nodded, glad he could finally get Adelaide out of the wilds and back to civilization. “Thanks, Chief.”

  Danbury waved him off, and he steered Adelaide to the small aluminum boat. Grasping her upper arm, he helped her into the front, shoved off and climbed in, taking a seat next to her on the bench as he listened to the distinctive dragonfly putter of the nine-point-nine horsepower Evinrude.

  The driver circled the boat in the water, revved up the motor and headed north toward its conflux with the Outer Millaudon Canal.

  The abrupt turn threw Adelaide off center, and she put her hands down on the cross-bench to steady herself, watching the water smooth away from the bow of the boat and create rain-dotted ripples in its wake.

  She glanced over at Royce, who seemed focused on the shoreline.

  “Look at that.” He pointed to a patch of gray-green marsh grass on the left-hand side of the boat.

  “Look at what?” She strained to locate the specific object, finally spotting what looked like a log bobbing in the water on the edge of the scum-crusted bank.

  “Alligator,” he said, leaning over to speak into her ear, over the hum of the engine. “Just waiting for his supper.”

  She knew bad things lived in the water. Things that could easily eat a full-grown adult if not given a wide berth and the respect they deserved.

  A shudder vibrated through her, forcing her to look for danger wearing camouflage among the palmettos, marsh grasses and moss-dressed cypress trees standing knobby-kneed in the cloudy water, but the defensive tactic had little effect on the unease crawling through her body.

  Searching the interior of the tiny boat, she focused on a canvas bag tucked in the front of the bow with the words Emergency Kit in red letters across the front of it.

  She was out of her element among these creatures and the unforgiving environment. Just knowing help could be in that little bag calmed her somewhat.

  In the distance she heard the putter of another boat, and looked up as the flat bottom passed, carrying the coroner and a boatman to the crime scene.

  The tributary narrowed and brought them close to a cluster of Tupelo gum trees shagged with low-hanging moss.

  Adelaide ducked to avoid being swept by it, but she couldn’t avoid the trail of dripping water that splashed across her forehead and rolled down her face.

  “Jeez.” She reached up and mopped the water off with her hand before glancing over at Royce.

  “Afraid you might get wet?” An amused smile spread on his lips, then faded slowly, taking her moment of pleasure with it.

  He reached out and plucked something from her forehead, immediately cupping it in the palm of his left hand.

  “Does it bite?” she asked, assuming the worst. Just her luck to wind up stung by some swamp spider who’d housed himself in the dangling moss and caught a ride on her head.

  Royce’s nerves thinned as he smoothed the perfectly round, brown object between his thumb and index finger. The manual examination confirmed his suspicions and solidified his concern. It was a single colored contact, the kind Wendy Davis wore to hide her heterochromia. The same kind that was missing from her right eye now.

  This had to be the boat used to transport her to the patch of boggy soil where she’d died. How else could it have wound up on Adelaide’s hand. It must have come from inside the boat.

  Staring at the lay of the tributary, he gauged the distance to the shoreline as it widened into a sweeping turn, and fractured in several directions.

  The moment of decision. Either the man at the helm was the killer, or he wasn’t.

  Adelaide sucked in a deep breath, feeling an oppressive sensation of dread sink into her bones.

  Something was wrong. Something was horribly wrong. She glanced around, spotted a patch of iris she’d pegged as they’d motored into the tributary. She liked to know where she was, liked to be oriented.

  Next to her on the bench, Royce brushed her leg with his right hand at the same time he opened his left one.

  She stared at the clear brown object.

  “Did you touch the body?” he asked in a voice so close to a whisper, she practically had to read his lips as she watched him speak.

  “No.” Looking back down at the flimsy object, she reached out and fingered it, making a tactile discovery. It was a soft contact lens.

  “Where did you find it?”

  “You brushed it onto your face with your hand. It came from somewhere in this boat.”

  She had touched the bench they were sitting on in order to steady herself and must have come in contact with it then. Now she understood the hush in his voice, the warning in his dark eyes.

  The man operating the craft could be Wendy Davis’s killer.

  “It’s evidence. I’ll take it. I can keep it safe.”

  Tenuously she picked up the lens from the palm of his hand. Tension coiled around her insides. Evidence had to be preserved. If the lens were to dry out, they might lose it. She hesitated for a moment, then put it in her mouth, an action that seemed strange even to her, but her mother wore contacts, and saliva could be used to preserve it safely.

  Using her tongue, she found the concave and forced it against the roof of her mouth, feeling it seal to her upper pallet.

  “You ate it?” Royce whispered, agitation in his response.

  “No. I’m making sure it’s safe.”

  His eyes widened for an instant, and she watched him pop the buttons on his rain slicker and reach inside.

  R
oyce locked his hand around the butt of his Glock and pulled it out of its holster.

  “I want you to get down when the action starts.” He didn’t want her to get hurt. “Okay.”

  Behind him he heard the Evinrude’s rpm tick up. Had the driver turned on the governor?

  Turning slowly, he caught sight of movement in his peripheral vision. He rocked forward off the bench seat, staying low as he pulled his pistol.

  Crack! The boatman slammed an oar into the side of his head.

  Royce took aim and squeezed off a round as a curtain of darkness blackened his vision for an instant, but he was already listing hard to the left side of the boat.

  A quick pull on the rudder by the boatman, whose face was buried in his rain hood, and his fate was sealed.

  The craft jerked hard in the opposite direction of his momentum.

  Royce launched over the side of the boat and slammed into the murky water, hearing only a note of Adelaide’s scream before he sank below the surface.

  He hit bottom with his feet and pushed hard, clawing for the top eight feet above, fighting against the drowning effect of his heavy slicker.

  Air, he needed air. His gun was gone. Adelaide was gone.

  He broke the surface choking and gasping as he scanned the water for the boat, spotting it in a sharp turn that kicked up a rooster tail less than fifty feet away.

  Panic sucked him back down under the water as the boat roared over the top of his head.

  He kicked to the surface, and watched in horror as Adelaide stood up and lunged for the boatman.

  The impact sent the boat on a kamikaze path toward the shore that ended in a blitz of white water as the crash was averted and the boat came around again headed straight for him.

  Where in the hell was Adelaide?

  Panic clutched his body as he scanned the water for her. At the last second, he pulled a breath into his lungs and dove under.

  Something splashed down ten feet in front of him, but he couldn’t see in the murky water. He floated to the top, eyeing a commotion in the water.

  Adelaide swam as hard and as fast as she could, listening to the hum of the boat just over her right shoulder. She’d never been good in the water, never had a need to be until now.

  Focus, she had to stay focused on Royce.

  Something brushed her leg below the surface, sending a jolt of terror through her. She kept paddling, keeping her focus on Royce, who swam toward her with powerful strokes.

  He stopped and pointed at a dense patch of cypress on her left. “Shore,” he yelled. “Get to the shore.”

  Determination drove her forward, spurred by the hum of the boat as it looped around for another pass.

  Sucking in a breath, she dove deep.

  The craft sliced through the water above her head.

  She kicked for the surface in a flurry of air bubbles, refocused and kept on paddling, stroking for the bank.

  Something brushed her leg again.

  Her arms were on fire, the muscles burning with fatigue as she ignored the confrontation she knew lay just under the water. It was a fight she couldn’t possibly win.

  She put her feet down beneath her and felt the bottom. Fighting for traction in the bayou mud, she grabbed an exposed cypress root and pulled herself up onto the bank.

  Behind her in the water she heard a splash.

  In her peripheral vision on the right, she watched an alligator make landfall three feet behind her.

  Panic ignited adrenaline in her bloodstream.

  She ran forward and darted to the left, hearing him hiss as his jaws opened and he scrambled forward on his short legs like a lizard.

  Alligators were fast in a straightforward charge, but not side to side.

  She zigzagged again, working to pull her feet out of the muck with each running step.

  Setting her focus on a point forty feet into the cypress, she ran from tree to tree, until she couldn’t hear the reptile chasing her anymore.

  Hunching over, she rested her hands on her knees. Her lungs burned and her heart threatened to hammer out of her chest, but she’d managed to escape certain death.

  Cautiously, she leaned out from behind the tree and stared at the path she’d taken, spotting Royce dragging himself up out of the water onto the bank.

  The alligator had turned back for the water, and now stood between them.

  Where was the boatman? She listened, but couldn’t hear anything over the torrential rain.

  Reaching under her poncho and inside her blouse, she pulled out the emergency kit she’d managed to snag from the front of the craft just before she jumped overboard.

  She opened it, staring at the single item she’d prayed would be inside when she took it.

  Yanking the flare gun out, she released the safety, raised it straight over her head and pulled the trigger.

  A single flare fired, whizzing high above the treetops, where it ignited and began its slow fall back to earth. Chief Danbury, Gina Gantz and the coroner were sure to see it and come to help.

  She squeezed off a second round for good measure and stepped out from behind the cypress tree to do battle, making eye contact with Royce in the gloom.

  Royce eased slowly to the right in an attempt to put some distance between himself and the angry momma alligator hissing at him.

  He was in a bad place, and he knew it. He eyed her egg mound, made out of mud and vegetation and tucked around the knees of an ancient cypress.

  “Hold up, Adelaide. She’s guarding her nest.” Relief washed over him when he saw her stop and step in behind a Tupelo gum for protection. The girl had moxie, he’d give her that, and a flare gun they could use as a weapon against the reptile if they had to.

  “I’m going to come around to you. Stay put.”

  Behind him in the water he heard the Evinrude sputter and die, restart and accelerate.

  The crazy boatman was coming in for another pass, but the immediate danger was staring him down right now, and he couldn’t take his eyes off the gator for a second, or he risked a full-on charge at an incredible speed.

  “Royce!” The sound of his name in Adelaide’s shrill scream was a moment too late. The blinding pain caught him behind the knees and slammed him to the ground, pinning his legs under the bow of the aluminum boat.

  In an instant it registered. The boatman had rammed him from behind.

  Adelaide rushed forward, raised the flare gun, took aim at the man in the flat-bottom boat and pulled the trigger.

  The flare hissed in a straight line of smoke and sparks and hit him square in the chest. He launched out the back of the boat into the water.

  The alligator charged.

  Royce covered his head with his arms, prepared for the inevitable attack.

  The alligator plowed into the water next to the boat.

  Stunned, Adelaide dropped the flare gun and ran for the boat, listening to the terrified screams of the boatman in the water as he tried to escape the alligator.

  She covered the distance to Royce and slid to a stop, watching the gator and the boatman vanish below the surface of the water ten feet out.

  Her stomach clenched. A wave of nausea pushing up her throat, she sucked in a breath and focused on Royce. “I’m going to push the boat back.”

  “Easy, my legs are trapped, and we need the boat to get out of here.”

  She put one hand on either side of the bow’s point and leaned into it. The boat inched back from its wedged-in-the-mud position and went buoyant on the water.

  Royce raised up onto his hands and knees, and sat back. “Nothing’s broken, thanks to the muck. Get in the boat.”

  She nodded and slung her leg over the side of the hull. Royce climbed in, hurried to the rear, put the motor in Reverse, pulled the choke on and pushed the starter button. The Evinrude hummed to life. He cranked the throttle handle and the boat moved back away from the bank.

  Seventy-five feet out into the water, and well out of the gator’s path, he let off the gas
and killed the engine.

  “You did a good thing back there.” He eased up off the boatman’s seat and moved onto the bench next to her.

  She turned a teary green gaze on him, and he put his arm around her shoulders, pulling her against him.

  “He would have killed us both, you know that don’t you?”

  “Yes, but that was a horrible way to die.”

  He couldn’t disagree, but he was thankful it wasn’t them. He watched the alligator break the surface of the water and crawl onto shore next to her nest.

  Somewhere in the bayou a motorboat engine revved, and he glanced around to see Chief Danbury, Gina Gantz, the coroner and their boatman cruise toward them and cut the power.

  “Beckett, what the hell’s going on? We saw the flares. Where’s your boatman?”

  Royce didn’t release Adelaide. “He tried to kill us. Adelaide hit him with a flare and forced him into the water. A gator got him. We need a recovery team out here to drag for his body. It’s here, between us and the shoreline.”

  Danbury reached inside his slicker and pulled out his handheld GPS unit. “I’ll mark it and call in the dive team. Any idea who he is?” Danbury asked, staring at him from inside his hood.

  “No, but we did find Wendy Davis’s missing contact lens in this boat.”

  Adelaide brushed the lens off the roof of her mouth, onto the tip of her tongue.

  “Good thinking,” Gina said, already pulling a plastic evidence bag open.

  Adelaide pinched it with her fingers, pulled it off the tip of her tongue, and flicked it into the bag.

  Royce released her and moved into the boatman’s seat.

  An icy chill skittered over Adelaide’s body, robbing her of the security she’d felt only moments ago next to Royce.

  Glancing up, she stared at the densely wooded embankment in front of her, and felt the unsettling sensation of being watched. Her eyes picked up shadow and light, the movement of vegetation, all through the veil of rain, all conspiring against her ability to pick out anything specific.

  “Get Miss Charboneau back to the station and file a report. I want detailed accounts from both of you.”

  Royce put the motor in Forward and fired up the Evinrude. “See you back at the station.”