The Evidence Room: A Mystery (15 page)

He ran a hand through his hair. “I don’t know about that. But when something bad happens in town, the Crumplers are either behind it or they know about it. I think we might be on the right track.”

“Then let’s bring them in for questioning. Find out what they know.”

Josh grinned. “Easy there, New York City. We don’t have any authority to do that yet. We have to keep on following the evidence.”

Ahead of her, Josh motioned towards a row of houses on stilts. The whole row of them looked abandoned, with their wilting porches and broken screen doors, kudzu curling out of every open window. In front of them, the bayou appeared stagnant, but Aurora could feel the water thumping beneath their feet, pulling the ground below them lumpy and uneven. The house closest to them bowed towards the water, a sole cracked plastic lawn chair half submerged in front of it. A porch light coated in bugs dangled above a rotting doorway. A gaping hole in the roof was ringed with a cluster of yellow songbirds.

Aurora had been born in one of these houses.

She focused on the back of Josh’s T-shirt, which was sticking to his shoulder blades. The dog glanced back at her and then resumed trotting at his side. Aurora wasn’t sure why he had agreed to help her with this case. All the years in New York had made her a cynic—no, a realist, she told herself. Why would he spend time on her case? What did he want?

“This is it,” he announced from what had been a front yard. Two planks of wood formed an X across a splintering yellow door, and the yard had succumbed to weeds and trash. Beau darted around the side of the house to explore the tall grass. Aurora took a seat on the top step and Josh sat beside her.

“Do you remember it at all?”

She’d expected some kind of revelation, some moment of clarity, but looking up at the house, all she felt was a suffocating sadness, an unexpressed grief for the people who had once lived here.

“That night,” she said. “They questioned me.”

He stared across the bayou. “Yes.”

“There must be a record of it somewhere. Did I say anything important? Was it in the file?”

“We didn’t find anything,” he said. “Do you remember it?”

The question took her back twenty years, to the police station. Detective Rossi. He’d picked her up at the morgue, brought her to a windowless room in the station. She’d sat on two phone books to reach the table, waiting for Nana and Papa to pick her up. Detective Rossi had rolled out a stream of paper and handed Aurora a bouquet of Magic Markers.

Draw what you remember, sweetheart
.

What had she drawn? It was a blank spot in her memory, something scrubbed clean by time or by some protective mechanism in her brain.

“I don’t think I gave them anything helpful,” she stammered, unable to keep the emotion out of her voice.

“Hey,” he said, putting a hand on her back. “You were just a kid. Nobody would expect you to remember anything. You did exactly what you were supposed to do—you survived. That’s all we can do.”

She knew it was a speech the police probably gave every victim, but it didn’t feel like empty platitudes coming from Josh Hudson.

“Thanks,” she said. She stood and cupped her hands to peer inside the doorway behind them. “So who owns this place now? I’m the last surviving Atchison, right? How come the Realtor didn’t ask me about this house? Looks like a prime slice of waterfront real estate.” She tried to smile, but the expression on Josh’s face stopped her.

“Your dad.”

Her dad. Alive or dead, Wade Atchison had always loomed over her life, a shadowy presence, the person who had killed her mother but let her live; an act of violence paired with an act of mercy. What did it mean? She thought about the question mark that Papa had drawn above her father’s name on the letter in his office.

“Do you think he’s still out there?”

“I think,” he said, “there’s a lot about this case that we don’t know yet.”

That was the understatement of the year. “I think you’re right.” Everything she thought she’d known about Papa, about her past, it was all unraveling, and she was determined to keep up.

“Aurora.” Josh was standing now, pointing to a spot a few feet away from the front yard where they stood. “Look, right there.”

An eye surrounded by scales broke the mossy surface of the water.

“Oh, my God.”

Josh grinned. “Your first gator sighting in the wild since you’ve been back.” The gator slipped beneath the surface.

“I probably should have seen it first, being the granddaughter of the alligator man and all,” she said with a laugh.

“Maybe you’re just a little out of practice.”

“Maybe,” she agreed. Together they watched the place where the alligator had been, but the surface remained smooth and unbroken. There was something otherworldly about the gators, and she understood why Papa had been so captivated by them. And Wade had been hired to kill them, take away the very thing Papa had worked so hard to protect. “I didn’t realize how huge they were.”

“Some can be nine feet long,” Josh said. “My dad used to say they didn’t get that way by being nice.”

His cell phone began to beep.

“Doc Mason,” he told her, holding up a finger. The medical examiner. Aurora had a flash of memory of a stainless-steel table, a man with glasses who helped her. Nana and Papa had shushed her every time she’d mentioned it later, but the memory of the morgue still popped to the surface. Twenty years later, what did Doc Mason remember?

“Great,” Josh was saying into the phone. “She’s with me right now. We can head on over.” He ended the call.

“Doc’s got something for us, from the autopsy,” he told her, the excitement rising in his voice. “He wouldn’t tell me over the phone.” He whistled for Beau. “You ready?”

“Sure.”

He began to trudge back down the path, but Aurora hesitated a moment on the step, looking back at the house.

“Thank you,” she said to Josh’s back.

“What?” He stopped and turned around.

“For helping me,” she said. “You don’t have to do this. I know that. I just really appreciate it.”

“It’s not a big deal.”

“This detective stuff—is this what you did before you worked in the evidence room with Samba?” She caught up with him, avoiding a pile of litter at the bottom of the steps.

“No, I worked narcotics. Undercover drug busts, that kind of stuff.”

“Sounds exciting.”

“I guess.”

“So you’re an undercover cop turned evidence expert who alligator wrestles on the side,” she joked. “What else don’t I know about you, Josh Hudson?”

It was a lame joke, but Aurora saw immediately that she had crossed a boundary, taken a step into forbidden territory. It was engraved on his face, written in the tense way he was now holding his shoulders.

“Not much to tell.” The tightness was in his voice as well, the flirty banter was over. He snapped a branch off a tree leaning into the path and tossed it in the direction of the water. “I’m just like you, born here but grew up somewhere else, then made my way back to the bayou.” They reached the car and he held the door open for her. “We’d better hurry over to Doc Mason’s before he gets called out on a case,” he said, a false brightness in his tone.

She wanted to apologize to him, but for what? What had made him bristle, act so strangely? His words haunted her.

You survived. That’s all we can do.

What had he survived?

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

The last autopsy of the day always made James hungry.

It sounded gruesome, but it was really no different than a businessman looking forward to coming home to a cooked dinner. In James’s world, there was no homemade meal, but there
was
a slightly wilted Cuban sandwich Ruby had picked up for him waiting in the fridge. Now that the last autopsy of the day was complete, nothing was standing in the way of his dinner.

Except Glenn.

“You’re going to eat? Now?” Glenn lolled against the open refrigerator in the break room, his round face pink and shiny as a boiled ham. He was like an unwieldy piece of furniture that James was always stubbing his toe on. A brand-new tech fresh from school in Utah, Glenn straddled the border between eager and downright annoying. James ignored him and reached for the sandwich.

“Detective Hudson and his guest are on his way here, Glenn,” James said. “Let’s clean up around here a little bit.”

The truth was, James wasn’t even sure if Josh would bring Aurora. He wanted to see her, to be able to somehow convey what her mother had been like, fearless and compassionate. There was so much he wanted to say; he wanted to tell her how the memory of their meeting had echoed in every child that had been on his table since then. Nobody ever warned you in medical school about the kids, about what it was like to see them laid out on your table, baby teeth and friendship bracelets and socks with little ruffled edges. In every one of those patients, James had seen Aurora, wondered where she was, hoped that someone was keeping her safe. He wanted to tell her this. But James was no good at these kinds of things, and so of course he would say nothing.

“Yes?” Glenn was still standing there, a questioning expression on his face.

“Ruby wanted me to give you a phone message from earlier,” Glenn stuttered. “Captain Rush at the PD returning your call. Also, I have the report from our earlier patient, Jasmine Doe? It’s on your desk.”

One of their earlier intakes had been a prostitute, killed by blunt force trauma, her body a testament to a life of pain and struggle. James had let Glenn take the lead on the exam, watching as he’d combed the limp strands of her hair, collecting evidence. He’d cradled her head like a baby. Glenn wasn’t so bad, James decided. Annoying, sure, but at least he cared about his job.

“Thanks. Nice work today, Glenn.” The tech grinned and gave him an emphatic thumbs-up.

In the quiet of his office, James hesitated before picking up the receiver, running his hands over Raylene Atchison’s file. Asking the police to open a closed case was risky; criticizing the work of another medical examiner was unheard of. And when that medical examiner was Davis Gentry, who was now a bigwig in the state capital, it was tantamount to career suicide. But Raylene had seen something good in James; she hadn’t been wrong about that.

Rush answered on the first ring. “Cooper’s Bayou PD, Captain Rush speaking.” James had never liked Rush. It was one thing to take your job seriously, but Rush had elevated his position at the PD to the level of a royal birthright.

“Doc Mason here,” James said, trying to sound jovial.

“Doc! Great to hear from you. What can I do for you today?”

“I have some questions about an old case.” James would leave Josh’s name out of the conversation; it seemed Josh had enough troubles of his own.

“Sure.”

“The Atchison homicide,” James said. “I was going through the file, and there are some problems here with the report.”

“Hold on, Doc. You’re talking about Raylene Atchison? That case was closed decades ago. Wade Atchison was guilty as sin. Everybody knows that.”

“I’m not so sure. Looking at these pictures—and given some of the evidence, I think there are some real questions about his guilt.”

There was a long silence at the other end of the phone. “Doc, this case is closed. Leave it alone.”

“What?”

“You heard me. Leave this one alone. Now, if you’re looking for something to do, we’ve still got some cases on the docket here.”

“Captain, with all due respect, I think you need to reopen this case. I’m not criticizing the police work on this matter”—James glanced at the file, half the size it should have been—“but we have some real issues here. Wade Atchison may be innocent.”

“Well, it’s not like he’s in jail, right? Wade’s probably whooping it up someplace in California or, hell, working a margarita stand in Mexico. No harm, no foul, Doc. I ain’t authorizing a reopening of this one. Leave this one be.”

The cavalier tone of his voice rattled James. Wasn’t anyone concerned about justice?

“I’m afraid I can’t do that, Captain Rush,” James said. “I’m bound by my ethical obligations to raise a question when there is a discrepancy in the autopsy report.”

Rush laughed. “Well, good luck with that at the DA’s office. A twenty-year-old murder? Some girl from down the bayou? They’re gonna laugh you all the way out of your job, Doc Mason. I’m telling you, the case is closed. Now, I have some paperwork to get to, and I’m sure you do as well. Good afternoon.”

James sank, stunned, into his desk chair.
Leave this one be
. Maybe Rush was just lazy.
Some girl from down the bayou
. The careless way he said it enraged James, and not just because he was from down the bayou himself. James looked through the glass separating his office from the autopsy bay. In death, they shed all the trappings of their life with their garments, each one deserving the same justice, the same dignity from his office and from the police. James didn’t believe in God, but he knew it wasn’t for him to judge, and it sure as hell wasn’t up to Clarence Rush, either.

Someone knocked softly at the door.

“Just give me a second here, Glenn.”

“I’m sorry—Dr. Mason?”

A young woman edged into his vision. Brown curls, a cherub face. She was taller, she was older, but James would have known her anywhere. There was so much of Raylene in the set of her jaw, the quiet strength in her eyes. Her little bow mouth was set in the same stubborn line that it had been all those years ago.

“Aurora,” he said. Before he could stop himself, he was on his feet and doing what he had done that July evening so many years before, putting his arms around her in a hug. She squeezed back, resting her head on his shoulder.

“It’s good to meet you,” she said, “again. Josh said you might be able to help us?”

“I’m going to do everything I can,” he said, looking over her at Josh Hudson, standing in the doorway. She ran a finger over the open file, the picture of Raylene on the riverbank.

“I’m sorry,” James said quickly. “Looking at these—I can’t imagine.” He flipped over the photograph to reveal the one of Raylene in life, standing in the front of a pontoon boat. “I knew your mother a little bit.”