“Oh, right.”
Sonny Betts. As slimy and vicious as they came and that was saying a lot for New Orleans.
Betts was one of the new breed of drug thugs that had flocked back to the city after Katrina. More ambitious and more brutal than their predecessors, guys like Betts no longer hid in the shadows to conduct their nefarious business practices because the city’s corrupt legal system and lawlessness allowed them to operate with brazen impunity in broad daylight.
“The feds put a lot of resources into building a case against Betts, and then Mr. Big-Shot-Attorney here goes and gets him off without even a slap on the wrist,” Mitchell said. “I think it’s fair to say they were more than a little pissed.”
“No kidding.”
He nodded toward the victim. “You think Betts had a hand in this?”
Evangeline shrugged. “Seems a poor way to thank a guy for keeping your ass out of a federal pen, but I wouldn’t put it past him.”
Tony Vincent walked up just then and Mitchell clapped him on the back. “Anthony! How goes the morgue business these days?”
He grinned. “Clients ain’t complaining.”
His gaze drifted to Evangeline, and she pretended she didn’t notice the lingering glance he gave her. She didn’t like the way he’d started looking at her lately. He was an attractive guy and he had a lot going for him, but she wasn’t ready to date. Not even close.
She couldn’t imagine herself going out to a movie or to dinner with anyone but Johnny. She couldn’t imagine another man’s lips on her mouth, another man’s hands on her body. She got lonely at times, sure, but never enough to betray the memory of her husband.
Which was not a very realistic or even sane way to spend the rest of her life, she freely acknowledged. But it was how she chose to live it at the moment.
Tony was still watching her. “Y’all ready to get this show on the road?”
Evangeline tried to ignore him, but, damn, the man really was something to look at. Almost too handsome in her book. She didn’t go for the pretty-boy types.
Never in a million years would Johnny have been considered a pretty boy. Or even conventionally handsome. Not with his broken nose and crooked smile. But right up until the day he died, his boy-next-door looks had made Evangeline’s heart pound.
“What have you got so far?” she asked crisply, snapping on a pair of latex gloves.
“Advanced putrefaction and seventeen-millimeter maggots. This guy’s been here for a while.”
She wrinkled her nose. “We can tell that from the smell. Can you be a little more specific?”
“Best guess, four to five days, but in this humidity…” Tony shrugged. “We’ll know more when we get him on the slab.”
“Cause of death?”
His eyes twinkled. “Oh, you’re going to love this.”
Yeah, I just bet I will.
They moved in unison to the body and squatted.
With his gloved hands, Tony turned the corpse’s head so they could see the right side of his face, which was severely swollen and discolored.
Extracting a pen from his pocket, he pointed to a spot near the jawline.
“What are we looking at?” Mitchell asked curiously.
“Puncture wounds. Skin necrosis is pretty severe so you have to look hard to spot them. See here?”
“What made them?” Forgetting about her previous wariness around Tony, Evangeline moved in closer to get a better look.
He gave her a sidelong glance when her shoulder brushed against his. “Would you believe, fangs?”
“What?”
He laughed at her reaction. “No need to sharpen the wooden stakes just yet. I don’t think we’re dealing with a vampire. See this dried crusty stuff on his skin? I’m pretty sure that’s venom, probably mixed in with a little pus.”
A thrill of foreboding raced up Evangeline’s spine. She had a bad feeling she knew what was coming next. And for her, dealing with the undead would have been infinitely preferable.
“Holy shit.” Mitchell stared at the body in awe.
“You saying this guy died from a snakebite?”
“Bites,” Tony clarified. “They’re all over him.”
“Jesus.”
A wave of nausea rolled through Evangeline’s stomach, and her skin started to crawl. She didn’t like snakes. At all. It was an inconvenient aversion for someone who had lived in Louisiana all her life. Serpents in the South were almost as plentiful as mosquitoes.
Evangeline was pretty sure her almost pathologi-cal loathing could be traced back to a specific incident in her childhood, while she’d been visiting her grandmother in the country. They’d been fishing from the bank of a bayou, and Evangeline had been so intent on the bobble of her little cork floater among the lily pads, she hadn’t noticed the huge cottonmouth that had crawled out from underneath the rotting log she’d perched on.
“Evie, honey, don’t you move a muscle. You hear me?” her grandmother had said in a hushed tone.
Evangeline had started to ask why, but then she froze when she saw the look on her grandmother’s face. She glanced down to find a thick, ropey body coiling around her ankle.
She’d seen snakes before, plenty of them. Her brother used to catch garter snakes in the yard and keep them in a cage in his bedroom.
But a cottonmouth was a far cry from a harmless garter snake.
The power of those sinewy muscles as they bunched around her leg both terrified and repulsed her. As she watched in horrified fascination, the snake lifted its black, leathery head and, tongue flicking, stared back at her.
For what seemed an eternity, Evangeline had sat there motionless, barely breathing. Finally, just as her grandmother arrived with a garden hoe, the snake unwound itself from her leg and glided to the water where it swam, head up, into a patch of cypress stumps.
But for the rest of the day, Evangeline couldn’t get the image of that serpent out of her head. She imagined it crawling back up out of the swamp and following her home.
Even safely inside her grandmother’s house, she saw that thick, patterned body everywhere—draped over a chair, coiled in a doorway, slithering underneath the covers of her bed. The hallucinations had gone on for weeks.
She shuddered now as she stared down at the dead man.
“I found bites on both ankles,” Tony said. “And two on his right hand. When we get him stripped, we may find even more. This guy was a veritable snake magnet.”
“Boy howdy.” Mitchell’s tone was grim, but Evangeline could detect an undercurrent of excitement in his voice. This was something different from their normal caseload of stabbings and shootings.
She wished she could share his enthusiasm, but snakes? It could have been anything other than reptiles and she would have been fine. A disem-bowelment, no problem. Mutilation, all in a day’s work. But not snakes. No way.
Mitchell shifted his weight, balancing himself on the balls of his feet. “Poor bastard must have died in agony.”
“No doubt,” Tony agreed. “Probably suffered heart failure.”
“No chance this was an accident?”
Tony shook his head. “Not likely. Do you know how rare it is for someone to die of a snakebite in this country? There’re only about a hundred and fifty cases a year.”
“Only?” Evangeline tried to suppress another shudder. “That sounds like a lot to me.”
Tony turned to her. “Relatively speaking, it’s not. Most hospitals and clinics stock antivenom, although I read somewhere that the supply is running low because the company that made it isn’t producing it anymore. I guess there isn’t enough profit in it.”