Raw Wounds Read online

  She remained in a crouch alongside the corpse, taking care not to disturb anything on the floor that might prove evidential, and stared into the bloodshot eyes. More than the identity of his slayer she wanted to figure out the motive behind Bowen’s murder, but there was nothing in the cataract stare to enlighten her.

  Finally she stood, distractedly rubbing her wrist as she watched Po slip away his cellphone.

  ‘Cops are on their way,’ he said.

  ‘We should get our stories straight,’ Tess said.

  ‘And I’m supposed to be the lawless one.’

  Ignoring his snarky comeback, she indicated the door. ‘Take a step outside and pull the door to where it was when we arrived. Tell me if you can see anything of Bowen from there.’

  ‘Not possible.’ Po wasn’t being insubordinate; he was stating fact. The direction the door swung on its hinges, there was no possible way they could have spotted Bowen through the narrow gap before they’d entered. Tess didn’t want to admit to trespassing in the house without good reason. They were there to serve a summons but with no legal right to enter the premises uninvited. ‘Take a deep breath, Tess.’

  She nodded, getting his point.

  ‘OK. So when we arrived we found the door partially open. When we knocked it opened a bit more and we got a waft of decomposition. Concerned for Mr Bowen’s welfare, I called out, took a quick look inside and spotted him lying here. We entered hoping we might be able to help him.’

  ‘I didn’t enter further than stepping through the door,’ said Po.

  Tess nodded. ‘Only I entered. Right. But I didn’t touch him because it was obvious he was dead.’

  ‘You touched his collar,’ Po said.

  She’d used her sleeve to cover her fingers when rolling down Bowen’s collar to inspect his neck, but she could have transferred trace evidence when the two fabrics touched. She was going to have to come clean, admit to touching Bowen, which wouldn’t go down well with the investigating officers. It was a case of admitting her curiosity had gotten the better of her, rather than becoming a possible suspect in Bowen’s killing if any trace evidence was matched to her. As a retired sheriff’s deputy samples of her DNA were still on record – taken supposedly for the process of elimination when she was still a law-enforcement officer, and she doubted her records had been deleted now she was a civilian once again.

  ‘OK. So I leaned over him to check for signs of life,’ she decided, ‘so if there was any transference it must’ve happened then.’

  ‘Don’t know what you’re concerned about,’ said Po. ‘By the smell of him Bowen’s been dead for days. Nobody in their right mind would suggest we had anything to do with his death.’

  ‘Just covering our bases.’ Tess knew how these things worked. As and when a suspect was found, she didn’t want a case against him clouded by conflicting evidence: a defence team would question the validity of any forensic evidence against their client if a conflicting DNA match had corrupted it. ‘I’m going to admit to checking him out, and have myself eliminated from the get go. I’ll probably get my knuckles rapped for this.’

  ‘Now you know why I didn’t join you over there.’

  ‘Po,’ she said cagily, ‘sometimes I worry that you know too much about police work. Are you sure you’ve left your old ways behind?’

  ‘I’m one of the good guys these days,’ he reassured her. There was no necessity. Tess knew exactly what Po was, and it was because there was something dangerous about him that she couldn’t resist. She wondered what things would have been like between them if she’d never left her law-enforcement career behind: but it was moot, because then they would probably never have met.

  ‘Your hand troubling you?’ Po asked.

  ‘I’m good. Can’t say as much for ol’ Ron over there. You’re as intrigued about his death as I am, right?’

  ‘Gotta admit, it’s got me wondering. But …’ He held up his palms. ‘The cops are coming. It’s their case now. Let’s just back off from this before we get in too deep again.’

  As much as it irked her, Tess exhaled in defeat.

  Po’s cellphone chimed.

  He glanced at the screen, and she watched his mouth draw a tight line, a match for those in his frown.

  ‘Is that the cops?’ Tess asked, though she knew it wasn’t normal protocol for cops to send texts in response to a call.

  ‘Nope. It’s Pinky.”

  He held out the phone and Tess read the message.

  CALL ME. URGENT!

  Their friend Pinky Leclerc was flamboyant, even when composing his text messages.

  Those three short clipped words meant something was seriously wrong.

  THREE

  ‘So he was dead when you arrived?’ The cop was thin-necked, his hair shaved high and tight, and his uniform appeared to have come direct from its packaging, bypassing the steam iron en route. He looked to Tess to be about fifteen years old. Had she ever looked as fresh-faced when first she’d donned a similar uniform?

  ‘I got here about a half hour ago,’ Tess said, making no attempt at disguising her frustration. ‘I didn’t hang around for days before calling it in. So what do you reckon?’

  ‘Ma’am, I know you’re a little rattled, but it’d help us both if you answered my questions simply.’

  Ma’am. The title rankled her. Made her feel old.

  The cop tapped his pen alongside his chin, waiting for Tess to continue. She frowned in response. The guy had a job to do and the sooner she helped him get it done, the sooner she could address what had grabbed her attention.

  ‘He was dead when I arrived.’ She pursed her lips. Decided to come clean and get her faux pas out of the way. ‘When I knocked on the door it swung open and I smelled him. I used to be a cop …’

  She caught the soft nod of professional courtesy from the young man, but his expression remained nonplussed.

  ‘I recognized the smell as decomposition. So I took a step inside and spotted Bowen lying there.’

  ‘Did you touch him?’

  ‘Only to check his vitals.’

  ‘Oh? When he already stank so badly?’

  ‘For all I knew the smell could’ve been from a pet that had died. I checked to make sure I couldn’t help him. You would have done the same.’

  He nodded again, scribbled notes. ‘You said you were here to serve a court summons? Can you corroborate that?’

  ‘You can call the DA if you want.’ Tess waved a short stack of papers at him. ‘Or take a look at these. I didn’t get to serve the summons after all.’

  The cop accepted the official papers from her, and studied them acutely. She doubted he was familiar with a court summons, being so young in service. Tess moved from foot to foot, glancing out the open door to where Po stood.

  Discovering the circumstances of Ron Bowen’s murder had taken second place in Tess’s thoughts the instant she’d watched a cold mask descend over Po’s features. While she initially spoke with the responding police officers, explaining how and why she was at the scene of a murder, Po had gone to stand beside his black Ford Mustang car while calling Pinky Leclerc down in Baton Rouge. Normally Po wasn’t the most emotive of men, but now the lack of any outward manifestation of his feelings told her more than if he were running back and forward tearing out clumps of his hair. His usual demeanor was languid; he had visibly tensed up, his spine rigid. Whatever Pinky had told him was bad. She just wanted to finish up with the cop and go to him. Preferably, she would attend the local police office later and give a full and concise statement, but the young patrolman was determined to get every last detail from her written into his notebook. He was ticking boxes, as he’d been taught to do, so there’d be no complaints about him from the Homicide detectives when they arrived.

  ‘These seem to be in order,’ the cop said, handing back the summons. ‘Now, if you could tell me …’

  Tess wasn’t paying him attention any longer. Po had just kicked angrily at the ground.

  Sh
e held up a hand to the cop, forestalling him. ‘Look. You have my details and my first account. That’ll have to do for now. Excuse me.’ Before he could answer she was out of the door and down the front steps. Po spotted her coming, and grimaced at her.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ She approached close enough that she could touch him, laying a hand on his right wrist. He clenched his phone as if it were a hot rock he was trying to squeeze the heat out of.

  ‘Something has come up.’

  ‘Is Pinky OK?’

  ‘Pinky’s fine. It’s not him, Tess, it’s … somebody else.’

  He turned from her, but didn’t walk away. ‘I can’t talk about this. Not here. Not now.’

  ‘Then let’s get out of here.’ Tess aimed a nod at his Mustang.

  Po glanced back at the house. ‘What about Bowen’s murder?’

  ‘Not important now.’

  ‘The cops finished with you?’

  ‘They know how to find us if they need anything else.’

  ‘I might be unavailable for a few days,’ Po said.

  ‘What? How? Po, what’s going on?’

  ‘I gotta go to Louisiana.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Right now.’

  He headed for the driver’s door of his car and pulled it open. Tess only looked at him, open-mouthed.

  ‘You coming with me?’ He stood, peering back at her over the open door.

  ‘You’re going to drive there?’ Po had a deep and intense aversion to flying that went beyond the norm. So his response surprised her.

  ‘Can you book me a flight online? I need to get moving.’

  Tess climbed inside the Mustang alongside Po, without giving much thought to anything else. He hit the ignition and the muscle car started with a growl as she buckled up. ‘You going to tell me what’s going on now? What’s so urgent that you have to leave this minute?’

  ‘My mother’s dying.’ He looked across at her. His turquoise gaze had dimmed. ‘She wants to see me before she goes.’

  Tess again found her mouth hanging open.

  ‘But … I thought you hated her?’

  ‘I do. Almost as much as she hates me. But who am I to ignore the last wish of a dying woman?’

  ‘Even if it means …’ She didn’t finish her thought because Po nodded sharply.

  ‘Even if it means burying the hatchet with the Chatards,’ he said. ‘It’s unavoidable, I guess. My mom has held out the olive branch, I’m not going to be the asshole to refuse it. If the Chatards have other ideas, then I’ll deal with it: a hatchet can be buried in more ways than one.’

  FOUR

  Tess didn’t know what to say. She was sitting in the kitchen of Po’s ranch-style house near Presumpscot Falls, having returned there with him to throw together a couple of travel bags for their journey down south.

  ‘Now you know all about me,’ Po said. ‘Might explain why I don’t like to talk about my past, and why going home isn’t usually the first thing on my mind.’

  Puffing out her cheeks, Tess still had no words. Po turned away, poured coffee from the pot he had going. He placed a steaming mug before her. ‘I know it’s a lot to take in, Tess. Believe me, I’m not looking forward to this, not one bit. But I have to go.’

  She nodded, though there was no conscious process to her response. She was still mulling over the bombshell he had just related to her, fitting it onto the sequence of his life events she’d already grown aware of since they met a few months ago.

  Po had spent a dozen years incarcerated at the Farm – otherwise known as Angola or the Louisiana State Penitentiary – after killing a man as an act of revenge. While he was serving his time, a brother of Po’s victim tried to avenge his sibling, coming at Po with a shiv, intending to take out his eyes. Po still wore the scars on his forearms that saved both his vision and his life. The brother wasn’t as lucky. After taking the shiv off him, Po returned the makeshift weapon, seating it in his would-be killer’s neck. Both dead men belonged to the Chatard family. She knew all that.

  Also, Tess had learned that Po’s father Jacques had died during a heated confrontation, and that her partner had subsequently killed the man that murdered him. She also knew that the confrontation had come as a result of bubbling hatred between the Villere and Chatard families, and had something to do with the behaviour of his estranged mother. But she’d never gotten the full story from Po before. Po was guarded when it came to talking about his mother, though he made no attempt to conceal his disliking of her or her actions. He’d once intimated, in a roundabout manner, that his mother was the perpetrator of domestic abuse, directed mainly at his father, but she’d formed the impression that perhaps as a boy Po had also experienced her wrath. She had never pushed him for details, because she knew it was difficult to open up about a difficult past. When first they met and she was yet to trust him, she’d tried to look into his history but came to a dead end. She could have done some more digging, used her skills as an investigator to get to the story without teasing it from him, but she’d come to respect his privacy too much. Sooner rather than later Po would have opened up to her in his own time, and she’d been prepared to wait. Discovering the truth after a brief text message from their friend down in Baton Rouge was a huge surprise.

  Clara had been an unfaithful wife to Po’s father. Not once but on a number of occasions, and with different lovers. His parents had split up more times than Po was willing to recount, but Clara had always come crawling back to their family home when she realized that the grass wasn’t greener in any other relationship. Whenever she returned to the fold Clara would weep, make promises about her faithfulness, but they never lasted: they were crocodile tears and false pledges. Soon she’d twist things, and when his dad wouldn’t admit to being the one to blame for her infidelity, the tears would come again, but this time driven by a fury that transformed her into a screaming banshee that enforced her argument with a vicious tongue and swinging fists.

  The final straw was when Po’s father learned Clara had been sneaking around again. One man’s tolerance could last only so long. This time it was him who sent her packing, and she’d rushed directly into the arms of her latest lover, Darius Chatard, a supposed friend of his. Shortly afterwards their neighbours were whispering about how Clara had conceived a child with her latest beau. Stinging with ignominy, Jacques couldn’t endure the shame for long. He was a quiet man, but he couldn’t take the whispers behind his back, the ridicule or the suggestion that Clara had left him because he was unable to father another child with her. He’d gone to set the record straight. But he hadn’t found his old friend waiting, but one of his adult sons, and what happened next had set the tone of Po’s life for the following quarter-century.

  ‘The man you killed was your stepbrother?’ Tess finally said.

  ‘We weren’t related at the time. My mother didn’t marry Darius Chatard until after I was locked up at the Farm.’

  ‘What about the brother that tried to stab you to death?’

  ‘He didn’t make it to the wedding. Besides, I’ll never think of any of those a-holes as family. My mother might’ve joined them, but the Chatards mean nothing to me.’

  ‘But those who’ve sworn this blood feud with you are your stepbrothers now,’ she went on.

  There were two living brothers, not to mention a bunch of cousins who had sworn to avenge their dead kin. During a trip to Louisiana a few months ago, Tess had witnessed first-hand the kind of trouble their pledge meant for Po when two armed thugs tried to claim the bounty on his head. Thankfully she’d been there to even the odds in Po’s favour. Things could have ended very differently otherwise.

  ‘You do understand no good will come of this?’ she said.

  ‘You don’t want me to go?’

  ‘You must go, and I’m coming with you. But for some reason, I’m not sure it’s the best decision I’ve ever made. Not after everything that’s happened. I mean … I thought my relationship with my mom was prickly, but this goes way
beyond any disagreement I’ve ever had with her.’

  ‘Your mom is an angel compared to mine.’

  ‘I think that’s a matter of perspective.’ Tess reached tentatively for her coffee, but never touched the mug. Instead her fingers went through her hair. ‘Then again maybe not. My mom can be a disapproving bitch at times, but she’s never sicked a bunch of killers on me before.’

  Po’s eyebrows made a slow dance as he mulled things over. ‘My mother isn’t behind the bounty on me. That’s on her husband and stepsons. But then again, she hasn’t done much to play mediator either. Who knows, maybe this is all a ploy to get me where her menfolk can get their hands on me.’

  ‘You can’t be serious?’

  ‘Nope. I’m talking BS.’ He flicked a hand at the laptop she’d set aside on the kitchen counter. ‘How’d you get on with booking us seats?’

  ‘I’ve got us on a six a.m. flight out of Portland that gets us to Baton Rouge for midday.’ She watched Po’s face fold at the prospect of being trapped within an airplane for hours. ‘We have a stopover in Atlanta, so you’ll be able to stretch your legs, grab a cigarette or whatever. Best I could do at short notice. Flying to New Orleans shaves half an hour off the time, but then you won’t be able to collect Pinky on the way.’

  He shrugged. ‘I’ll have to endure it: Pinky’s worth the extra half hour. I’ll have him meet us at Baton Rouge. We can drive to the hospital from there, should make it there by late afternoon.’ He laughed without humour. ‘That’s if Mom doesn’t decide to slight me again. Wouldn’t put it past her to die before I can get there.’

  Tess turned her face aside, burning at her guilty thoughts. Maybe Clara dying before he reached the hospital would be best for them all. According to Pinky, Clara wanted to impart something important to her son, but it was as she’d already attested, nothing good could come from hearing the woman’s last words. She hoped it was to tell Po how sorry she was and ask for his forgiveness, but in her gut, Tess knew that wasn’t it.