The Delta Murders

Blacktop turned to gravel. Gravel turned to mud. The GPS died twenty minutes ago.

Cane Parish doesn’t want to be found.

Sarah pulled over and cut the engine. Through the windshield: yellow crime scene tape, a clearing, and the particular stillness that settles over a place after something terrible has happened in it. Like the land itself is holding its breath.

She got out.

The heat was a fist. Immediate and total. The kind that makes you forget there was ever a world with air conditioning or clean wind or anything that didn’t smell like standing water and sweet rot. Her boots sank an inch into the mud before she’d taken three steps. The air tasted like copper and gardenia and she hated that combination now. She always would.

She ducked under the tape.

The symbols were worse in person.

The photographs Doucet had sent her were clinical, flattened, the way photographs always make horror manageable. Standing over them now, crouching with her elbows on her knees and her pulse doing something loud and ugly in her throat, there was nothing manageable about it. Concentric rings broken by angular shapes, drawn in something darker than the soil around them. Not paint. Paint didn’t soak in like this. Paint didn’t look like it had been fed into the ground.

She pressed two fingers to the edge of the outermost ring without touching it.

Not voodoo. She knew enough to know that. This was something assembled. Borrowed pieces from different traditions, chosen the way you’d choose tools. Whoever did this had a specific job in mind.

Her stomach clenched and she breathed through it.

Cheryl Fontenot. Thirty-one. Records clerk. Choir singer at St. Francis. Fourth-grade daughter named Maya who was staying with her grandmother now because there was nobody else.

Sarah stood up. She took thirty photographs and then she took thirty more.

The rain started while she was still standing there. Not a warning, no gentle lead-in. Just suddenly: rain. Fat and heavy and immediate, the way storms work down here. She was soaked through before she reached her truck.

She sat in the driver’s seat and looked at the photographs on her phone until they stopped being images and started being information.

Then she started the engine.

She had one more stop.

She’d been rehearsing the opening line since New Orleans.

She still didn’t have one.

The house at the end of Millhaven Road hadn’t changed. That felt deliberate.

Deep grayish-blue paint. Shutters closed. Live oaks grown so old their branches had fused overhead and made the driveway into a tunnel. His truck was there. Rust along the wheel wells. Mud on the tires like he’d been somewhere recently and didn’t care who knew it.

She knocked.

Waited.

The door opened and she understood immediately that she had been wrong about what seven years would do to a man.

She had imagined him softened somehow. Reduced. What she got was the opposite. Elias Cormier looked like something that had been left out in the elements too long and had hardened instead of breaking down. He’d lost weight he hadn’t needed to lose. His face was angular in a way it hadn’t been, like his bones had gotten closer to the surface. There were shadows under his eyes that looked permanent. His hair curled at the ends from the wet air and he hadn’t done anything about it.

He looked like a man who had stopped negotiating with the world.

He looked at her the way he always had. Too slowly. Like he was reading something.

“Sarah.” Flat. Not surprised. Not glad.

“I need to talk to you about Cheryl Fontenot.”

“I know why you’re here.”

“Then step back from the door.”

A beat. He stepped back.

She walked in.

The house smelled like coffee and old wood and something beneath that, like closed rooms and no sleep and a kind of determined solitude. Books everywhere. Not shelved. Just present, stacked on the floor and draped over chair arms like he’d set them down mid-thought and never returned. The ceiling fan turned overhead without improving anything.

He poured coffee without asking. Set hers in front of her and sat across the table and looked at her with those too-slow eyes and said nothing.

She sat down.

“Tell me about that morning,” she said.

“I gave a statement.”

“Tell me again.”

He wrapped both hands around his mug. His knuckles were scraped. She noticed and said nothing. He looked at the table and spoke like a man reciting something he’d been over so many times it had worn smooth.

“I walk that road most mornings. Cut through past the Tremaine property, come back along the water. I smelled it before I saw anything.” He stopped. Looked up. “You know what that smell is.”

“Yes.”

“I saw the clearing. The shapes in the ground. Her.” Something moved across his face and was gone. “I called it in. I stayed until the sirens.”

“You didn’t approach the body.”

“She was gone. There was nothing to approach.”

She watched his face the way she had been trained to watch faces. For the seams. For the place where the performance meets the person underneath.

She found nothing.

That was either very good or very bad.

“Why are you still in this parish?” she asked.

He looked at her like the question was almost funny. “Where would I go.”

“Anywhere.”

“You went anywhere,” he said. “How’d that work out.”

The air between them had a specific quality. She recognized it and hated recognizing it. Seven years and she still knew the frequency of him. Could feel it in her chest like a key finding a lock she’d thought she’d changed. His jaw was tight. He knew it too. He was doing the same thing she was doing: staying very still and hoping stillness was enough.

It wasn’t enough. It had never been enough with him. That had always been the problem.

“I need access to the water routes,” she said. “The trails you use.”

“I’ll take you.”

“I’m not asking you to come.”

“The bayou at night takes people.” His voice didn’t move. “You’ve been gone a long time, Sarah.”

She held his gaze for three full seconds.

“Seven in the morning,” she said.

“I’ll be up.”

She stood. He stood. The kitchen was small and they were suddenly close and she felt him decide not to say something. She watched him make that decision. He watched her watch him make it.

She picked up her bag and walked out through the front room and down the porch steps into the rain.

She didn’t run.

She didn’t look back.

She got into her truck, closed the door, and sat with her hands on the wheel and her wet hair dripping onto the seat and breathed. Just breathed.

Then she opened the case folder.

She went to the wide overhead shot. The one she’d been avoiding. She turned on her flashlight and held it over the image and looked at it the way she should have looked at it before.

The symbols filled the center of the frame. Concentric rings. Angular shapes. All of it contained within the scene tape.

Except.

Bottom right corner. Outside the tape. Where the photographer had been standing.

One symbol. Pressed into the mud. Small and clean and deliberate.

Not inside the scene.

Behind the photographer.

Someone had drawn it while the police were still working.

Someone had been standing there watching.

Her phone buzzed.

Unknown number. One image file.

She opened it.

Her truck. Photographed from behind. Taken tonight. Rain on the lens. Millhaven Road, and in the background, small and amber, the gallery light of Elias’s house.

The photographer had been standing between them.