Thoughts of murder came, seeping into her like cold, and she shivered again and rubbed her hands over her arms as an image flashed through her head. A young woman lying out here, alone, dead, the swamp watching, knowing, keeping its secrets…
"Hey, ugly, outta my seat."
Jack's voice snapped the terrible vision, and she jumped. Huey grumbled a protest and clambered between the seats to the back, where he curled up in a ball with his back to them.
"Not your dog." Laurel rolled her eyes.
Jack grinned as he climbed behind the wheel, teeth flashing bright in the gloom. "I can't help it if he finds my personality irresistible." He tossed a dirty denim jacket across her lap. "Put that on. I charmed Nipper out of it on your behalf."
Laurel wasn't sure whether she should thank him or not. The jacket reeked of male sweat, cigarette smoke, and gasoline, but the Jeep was open, and the ride back was likely to be a chilly one, considering her damp state. She wrinkled her nose and shrugged into the coat. The sleeves hung past her fingertips.
"You okay?"
She glanced up from rolling the cuffs back.
"You looked a little peaked there a minute ago."
"I was just thinking… about that girl they found…" And what it would be like to die out here with no one to see, no one to hear but the swamp. She kept that part of her thoughts to herself. She had too vivid an imagination, put herself too easily in the place of others. Not a good trait for someone who had to deal with the victims of violent crimes. It was that inability to draw the line between sympathy and empathy that made her vulnerable.
"Bad business, that," Jack said softly, his hand on the key, his eyes scanning the darkening swamp.
A barred owl called four round notes, then lifted off from the branches of a nearby cypress tree, its wide wings beating the air, barely making a sound. Laurel pulled the smelly jacket tighter around her.
"Did you know any of them?"
He shot her a hard glance. "Are you questioning me, counselor? Should I have a lawyer present?"
Laurel pushed past the question of whether his tone held sarcasm or defensiveness, not sure she wanted to know the answer. "I'm asking an innocent question. Self-professed lady's man that you are, it wouldn't seem too unreasonable that you would have known one of the victims."
"I didn't. None of them were from here."
Four bodies. Four parishes in Acadiana, but not Partout. No victims from Partout Parish, no victims found here. Laurel couldn't help wondering if that was by chance or by design. If Partout Parish might be next on the killer's list. She looked at the wilderness around them and thought again about the terrible loneliness of dying out here.
The swamp was an unforgiving place. Beautiful, brutal bitch. Steamy and seductive and secretive. Death here was commonplace, a part of the cycle. Trees died, fell, decayed, became a part of the fertile ground so more trees could grow from it. Mayflies were eaten by frogs, frogs by snakes, snakes by alligators. No death would find sympathy here. It was a place of predators.
She glanced at Jack. Jack, who had teased her out of her mood at Beauvoir. Jack, with his devil's grin. He wasn't grinning now. That mask had fallen away to reveal the intensity that she suspected was the core of him. Hard. Hot. Shadowed.
"The only place I kill people is on paper, sugar," he said. He pulled a cigarette from his shirt pocket, dangled it from his lip.
The word "liar" rang in his head as he swung the Jeep around in a U-turn and headed for town.
Savannah stood outside the French doors of Coop's study, hiding among the overgrown lilac bushes beside the comfortable old house, watching as he worked. He sat at his desk, hunched over his notebook, a cigar smoldering in the ashtray, a snifter of brandy sitting besdie it. The desk lamp was the only light on in the house, creating an oasis of soft, buttery light around him. Through the glass he seemed like a dream, a warm, golden dream she would never be able to grasp and hold on to. Always held at bay by an invisible barrier. Her past. His devotion to his wife.
Damn Astor Cooper. Why couldn't she just die and be done with it? What a cruel bitch she was, hanging on to him with her invisible threads when she was nothing more than a shell. She may have been a lovely woman in her time. Savannah imagined her as being sweet and demure and gracious. Everything she wasn't. Respectable, the perfect wife, the perfect hostess. But Coop's wife was nothing now, and she could give him nothing but heartache. Her mind was gone. Only her body lived on, functioning automatically, tended by nurses.
I could give him something. I could give him everything, Savannah thought, absently smoothing her hands down her wrinkled silk tank.
Like she had given Ronnie Peltier everything?
She tightened her jaw at the bitter inner voice, tightened her hold on the lilac branch. She'd had sex with Ronnie because she had wanted to, needed to. There was nothing to feel guilty about. Not the way she had offered herself, not the way she had given herself, not the greedy, insatiable way she had taken him.
"It's what you were made for, Savannah… You always want it, Savannah…"
That was the truth. The truth that had been burned into her brain night after night. She was a born seductress, built for sin. There was no use fighting her true nature.
She hadn't fought it tonight. The scents of sex and Ronnie's Aqua Velva aftershave lingered on her in testimony to the fact. They hadn't even made it to his trailer house before succumbing to their passions. Savannah had made him pull his truck in around back of the old lumber yard and climbed on him right there on the bench seat of his Ford Ranger. Ronnie made no protest, asked for no explanations. That was what she liked about young men-they were uncomplicated. There were no moral millstones weighing down Ronnie Peltier. He was perfectly willing to drop his Levi's and just go at it for the sheer fun of it.
Arousal and shame grappled for control within her, twisting, struggling against each other, and tears rose in her eyes, blurring her vision of Coop as he sat writing.
"Damn you, Conroy Cooper," she mumbled, hating the feelings writhing inside her, and directing that hate at Coop. It was his fault. If she hadn't fallen in love with him, if he weren't so damn noble… He was the one who made her feel like a whore.
No. She was a whore. She had been born a whore and trained to perfection. Cooper made her ashamed of it.
Crying silently, she pushed herself away from the lilac bush and sidled along the house like a thief. She pressed herself against the clapboard siding and crept along to the edge of the French doors, where she pressed her face against the glass.
Cooper straightened his back slowly, wincing as he set his pen aside. His brain felt numb and empty, like a sponge that had been wrung out by merciless hands. The analogy struck him as one last drop of inspiration, and he started to reach for his pen again to scribble it down when a movement at the French doors caught his peripheral vision.
" Savannah?" He mumbled her name to himself, straining his eyes against the darkness that cloaked her features. Of course it was. She would come to him now in contrition, as she always did after one of her little blowups. And he would take her back and comfort her. They had gone through this cycle before. Savannah was a creature of habit. He frowned at the thought that her habits included self-inflicted torment and degradation.
She fell into his arms the second he opened the doors, sobbing like a child. Cooper folded his arms around her and rocked her and murmured to her, his lips brushing softly against her wild mane.