He’d had two basic requirements: warm weather and little crime. The second condition had eliminated all the major cities of the South. Villejeune, though, had been perfect. Though he supposed there might be a little drug traffic in the swamp, it was just that. Little. With no good landing strips in the area, and the nearest metropolitan center fifty miles away, Villejeune held little attraction for drug lords.
Indeed, after looking over the records, he had concluded that there was little crime of any sort in Villejeune. That was fine with Tim Kitteridge.
Now, only two months later, a body had been pulled out of the swamp.
Kitteridge worked himself out from behind the wheel and wondered, not for the first time, if he should have just retired. Still, at fifty-five he had another ten years in him, and though he could have lived on his retirement pay, it would have been tight. On the other hand, retirement would have definitely precluded having to look at corpses, which was something he truly hated.
He slammed the car door shut, crossed the parking lot, and nodded a greeting to Jolene Mayhew, but said nothing else, knowing that if he spoke to the nurse at all, he would proceed to stall even further. Better just to get it over with. He passed through the emergency room, then went down the long corridor. At the end lay the small room that was the morgue. Orrin Hatfield, the coroner, was already there, waiting for him. To his relief, the body was covered, and he made no move to remove the shroud. Instead, he picked up the clipboard on which Hatfield had made his notes and scanned it quickly.
The first space, where the victim’s name should have been filled in, was blank. He glanced questioningly at Hatfield.
The coroner, whom Kitteridge judged to be in his mid-forties, shrugged helplessly. “No identification at all.”
“And neither of the boys recognized him?”
Kitteridge shook his head. “Seems like nobody here’s ever seen him before.”
Just then the door opened and Warren Phillips walked in. “Chief,” he said, nodding to Kitteridge. “Orrin. Jolene tells me we have an unidentified body.”
“Duval and Templar brought it in aground midnight. No ID, and nobody recognizes him.”
Phillips frowned, moving to the table, where he pulled the covering back from the corpse’s face. Taking a deep breath, fighting the nausea that rose in his gut, Tim Kitteridge made himself look, too.
The old man’s eyes were still open, and the rictus of fear that had twisted his features as he died remained frozen in place. But what startled Kitteridge was the man’s age. His hair—only a few straggling wisps—was snow white, and the heavily creased skin of his face was draped loosely around his skull. Most of his teeth were gone, and his body, what Kitteridge could see of it, was little more than skin and bones.
Phillips, a deep frown creasing his brow, pulled the cover farther back, exposing the wound in the man’s chest. A gaping slash, several inches long, laid the man’s rib cage open. Once again Kitteridge fought to control his churning stomach.
Phillips uttered a low whistle. “Whatever got him, it tore his whole sternum out.”
“You mean whoever got him, don’t you?” Kitteridge asked, looking at the doctor. To him, the cut had looked exactly like a knife wound. “Any idea who he is?”
Phillips, still examining the wound, shook his head. “No one I’ve ever seen before.” He glanced up at Orrin Hatfield. “What do you think? Is it a homicide?”
The coroner shrugged. “Probably. But offhand, I’d say the odds are pretty good we’ll never even find out who this is, let alone why somebody might have killed him. If he was poaching on someone else’s trap line, no one will ever talk about it.”
“Any identification on him?” Kitteridge asked.
“Nothing at all.” Hatfield’s eyes met Kitteridge’s. “Did Judd or Marty find anything out there?”
“If they did, they haven’t told me yet. But, Christ, how old was this guy? Ninety?”
Warren Phillips’s lips curved into a thin smile. “Hard to tell with these old swamp rats. And this is sure one of them.”
Kitteridge sighed silently. He was already well aware that the marshlands harbored a closed community of people who shared nothing of their secrets with the townspeople of Villejeune, and in fact were rarely seen in the village at all.
But the swamp sometimes seemed full of them—sallow-faced men in rotting boats, running trap lines and setting nets, scratching a living out of the wilderness. Many of them, he knew, barely