to dispose of him in this channel full of big muddies.” Lozza addressed Barney. “Want to show me the way to that old farmhouse?”
“Are you bloody nuts? No bloody way I’m going in there. Not to that place. Not now. In this weather? Hell no.” He made another sign of the cross over his body.
Thunder clapped and rain doubled in volume and velocity. Water bounced off the river almost a half meter high, creating a shimmering silvery cauldron as white lightning pulsed through the mangrove swamp.
Lozza left Mac manning the watercraft and radio while Gregg strung out blue-and-white crime scene tape, marking off the immediate area. She picked her way slowly along a narrow and dark path through the tangle of trees. A wet spiderweb caught her across the face, and she started. She wiped the sticky threads off and continued. Reeds snapped back, branches clawed at her jacket.
A lizard as large as a small dog scurried across her path. She stilled and controlled her breathing before continuing again.
Lightning flared simultaneously with a loud crack of thunder, and she saw the house. The thunder grumbled into the distance, the forest went black again, and the rain drummed down even harder, creating little rivers through the swamp. Lozza picked her way carefully along the wet path until she came upon the derelict building.
It was a single story with an old tin roof that clattered under the raindrops. A covered veranda ran around the house. Lightning flashed again and silhouetted the low building against gnarled trees.
She made her way to the front door. The porch floor was rotted, and the door hung on rusted hinges. She creaked it open.
A bat darted out and she ducked. The creature’s claws tangled in her cap and hair before it fluttered out into the swamp with a screech and a whopping of wings. Her heart hammered. She entered the building. It was sweltering inside the house. It smelled of urine and excrement and . . . something worse. Like putrid meat. She panned her beam across the room. It lit on a broken table. Two chairs with metal legs. A kitchen area with an old stove. She made her way deeper into the house. The heat and stench grew stronger. Lozza covered her nose and mouth with her arm. Rain clattered on the old corrugated metal roofing and dripped through holes, puddling on the floor.
She entered a room at the end of the passage. Her eyes adjusted as she tried to make sense of what she was seeing.
A chair in the middle of the room. A man’s boating shoe lay near the chair. Ropes hung down from an exposed rafter. The rope ends trailed around the chair. New ropes. Yellow and blue—same colors as the polyprop tied around the floater’s ankles. The exposed wooden floorboards were stained dark under the chair.
Blood?
Urine?
Lozza looked up and panned her beam along the roof rafter where the ropes had been tied. A sense of horror seeped into her. She entered the room slowly and the air stirred around her, lifting spiderwebs that wafted in the currents her movements created. Heat rose and the stench increased. She aimed her beam into the corner. Her pulse quickened. A pile of excrement.
Human?
She moved closer. Near the pile of feces lay a tangled pair of men’s cargo pants and once-white boxers. The pants were blood-soaked. The boxers appeared soiled with human excrement, and the stink was stifling. She moved her light back to the chair and froze as something near the far wall caught her eye.
Lozza inched toward it. Floorboards creaked beneath her boots. A gecko scurried, and something cried outside. She crouched down, her arm still covering her mouth and nose.
The missing fingers from the floater’s right hand. Three.
Beside the severed digits lay a pair of secateurs, pruning clippers. On the handle of the clippers was the name of the Cresswell-Smiths’ boat. Abracadabra.
Lozza came slowly to her feet. She began to back away, not wanting to disturb the scene any further. The heel of her boot kicked something that spun and clattered across the wooden floor. She swung her beam in the direction of the sound. A knife. Fishing knife. Bloodied. And behind the knife, more clothing.
Lozza walked slowly over the creaking floorboards, trepidation filling her throat. She crouched down beside the pile and shone her beam on it. A royal-blue windbreaker and a pale-blue Nike baseball cap. Bloodied. The label inside the jacket was legible.
CANADIAN OUTFITTERS
The jacket came from Canada.
She thought of