The Whispering Room

But a cottonmouth was a far cry from a harmless garter snake.

The power of those sinewy muscles as they bunched around her leg both terrified and repulsed her. As she watched in horrified fascination, the snake lifted its black, leathery head and, tongue flicking, stared back at her.

For what seemed an eternity, Evangeline had sat there motionless, barely breathing. Finally, just as her grandmother arrived with a garden hoe, the snake unwound itself from her leg and glided to the water where it swam, head up, into a patch of cypress stumps.

But for the rest of the day, Evangeline couldn’t get the image of that serpent out of her head. She imagined it crawling back up out of the swamp and following her home.

Even safely inside her grandmother’s house, she saw that thick, patterned body everywhere—draped over a chair, coiled in a doorway, slithering underneath the covers of her bed. The hallucinations had gone on for weeks.

She shuddered now as she stared down at the dead man.

“I found bites on both ankles,” Tony said. “And two on his right hand. When we get him stripped, we may find even more. This guy was a veritable snake magnet.”

“Boy howdy.” Mitchell’s tone was grim, but Evangeline could detect an undercurrent of excitement in his voice. This was something different from their normal caseload of stabbings and shootings.

She wished she could share his enthusiasm, but snakes? It could have been anything other than reptiles and she would have been fine. A disem-bowelment, no problem. Mutilation, all in a day’s work. But not snakes. No way.

Mitchell shifted his weight, balancing himself on the balls of his feet. “Poor bastard must have died in agony.”

“No doubt,” Tony agreed. “Probably suffered heart failure.”

“No chance this was an accident?”

Tony shook his head. “Not likely. Do you know how rare it is for someone to die of a snakebite in this country? There’re only about a hundred and fifty cases a year.”

“Only?” Evangeline tried to suppress another shudder. “That sounds like a lot to me.”

Tony turned to her. “Relatively speaking, it’s not. Most hospitals and clinics stock antivenom, although I read somewhere that the supply is running low because the company that made it isn’t producing it anymore. I guess there isn’t enough profit in it.”

“He probably lost consciousness within a few seconds and the snake kept striking,” Mitchell said. “If it was a moccasin, those bastards are vicious. Some people will try to tell you their aggression is a myth, but don’t you believe it. I’ve got stories that would curl your hair.”

“I’ve always heard a bite from a cottonmouth feels like a hammer strike,” Tony said. “But I don’t think one snake could have done this much damage to a grown man. Not even a pit viper. Even after the first couple of bites, he should have still been able to get away.”

Unless he was restrained.

Gingerly, Evangeline lifted the cuff of the victim’s shirt with a probe and peered at his right wrist. There was so much swelling and the skin was so discolored, she couldn’t tell if he had ligature marks or not.

She moved to the left wrist, where she noticed faint bruising just below the edge of the Rolex.

“Could have been caused by the watch band when his arm puffed up,” Mitchell said over her shoulder.

“Maybe,” Evangeline said doubtfully. “But like Tony said, a grown man should have been able to get away, even after the first couple of bites. There must have been a reason why he couldn’t. And how the hell did he end up in here?”

“I wish I could help you out,” Tony said with a teasing smile. “But my job is just to bag ’em and tag ’em.”

“And we’ll need some time before you do that,” Evangeline said.

“Sure thing. Just holler when you’re finished.” His eyes glinted with amusement as he added, “Have fun, Ghoul Girl.”

Evangeline didn’t bother getting irritated. What would be the point? Instead, she turned back to the dead man.

The swelling and discoloration around the wounds was a good indication that he hadn’t died quickly. The venom had had time to spread, and what the poison had done to the body was ghastly.

“Looks like something from a horror movie,” Mitchell muttered.

“Yeah. Or a nightmare.”

Evangeline couldn’t help wondering who the dead man had left behind. A wife? Kids?

She knew something about the anguish and loneliness that faced his loved ones in the coming weeks and months.

For the longest time, she’d tried her damnedest not to let the victims and their families get inside her head, but no matter what she did, no matter how thick she built her defenses, they still found a way in.

They whispered to her in her dreams, screamed at her in her nightmares. And when their silent pleas tugged her from sleep, she obligingly rose in the middle of the night to go over and over the minutiae of their case files, hoping, always hoping, she would find something previously missed. She’d found that the young ones were especially tenacious.

This victim was no child, but what had been done to him was obscene and Evangeline knew it would haunt her.

It already did.

“What do you think?” she asked Mitchell.

“I think we’ve got ourselves an interesting case here.”

“That’s one way of looking at it.”

Mitchell glanced over his shoulder, then lowered his voice. “Jesus, Evie. What the hell are we dealing with? Some kind of voodoo shit?”

“I don’t know. Could be, I guess.” But in spite of how the media tried to play up sensational cases, ritual murder was rare, even in New Orleans.

Evangeline moved to the victim’s feet and examined the soles of his expensive shoes. “Take a look at this, Mitchell.”

He came up beside her. “What’d you find?”

“The bottoms of his shoes are caked with mud, but I don’t see any muddy footprints in here, do you?”

“Which means he didn’t walk in here under his own steam.”

“No big surprise there.” Evangeline glanced around. “Whoever dumped him probably figured it’d be a while before he was found.”

“Question is, was the poor bastard alive or dead when they left him?”

“There should be evidence of lividity somewhere on the body.”

A movement in the corner of the room gave Evangeline a start, and it took all her willpower not to retreat from that filthy, ramshackle house as fast as she could. For all she knew, the serpents that had attacked the victim were still slithering around somewhere in the piles of rubble.

Great. Just great.

Coming face-to-face with a pit viper was all she needed to make her day complete.

All right, get a grip. It’s not a snake. Probably just a rat. Or a big old cockroach.

But Evangeline had a sudden mental image of the victim, hands and feet bound, a gag in his mouth to stifle his screams as sinewy bodies crawled all over him, up his pant legs and down the collar of his shirt.

She imagined his agony as the razor-sharp fangs sank into his soft flesh and the poison spread through his bloodstream, making him weak and sick and maybe even blinding and paralyzing him.

She stood so abruptly, a wave of dizziness washed over her and she put out a hand to steady herself.

Mitchell rose and looked at her in surprise.

“You okay?”

“Yeah, I just don’t like snakes.”