LITMIR.BIZ

       CHAPTER 4

      PEOPLE CAME TO THE fifteen-hundred-acre City Park to feed the ducks or to relax under the spreading live oaks draped with gray-green curtains of Spanish moss. They enjoyed the well-manicured botanical gardens, the Art Deco fountains and sculptures. Children loved the fairy-tale theme park and the famous wooden flying horses on the antique merry-go-round.

      Now spectators gathered to watch a homicide investigation in progress at the lagoon.

      As always, Carson was creeped out by these morbidly curious onlookers. They included grandmothers and teenagers, businessmen in suits and grizzled winos sucking cheap blends out of bagged bottles, but she got a Night of the Living Dead vibe from every one of them.

      Centuries-old oaks loomed over a pool of green water fringed with weeds. Paved paths wound along the edge of the lagoon, connected by gracefully arched stone bridges.

      Some rubberneckers had climbed the trees to get a better view past the police tape.

      “Doesn’t look like the same crowd you see at the opera,” Michael said as he and Carson shouldered through the gawkers on the sidewalk and the jogging path. “Or at monster-truck rallies, for that matter.”

      In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this area had been a popular place for hot-blooded Creoles to engage in duels. They met after sunset, by moonlight, and clashed with thin swords until blood was drawn.

      These days, the park remained open at night, but the combatants were not equally armed and matched, as in the old days. Predators stalked prey and felt confident of escaping punishment in this age when civilization seemed to be unraveling.

      Now uniformed cops held back the ghouls, any one of whom might have been the killer returned to revel in the aftermath of murder. Behind them, yellow crime-scene tape had been strung like Mardi Gras streamers from oak tree to oak tree, blocking off a section of the running path beside the lagoon.

      Michael and Carson were known to many of the attending officers and CSI techs: liked by some, envied by others, loathed by a few.

      She had been the youngest ever to make detective, Michael the second youngest. You paid a price for taking a fast track.

      You paid a price for your style, too, if it wasn’t traditional. And with some of the cynical marking-time-till-pension types, you paid a price if you worked as if you believed that the job was important and that justice mattered.

      Just past the yellow tape, Carson stopped and surveyed the scene.

      A female corpse floated facedown in the scummy water. Her blond hair fanned out like a nimbus, radiant where tree-filtered Louisiana sunlight dappled it.

      Because the sleeves of her dress trapped air, the dead woman’s arms floated in full sight, too. They ended in stumps.

      “New Orleans,” Michael said, quoting a current tourist bureau come-on, “the romance of the bayou.”

      Waiting for instruction, the CSI techs had not yet entered the scene. They had followed Carson and stood now just the other side of the marked perimeter.

      As the investigating detectives, Carson and Michael had to formulate a systematic plan: determine the proper geometry of the search, the subjects and angles of photographs, possible sources of clues…

      In this matter, Michael usually deferred to Carson because she had an intuition that, just to annoy her, he called witchy vision.

      To the nearest uniform on the crime line, Carson said, “Who was the responding officer?”

      “Ned Lohman.”

      “Where is he?”

      “Over there behind those trees.”

      “Why the hell’s he tramping the scene?”. she demanded.

      As if in answer, Lohman appeared from behind the oaks with two homicide detectives,

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