Faye Longchamp 01 - Artifacts

to share a bit of gossip about the double murder. Nguyen had no time to watch a couple of rednecks jaw at each other. He walked out, leaving his potted meat and bread on the counter.

    Stuart Sheffield was aware that his neighbors hated him. They hated his rusty singlewide. They hated the ramshackle roofover that covered the trailer’s leaking shingles and sheltered two porches, front and back, where he stored broken stuff that he didn’t feel like hauling to the dump. They especially hated every scrap of trash that could be seen from the road (including Stuart himself, who sat drinking beer on the front porch with daily regularity), because they felt the condition of his home lowered their property values and made them look like rednecks by association. And they were right.
    Nevertheless, Stuart liked his environment precisely the way it was. He lifted a beer can in tribute to every car that drove past his private paradise, listening all the while for the sound of real estate prices tumbling. He particularly enjoyed the fact that his choice of careers gave him plenty of idle time to annoy his neighbors, because a man in his line of work could afford to work very rarely indeed.
    He would be working this week for a change and the anticipation vibrated in his chest, just as his cell phone had vibrated in his pocket not an hour before. It still tickled him to mate the tiny phone with his teeny palmtop computer, bringing the World Wide Web to his very own porch. E-mail was a beautifully anonymous way to deal with the kind of people who hired him and Stuart had just snagged himself a new client.
    The job was practically in his backyard—he could drive there in a couple hours, easy—so tonight he’d be a guest of the Panacea Palace Motel, and his new client would be footing the bill. The household staff of the Panacea Palace would make his bed and cook his meals and swab out his toilet, while he focused all his attention on finding a tall, broad, pony-tailed man with a tall, broad price on his head. The man and his companion—a slender, dark adolescent boy—had been seen digging in the Last Isles and, although his new client was stingy with information, Stuart inferred that the Last Isles weren’t safe places to dig. With appropriate coercion, Mr. Ponytail would lead him to his young friend so that Stuart could conveniently kill them both and make enough money to forget about working. This job would pay him so much that he could look forward to simply sipping beer on his front porch every day for a year.

    “I think Sheriff McKenzie was trying to get rid of us,” Magda said, as she sat in her car in the parking lot at Wally’s. She looked too tired to crank it.
    “No. Not us,” Faye said, leaning in the window to say good-bye. “He was trying to get rid of you . He’s been trying to get rid of you all day.”
    “Well, I told him everything I knew about the kids and what happened to them. He was supposed to tell me everything he knew.”
    Faye rubbed at a stiff cord of muscle in her neck. “I don’t think that’s the way it works.”
    “The kids’ parents aren’t here yet. Somebody had to light a fire under the cops.”
    Faye grimaced, remembering how Magda had leaned over the crime scene tape all morning until they dragged her ashore, bellowing instructions to the investigators on proper handling of their forensics samples. “I bet those guys do a better job of tracking their chain-of-custody forms next time.”
    Magda shrugged and found the energy to crank the engine. “Where’s your car?”
    “My car’s no help. I left my skiff at Seagreen Island when we came in on the sheriff’s boat and I can’t get back to the Gopher without it. I’m stuck ashore till morning. Maybe Wally will let me sleep on his boat.”
    Magda grunted. “Wally works his boat hard. It’s dirty and it smells like fish guts. Want to grab a burger and bunk on my couch?”
    “In Tallahassee?”
    “No, genius. Even Dr. Raleigh, my department chairman, agrees a daily drive to and from Tallahassee would be a tough commute. The university keeps a few cottages and a trailer in metropolitan Panacea for researchers working at the marine lab there. The cottages were full, so I got the trailer.”
    “You say that as if it’s a good thing.”
    “The trailer has a satellite dish.”

    Stuart circled through the parking lot at Wally’s Marina, scoping out the territory. His new client had suggested that he begin his search for