Faye Longchamp 01 - Artifacts

Man can shoot?”
    His question drew no response, so he continued speaking in his oddly deliberate way. “The Wild Man’s tracks looked ordinary, like the footprints of a good-sized man, except you could see where his claws cut into the soil. Gave me the willies.”
    Liz felt a case of the willies coming on, herself.

    A morning spent mucking around in Joyeuse’s dirt was never a morning wasted, but Faye still wished she’d found something worth selling while she was playing in the mud. Joe, bless his heart, had come out to help her, and his company had made the fruitless hours pass pleasantly. They had chosen a spot within view of the great green-and-blue Gulf and the sea winds had brought the salt smell to them where they worked.
    When she went inside, Faye decided it wouldn’t be time-effective to primp for her date without simultaneously doing something productive. So while her facial mask dried, she sloshed Abby’s silver chain around in the cup of formic acid that she hoped would soak off its encrusted grime. It emanated a chemical odor that made Faye think of two things: a manicure and another necklace she had found and cleaned years before, then stored away.
    It was a pendant necklace and it was old, a hundred years or more, but worth no more than the current market price of silver. She had cleaned it, admired its delicate scrollwork, and wondered about the woman whose initials—CSS—were engraved on the back. Intriguing though it was, it hadn’t been worth selling, so she had stashed it in her jewelry box and forgotten it.
    Now Faye cradled it in her palm and put to sleep the everpresent appraiser in her head, the one who knew the street value of everything. She considered it for its aesthetic value. It was dainty, pretty enough to impress a senator, and broken. She debated whether to throw it back in her jewelry box, saving herself the trouble of dragging out her needle-nosed pliers and magnifying glasses, but she’d kinda been saving it for an occasion like this.
    There was enough time before her date with Cyril to give herself a manicure or to fix the pendant, but there wasn’t enough time to do both. Faye opted to fix the pendant. It was one-of-a-kind and having it around her neck would make her look a lot more distinctive than the same red-painted claws anyone else could buy and glue on.

    Sheriff Mike was inexpressibly tired in body and soul. There was nothing much he could do about his body. If a case kept him awake nights, then he missed his beauty sleep. It had happened before. It would happen again. But he didn’t often let a case rumple his soul like this one did. Maybe it was because the dead kids’ weeping parents made him think of Irvin Williford.
    Yesterday, he had excused himself from a pointless meeting in Tallahassee and gone looking for a heckuva big church, one where he could find a priest saying mass in the middle of a day that wasn’t Sunday. And he had found one, too, but he’d left with his soul still rumpled, because the redoubtable Dr. Magda Stockard was there. The woman prayed as fiercely as she did everything else.
    She had raised her head and conveyed, in a single moment of eye contact, her disdain for his failure to lock somebody up for the murder of her kids. Then she’d gone back to praying.
    So here he was, trying to answer her prayers. The forensics lab report from the murderer’s campsite was spread across his lap. It was thorough, but that didn’t make it useful.
    His detectives had found a few hairs, two of them gray, but none with root bulbs, so there would be no DNA evidence. They had overcome the devilishly difficult job of finding anything at all on a windswept, rainsoaked, outdoor murder site by locating a few fibers to go with the hairs. As luck would have it, the fibers were blue. They were cotton, for God’s sake, nothing exotic. How was he supposed to convict somebody when he knew nothing about him except that he owned a pair of jeans or a cotton workshirt?
    His investigators were doing a hell of a job. He would grant them that. In fact, he doubted that big-city officers could do as well if faced with a murder scene in the wilderness. But just having evidence wasn’t enough. It had to be evidence that pointed to a single unique individual, or all this effort led to emptiness.
    He was fighting like the devil to keep this case. Calls from the Feds grew ever more frequent. They were convinced that drugs were involved and they were itching for him