Pine Lake. Amanda Stevens

       Chapter Two

      Jack sat on his uncle’s boat dock as a fine mist settled over the lake. All around him, the landscape was eerie and primal, a swampy labyrinth of channels and bayous that stretched all the way across the Louisiana border. The town of Pine Lake was less than a quarter of a mile away, but the woods blocked the lights. He could see nothing but the silhouette of trees and a glimpse now and then of the old lake bridge through the curtains of Spanish moss hanging from a dense forest of bald cypress.

      Damn, it was dark out here.

      Jack had forgotten what it was like to be that deep in the country, without the glow of skyscrapers to create a false daylight. As he stared out at the water, the night came alive. A loon trilled from the woods as a mosquito buzzed his ear. A female alligator grunted nearby, warning predators away from her nest. The nocturnal sounds stirred an uneasy excitement. You shouldn’t have come back here, a voice in his head taunted. You’re asking for trouble.

      Yeah, maybe he was.

      He hadn’t told anyone he was coming. Not Nathan, not Tommy. But the cabin had been spotless when he arrived, the cupboards and refrigerator well stocked. Even his uncle’s fishing boat had been scrubbed and gassed up. Jack wasn’t too pleased by the preparations. Nathan’s overconfidence bugged him, but it wasn’t misplaced. He was here, wasn’t he?

      All weekend long he’d brooded about those two phone calls and then come Monday morning, he’d headed upstairs to talk things over with his boss, Ezra Blackthorn. The taciturn head of the agency had listened carefully to Jack’s story, but he hadn’t offered much in the way of advice. Wading back into the muck of his past had been Jack’s decision alone. As much as he dreaded what he might find, he couldn’t ignore any chance, no matter how slim, of finally bringing Anna’s killer to justice. To resolve once and for all what had really happened on that long-ago Friday night.

      But he had no delusions about easy answers. His investigation was likely to get messy. He didn’t trust Nathan or Tommy to tell him the truth. Obviously, they were each working an angle. He could well imagine Tommy Driscoll getting involved in something shady. Even as a kid, Tommy’s innate charm and athletic prowess had fostered a sense of entitlement. He’d learned early on that he could talk his way out of anything and Jack doubted his attitude had changed now that he wore a badge.

      Nathan was a little harder to figure out. He already had money and prestige. Why risk his standing in the community?

      Jack really didn’t care what either of them was up to. He did care that one or both had lied about their whereabouts on the night of Anna’s murder.

      He watched the water with a pensive frown, unable to shake his disquiet. His mind had strayed to such a dark place that when he saw a light flicker on the old lake bridge, he half convinced himself he was being paranoid.

      But no, there it was again. Not a flickering light as he’d first thought, but the bobbing beam of a flashlight moving across the wooden deck. The bridge had been abandoned decades ago, but the rotting floorboards and creaking beams had never dissuaded the local daredevils. He watched for a moment, thinking back to his own misadventures on that bridge.

      The light was no longer moving, he noted. The beam stayed stationary for so long that he had to conclude someone had set the flashlight down on the deck or perhaps wedged it between the braces. If he concentrated hard enough, he could almost conjure a form standing at the guardrail. He was tempted to start up his uncle’s boat and train the spotlight on the bridge, but even so powerful a beam would be swallowed by the misty darkness. Besides which, this was none of his business. He hadn’t come to Pine Lake to get sidetracked—

      He heard a splash as something heavy hit the water. Then the flashlight beam swept down and over the lake, glimmering sporadically through the trees. Jack was far enough away that he couldn’t be spotted, but he instinctively shrank back into the shadows.

      For the longest time, the light moved slowly over the water. Then the glow vanished, only to reappear bobbing toward the end of the bridge. A few minutes later, Jack heard the sound of a car engine on the far side of the lake. Not a frantic rev but a stealthy purr as the car slowly drove away on the old dirt road.

      He didn’t know what to make of the splash or the light. People had been known to use the lake as a dumping site. If caught, the offense carried a stiff penalty, but back in Jack’s day, the area around the bridge had rarely been patrolled. Which was undoubtedly the reason Anna’s killer had chosen to dump her body from the deck.

      That splash...

      What were the chances another body had been thrown from the bridge on the very night he’d returned to Pine Lake? Slim to none, Jack decided, but he knew the sound would niggle at him all night. Might as well take the boat out and have a look.

      * * *

      A FEW MINUTES LATER, Jack maneuvered away from the dock and headed into the channel. It was even darker on the water. He didn’t want to turn on his running lights, much less the spotlight in case someone lurked nearby. But it was dangerous to be on the lake blind. Dangerous for others, dangerous for him. If he strayed from the middle of the channel, he had to worry about cypress knees below the surface and those thick mats of aquatic vegetation that could entangle the boat’s propeller.

      He turned on the spotlight, keeping the beam concentrated on the water ahead of him. As he neared the bridge, he shifted into neutral and drifted as he trained the light along the banks where ground mist thickened. Cypress trees rose from the shallows like bearded sentinels, obscuring both ends of the bridge. Beyond the lake was the pine forest and all along the water’s edge, a creeping carpet of lily pads and lotus.

      He made a pass underneath the first span of the bridge, once again searching along the banks and in the deeper water of the channel before returning through the second span. Clouds blocked the moon so thoroughly he had to rely solely on the spotlight. Even through the mist, he could pick out turtles and frogs and the red glowing eyes of an alligator, but he saw nothing unusual in the water.

      If someone had thrown a body off the bridge, they would have more than likely weighted it. It could take days or even weeks to surface. He was wasting his time and he knew it. All he’d heard was a distant splash. All he’d seen was a bobbing flashlight. He had no reason to believe that anything untoward—

      She was there in the shallows, floating on her back among the lily pads.

      Jack used the trolling motor to navigate through the strangling vegetation and then a paddle to hold the boat steady as he observed the body. He didn’t attempt to drag her from the water. She was dead and had been the moment the bullet passed through the back of her skull and exited between her eyes. During his time as a cop, he’d seen that jagged, X-shaped wound before, usually in drug-related executions. The facial damage was extensive, but the best Jack could tell, she was young, probably no more than early twenties, with long blond hair floating all around her.

      He sat for a moment, awash in memories before he took out his phone and called Tommy Driscoll’s number.

      The phone rang five times before Tommy finally answered. He sounded annoyed and winded. “Driscoll.”

      “Tommy, it’s Jack King.”

      “Jack? It’s a little late, isn’t it, buddy?”

      “Not for this.”

      “You heard from Nathan?” he asked anxiously.

      “I’m calling about something else.”

      A long silence. “Where are you?”

      “Sitting