The bayou graves, p.1
The Bayou Graves, page 1
The Bayou Graves
A Sophie Quinn FBI Mystery Thriller Book 2
Georgia Wagner
Text Copyright © 2023 Georgia Wagner
Publisher: Greenfield Press Ltd
The right of Georgia Wagner to be identified as author of the Work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
All rights reserved.
The book is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
‘The Bayou Graves’ is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organisations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, and events or locations is entirely coincidental.
Contents
1. Prologue
2. Chapter 1
3. Chapter 2
4. Chapter 3
5. Chapter 4
6. Chapter 5
7. Chapter 6
8. Chapter 7
9. Chapter 8
10. Chapter 9
11. Chapter 10
12. Chapter 11
13. Chapter 12
14. Chapter 13
15. Chapter 14
16. Chapter 15
17. Chapter 16
18. Chapter 17
19. Chapter 18
20. Chapter 19
21. Chapter 20
22. Chapter 21
23. Chapter 22
24. Chapter 23
25. Chapter 24
26. Chapter 25
27. Chapter 26
28. Epilogue
29. What’s Next for Sophie Quinn?
30. Also by Georgia Wagner
31. Also by Georgia Wagner
32. Want to know more?
33. About the Author
Prologue
It was a beautiful day to kill himself.
Jack drank in the predawn glow, inhaling deep, breathing in the pale fire from the sky ready to bake the swampland and the yeasty smell of black soil and clay. The steady putter of his motor eased him along familiar river paths.
There were a few homes here and there at first, a few moldering docks where personal rowboats, johnboats, and wide-bodied skiffs like his own lay moored. Soon Jack left all of them behind, along with the distant highway traffic and the wet concrete smell of the city. He whistled to himself, a high and wandering melody from his childhood. His cheeks puffed, projecting the song over the chuckling engine behind him.
He blinked as the sunlight grew stronger, wiping the stray tears in the corners of his eyes, whistling even stronger to spite the sensation.
At the forward helm, his palms lightly leading the wheel like a practiced dancer’s hands on his partner’s hips, he took narrower and narrower offshoots from the wider rivers. There were paths in the bayou that you could only know by piloting them. Like a city without street signs.
And he knew them all.
He’d come here since childhood. He’d been shown the paths by those who could navigate them by starlight and memory alone. Tougher men than him.
Whenever people shook Jack’s hand, they always seemed surprised by the strength in them. The coarse roughness. His greetings were often accompanied by exclamations of “Daggum, but you got some mitts on you, don’t ya?” or “Oh my. That’s quite a grip!”
He would smile and offer a sheepish apology. But he wasn’t fooled. Other people being weak, being soft didn’t mean he was strong.
Compared to some men . . . he was weak. Terribly weak.
This was the place.
With a deep rattling breath, Jack cut his skiff’s motor and in the slow, dark flow of the mangrove-choked waters, he listened to the plop and ripple of river fish as they took their breakfast from the humming insects dancing on the water’s surface.
“Is it today, then?” Jack murmured to himself, idly picking at his nails.
It was, after all, a fine day for suicide.
Bam!
The pounding sound jolted him out of his thoughts with a scowl.
Bam! Bam!
Flat strikes on solid wood from the back of the skiff. Jack looked back, his lips curling as his nose wrinkled in a sneer. He bristled as he laid eyes on the black tarp at the rear of his skiff.
“Help! Let me out!” a woman’s voice cried.
Bam! BAM! BAM! BAM!
All thoughts of self-harm disappeared as Jack stepped to the tarp, tearing it back to reveal a wooden coffin, rough, unfinished and nailed at the corners like a prop from a spaghetti Western. He glared at the shaking wood, his thoughts turning red.
“Someone, help me! Get me out! I can’t breathe!” The woman’s voice choked off the words with hyperventilating sobs.
With a closed fist, Jack pounded on the coffin lid and a frightened yelp answered him.
“You should have spoken up. But you didn’t. You never speak up until you’re ready to scream. Well, scream all you like, now.”
The woman did scream, a primal, wordless shriek of fearful panic.
Jack screamed back, red-faced as he leaned low over the coffin lid.
The knots holding the coffin to the skiff’s cargo rails were tight, but his coarse hands were used to working them. He paid little attention to what his body was doing, feeling heat creeping into his face. Anger. Pain.
With one booted foot he kicked the coffin’s side, and it pitched over the edge of the skiff, setting the boat wobbling by the sudden change in weight and shooting a geyser of black water sprinkling through the air.
He didn’t stay to watch, turning back to the helm and starting the motor once more. He wouldn’t look back.
After all, he was a terribly weak man.
Chapter 1
“Expectation is the enemy of observation.” Sophie Quinn muttered the phrase like a mantra, rubbing her fingers through the close crop of her auburn hair against her temples. Her eyes were closed as she cleared her mind, the thin fabric of her tank top nightshirt rising and falling with each steadying breath from her athletic frame. The heat of her laptop against her thighs compounded the uncomfortable mugginess of the early morning humidity, last night’s dew rising with the sun like sweat all across Louisiana’s Gulf Coast.
Without looking, she could imagine the crime scene pictures, witness statements, and forensic reports fed in from the USB stick jutting out from the machine’s side like a hangnail. She’d paid a private investigator, Fabian St. Claire, quite the bounty for the information: supposedly, RK’s first killings. The infant steps of the River Killer, the man who had murdered her sister and nearly killed Sophie too.
A lump of money and three days of study later, and Sophie could feel her impatience mounting. She rolled her neck, slowly easing out the kinks.
Her breakfast of black coffee and a microwaved cup of ramen was going cold on the sticky, plastic table beside her. Three days ago, she’d moved from the FBI provided suite to a motel outside of New Orleans. Maxwell Meyers, Sophie’s boss in the Detroit field office, had called to ask when she’d be back, and Sophie had told him she had reconnected with her parents and needed some time.
The best lies had a nugget of truth. She had reconnected with her parents during her last investigation, by stumbling into them while pursuing a suspect and then berating them like an ill-tempered child for being happy to see her. Sophie’s stomach twisted at the memory, and she took another drink of the stale coffee to give it something more tangible to gripe about.
Her parents hadn’t tried to call after her sudden departure. Apart from the pain in Sophie’s heart, it was as if their six years of silence hadn’t been broken at all. Sophie had been tempted once or twice to call them, to be the one to break the silence . . . to maybe even apologize. But each time, she only had to glance at her open laptop and the urge would quiet.
She opened her eyes.
The pixelated grain of the laptop images stared back at her. Many of them were copies of copies, uploaded from scans of physical prints. The originals were no doubt stored in some police server or an FBI database somewhere. An unfortunate side effect of using PIs, they often couldn’t cite their sources, pilfered, anonymous, and ill-gotten as they could be.
It would have to be enough.
Sophie looked again, closer, mouthing her mantra once more. “Expectation is the enemy of observation.”
Dates on forensic reports put the information at ten years ago, four years before Sophie, her sister Molly, and the other eight victims of the River Killer. Several shots showed the same pair of victims. Two young women, just like the other ten victims, just like Sophie had looked six years ago.
The victims were bound at the wrists by chains, their hands over their heads and looped through the branches of a forlorn willow.
“10 mm low carbon steel with long 40–50 mm links,” Sophie muttered to herself. It was difficult to tell from the photographs, but in one close-up shot, the size of the links appeared consistent with the chains RK had used in his string of killings.
The difference that Fabian had noted when handing over the USB was apparent. These were def initely . . . messier. The women had clearly put up a fight; pictures of multiple bruises and cuts were included in a fragment of a pathologist report that indicated they were made before the women were killed.
But the most striking note was in what had killed the women. A single shot, close range, to the head. The report said it was a hunting rifle.
Well, what you think, cher? Not exactly clever, t’just shoot both the girls like that. Then again, I was ‘bout to shoot you, you slippery lil’ water snake.
Sophie’s hands tensed and her mouth drew into a hard line. For a moment, the red light of the motel room smoke alarm seemed to flare like the smoldering end of a cigar. RK’s voice, graveled and callous as a country grave, a voice forever imprinted in Sophie’s mind, taunted her.
She bit the inside of her cheek—a trick she learned in her training under her magician mentor, the Great Gavriel—and the pain returned her to the present.
Footprints.
RK’s crime scenes were infuriatingly clean of boot prints and tread marks, but this scene had multiple sets. Two separate boot treads and then the bare footprints of the two victims. Another difference. Both victims here had their shoes removed, but in the ten victims of RK’s infamous spree only one had been missing a sandal from one foot. Why change that?
Maybe it wasn’t his idea? If there were two boot prints, then someone else was there. Either during the killings or soon after.
Two people; then only four years later, RK was alone.
Sophie’s memory flashed, the sensation of bobbing in the bayou waters, the murky current tugging at her back-length auburn hair, long since cut short. A shadowed face with invisible eyes staring down at her from under a frayed baseball cap. Work boots and blue jeans. A dim flare and drifting clouds of obfuscating cigar smoke. A shotgun pinched in the crook of his elbow.
A shotgun.
Sophie blinked, her mind suddenly racing as she quickly stood and paced the room. Of course, it wasn’t a hunting rifle. Another change. Was the rifleman someone else? A partner? Hunching over the laptop, Sophie flipped through the open files, suddenly questioning every detail of the gun.
The casing.
A single bullet casing was found on the scene, labeled and tagged as a hunting rifle. Sophie’s fingers rolled across the tabletop. Her mind slipped back to her criminology degree.
After Molly’s death, Sophie had abandoned her old life, the sold-out illusion acts and displays of mentalism or hypnotism before astounded crowds. Mysteries and Phenomena with Sophie Quinn had been canceled at the height of its popularity, as its star and host disappeared into dual PhD studies in record-smashing time. All in the hope of joining the FBI, being on the team that could bring RK to justice.
She’d perused munitions manuals, trying to familiarize herself with the guns and ammunition she may have to deal with as an FBI agent, preparing for a test the FBI was ultimately unwilling to give her. Psychological evaluation found the frequency and intensity of her flashbacks too high of a risk for a full agent. It was only with great effort that Sophie was even able to convince them to give her a chance as a consultant.
Now, in a stifling motel room in the early hours of the morning, she sifted the pages of the manual in her mind. Rifles, page 189. Casings. Sophie dragged her finger through the empty air in front of her face, her pupils dancing behind her closed eyelids. As a child, her mother said Sophie had an appetite for learning, an envie for words and trivia. Her mentalism and hypnosis training under the Great Gavriel added a depth to her ability that drove it to heights she was sure her mother would call miraculous.
There.
Sophie’s finger hovered, stopping in midair. She froze for the barest moment, then whispered, “It’s the wrong casing.”
She hunched over the laptop, double-checking the image from the crime scene. No. She was right. The casing was too long and thin. Someone had mis-logged it or some exhausted forensics tech had simply eyeballed the casing for his report.
This wasn’t a bullet casing from a hunting rifle. It was from a military rifle, likely an M16 or similar design.
This fact immediately sprouted limbs in Sophie’s mind, her heart racing as she set to pacing once more. The presence of a military weapon returned a fact she’d found the day before to her mind. She picked up her laptop, typing with one hand as she walked the length of the flat, grey-green carpet.
The land the victims were found on, where they were killed, was private property. At the time the investigators hadn’t thought anything of it. The owner of the land was cleared. But things change over time. When Sophie had researched the location, she’d found reports about the current owners of the land.
The Mississippi Line Minutemen.
An off-grid militia group.
For a few minutes, Sophie simply stared. She felt stunned, as if all the blood in her veins had gone still. Six years . . . going on seven. Every lead had been a dead end. Even the last case, when the FBI pulled her back to her hometown to finally bring down the River Killer, it had turned out to be a copycat. Was this what she was looking for? She could see it in her mind’s eye. A militia member, possibly two, the group still in its infancy. They’re not there for any ideals, they’re there for violence. They find and kill these women. Somehow . . . it goes wrong. Maybe the group finds out and kicks them out. But one of them can’t let it go. He waits, he plans, and then four years later . . . RK appears.
He could be a member, a former member, a friend of the group shielded by them.
Sophie’s consultant access to the FBI databases was limited, but she checked it anyway. No follow-up investigation was made to rule out the Mississippi Line Minutemen’s involvement in these deaths.
Frowning, Sophie nipped at her cuticle. There was no easy way about this. Militia groups were notoriously protective of their ground and membership. Maybe she could pose as a volunteer? A journalist looking to get their story firsthand? No. That wouldn’t work. Sophie sighed, flopping back onto the motel bed. A group that was self-sufficient and off-grid like the MLM would have no reason to let a lone woman snoop around. If Sophie was going to chase this lead, she would need backup, an insider . . . or a couple trucks worth of FBI agents behind her.
She’d need a favor, and she knew just the person to ask.
As Sophie reached for her phone, it abruptly lit up, vibrating with an incoming call. She raised an eyebrow, as it wasn’t quite seven in the morning, but after she scanned the name, she accepted the call.
“Quinn,” the voice on the line started, a sharp, older woman’s voice, a voice used to command. “Good. You’re already up. Get dressed. Agent Greer is picking you up in fifteen.”
Sophie started. Supervising Agent Lidya Merchant was never one to mince words, but the last time they’d spoken, Sophie had been packing for a flight back to Detroit.
“Ma’am,” Sophie began.
“Stow whatever you’re about to say,” Merchant interrupted. “I know you’re still in town because you didn’t take your flight. You told Meyer you’re here because of your parents, and I know that’s bullshit because I know you, Sophie Quinn. So that means you stuck around for some other reason. And given our history, I don’t think it’s unreasonable of me to think you may be sticking your nose where it isn’t welcome. Am I getting warm yet?”
Sophie’s jaw dropped, fishing around for some rebuttal to the rapid-fire accusations, but for all her skill as a performer, Merchant was the one person Sophie could never seem to outmaneuver. The woman was absolutely unflappable.
“How did you find my motel?” Sophie asked at last, grabbing her slate-grey suit off the back of the closet door.
“Quinn, I’ve tracked down Serbian arms dealers through the streets of Kosovo, you think I can’t track down one wayward magician in my own backyard? Thirteen minutes—besides, you’re going to want in on this one.” Lidya paused, and Sophie thought she heard the faint rustle of paper across the phone line.
“How many bodies?” Sophie asked softly.
Merchant hesitated a moment, then replied, “We’re still finding them. Twelve minutes, Quinn,” and the line went dead.
Chapter 2
Talking to kids was not Sophie’s strong suit. Intimidating suspected murderers, cold-hearted producers, and the occasional ornery guest star—that she could do. Anyone too young to drink, though? Terrifying.
