Free The Evidence Room: A Mystery by Cameron Harvey Page A

she knew it. Still, there was a goodness in her, he could see it. She wanted to help him.
    “Pea, please. Whatever it is—I need to know. I need to find her.”
    “She’s in trouble, Josh. She’s involved with some bad people. You need to be careful.”
    When they were kids, Liana was the one who had first disobeyed the rule to stay on their block. She had shrugged off their parents’ attempts to control her. In his mind, he could still see her balancing on the roof of their house, tempting the fates. Walking the line. Taste death live life , she had written on her forearm in green Magic Marker. His sister, imperious and wild. He had never imagined it would lead to this.
    Josh reached into his jeans pocket for the spiral notebook he always carried. “Just tell me,” he told Pea. “Where is she?”
    On the other end of the phone, there was silence.
    “Hello? Hello? Pea?”
    The line went dead.
    “Goddamnit,” he swore. She was playing him. He knew it. But what the hell was her endgame? None of it made sense. Josh swallowed his anger. First day at work, he reminded himself. He couldn’t fuck this job up, or who knew what the next stop was on the one-way train to career suicide?
    “Sorry, man. Family stuff,” he began, expecting to see Samba around the corner, but there was no sign of his boss. Josh walked towards the front entrance, where he heard Samba’s voice on the phone.
    “… each one. Got it. I can do that, yes, sir.” The older man’s voice was no longer the jolly tone of earlier; this was all business. Samba turned and raised a hand at Josh. “Yes. I’ve got help here, so I should be good. We will let you know when we’ve got something. Okay. Thank you.”
    “I’m glad you’re here, Josh,” Samba said before Josh could ask the question. “We’ve got a case.”

 
    CHAPTER ELEVEN
    The bayou invaded Aurora’s dreams that night.
    She woke to the sound of a paddle being dipped and pulled through creamy swirls of earth-colored water. Aurora crooked a finger and pulled aside the gauzy white curtain by Papa’s bed, revealing the violet swath of bayou outside her window. Mist hovered above the water, punctured by the knuckles of sunken cypress trees. A lone figure nudged a skiff in a wide arc around a sunken cluster of plants with leaves that reached skyward like upturned palms and then settled the boat against the opposite shoreline, resting the paddle across the bow of the boat. There was something unearthly about the landscape, especially at this time of the morning, so otherworldly that you could believe there was truth in those old bayou stories about ghost lights and mists that drew people deep into the patchwork of sloughs and never released them.
    Aurora slid on shorts and a T-shirt and pulled on one of Papa’s old baseball caps. The things she should do scrolled through her mind, a crisp and orderly list. Go through Papa’s desk. File papers at the courthouse. Maybe put the house on the market. The real estate agent’s glossy business card beckoned her from the desk. Renee Trosclair, the card proclaimed below a picture of a woman with an aggressively spiked blond haircut and a teeth-baring smile. Look no further—you are home!! There was something oddly disconcerting about the phrase.
    The bedroom was blissfully free of the voodoo items filling the rest of the house. Here, framed pictures surrounded the oak bed covered with one of Nana’s quilts. Aurora’s mother and grandmother beamed at her, not from stiffly posed photographs but candid shots, their mouths open, their eyes shining, standing behind birthday cakes and reaching for each other across a sea of opened Christmas presents. All her life, Aurora had wished for something of her mother’s: a talisman, a reminder that she had existed as more than a story, more than a forbidden topic of conversation. It was a request that she had never had the courage to make, too afraid of upsetting the careful equilibrium in her