Free Judas Burning by Carolyn Haines

Jexville, she, too, viewed Medino as an outsider, but an altercation with him wouldn’t help a thing.
    “Let’s go back to the beach,” she said.
    Medino pulled out his notebook. “I’ve been tracking this man. The sheriff scoffed at my idea, and now he has two dead girls on his hands.”
    “They aren’t dead until we find the bodies,” J.D. said.
    “They’re dead,” Medino said. “They’re dead, and we all know it. Look at this stuff.” His hand swept toward the altar where the sunlight sifting through the vines caught the crude crucifix. “He’s a psycho, just like I said. Those girls are dead because no one would listen to me.”

C HAPTER N INE
    J.D. stood on the spit of land where one bare footprint led into the river and disappeared beneath waters now golden orange in the slant of the afternoon sun. He looked upriver at the circling boats. More than thirty hours had passed since the girls were last seen. He stared out at the water, keenly aware of the quiet that surrounded him.
    He knew the hush that had fallen over this section of the twisty river. He’d heard it before—the presence of death.
    In a dense jungle filled with a green so intense it blistered the back of his retinas, he’d heard the silence that preceded death’s appearance. It had been a day as hot as anything Mississippi could deliver. Marines all around him cursed as they made their way up a hill. Without a hint of warning, the day lost volume. His buddies stumbled and cursed, their faces tired and furious at the upper-level betrayal that had put them in a country where no official war had been declared, where the troops they’d been sent to help were murdering women and children, even nuns. Around them the tropical forest was alive with birds and the quick, elusive creatures of Central America. Then the birds hushed. Death drained all sound, sucking it away before rising up out of the lush vegetation, exploding with a vengeance that cut J.D.’s friends into ribbons. Sound returned with the screams and cries of the injured and dying.
    That had been the first time.
    J.D. had heard the hush of death again in a dark El Salvador City alley, where he stood with a drunken buddy, a black kid from Chicago who argued in his flat, clipped speech. “You can’t sell a ten-year-old girl,” Mike had insisted to a dead-eyed man with the facial features of the Mayans.
    “Come on, Mike,” J.D. had told his friend, pulling him along by the uniform sleeve. “We can’t do anything here. Not now.” They were being watched by El Salvadorian soldiers, men with guns who didn’t care who they killed.
    His friend had tugged free, walked back to the pimp, and grabbed him by his shirt, lifting him against the wall. “I’ll be back,” he said, “and when I do, I’m going to cut your gizzard out, you piece of shit.”
    The noise of a city in the throes of night had suddenly disappeared. For two seconds there had been total silence, then the click of the knife blade and Mike’s soft grunt of surprise. J.D. had known in that split-second vacuum that his friend would die. Nothing he did or said could stop it. Mike was a dead man, and there was no turning away from it. Even as J.D. leaped forward, the noise came back in a hot rush. The pimp screamed a curse and fled as Mike sank to his knees, his brown
eyes
still disbelieving, his big, calloused hands holding in his guts.
    J.D. looked out at the river, aware that sound had returned. He heard the murmur of Dixon’s voice as she spoke with Medino, and he heard his deputy approach.
    “The volunteers are ready to go back to town,” Waymon said.
    J.D. nodded. He’d called technicians from the state lab to work the scene around the altar and had a call in to Parchman Penitentiary for some tracking dogs.
    “Looks like the national reporter is trying to make time with the local press,” Waymon said.
    J.D. turned to look at the sandbar, where Dixon chatted with Medino. Her hair was damp with sweat, and