Alligator Moon. Joanna Wayne

about stirring a handful of complications into the pot. The situation now reeked of guilt on the part of the surgery team and gave Drake and Reverend Evan Flanders a huge advantage in public opinion if not in the trial itself.

      It might add a few insurmountable hurdles to Cassie’s plans, as well. Her boss would want human interest stories and some investigative articles on the new development. Olson was determined to turn the previously floundering Crescent Connection into a magazine no local citizen would want to be without.

      He wanted in-your-face reporting on issues that mattered and up-close and personal articles on the kind of stories that the citizens just couldn’t get enough of. Dennis Robicheaux’s suicide would fit solidly into the latter category. Olson would have complained about an impromptu vacation before the suicide. He’d likely veto it now.

      Instead of a week in the Greek Islands, she’d be tooling around the tiny south Louisiana town of Beau Pierre. It was a disgustingly poor tradeoff.

      NORMAN GUILLIOT stepped into the shower, his body still humming from the orgasm he’d reached a few minutes ago with his wife. Fifteen years of marriage, and Annabeth could still touch all the right buttons to get him off.

      She wasn’t as hot as she’d been when he’d first met her, but at thirty-six she still had a body that turned heads. She was smart, too, a lot smarter than most folks gave her credit for being. Her worst fault was probably her extravagance. If one fur coat was too much for a climate that never saw a real winter, buy two. But he could afford her, so what the hell.

      The goal now was to stay wealthy. He’d worked damn hard to get where he was, and he wasn’t letting some two-bit lawyer and a TV Bible thumper yank it away from him. He was fifty-eight, years too old to start over.

      Norman adjusted the stream of water until it was as hot as he could stand it, then let it pulsate onto his shoulders and roll down his taut stomach and over his private parts, washing his and Annabeth’s juices right down the drain. That was okay. They were in endless supply. He squirted some shampoo into his thinning hair and worked it into peaks of lather.

      The shower door opened and Annabeth poked her head inside, looking like some blond apparition floating in the fog of vapors.

      “You have a phone call.”

      “Get the name and number. I’ll call them back when I get out of the shower.”

      “It’s Sheriff Babineaux. He says it’s important.”

      Norman’s muscles tightened and his breath seemed to be sucked into the steamy vapor that whirled around him. “Did he say what this is about?”

      “No.”

      He rinsed the shampoo from his hair, then left the water running when he stepped onto the wine-colored carpet to take the receiver from Annabeth.

      “What’s up, Tom?”

      “Your anesthetist killed himself.”

      “Dennis?”

      “Yeah.”

      “Are you sure?”

      “Oh, I’m sure. I’m looking at the body right now.”

      “When did this happen?”

      “Sometime during the early hours of the morning. Apparently he was driving home from somewhere. He ran his car off the road just south of the Tortue Bayou.”

      “But you said he shot himself.”

      “He did. Shot himself right in the head. The gun was still lying there in the swamp when Hank LeBlanc found him this morning. He was heading out to do some fishing and saw the car. Stopped to check it out, and there was Dennis. Dead.”

      “Dennis? Dead?” The words tumbled about in Norman’s brain, and for a second he wasn’t sure if he’d said them out loud or merely thought them.

      “I know this is a shocker, Doc.”

      “Are you certain it was suicide?”

      “No doubt. Of course, his brother John isn’t buying that, but the evidence is here. It’s open and shut to my mind, and my mind is the one that counts in this parish.”

      “Is John there with you?”

      “No, but he’s on his way.”

      “So am I. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

      “I wouldn’t recommend it.”

      “Why not?”

      “Dennis blew his brains out with a .45. That ain’t the best accompaniment to breakfast.”

      “It won’t be my first sight of blood—brains either, for that matter.”

      Annabeth was staring at him when he broke the connection.

      He’d like to spare her this, but that was the thing about fame and wealth. It set you inside this giant ball and everybody who walked by felt compelled to give it a kick. She was in the ball with him, so she’d have to prepare herself for a new onslaught of reporters’ feet slamming into their ball.

      “What is it now?” she asked.

      “Dennis Robicheaux shot and killed himself last night.”

      “Oh, no! Not Dennis.”

      His towel slipped from his waist as he reached for her and pulled her into his arms.

      “Not Dennis. Please. Not Dennis.”

      “I know it doesn’t seem possible, but these things happen.”

      “He didn’t kill himself. I know he didn’t. He wouldn’t.”

      “You don’t know him that well, sweetheart. He had some problems.”

      “No. Not Dennis. He wouldn’t kill himself. Why would he?”

      “Who knows? Maybe it’s the Robicheaux blood. Look at his brother. As soon as the first blast of adversity hit, John came running home to drown himself in whiskey and the same stinking life he’d worked to escape.”

      “Dennis wasn’t like John.”

      “I’m not saying he was, but he was still a Robicheaux.”

      “It was the reporters who did this to him, Norman, not his Robicheaux blood. They kept hammering away at him, determined to blame Ginny Lynn Flanders’s death on him.” She pulled away, looked in the mirror, then dabbed her eyes with the back of her hands. “What will this do to the lawsuit?”

      “Nothing. The reporters will howl and make a big show about it, but in the end, it won’t have a thing to do with the legal proceedings.”

      “I hope you’re right.”

      So did he. “I’m going to finish my shower and meet the sheriff out where they found the body.”

      “I want to go, too.”

      “It’s no place for a woman.”

      She barely knew Dennis, but she had a tender heart, cried over dead goldfish. He’d like to stay here with her. He sure had no desire to see the body, but he had to be certain John didn’t throw some of the stinking Robicheaux shit into the mix.

      This was suicide. And a suicide it would stay.

       CHAPTER THREE

      JOHN HIT the brakes and steered the car to the shoulder of the narrow road. A group of about six men stood in ankle-deep water a few yards away, gathered around the body. The body. Dennis.

      The reality of the situation hovered over him, but it hadn’t struck yet. Once he walked over and stood where the sheriff and the others were, once the image got inside his head, reality would grab him by the balls and squeeze down tight.

      A warning screamed and echoed in his ears as he sloshed into the bog. Hold back