Cross Justice (Alex Cross 23)

“Francie Letourneau. She’s from Belle Glade. Haitian immigrant. You know her?”

Drummond shook his head. “I don’t know the Glade like I used to.”

“Nice lady, for the most part. Worked over in Palm, cleaning castles.”

Johnson said, “You were professionally acquainted with the deceased?”

“We got Francie on drunk-and-disorderly a few times, but really, she was just blowing off steam.”

“You got an address for Ms. Francie here?” Drummond asked.

“I can get it,” Holland said.

“Please,” the sergeant said. “We’ll go down and take a look.”

“You might want your boots,” the deputy said as she climbed into the cruiser.

Drummond went to the rear of the unmarked and got out a pair of knee-high green rubber boots. The sergeant glanced at Johnson’s shiny black shoes, said, “You’re gonna need a pair of these for working the west side of the county.”

“Where do you get them?” Johnson asked.

“Best price is that Cabela’s catalog,” the sergeant said as he put them on. “But you can pick up something local at the Bass Pro Shops in Dania Beach.”

Drummond led the way around the cruiser, behind the coroner’s van, and over the bank of an irrigation ditch. Holland had taped off a muddy path that led down to the water.

“That’s the blackest mud I’ve ever seen,” Johnson said.

“Some of the richest soil in the world,” Drummond told him, skirting the tape through thigh-high swamp grass.

Johnson followed. Three steps in, he sank in the mud and lost his shoe.

“Cabela’s,” Drummond called over his shoulder.

The young detective cursed, dug out his shoe, and wiped it on the grass before joining the sergeant down by the ditch. Francie Letourneau’s body lay faceup in the muck, head at the water’s edge, feet oriented uphill. Her eyes were open and bulging. Her face looked particularly swollen. And her feet were bare and muddy.

“Cause of death? Time of death?” Drummond called to the assistant medical examiner, a young guy named Kraft who also wore green rubber boots and stood on a folded blue plastic tarp next to the body.

Kraft pushed back sunglasses, said, “She was strangled thirty-six to forty hours ago. Ligature is deep, and looks like there’s fibers in the wound.”

“She’s been here in this heat the whole time?” Johnson said.

“I don’t think so,” Kraft replied. “She was killed somewhere else and dropped here, probably last night. A fisherman found her at dawn.”

The sergeant nodded. “She got a phone on her?”

“No,” the medical examiner said.

Drummond looked around before crouching to study the body from six feet back. Then he walked up the bank along the tape and looked at the path and the marks in the mud and the footprints, most of which were filled with murky water.

The sergeant gestured to shallow grooves in the mud.

“Her heels made those marks,” he said. “He drags her downhill, holding her under the armpits. Right there, where the grooves get smaller, her shoes come off. Killer dumps the body and goes back for the shoes. So why doesn’t he push the body into the water?”

Johnson said, “Maybe he meant to but something spooked him. A car out on the main road. But why take her shoes? A fetish or something?”

“He didn’t take them,” Drummond said, gesturing across the ditch. “He tossed them. There’s one of them hanging on a branch over there.”

Johnson frowned, saw the shoe, and said, “How’d you see that?”