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at his own contrariness, Steve checked the odometer and slowed again. The turn-off for Harry’s Bayou should be around the next bend or two.
    Sure enough, he spotted a glowing red light just moments later. Officer Martin had efficiently marked the turn. Steering the cruiser onto a rutted dirt track, Steve searched the dark, humped shapes on either side for the ruins the shift officer had mentioned. If a roadside dive had once existed at this location, it’s remains now lay buried under a thick blanket of kudzu.
    Grimacing, Steve guided the cruiser down the bumpy track. The kudzu had denuded the tall cypresses on either side of the road of leaves and the feathery Spanish moss that had once draped their branches. Dark stumps now, they thrust into the night sky, making a last, painful stand against the vine that devoured them.
    Steve hated the damned kudzu, felt claustrophobic every time he had to tramp or drive through stripped, silent woods like these. The stuff had been introduced into this country by some well-meaning agriculturist back at the turn of the century, supposedly to curb erosion on bare banks and fallow fields. Almost indestructible, it propagated a foot or more a day, climbing trees and telephone poles, covering fields, killing all life beneath. Long tradition had it that mothers in the South needed to keep a close watch on sleeping babies during the summer to make sure a kudzu vine hadn’t snaked through a window and strangled them.
    Steve’s jaw had locked by the time he spotted lights at the end of the dark, silent tunnel. Blowing out a breath of relief, he pulled up behind Martin’s black-and-white. The moment he opened the door and stepped out into the night, he caught a whiff of a putrid stench. Wilena’s initial report had been right on the mark. The floater had been in the water for a while.
    Gratefully, he accepted the small jar of Vicks Vapor Rub Martin offered him. Most of the cops carried a jar in their squad cars for situations like this. A thick smear of the powerful mentholatum under each nostril blocked even the stench of death.
    “What have we got here, Martin?”
    “Well, I thought at first it might be that possible drowning victim, the one whose sailboat turned over in the storm last month.”
    “The Reverend McConnell?”
    Keeping a wary eye out for snakes, Steve approached the bayou’s edge. The body – what was left of it – drifted face down in the weeds.
    “The build’s about right,” Martin continued, aiming his flashlight’s powerful beam at the corpse. “But…”
    “But what?”
    “If this is McConnell, I’m not sure he drowned. He’s sporting a nice sized crease in his skull.”
    A wavelet lapped at the body, dislodging the small flap of scalp still clinging to the cranium. The bone beneath the floating hair glistened white and clean in the flashlight’s beam. Even from where he stood, Steve could see the jagged edges where something or someone had smashed in the frontal lobe.
    “I suppose he could’ve hit the rail when he went over the side of his boat,” Martin observed.
    “It’s possible.”
    “Be interesting to see what the ME and the crime lab over to Tallahassee come up with.”
    “Yes,” Steve agreed. “Very interesting.”

Chapter Four
     
    Detective Jim Hazlett arrived at Harry’s Bayou some fifteen minutes after the boys from the county medical examiner’s office had fished the body out of the bay.
    A good thirty pounds overweight and as overworked as everyone else in the Florida Department of Law Enforcement’s investigations division, Hazlett had some twenty years of experience walking the jurisdictional tightrope between federal, state, and local agencies. He was a good man, one of only a handful of detectives in the Panama City office. He was also the FDLE officer who’d investigated Ron Clark’s death.
    “Evenin’, Sheriff.”
    “Hello, Jim.”
    Hazlett hooked a thumb at the corpse waiting to be hauled up to the meat wagon. “Is