Altar of Eden (7 page)

As the sun began to set, the marine helicopter banked away from the Mississippi River and out over the small town of Port Sulphur. From the air, there was not much to distract Lorna from her mode of transportation. If she kept this up, she might even get used to air travel, but her sweaty palms and shallow breathing defied any such accommodation now.

To offset her fright, she concentrated on the passing landscape below, marking landmarks, estimating how long she had to remain airborne.

Below, Port Sulphur was easy to miss, covering less than six square miles, protected by a weathered and battered levee system. It had once been a rugged company town serving Freeport Sulphur, but in the nineties, after drilling and refinery operations had shut down, the town had begun a slow decline, waiting only for Katrina to write its epitaph. A twenty-two-foot wall of water had swept through the town, all but wiping the place away. Of the three thousand or so residents, only a small fraction had returned to their flooded homes.

If Lorna hadn’t been studying the world below with such anxiety, she might have missed the place. They were past the town in seconds and over water again—a wide shallow lake called Bay Lanaux. They began a fast descent. It had been a short flight, covering the forty miles as a crow flies from New Orleans in less than fifteen minutes. Short as it was, Lorna was still ready to get out of this bird.

Tense, she jumped slightly when Jack’s amplified voice cut into her headphones. He sat up front with the pilot. She shared the back with two other CBP agents. They had told her their names, but she had already forgotten, her mind too occupied with keeping the helicopter flying by sheer willpower.

“We’ll be taking a CBP boat into the canals south of the lake,” Jack explained. “The boat will act as the base of operations for this mission. Two smaller airboats will flank our path, canvassing the smaller byways and channels to either side. And in case they’re needed, we have a pair of canoes for tighter places.”

Lorna stared out at the gathered maritime force as the helicopter settled to its floats in the water. A second, larger helicopter lifted off from the lake. It had carried in more of Jack’s team, along with some local talent. The CBP boat nearby looked to be the same one from earlier, an Interceptor-class craft made for inland or ocean travel. A pair of smaller airboats circled farther out, propelled by their giant fans, whisking swiftly over the water.

After they landed, chaos ruled as men and weapons were ferried from chopper to boats. Reaching the aft deck of the CBP boat, Lorna found herself mostly in the way, tussled by big, rugged men smelling of cheap aftershave, leather, and gun oil. Rough voices barked around her or burst with laughter.

She moved to a quiet corner, away from the tornado of testosterone.

Nearby, a half-dozen men in dark green shirts and trousers—Jack’s Special Response Team—bustled about securing weapons: sidearms, shotguns, assault rifles. Night-vision goggles sat atop their helmets. No one was taking any chances.

Three other men dressed in hunting vests and jeans shared the back of the boat, but they kept to the other side, sitting atop overturned canoes. Lorna recognized the flat-bottomed dugouts to be Cajun pirogue. All three men—two black, one white—definitely had the rangy look of backwater Cajuns. One vaguely resembled Jack, maybe a relative. While dating Tommy, she had never met all of the Menard clan.

The final member sharing the boat came waltzing up, tongue lolling, tail wagging. It was a purebred bloodhound, but even the dog’s manner was cocky with a happy-go-lucky glint in his eyes that was pure Cajun.

“Burt,” she whispered to herself as memories of happier times swelled through her. She might not have met Tommy’s older brother, but she had been introduced to the family’s best hunting dog.

Jack had mentioned bringing a scent hound along for the hunt, but she never thought it would be Burt.

Glad for some friendly greeting, she knelt to accept the dog’s attention. He ambled up, shaking a bit of drool. She reached out a hand to scratch behind one of his impossibly long ears—but a sudden sharp shout froze them both.

“Burt! Git your butt back over here! Leave that
bonne à rien
alone.”

The dog glanced over his shoulder and dropped his tail. With a reluctant, almost apologetic glance at Lorna, Burt turned and returned to the trio by the canoes.

The one who had barked the order glared over at her. It was the man who bore a resemblance to Jack, probably related. Lorna didn’t understand what he had called her—
bonne à rien
—but from the sneer in his voice, it wasn’t a flattering term.

Jack had been talking to his second-in-command, but he swung around fast and came at the other. He grabbed the man by the collar of his flannel shirt and pulled him nose to nose.

“If I ever hear you talk to Dr. Polk like that again, I’ll toss your ass overboard. Brother or not. She’s here at my request. Stow that attitude or get off my boat.”

Lorna stared harder at the two.
Brother?
She studied the other man with new eyes. That would make him Randy, the older brother of Jack and Tom. He had been in jail when she and Tom were dating, incarcerated for a year after a drunken brawl in a pub on Bourbon Street. It didn’t help that he had slugged an off-duty policeman.

Randy seemed about to argue, and even placed a palm on Jack’s chest as if to shove his brother away. But he must’ve read something in Jack’s face. His arm fell away. He took a step back and tried to shrug it off with a halfhearted acknowledgment.

“You’re the boss, little brother.”

Not satisfied, Jack held him a moment longer, letting his intensity burn.

Randy finally sagged. “
Mais oui!
All right! I heard you!”

Jack let him go and glanced to Lorna in the same apologetic way as the hounddog. The brother returned to his friends. The trio retreated to the far side of the canoes. Once Jack finished with orders for his second-in-command, he joined Lorna.

“Sorry about that. C’mon. Before you cause any more trouble, let me show you the layout for tonight’s search. See if you can offer any advice. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?”

She rankled a bit at his surliness, but she kept her mouth shut. She followed him toward the pilot’s cabin of the boat. As he held the door for her, she was surprised to discover that the cabin was air-conditioned, almost chilly compared with the persistent heat of the evening. The sun had set, but the western sky still glowed a rosy orange.

He led her to a chart table. The only other occupant in the cabin was the ship’s pilot, dressed like all of Jack’s men in the CBP rough duty uniform, minus the helmet. The ship was already headed across Bay Lanaux. The trundle of the engine vibrated the deck through her hiking boots. The line of bayou forest stretched ahead of them, looking impenetrable and dark.

“Here’s the route we’re taking.” Jack placed a palm on a map clipped to the table. He ran a finger down a line drawn on the chart. “After the storm, we estimate the cat made landfall near Bay Joe Wise then headed due north.” His finger stopped. “Here is where we rescued the boy. That cat covered a lot of ground in a short time.”

Lorna had already heard the details about that fatal encounter. She took a deep breath, glad to fall back on her professional background.

“Jaguars hunt a wide territory,” she started. “That’s why she’s on the move. She’s genetically wired to keep moving until she finds a spot that she believes will support her.”

“So she could keep moving for a while?”

“Definitely. This migratory trait is one of the reasons jaguars are endangered in the wild. Their native jungles and forests are being encroached upon and broken apart by man. With this strong drive to roam, the breakup of their forests was driving them into deadly encounters with people.”

She had read about an environmental project was under way to create a continent-spanning chain of wild forests, linked from Mexico to South America, a vast landscape through which the jaguar populations could expand and migrate freely. It was called the Paseo de Jaguar, or Path of the Jaguar.

She studied the map, trying to figure out this particular jaguar’s
paseo.
There was one important clue.

“Let’s not forget that she also has a cub,” Lorna pressed. “So she’ll be looking for a territory with a rich food supply, rich enough for
both
of them.”

Jack kept to her shoulder, studying the map alongside her. “But where? If she continues north, she’ll be passing between Adam’s Bay and Lake Washington. That’s deep bayou country. Where do we even begin to search?”

“We start with her food supply. The bayous are the perfect environment for a jaguar. They typically hunt along waterways. In fact, a large part of their diet is seafood. Turtles, fish, caiman.”

Jack turned at her. “The kid we rescued said the cat had torn into a bunch of crab pots.”

She nodded. “Jaguars are opportunistic carnivores. They’ll eat anything. They can even bring down cows and full-grown horses.” She responded to the disbelief in his face. “They’re the perfect killing machine. Where tigers and lions rip out the throat of their prey, jaguars kill by crushing their prey’s skull. They have the strongest jaws of any large cat. Evolved, it’s believed, to help jaguars crack through the iron-hard shells of turtles.”

“If they like turtles, we’ve got plenty of ’em in the bayous. Terrapin, snapping turtles, and all manner of cooters and sliders.”

“Yes, but they’re small and less abundant than our jaguar will need. With her body mass, she’ll be looking for a dense and easily accessible food supply. She won’t stop until she finds it.”

Jack suddenly stiffened beside her.

“What?” she asked.

He leaned closer to the map and ran his finger along the hand-drawn line. He also searched to both sides of the path. His finger stopped and tapped. A name was written under there:
Bayou Cook.

Jack straightened and glanced to her. “How sharp is a jaguar’s sense of smell?”

“Extremely sharp. They’re mostly nocturnal hunters, so they have to be able to track prey by scent.”

“How far do you think they could track a smell?”

“Hard to say. Depends on the source of the odor, its strength, the wind direction.” She shook her head. “Lots of variables. Could be many miles if the conditions were right.”

“So if a place gave off a really strong odor and the wind was in the right direction, it could draw the cat. Even from miles away.”

“Sure. But it would have to be a scent that the cat recognized as a food source.”

“You said jaguars fed not just on turtles and fish, but also on caiman. The southern cousin of the American alligator.”

“That’s right.”

“So if there was a concentrated source for such a meal, a place that really smelled strongly—”

“It would definitely draw her.”

Jack ripped the chart from the clips and carried it over to the boat’s pilot. He pointed. “This is where we’re headed. Bayou Cook. Radio the airboats, let them know there’s been a change in plans. We’ll head directly over there.”

“Yes, sir.”

Jack returned, the map in his hand.

“What’s at Bayou Cook?” Lorna asked.

“A tourist site. Draws sightseers year-round, mostly from the cruise ships that dock in New Orleans. You get a swamp tour, an airboat ride, and at the end, a visit to Bayou Cook.”

“What’s there?”

Jack stared hard at her, certainty in his eyes. “Uncle Joe’s Alligator Farm.”

Uncle Joe had no interest in children, but the camp groups brought in good money.

He stood on the front porch of his house with a tall, frosted bottle of Budweiser resting on the rail. The scorching day only seemed to grow hotter and damper as the sun faded away. It was like that out here. The first hour after sunset, the heat seemed reluctant to leave, overstaying its welcome. But slowly over the course of the night, it began to drain away, making it easier to breathe.

He enjoyed that time of night.

’Course, the beer helped, too.

He took a deep swig and stared across the thirty acres of his property. On the far side, a new campsite had been carved out of the neighboring stand of old-growth cypress forest. It was currently occupied by a troop of Boy Scouts from Baton Rouge, booked for the entire week. Campfires flickered among the tents, and strings of lanterns decorated the encampment. Songs echoed through the early evening, accompanied by the honking of bullfrogs and the occasional hoot from an owl or bellow from a bull alligator.

Between his log home and the campsite stretched the eight pools and pits of the alligator farm. He also had a bobcat exhibit and a shallow pond that held Gipper, a giant snapping turtle. The farm was crisscrossed with elevated walkways and observation decks.

He looked on with pride. It had cost him over half a million to expand the place from a single pond with a few breeding alligators to this singular attraction of the bayou. Last year alone, he had grossed three times his investment.

Of course, some of that money was under the table. As a conservator, he wasn’t supposed to sell the alligators for skin or meat, but it didn’t cost much to grease the palms of local enforcement agents to get them to look the other way. And for some wealthy anglers, newly hatched baby alligators were considered the best bait for bass fishing.

Across the farm, Joe watched a couple men patrol the walkways, rifles at their shoulders. They were the local militia he’d hired earlier today after hearing of some large cat sighted near the coast. He had been warned by radio to evacuate the area, but the Gulf was far away. And he would lose thousands in deposits and campsite rentals from the Scout troop alone if he evacuated.

Besides, the warning was just that: a
warning,
not an order. He hadn’t let Katrina chase him off; he wasn’t about to let some wildcat do the same. To justify his decision, he had hired four men from the parish’s sheriff’s department. In these hard times, everyone was looking for a little overtime.

Footsteps approached behind him. “Papa, I’m off to feed Elvis.”

He glanced back as his daughter crossed the porch. She carried a cookie tray stacked with chicken carcasses. “Not too many. We have a show scheduled for the morning for the campers. I want him hungry.”

“You can’t starve the old fella,” she scolded him gently.

He waved her away, feeling a welling of love and pride for his only child. At twenty-two, Stella had been accepted to business school at Tulane. The first of his family to attend college. She was aiming for an MBA, but also took classes in environmental law. While his preservation efforts here at the farm were motivated by profit, she was a true conservationist. She knew about his under-the-table dealings, but she had a good head on her shoulders. This was Louisiana. Nothing got done without some backroom bargaining. And besides, many of his illicit profits went right back into the farm and its many conservation programs.

She climbed down the stairs to the first of the elevated walkways that crossed the ponds. Footsteps again sounded behind him, accompanied by a slight shaking of the deck. His wife joined him, wiping her pudgy hands on a dish towel. She took his beer bottle, shook it to judge how much was left, then pulled out a fresh bottle from her apron pocket and handed it to him.

“Thanks, Peg.”

She settled next to him and leaned her elbows on the rail. She sipped at the remains of his old beer. She was a large woman, but he liked her big. He was not exactly skinny himself, with his belly hanging farther and farther over his belt buckle each year, and under his LSU ball cap, his hairline was retreating just as quickly as his belly was expanding.

“I wish she’d wear more clothing,” his wife said.

He watched Stella cross toward the central pool. He understood his wife’s concern. She wore cutoff shorts and a blouse tied around her midriff, exposing her belly. She hadn’t even bothered with shoes. And she definitely hadn’t inherited any fat genes from them. She was all muscle and curves, with long blond hair, like some Venus of the bayou. Joe was not unaware of the effect she had on the local boys. Not that she gave any of them the time of day.

In fact, it was long odds that he’d ever get the opportunity to change the name of his farm from Uncle Joe’s to Grandpa Joe’s. He suspected Stella’s interests lay elsewhere than boys. She talked much too much about her friend at Tulane, a girl named Sandra who wore a biker’s jacket and leather boots.

But maybe it was just a phase.

He took a big swallow from his bottle.

If only she met the right boy . . .

“C’MON, BIG FELLA
, who wants a late-night snack?”

Stella stood on the observation deck over the largest of the farm’s ponds. Her only illumination was a single lantern on a pole. The black water below merely reflected the light, hiding what lurked beneath its surface. She unhitched the gate in the fence with one hand while balancing the tray of chicken carcasses in the other. She had freshly slaughtered the four chickens herself. Blood, still warm, spilled off the tray and down her arm.

She grimaced and headed out onto the bare plank that extended over the pond like a diving board. She moved to the end and leaned over the water until she could see her own reflection in the pond.

There wasn’t even a ripple, but she knew Elvis was down there. The bull alligator had been at the farm longer than any of them, one of the original inhabitants of the breeding pond when her daddy first bought the place. Since he’d been caught in the wild, no one knew Elvis’s exact age, but a team of biologists guessed the alligator had to be close to thirty years old. The scientists had come here to collect blood samples from the pond’s denizens. Apparently a protein found in alligator blood showed promise for a new generation of powerful antibiotics, killing even resistant superbugs.

But even the biologists hadn’t attempted to approach Elvis. He stretched eighteen feet long and weighed well over half a ton. No one messed with Elvis. Past his breeding age, he had the pond to himself and liked it that way.

He was definitely spoiled.

She set down the cookie tray next to her and knelt at the end of the plank. Grabbing one of the bloody carcasses, she extended her arm out over the water. Droplets of blood fell and lightly splashed into the water below, sending out faint circular ripples.

She waited—but it didn’t take long.

Across the pond, a new set of ripples formed a
V
and aimed toward her position. The tip of the alligator’s snout was all that was visible. It glided smoothly toward her, unhurried but determined. Behind, a sashaying swirl marked the swish of Elvis’s massive tail, still hidden under the water. It was that movement, almost sexual in its sway, that earned the alligator its nickname.

“C’mon, Elvis. I don’t have all night.” She shook the chicken.

As if put off by her demand, he sank out of sight. All ripples died away. Stella tensed. Movement at the corner of her eye drew her attention across the pond. Caught for just a glimpse, something bright flowed through the forest, reflecting the moonlight, then vanished back into the darkness. She stared at the spot, already beginning to doubt she’d seen anything. The swamp was full of stories of ghosts, usually attributed to glowing swamp gas, what the Cajuns called
feu follet,
or
crazy fire.

But this wasn’t swamp gas.

She squinted for any other sign of it, concentrating with both eyes and ears—then an eruption blasted below her. Water fountained upward, along with the explosive surge of a half ton of armored muscle. Massive gaping jaws, lined by jagged yellow teeth, surged up toward her, close enough she could’ve leaned down and tapped the creature’s nose.

Elvis could leap high out of the water, clearing even his hind legs. Stella dropped the chicken into those open jaws. They clamped shut with an audible
snap.
Gravity took over and dragged Elvis back down. He splashed heavily and sank away with his prize.

Stella dropped another two chickens into the water. Normally alligators needed movement to draw them to feed, but Elvis was accustomed to being hand-fed. He’d fish out the other two carcasses at his leisure. Minding her father’s instructions, she left the fourth chicken on the tray.

Done with the feeding, she collected the cookie tray and turned to head back. A large shape blocked the gate. Startled, she fell back a step, almost tumbling off the end of the plank.

But it was one of her daddy’s hired guns. He carried a shotgun, a military-grade twelve-gauge, over his shoulder and leaned on the gatepost. “Done feeding the beast, eh? See you gotcha an extra chicken there.”

The man shifted so that the lamplight revealed the speaker. Ten years older, he was a bull of a man, though a bull that had gone to pot. He wore a dirty Stetson that did little to hide the greasy strings of his mud-brown hair. He sucked on a toothpick and spoke around it. One hand rested on a fat belt buckle shaped like a set of steer horns.

She scowled and headed toward the gate. “Shouldn’t you be patrolling? That’s what my daddy paid you for.”

He leaned on a hip, completely blocking her way. “Why don’t you be a good girl and head on back to the house and cook
me
up some of that chicken, sweetheart.”

His gaze traveled up and down her form, as if he were interested in more than just chicken. Disgust churned up, but also a trickle of fear. She was all too conscious of her exposure—not just the amount of bare skin, but also her precarious perch on the plank.

She also knew this man well enough to fear him. Garland Chase— better known around these parts as “Gar” because of his resemblance to the nasty snake-fish that plagued these swamps—was the sheriff’s son, and everyone in Pasquamish Parish knew his daddy turned a blind eye to his boy’s less-than-legal activities, including running his own protection racket. Stella’s father volunteered a monthly stipend to the “policemen’s orphan fund,” paid directly to this asshole.

“My daddy’s paid you plenty for the night,” she said. “You can fetch your own dinner.”

Feigning more courage than she felt, she straightened her shoulders and headed toward the gate. She refused to let him intimidate her. He backed aside, but only a step. She tried to push past him, but at the last moment he blocked the way with a thick arm again.

He leaned in close. She smelled his breath. He had been drinking.

“What’s wrong? Can’t dykes cook?” he asked. “Or is it your girl-friend who does all the cooking? What you need is a real man . . . someone to teach you how to fetch and carry like a good wife.”

Fear turned to fury in a heartbeat. “I’d rather fuck Elvis.”

The man stiffened, his fat lips disappearing into a sneer. “Maybe I’ll throw you in there and you can try. Accidents happen all the time in the swamps.”

Stella knew this wasn’t an idle threat. The man wasn’t above such actions. Gar and his cronies were known to have caused
accidents
in the past. It was one of the reasons her daddy never missed a payment.

She shoved his arm out of the way, but he kept tight to her, his eyes gone dead mean.

At that moment the screaming started—loud, strident, and terrified.

They both turned.

It rose from the Boy Scout camp.