Nancy K. Duplechain - Dark Trilogy 01 - Dark Bayou by Nancy K. Duplechain Page B

nice smile.
     
    “Who is that?” I asked.
     
    Lucas just shook his head. He flipped the picture down on top of the envelope. The next picture made us both gasp. It took me a second to realize it was the same man as in the first picture. In this one, he was on his back, naked, under water. His eyes were open in terror, frozen that way in death. His body was bloated and—
     
    Lucas quickly flipped that picture down on top of the previous one. The next picture was a young black man wearing a Lafayette High cap and gown in his graduation photo. The next one was of him, impaled by a tree in a very bad car accident. Lucas flipped to the next picture and the next and the next. Each was a before and after.
     
    “Damnit!” He said, stopping suddenly. I looked at him, waiting for him to tell me. “I took these pictures.”
     
    “What?”
     
    “Not the before pictures, but the ones …” he trailed off. “These were all crime scene investigations. I took them myself. They all happened in the last couple of years.” He flipped over another picture. “See?” I looked at it. It was a girl in a U.L. yearbook photo. “That’s the student I was telling you about.” He flipped to the next picture, and it pained him to see her with her head bashed in and her torso ripped open, just how he described her to me at the bar last night.
     
    “But why give these to you? How would he even get them in his possession?”
     
    “I don’t know,” he said, as he flipped through more pictures. I looked away, my stomach starting to churn. “Oh, my God,” he said, barely a whisper.
     
    “What?” I turned to him. He quickly moved to hide the last few pictures from me. But he didn’t move quickly enough. I glimpsed the photo in his hand; David, looking dashing in his police uniform. I reached out for the picture, but Lucas held the stack away from me. I snatched it, anyway.
     
    “Leigh,” he warned.
     
    I flipped over to the next picture. It was Michelle in her uniform; standard police picture.
     
    “Leigh. Don’t.”
     
    I slowly flipped over to the next picture. It was the car accident. I stared at it long and hard, barely able to breathe. My eyes started to water. Lucas quickly pulled the pictures away from me. I was holding on too tightly, so he only managed to pull the accident picture from the top. The next picture took me by surprise and I was truly bewildered. It didn’t seem to fit in with the others. By the order in which things were going, the next picture under this one should have been a gruesome one, a horrible crime or accident, but I knew that wouldn’t be the case. It couldn’t.
     
    I carefully lifted up the picture of my mother—the picture Dad took of her on our trip to Gulf Shores. Her hair was blonde and her smile warm and sunny. Around her neck was her cherished locket that contained pictures of her and Dad back when they were dating. I held my mother’s picture to my chest. The next one should have been her looking peaceful, the aneurysm taking her out instantly, no gory scene, just peace. But it was gory. It was enough to make me rock my head back onto the headrest. Lucas, alarmed, pulled the picture from me, along with the one under it, which was the last in the series.
     
    “Oh, Leigh. Honey, I’m so sorry.”
     
    “I don’t understand. She died of an aneurysm,” I said, mostly to myself. He was silent. He appeared to be just as dumbstruck as I was. And who wouldn’t be? You think someone died peacefully, only to come across hard evidence that contradicts that. Her body was a heap on an old, dirty wooden floor, a knife in her abdomen, blood pooling around her. It wasn’t so much the gruesome scene that was shocking. It was the expression on her face. I read true horror in her eyes. She was in agony, and she was terrified.
     
    I started breathing in and out too quickly. I felt myself starting to hyperventilate. Lucas put his hand on mine, and I grabbed it hard and squeezed. He let