Chapter 10

10

“Is he in a bad mood?” Annie asked as they headed back down the hall toward the ER.

“He’s got the caps lock on,” Nick said, showing her his phone screen.

GET YOUR ASS TO MY OFFICE ASAP.

“Shit,” Annie said. “He’s heard from Johnny Earl.”

“That’s a good bet, though he’s just generally in a bad mood these days.”

“Sorry I’m adding to that.”

“No, you’re not,” he said, cutting her a look, a hint of a smile turning one corner of his mouth.

His wife had a long and consistent history of doing the right thing (in her mind) first and apologizing later. She was as stubborn as the day was long when it came to her beliefs about anything. She would stand in the face of a roaring lion if she had to. She had stood up to him more than once when no grown man would have. That attitude got her in trouble as often as not, but he loved her for it fiercely.

“No,” she admitted. “I’m not sorry. I’m not sorry at all. I just wish it wouldn’t be a problem.”

“It won’t be, not after the initial explosion.”

“The shrapnel is so unpleasant, though.”

“Me, I’m more concerned about what we’ve got going on here. Your missing person and my missing person just happened to know each other?”

“Could be a coincidence.”

“You know how much I like that word,” he said. “Not at all. And Marc Mercier’s wife told me he spends his free time with the guys he went to high school with.”

“I asked B’Lynn about Robbie’s friends. She said she didn’t know if he had any left. With his drug history and your guy’s anti-drug history, it wouldn’t seem like they’d be hanging out in the same circles.”

“But your Mr. Fontenot is allegedly clean now, yeah? It’s a decade on since high school. If he’s making a fresh start, runs into old buddies…who knows?”

“Well, we know that body on the slab in there isn’t Robbie, and Robbie’s been gone more than a week. Your guy disappeared when? Saturday?”

“ Mais yeah, but gone doesn’t necessarily mean dead or missing. I’ve requested Marc Mercier’s dental records. If there’s enough jaw left on the one side of the mouth of our corpse, we might be able to compare. Otherwise we’re waiting on DNA results to eliminate him. Christ knows how long that’ll take.”

“You need to text me a picture of him,” Annie said. “I’ll show Robbie’s neighbor and his mom.”

“Same here. Text me that picture of your guy.”

They turned the corner into the ER waiting area. Beyond the big glass doors, the gaggle of reporters had grown while they’d been inside. There were TV cameras now as the afternoon countdown to the five-o’clock news began. As the doors slid open, the reporters shouted a chorus of all the same questions they had asked before.

He hated dealing with the media, but he stopped to address them nevertheless. They had their uses, and he had his responsibilities.

“I have no new information for you regarding the identity of the victim found outside of Luck this morning. As I stated earlier today, the victim is a white male, age twenty-five to thirty-five, with dark hair and dark eyes. If anyone in the public has any information, please call the sheriff’s office tip line. That number is three-three-seven—”

“You lying son of a bitch!”

Kiki Mercier had pushed her way to the front of the small crowd. Now all eyes turned toward her in her bib overalls and work boots, her short hair standing up in ragged tufts, as if she’d been pulling at it.

“I asked you was he dead and you said no,” she said, stepping forward. “He’s dead in there right now, isn’t he? That’s my Marc in there, and you wouldn’t tell me!”

“Mrs. Mercier,” Nick said quietly, well aware the TV cameras were rolling, “I don’t know any such thing.”

“You’re lying!” she cried, tears welling in her eyes as she took another step forward. “You told that bitch wife of his! You told her, but you wouldn’t tell me. I’m his mother! I want to see him!”

She was close enough now Nick could smell the whiskey on her breath.

Luc Mercier rushed up behind her, red-faced. “Jesus, Ma, stop it! You’re making a fool of yourself!”

“Don’t you talk to me like that!” Kiki snapped. “You’d be only too happy if your brother was dead!”

“For fuck’s sake, shut up!” Luc said, his voice low and tight. “You’re drunk!”

“Don’t you tell me what to do, Luc Mercier,” she barked back. “You’re only here to drive the damn truck.”

She turned back toward Nick, losing her balance and falling against him. “I want to see my son. Right now!”

Nick turned, pulling Kiki with him. He looked to Annie and said, “Find us an empty room. Quick.” To the uniformed deputy standing sentry at the doors, he said, “Keep these people out here.”

Behind them, the shouted questions of the reporters rose to a crescendo.

Annie dashed ahead of them, through the ER waiting area and down the hall, knocking on the door of an examination room then swinging the door open and motioning for them to come.

“I had to hear it on the radio,” Kiki said angrily as Nick ushered her into the room. “That there was a body found practically down the road from us. You stood right there in our place and didn’t say a goddamn thing!”

“I didn’t say anything because we don’t know anything, Mrs. Mercier,” Nick said. “I’ve got an unidentified body. I don’t know if it’s Marc. I don’t know who it is.”

“Let me see him!” she shouted. “I know my own son!”

“No,” Nick said. “That’s not how this is happening.”

“You went to Melissa,” Luc said. “Has she been here? Where the hell is she? Or can’t she be bothered?”

“I’ll be blunt with you,” Nick said. “This victim took a shotgun blast to the face.”

Kiki gasped as if she’d been struck. “No!”

“No one is identifying him by sight,” Nick said. “This body was dumped. I don’t have a vehicle; I don’t have an ID of any kind. Yes, I went to Marc’s wife. She is his legal next of kin. I had to get the information from her for Marc’s dentist in Philadelphia to send his dental records for comparison.”

“Oh, my God, she’s killed him!” Kiki wailed, falling against the exam table. “I told you she killed him. Her and Will Faulkner. And now they gonna take my grandbaby away from me!”

“Mrs. Mercier,” Annie said, reaching out to lay a hand gently on her shoulder. “Why don’t you take a seat and we’ll talk about your concerns.”

Kiki jerked backward. “Who the hell are you?”

“Detective Broussard.”

“I don’t want to talk about my concerns , Detective Broussard,” she said, sneering at the idea. “I want to see my son!”

She shoved Annie hard into the cabinets and bolted for the door.

Nick blocked her, grabbing her by the shoulders and trapping her back against the exam table. Fueled by rage and panic, she was shockingly strong.

“Let me go!” she screamed, twisting in his grasp. “Let me go, damn you!”

“Stop it!” Nick ordered. “Be still, or I’m putting you in handcuffs!”

He glanced over at Annie. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” she said, even as she pressed her fingertips against her eyebrow to stem the flow of blood from a cut.

“Jesus Christ, Ma!” Luc Mercier exclaimed. “What are you doing? What the hell is wrong with you?”

“I’m here to fight for your brother,” she said. “What are you doing? Nothing!”

“Fight for him how? Fight for him for what?”

“You don’t love your brother!”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake! You’re out of your damn mind!”

“ C’est assez! ” Nick barked, pulling Kiki’s attention back to him. “Enough!”

She went still, and he loosened his hold on her shoulders, not trusting her enough to let go altogether.

“I understand that you’re upset, Mrs. Mercier,” he said. “But you just assaulted a sheriff’s detective. You’re intoxicated and violent, and I would be well within my rights to arrest you. Is that what you want? You want to go sit in jail? I will happily accommodate you.”

Kiki huffed a sigh, still agitated. “You’ll arrest me, but you won’t arrest Prissy Missy, and I’m telling you she killed my boy!”

“I’m done explaining myself to you,” Nick said.

He looked to Luc Mercier, the errand boy and chauffeur and apparent constant source of disappointment to his mother, and couldn’t help but feel sympathy for him, having to deal with a daily dose of this woman.

“You’re gonna take your maman out of this building by another door,” Nick said. “Speak to no one, and go home now or she’s going to jail until she’s sober, and you can deal with the aftermath of that. Those are your choices, Mr. Mercier.”

“Might as well ask me would I rather be gouged with a stick or hit with a hammer,” Luc grumbled. He looked at his mother. “I should let them lock you up, if for no other reason than I wouldn’t have to listen to you bitching on the drive home.”

“Don’t you dare!”

“Don’t worry,” he said. “You’d only be worse after jail. I’ll take you home and you can drink yourself into oblivion tonight, fretting about your one worthy child. If there’s a God, you’ll choke to death on your own vomit later.”

“Oh, you’d like that,” Kiki snapped.

“I would, yes.”

“You’re an ungrateful, spiteful man.”

“Well, look who I learned from.”

“ Arrête! ” Nick snapped. “I’ve had it with the both of you!” He stepped back, hands raised. “Go! Go home. Now, before I change my mind. I’ll be in touch as soon as I know whether or not the body in the morgue is Marc’s.”

—

“These family meetings are so heartwarming,” Annie said, pressing a tissue to her bleeding eyebrow as they watched the Merciers walk away down the hall toward the main entrance of the hospital.

“To hell with them,” Nick grumbled, turning his attention to her. “Are you all right, chère ? You’re bleeding. Let me see.”

“It’s nothing,” she said, but she let him look and fuss as he muttered a stream of curse words in French. “It’s just a little cut. I’m fine.”

“You hit your head!”

“No. I just caught the edge of the cabinet with my eyebrow. Really, I’m fine.”

He scowled at the cut. “I want you to get it looked at. That might need a stitch.”

Annie drew breath to object, but he cut her off with a stern look.

“No arguments, ’Toinette. We’re at the damn hospital. Have a nurse look at it while I go outside and deal with the press.”

She sighed in resignation. “All right.”

They walked together back to the ER, Annie turning to the triage desk as Nick went through the double doors to face the reporters waiting outside. She gave the nurse at the desk a peek at her bleeding eyebrow and then followed her back into the treatment area, where the physician’s assistant came to look at the wound.

“Please tell me I don’t need stitches.”

“You don’t need stitches,” the PA said. “We’ll just clean it up and put a butterfly on that, and you’ll be all set. It won’t take a minute. Just have a seat here.”

Annie hopped up on the end of a gurney to wait. The treatment bays were divided by curtains but open to the work lane, which was cluttered with various carts and machines pushed up against the wall. Privacy was minimal. She could hear conversations on either side of her—a mother consoling a daughter over a broken arm, a man complaining about his insurance, a nurse giving someone instructions about resting an injury.

“…Are you sure you don’t want to speak to a deputy, Mrs. Parcelle?”

Annie sat up straighter. Tulsie Parcelle, the young woman who had tried to duck her notice in the waiting area when she and Nick had first come in.

“No! There’s no reason for that,” the woman scoffed, laughing. “I just had an accident, that’s all. Quit making such a fuss!”

Annie hopped down off the gurney and walked down the work lane. Two beds down, she found Tulsie Parcelle, her right arm in a sling, cradled gingerly against her body. In her early twenties, petite and curvy, she was a pretty girl when she didn’t have a black eye or a busted lip. She had a heart-shaped face with tiny blue eyes that disappeared when she smiled. Her honey-blond hair hung in a thick braid over one shoulder.

“Hey, Tulsie,” Annie greeted her, keeping her tone light and conversational. “I thought that was you in the waiting room. How are you?”

“I’m good!” the girl answered stupidly, as if she wasn’t sitting in an ER with her arm in a sling, looking like she’d been on the losing end of a brawl.

“What’d you do to yourself?” Annie asked, as if she had never been called to the Parcelles’ farm on suspicion of Cody Parcelle knocking his wife around.

Tulsie had refused to press charges that day, insisting her husband hadn’t touched her, that she’d had an accident handling a young stallion. The story had smelled like so much horse manure to the deputy who had responded to the 911 call. Annie had agreed with him, but without a complainant or a witness, they’d had to accept the girl’s story.

“Just a stupid accident!” Tulsie said now with another nervous laugh. “I was pulling down some hay. Cody, he bought a whole load of those big hundred-pound bales. I don’t know what he was thinking. They’re way too big for me to deal with! It’s like me trying to wrestle an alligator. I wrenched my shoulder pretty hard, but I’ll be fine!”

She spoke in exclamation points, as if the extra emphasis and forced smile would sell her story.

It could have been true, Annie conceded, but if she’d gotten hit in the face with a bale of hay, there would have been scratches, not just a black eye and a split lip. More likely was Cody Parcelle backhanding her across the face and yanking her around by one arm, but if Tulsie wasn’t ready to tell that story, there wasn’t anything Annie could do about it.

“Better ask Cody to get those bales down for you from now on,” Annie said. “A hundred pounds apiece? That’s almost as big as you are!”

“Oh, well, you know us farm girls,” Tulsie said, trying to smile again with her fat lip. “We just figure things out!”

She was trying so hard to sound lighthearted and carefree that she came across as frantic, verging on hysterical.

“Yeah, well, still,” Annie said. “Us short girls need to know our limitations, right?

“I didn’t see Cody out front,” she said. “He didn’t come with you?”

She glanced around as if Cody Parcelle might be lurking nearby, half hidden by a curtain. “You didn’t drive yourself here with that bad shoulder, did you?”

“No, I—”

“Because it’s really not okay for you to drive like that,” Annie said. “I’d be happy to give you a lift home—”

“No, no, not necessary!” the girl protested, smiling, laughing, sliding down off the gurney. “Our hired hand brought me. They’re waiting out in the parking lot.”

“Oh, well, good,” Annie said. “But, you know, if you ever need help, you just call me.”

She handed the girl a business card, and they both knew her offer had nothing to do with the attack of a hundred-pound hay bale.

Tulsie shoved the card into the pocket of her jeans, her eyes already on the exit. “Sure. Thanks, Annie. I need to get going. There’s chores to do before supper!”

“You take care,” Annie said.

“I will!”

The girl all but bolted down the work lane, nearly colliding with the PA coming back to tend to Annie’s eyebrow.

The nurse who had been helping Tulsie leaned toward Annie and murmured, “Funny how that girl can look everywhere but right in your eyes.”

“Yeah,” Annie agreed. But it wasn’t funny to either of them. It wasn’t funny at all.