Chapter 11

11

August F. “Gus” Noblier had ruled as king of Partout Parish for two decades before his retirement. A reign of consecutive terms blemished by one election loss to the skullduggery of a political rival who had subsequently left the office in a cloud of scandal, only to be replaced by Gus for another dozen years after. It was a tenure unlikely to be repeated.

He was a figure as big as his reputation—rawboned and rough-edged, full of bluster and bombast and too much fried food. He stood behind his desk with his hands on his hips and a scowl on his face. He had dressed for his day of meetings in Baton Rouge in full uniform, though he had jerked loose his necktie now at the tail end of the afternoon. He looked tired and irritated.

Between the shocking circumstances of the death of his successor, Kelvin Dutrow, and the fact that Dutrow had never promoted a chief deputy to the official position of second-in-command, the governor himself had asked Gus to come back and take control until the situation could be sorted and settled. Gus had done so grudgingly, out of a sense of duty, and he had made no bones about his intention to leave as soon as his replacement was in place.

As impossible as it had been for anyone to imagine him relinquishing his hold on power in the first place, retirement had suited Gus just fine. He had filled his days with his horses and his hobbies and helping his wife in the garden. He had claimed not to miss the spotlight or the endless headache of holding office, though Annie secretly wanted to believe otherwise.

Gus Noblier had been a constant in her professional life since she had come out of the police academy. He had hired her as a patrol deputy and promoted her to detective, serving as a mentor of sorts along the way. He had filled a similar role for Nick, hiring him after Nick’s career in New Orleans had crashed and burned like a derailed train. He had known Nick’s father and had taken on Armand Fourcade’s son at a time when no one else would have touched him.

He stood looking at Annie and Nick now like they were a pair of ill-behaved students who had been sent to the principal’s office.

“Imagine my surprise,” he said, “when I’m sitting with the governor at Sullivan’s, about to cut into my beautiful Delmonico steak, and my phone starts blowing up with Johnny Earl having a tantrum because one of my detectives has chased one of his off a case. Imagine my indigestion.”

“That’s what you get eating red meat,” Nick said.

Gus’s scowl deepened as red began to creep up his neck. “Are you trying to be amusing?”

“No.”

“Because I am not in the mood to be amused by anyone, least of all you, Lieutenant.” He turned his eagle-eyed glare on Annie. “And you must be eating your Wheaties these days, young lady. First day back on the job and you’re sinking your teeth into the town boys like a terrier with a rat, running their detective off his case in their jurisdiction.”

“I didn’t run Dewey Rivette off his case, sir,” Annie corrected him. “He didn’t have a case. He wasn’t investigating anything. He’s just a big baby who showed up mad because he thought I was about to make him look bad.”

“Weren’t you?”

“I don’t have to lift a finger to make Dewey Rivette look bad. He does all that heavy lifting on his own. Anyway, Bayou Breaux is as much our jurisdiction as it is theirs, as you yourself have pointed out many times.”

His attention went back to Nick. “And I suppose you’re gonna make excuses for your wife’s behavior?”

“ Mais non ,” Nick said calmly. “No excuses are necessary. Detective Broussard, she did nothing wrong.”

“You gave her the okay for this?”

“Me, I was otherwise engaged at the time with a murder victim. At any rate, my detectives don’t need permission to investigate crimes. It is their job after all, is it not?”

“Don’t get cute with me,” Gus grumbled. “I’m trying to orchestrate a smooth change of power in this office. I don’t have time to be starting World War III with Johnny Earl.”

“ C’est triste ,” Nick said. “That’s sad, for sure, considering butting heads with Chief Earl has always been your favorite way to pass a good time, yeah?”

“Now, listen here—”

“Don’t bother to deny it. I don’t know how you stood it this long out of office not being able to wind up Johnny Earl ’til his head spins. It seems to me the only real problem here is that you were caught unaware. You never did like to play defense.”

“Well, the best defense is a good offense,” Gus conceded as he took his seat. He heaved a sigh and gestured them toward chairs.

“Have you actually spoken with Chief Earl?” Nick asked.

“Without knowing the particulars of the situation? Hell no!”

“Then there is no problem, is there? You’re just cranky because the governor didn’t tell you what you wanted to hear today, and you’re gonna be stuck with this job longer than you want to be, yeah?”

Gus made a rumbling sound low in his throat like distant thunder. “That I’m sitting here this minute dealing with you is already longer than I want to be here.”

Annie glanced around the office. When Gus had reigned, this room had been a veritable time capsule of the history of Partout Parish. The walls had been covered in photographs of Gus with every important or self-important politician and minor celebrity in south Louisiana, as well as dozens of commendations and awards and framed newspaper and magazine articles featuring Gus. Every available surface had been piled with old files and weird relics he had collected over the years: lacquered alligator heads, giant ceremonial ribbon-cutting shears, a jar full of tiny plastic baby dolls found in decades’ worth of king cakes.

When he had come into office, Kelvin Dutrow had stripped the room bare and then built his own wall of fame, all of it gone now, thrown away and forgotten. The wall had remained empty, save for the dozens of empty picture hooks. Gus had made no effort to bring anything personal back into the room. The sense of impermanence was subtly unsettling.

“I wanna dig Kelvin Dutrow up and kill him myself for leaving this office in the lurch,” he grumbled. “No chief deputy, and the next obvious choice don’t want the job, not that I blame him.”

Nick, who had hated Kelvin Dutrow on first sight and had never changed his mind, wisely chose to say nothing in the moment. Gus had handpicked Kelvin Dutrow to succeed him. That his choice had turned out to be a bad one was not sitting well with him. He now found himself in a hell that was, at least in part, of his own making, but he was more than willing to take some of that frustration out on anyone handy if they displeased him.

“This is a missing persons case,” Annie said, turning them back to the topic at hand. “We should have been brought in immediately, not left to wait until a family member came to us out of desperation.”

Gus sighed and rubbed a big hand over his face and back over his silver crew cut. “Is this family member the same woman Valerie tells me attacked her this morning?”

Annie rolled her eyes. “She did not attack Valerie. If Valerie didn’t wear her skirts too tight and her heels too high, she could have easily gotten out of the way.”

“Out of the way of what?”

“B’Lynn Fontenot,” Annie said. “She came here this morning hoping to appeal to you directly. She said her ex-husband is an acquaintance of yours—Dr. Robert Fontenot.”

“Bob Fontenot?” Gus said. “There’s a name I haven’t heard in donkey’s years.”

“He moved to Lafayette.”

“I know.”

Something in the way he said it gave Annie pause, like those two simple words might be only the very tip of a substantial iceberg.

“You haven’t heard from him lately?” she asked.

“No.”

“His son is missing.”

“Is he?”

Another two icy chips off the same block. There was a story there, and Gus wasn’t wanting to share it.

“He’s been missing since Halloween,” she pressed on. “So far, the only person who has any sense of urgency about it is his mother—and I include the BBPD and our own desk sergeant in that statement. Dewey Rivette has done nothing, as far as I can see.”

“The Fontenot boy isn’t this body you’ve got laying in the morgue at Our Lady?” Gus asked.

“No, sir. Definitely not.”

“And we may have another possible missing person,” Nick said. “Marc Mercier, who hasn’t been seen since Saturday. He and Mr. Fontenot knew each other, as it turns out.”

“Then who is this corpse? Marc Mercier?”

“We don’t know yet. I’ve got to get his dental records and hope there’s enough mouth left on that corpse for comparison. He took a shotgun blast to the face. It’ll probably come to DNA to identify him, and where do we even start with that if it isn’t Marc Mercier?”

Gus slapped a hand down hard on his desktop. “What the actual hell is going on in this parish? I leave for one day and come back to all this mess? Missing persons. Unidentified murder victims…”

“ Mais yeah,” Nick said dryly. “As I recall, there was no crime at all when you were sheriff before.”

“Smart-ass. The world’s going to hell on a sled,” Gus declared. “You think this is somehow all connected, do you?”

Nick gave half a shrug. “I have no idea at this point.”

“I spoke with Mrs. Fontenot after we left the morgue,” Annie said. “She remembers Marc Mercier from when the boys were in school. They ran together before Robbie had his accident, but not after. He lost most of his old friends. They graduated, moved on with their lives. She doesn’t know who his friends are now. He doesn’t share with her. But she’s never heard him mention Marc Mercier in recent memory, for whatever that’s worth.”

Gus frowned. “Try to find people in this town who didn’t go to school together. Doesn’t mean much.”

“I still don’t like the coincidence,” Nick said. “For now these are three separate investigations that may or may not intersect. But if it turns out there’s a connection, I would sooner not be tripping over the BBPD as we investigate.

“Annie filed the missing persons report, she’ll enter Mr. Fontenot into the NCIC database, and she’s already working on a possible witness. As far as I’m concerned, this is our case going forward, and Dewey Rivette can devote himself to solving the crime wave of shoplifting in downtown Bayou Breaux.”

Gus sat back in his chair and heaved a sigh as the wheels of his mind turned.

“If you had been here this morning,” Annie began, “what would you have told Mrs. Fontenot? Would you have turned her away? Would you have told her that her son isn’t our problem because of his address, because you didn’t want to offend Johnny Earl?”

“No,” he said wearily. “I don’t reckon I would have. But that doesn’t make this any less of a can of worms.”

He swiveled his chair slowly back and forth as he stared out the window, as if it was a portal into the past.

“That boy caused his parents a world of grief,” he said. “And here he is, still doing it.”

“We don’t know that he’s done anything,” Annie said. “All we know at this point is he’s gone. Where and why, I don’t know. Could be no fault of his own at all.”

“The result is the same,” Gus said. “Here’s his mama, hysterical with worry, begging for help, running herself ragged, I expect. She’s dragged him out of hellholes before. She’s gotta be thinking he’s dead or worse.”

“ Mais yeah, and she could be right,” Nick said. “That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t look for him. And, given the shit show this office has been in recent months, stepping up in a public way to take over a case the BBPD fumbled could be a good PR move, no?”

Gus laughed, a big, loud belly laugh. “How unlike you to consider the public image of this office! Since when do you give a rat’s patoot about appearances?”

“I don’t,” Nick admitted. “You know that all too well. I only care about the work. That’s why I have my job and why you have yours.”

Gus pursed his lips and nodded. “I can’t deny this office could use some good publicity. I don’t like having to get there via a minor crime wave, but showing people we have control of the situation surely can’t hurt us.”

And if that show of strength came at the expense of his rival, all the better, Annie thought, but she kept that thought to herself.

The sheriff turned his eagle eye on her. “I’m gonna hope for everyone’s sake this case has a positive outcome, but I’m gonna tell you what, Annie, you’ve cut a big hog in the ass here. Robbie Fontenot was nothing but trouble and disappointment back when, and there’s no reason to expect something better now.”

“I know,” she said. “But it’s not always nuns and schoolteachers who need us.”

“No. That’s true,” he said on a sigh. He raised a big hand as if to give a benediction. “Give my regards to Mrs. Fontenot,” he said by way of dismissal. “I’ll deal with Johnny Earl.”

—

“Thanks for having my back, boss,” Annie said as she and Nick walked across from the main building toward the Pizza Hut.

The sun was puddling against the western horizon like molten gold, casting the world in a burnished glow as the last of the afternoon slipped away. The pleasant warmth of the day had gone with the light. She wished for the jacket she’d left in her vehicle.

Nick glanced down at her. “I didn’t do you any favors, chère . This is the best way to proceed.”

“I’m glad you’re a control freak, then. It sometimes works to my advantage.”

“Why do you think Dewey Rivette is so bent out of shape about this that he would go to his chief?” he asked. “He could have just stepped back and saved himself the headache. Or he could have welcomed our help and kept his hand in. Why make such a fuss?

“If he’s made no progress and had no real interest in the case, then he had to expose himself to Johnny Earl as being incompetent,” he said. “Why do that? Why wouldn’t he be just as happy to let it go?”

“I don’t know,” Annie admitted. “I looked at Robbie Fontenot’s arrest record. Dewey collared him a couple of times back when he was still in a uniform. Not for anything much, mind you, and it was years ago.”

“Could Rivette be running him as a CI?”

“I wonder that, too. But if Robbie Fontenot is his informant, wouldn’t that be all the more reason for him to take a genuine interest in finding him?”

“Maybe he doesn’t need to find him because he already knows where he’s at.”

“Then why make himself look like an incompetent fool?” Annie asked. “It’d be one thing if nobody cared this kid is missing, but Dewey’s had B’Lynn Fontenot calling him on a daily basis. Why wouldn’t he try to at least make it look like he’s doing everything he can?”

“Well, I doubt Dewey’s ever won any prizes for his intellect,” Nick said, pulling open the outer door and holding it for her. “But this is curious nonetheless.”

“Yeah. Stay tuned,” Annie said as she walked through into the bullpen. “I have a feeling the shit has only begun to hit the fan where Dewey and the BBPD are concerned.”

“There he is!” Chaz Stokes announced. He stood leaning a hip against the counter next to the coffeepot, his porkpie hat tipped back on his head. “Our own star of the afternoon news himself!”

Nick scowled. “What are you doing watching afternoon television? You have a murder to investigate.”

“I happened to be investigating in a place with a television,” Stokes said, “and there you were, nose to nose with that Mercier woman. She needs her own show: Crazy Housewives of Asscrack, Louisiana. That’s some must-see TV right there!”

“How like you, Chaz,” Annie said, irritated, “making fun of a woman in an emotional crisis. She thought her son was dead in the morgue. Put a laugh track to that, why don’t you? Hilarity ensues as a man gets his face shot off and his mother loses her mind with grief. Belly laughs all around!”

“You’re in the wrong building, Broussard,” Stokes said. “The Fun Police meet two doors down. Or you could get a sense of humor.”

“I have a great sense of humor,” Annie countered. “You’re just not funny.”

He made a face at her like he was ten years old. Annie rolled her eyes like an annoyed little sister.

Their mutual dislike went way back. He was the kind of man who believed his looks entitled him to the adoration of all women everywhere. If a woman didn’t agree, she went immediately from potential date to enemy in his eyes. He had dogged Annie pretty hard when he had been new to Bayou Breaux and Annie had been a green deputy and the only woman driving a patrol car in the parish, before she and Nick had become an item. When she had turned down his advances, Stokes had become her bully, spurring on co-workers in their campaign of sexual harassment against her. It had been a miserable time in her life.

Her relationship with Nick and her promotion to detective had put a stop to the worst of it, no one in their right mind wanting to run afoul of Nick’s temper. And times and attitudes toward women in policing had changed in the years since. Old grudges had softened, and she and Stokes had learned to coexist. That was as good as it would ever get. He still managed to irritate the shit out of her by merely breathing the air.

“Listen up!” Nick barked, getting the attention of everyone in the room. “As of right now, we’ve got three cases that will take precedence over everything else we’ve got going on. The unidentified murder victim found outside of Luck this morning; the disappearance of Marc Mercier, last seen Saturday night; and the disappearance of Robbie Fontenot, last seen on Halloween, both white males in their late twenties.

“These three cases may or may not be related. We know that Mercier and Fontenot knew each other in high school. Whether or not they’ve had anything to do with one another recently, we don’t yet know. We do know that the body in the morgue is not Robbie Fontenot. I’ve requested dental records on Marc Mercier for comparison, or we may have to rule him in or out by DNA.

“Annie is the lead on Fontenot. Chaz is the lead on the DB. I’ll take Mercier. Wynn, we’ll need cell phone records for both Fontenot and Mercier.”

“Do we have case numbers?” Dixon asked.

“On Fontenot, yes,” Annie said.

“I’ll have a case number for you on Mercier before I leave tonight,” Nick said. “For now, we’ve got a BOLO out on Mr. Mercier’s vehicle, a new black Ford Raptor pulling a seventeen-foot modified V-hull boat. Mr. Fontenot’s vehicle—a blue Toyota Corolla—has been reported stolen. I’ve given all the basic information to the press, but we need to get photos of both men released to all media outlets. Wynn, I’ll put that on your plate, too.

“Deebo,” he said, turning his attention. “Annie’s case may have a drug connection.”

Jeffcoat nodded. “We’ve already spoken. Whatever you need, Annie.”

“I need to know about a possible drug house on Lafourche over by the Mardi Gras warehouse,” Annie said. “Do you know that neighborhood?”

“Sure. Used to be Two Deuce Krewe territory, if we’re talking about hard drugs,” Deebo said. “But not for a while now. They move around. Did you see something?”

“The house is across the alley from where Robbie Fontenot lives,” Annie said. “It looks like it could be abandoned, but it’s also got bars on the doors and it’s tricked out with security cameras.”

“And you want to knock on the door and ask can you see their security footage?” he asked. “There’s a good way to get your head shot off.”

“I want to know what I can know about it,” Annie said. “Robbie Fontenot is a recovering addict. He’s supposedly been clean since he got out of rehab recently, but if his next-door neighbor is a dealer, that’s the most obvious rabbit hole to go down. As for the cameras, the one on the back porch could possibly catch anything going on at the back of Robbie’s place. That’s what I’m most interested in.”

“You’ve been in his house,” Nick said. “Were there any signs of a struggle?”

“No. I can’t say he was taken from there, but I’d sure like to see any comings and goings,” Annie said. That she was most curious about any comings and goings of Dewey Rivette, she kept to herself.

“I’ll find out what I can,” Deebo offered.

“Thanks.”

“Find out who owns this supposed drug house,” Nick said. “It’s likely a rental property.”

Annie nodded.

He turned to Stokes. “Has Alphonse Arceneaux come in to make his statement?”

“Yeah. He didn’t have anything useful to add. He’s still more hot under the collar about kids stealing his goddamn nutria. He gave me a list of suspects for that,” he said with a dismissive eye roll.

“Check them out.”

“What?” Stokes scoffed. “Are you fucking kidding me? Are we the swamp rat police now?”

“Use your head for something other than a hat rack,” Nick snapped. “If someone is raiding his traplines, they’re getting out there earlier than he is. Maybe they saw something. Check them out. Bring them in. They’re potential witnesses. What else did you manage to do today besides catching me on TV?”

“As you know, there’s no houses on that road out to where the body was dumped,” Stokes said, “so no doors to knock on, no witnesses. We can’t know if the vehicle that brought him out there came north out of Luck or south out of Bayou Breaux, or came from any one of a dozen side roads in between.

“The tire tracks at the scene are probably from a pickup,” he went on. “Hopefully, the casts are clean enough to get a make on the tires. That’ll take days or weeks to hear back. In the meantime, we can check security cameras on the south end of Bayou Breaux and the north end of Luck on the off chance this mystery truck stuck to a main drag hauling a murder victim around, and then we track down every pickup we see on the video.”

“The autopsy will be first thing tomorrow,” Nick said. “We’ll have a more accurate time of death, but he was out of rigor and decomp had already started, meaning he was probably killed on the weekend. But he wasn’t laying where we found him all that time, that’s for sure. You only need to look at video from last night. We can borrow a couple deputies to help with that. There can’t be but four or five businesses on either end of that route with cameras. And check any houses along the way for cameras on garages or video doorbells.”

Stokes nodded. “We won’t have a full tox screen back anytime soon, but I asked for a quick blood alcohol. If he’d been drinking, I think bars are a good place to start asking questions. Any altercations over the weekend, any guys seen stepping out with other dudes’ ladies, that kind of thing. I still say that’s what this will come down to. Why else is he only half dressed?”

“Don’t rule out the chance that he could be gay,” Annie cautioned. “Remember Ronald Dominique? Twenty-three victims, all men and boys.”

“Thanks, Broussard,” Stokes grumbled. “That’s all we need. A serial killer.”

“Don’t shoot the messenger,” Annie said. “We’ve got two men missing and a dead body, all white males from the same age-group. I’m just saying.”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Nick said. “For the moment, these are three separate cases. Let’s keep it simple but keep our minds open.

“We’ll set up the conference room. I want to lay these cases out side by side on the whiteboards. Then, if there is a connection, we’re more apt to see it right away. And if there’s not, we’ll see that, too.”

He glanced at Annie and nodded for her to follow him down the hall to his office.

“Serial killer,” he muttered as they went.

“That wasn’t my point,” Annie snapped, her patience worn thin by the day and by Chaz Stokes. The adrenaline that had carried her through the afternoon had run out. She wanted to lie down and take a nap, right there on the spot, but didn’t even dare to express her exhaustion to Nick lest he seize the opportunity to tell her she shouldn’t have come back to work. She had to thank her lucky stars he was too preoccupied at the moment to notice.

“I know that wasn’t your point,” he said, holding the door for her. “But think about it. We’ve got an unidentified body and two missing persons, all white males in the same age-group. How long before some true crime podcast junkie jumps on that and sets fire to social media? It’s probably happening as we speak.”

“It’s not like you to care about such things.”

“I don’t care for myself, but I don’t like it for Gus,” he said, shaking his head. “Bad enough that he had to come back to this job at all, but now this mess…He doesn’t need the pressure. He should be home driving Arnell crazy, not dealing with multiple high-profile cases while eating steak with the governor. He’s gonna end up having a heart attack.”

“I guess we’d better solve these cases, then.”

“I want an ID on that body by the end of the day tomorrow.”

“If it’s your Mr. Mercier, hopefully the dental records solve that mystery,” Annie said. “And with all the local news coverage, if some other poor soul from the area has gone missing, we should be hearing about it. If this guy isn’t from the area and he just got dumped there, that’s a problem.”

“That seems unlikely, given the location,” Nick said, taking his seat behind his desk. “That’s a spot locals go to. It’s not near a major highway.”

“Fingers crossed he’s a local, then, as odd as that is to say. I’m just relieved he’s not my guy.” She checked her watch and sighed. “If we’re done, I’m gonna go pick up Justin.”

She started to turn toward the door.

“You leave that drug house to Deebo.”

His words spun her around and pulled her back. She felt her temper stir and rise. “That’s why you asked me back here. To tell me that.”

He had already turned his attention to his computer screen, dismissing her.

“This is my case,” she said. “I’ve got a missing person possibly involved in drugs, but I’m supposed to avoid the neighborhood drug house? How is that supposed to work?”

“Like this,” he said, not looking up. “You don’t mess around with that house until Deebo does the intel. That’s an order.”

“Is that an order you would be giving to anyone else in this office or just me?”

“Just you,” he admitted.

“That’s not right.”

“Too bad. Deal with it.”

“Nick—”

“Don’t argue with me, Antoinette.”

Now he looked up at her, dead serious. Any sane person would have shut their mouth and backed away.

“Me, I don’t want to have this conversation twice today,” he said. “Deebo is our drug task force guy. He’s got the best contacts in that world. He can deal with the drug house. That’s a sound management decision, and that’s that.”

Annie weighed her options, not that she really had any. She wasn’t going to win this fight, and pushing back would only make him dig in.

“Yes, sir,” she said with a little salute. “I’m going to go now and pick up our son. Is that all right with you? Because, statistically speaking, driving a car will be the most dangerous thing I do today.”

“Not if you stand there and push your luck with me, it won’t be,” he said in a completely empty threat.

“Oh, what’re you gonna do?” Annie asked. “Lock me in a tower?”

“Maybe. Do you know of one?”

“No, but if you find one, I want a room with a view,” she teased.

Nick fought a smile. “Because God forbid you should have to mind your own business for a time.”

“What kind of detective would I be if I minded my own business?” she asked, coming back around his desk.

“Well, you’d be safe,” he said, looking up at her. “That’s all I want, ’Toinette. To keep you safe. You can’t fault me for that.”

“I don’t,” she whispered, leaning down to kiss his cheek. As much as she wished her safety didn’t have to be an issue, she appreciated his concern and his desire to protect her.

That thought brought the memory of Tulsie Parcelle, with her split lip and black eye, cradling her injured arm against her body as she hustled out of the ER, ashamed and afraid.

“I count myself very lucky,” she said. “I’m off now. I’ll see you at the Corners. Try not to be late. This day has been long enough as it is.”