Chapter 21

21

The call had come to Melissa Mercier’s phone at 2:04 in the morning.

“Why?” Annie asked aloud. “Why would Robbie Fontenot call her? Why would he even have her number?”

“She says she never heard of Robbie Fontenot until she saw him on the news last night,” Nick said. “She was up when that call came in because she thought she heard someone trying to break into the house. Then she decided it was just the wind and a loose shutter. Will Faulkner says he walked around the yard when he came over—which would have been around two fifteen. He didn’t see anything suspicious. I looked. I didn’t see anything. But the yard is not secure, and there’s no security cameras on the house.”

“I think my brain has whiplash,” Annie muttered, rubbing her forehead, wincing as she touched the bruise on her cut eyebrow.

They sat in the conference room of the Pizza Hut, where they had organized the whiteboards for each of their three cases. The room was filled with the intoxicating aroma of the building’s namesake coming from a stack of boxes on the table. One veggie, one cheese, one sausage, one pepperoni. Four large pizzas for six detectives, but the boxes would be mostly empty before the night was over. Leftovers would be had for breakfast the next day.

“It looks like the phone has been turned off pretty much since Halloween night,” Wynn said. “Location services are turned off. It pinged off that cell tower west of town last night for the one phone call and went dark again.”

“So, maybe someone was there in that yard after all,” Nick said.

“And he called Marc Mercier’s wife, in the middle of the night, and said nothing,” Annie said. “Why? Just to freak her out? And again, why?”

“I don’t know,” Nick said. “I wanted to put a deputy on that house tonight, but Gus shot me down. He’s trying to play nice with Johnny Earl, who took exception to me saying his officers were largely ornamental.”

“Truth hurts.”

“I suppose they’re capable of sitting in a car and watching a house all night, if that keeps the peace.” He turned toward Wynn. “What about Marc Mercier’s phone?”

“Dark since Saturday evening. No calls. Location services off.”

“What was his last call?”

“To his brother at about six thirty in the evening.”

“And then he turned his phone off,” Nick said. “Why? Who does that? He went home for supper. He went out somewhere. He was supposed to meet his brother the next morning. Why wouldn’t he have his phone on?”

“The world was better for us when people were ignorant about their electronics,” Annie said, helping herself to a slice of sausage pizza. “Watch one Dateline marathon on TV and you’ll know enough to turn your phone off if you’re up to something.”

“What’s he up to, though?” Nick asked. “And what’s your guy up to with his phone off?”

“Nothing good. I found a pile of money in a box in his old bedroom at his mom’s house. Twenty-four hundred and then some. A guy with no legit job.”

“Is he dealing?”

“I haven’t found any evidence of it or anybody to say it’s so. Deebo doesn’t think so. But I did get Dewey Rivette to confess he’s been running Robbie as a CI. Although he swears he never gave Robbie all that money. And really, where would Dewey get that kind of cash to throw around? Fifty here and there. A hundred right before Robbie disappeared. That, I can believe. He claims Robbie told him he could get info on some copper thieves, then he dropped out of sight,” she said. “And now he’s driving around in the middle of the night, calling up the wife of a guy he went to high school with a decade ago? I don’t get that.”

“No one in Marc’s world knows of any connection between Marc and Robbie in recent memory,” Nick said. “But the Merciers are in the junk business. Everyone says they’re on the up-and-up, but they may well know people who aren’t.”

He went to the whiteboard and wrote COPPER?? under both Marc Mercier’s name and Robbie Fontenot’s.

“The brothers had a fight Saturday morning,” he said. “Came to blows. All Luc will say is that they disagree on how to run the business. He wants Marc gone so he can run things his way. Maybe what he wants to do isn’t legal. Robbie Fontenot is shopping around info on copper thieves. Maybe that’s the connection.”

“It still doesn’t explain why Robbie would call Marc’s wife at two in the morning.”

“ Mais non . Did you look at any of that bank video from Monster Bash?” Nick asked.

Annie sighed her frustration. “I’ve looked at about an hour’s worth so far. Do you know how many people were in that parking lot that night? Most of them in costumes. I counted five dressed as cops, which makes me wonder if what Donnie Bichon saw was even really a city officer. And the quality of the video isn’t bad, but it’s hard to make out faces the farther they are away from the camera. I can’t say I saw Robbie Fontenot. I’ve only seen him in a photograph. I don’t know how he carries himself, what gestures he uses.”

“You might need to have the mother look at the footage,” Nick said.

“I want to see the video from the camera on the other side of the parking lot first,” Annie said. “The different angle might help.

“I asked Danny Perry if he saw Robbie that night, and he got cute about it. No, unless there’s video, and then maybe he did, but if he did, it wasn’t any big deal. He probably thinks he’s protecting Dewey, but that ship has sailed. Dewey’s gonna be working security at the lamp factory if I have anything to say about it. He put Robbie Fontenot in harm’s way then turned his back on him.”

“I asked Dozer Cormier if he’d seen Robbie Fontenot,” Nick said. “He tried to act like he didn’t know who I was talking about.”

He turned to Wynn Dixon. “Wynn, when you go through the call logs, look for any contact between those three numbers: Mercier, Fontenot, and Cormier.”

“Got it.”

“We’ve got no legal cause to get Dozer Cormier’s phone records, but his number will show up as incoming calls on theirs, at least.”

Deebo Jeffcoat walked into the conference room looking like a vagrant in dirty, baggy trousers and an untucked flannel shirt, and made a beeline for the pizza. He took a slice of pepperoni and a slice of veggie and put the slices face-to-face, making a giant pizza sandwich.

“All my food groups right here,” he said with a big, satisfied smile as he held his creation up like a prize, then lowered the pointy end into his mouth and took a bite big enough to choke a horse.

“Deebo, you have the metabolism of a fruit fly,” Annie said. “I’m jealous.”

“Well, there’s gotta be some upside to being a scrawny runt,” he said, wiping the grease from his scraggly beard with a napkin.

“I have something for you,” Annie said, holding up the evidence bag with the drugs from Rayanne Tillis’s bedroom.

Deebo set his supper aside and squinted at the bag, his expression sobering. “Where’d you get this?”

“I had a girl—a possible witness—OD this afternoon over on Opelousas near the Mardi Gras warehouse,” Annie said. “Do you know what it is?”

“I know exactly what it is,” he said, taking the bag and turning it over. “They’re calling it Diablo, for the letter D on the pill. It’s counterfeit Oxy that’s coming up out of Mexico. It’s laced with fentanyl. Bad, bad stuff.”

“Where would a girl with no money come by that?”

“Santa Claus?” he suggested. “The Easter Bunny? The Great Pumpkin? This shit is expensive. Fifty bucks a pill so you can feel extra fancy while you die from it. They’re not giving out free samples of this at Costco, I’ll tell you that.”

“So, if she didn’t pay cash for this,” Annie said, “then someone gave it to her for a reason. As payment for something, or as a lovely parting gift to send her on to the next life.”

“This was the girl you picked up yesterday, caught stealing?” Nick said.

“Yes. Rayanne Tillis.”

“Ah, man,” Deebo said. “Rayanne’s dead?”

“You knew her?”

“Picked her up more than once myself. She was no stranger to a jail cell. Possession, prostitution, shoplifting. Mean as cat meat, but she could be funny when she wasn’t fucked up. That’s a shame.”

“Who would want to kill that girl?” Nick asked. “What threat could she be to anyone?”

“She was talking to me,” Annie said. “Mind you, she hadn’t actually told me anything useful yet. But now she never will.”

“What could she know that would be worth killing her over?”

Annie swiveled her chair, contemplating what she was about to say.

“I was asking her yesterday about anyone she might have seen coming and going from Robbie Fontenot’s house. I asked her had she seen the town cops going in there. I asked because I didn’t believe they’d done much. And she said, ‘Oh, yeah, ’cause I should rat out cops.’?”

Everyone was silent for a beat. Finally, Nick said, “That’s a serious accusation, ’Toinette.”

“I’m not accusing anyone of anything,” she said. “This is the sequence of events. That’s what she said. This is what happened. A man was seen leaving her house last night about one fifteen in the morning. Someone brought her those drugs, and now she’s dead. That’s what I know.”

“That could also be a drug buddy or a john she partied with, and she just lost the opioid roulette game this time,” Deebo said. “Was there any sign anyone forced her to take those pills?”

“No,” Annie admitted. “And she was still alive when I found her around noon. So the guy was long gone before she took the fatal dose. But if someone gave her those pills probably knowing full well how dangerous they are…”

“But that’s not a secret,” Deebo said. “Narcotics are inherently dangerous. It’s not like she didn’t know that. It’s not like she thought she was popping breath mints. Addicts take drugs and die from it. That’s just a sad fact.”

“All right,” Nick said on a sigh. “Let’s put a pin in this for now and see what plays out. If it’s about Robbie Fontenot, we’re gonna get to the bottom of that anyway. What’d you find out about that drug house, Deebo?”

“That house is owned by a trust,” Deebo said.

Annie squinted at him. “A falling-down house in that neighborhood is owned by a trust? Are gangs getting that sophisticated now?”

“Hell no. They just take what they want. Ravenwood Trust. The trustee is listed as a Kenneth Wood of Baton Rouge. That’s as far as I got. There’s no anecdotal information on any major drug dealing in that neighborhood. It’s not like the old days when dealers staked out a corner and did their thing. Nowadays people text their orders and pay with Venmo.”

“Y’all are gonna wanna kiss me full on the mouth!” Chaz Stokes announced as he walked into the room, arms wide, like a triumphant hero.

“Who’s he talking to?” Wynn asked.

“Doesn’t matter,” Annie said. “No one here is taking him up on it.”

“I’d do it on a bet,” Deebo offered. “What’ll you give me?”

“A punch in the mouth,” Stokes said, scowling.

Deebo shrugged. “Your loss. I’m a really good kisser.”

“I’d be waiting for something to crawl up out of that beard and bite me.”

“Whatever you’re into, man!” Deebo laughed. “Let your freak flag fly, Chaz Stokes!”

“You’re hilarious, you are,” Stokes said. “Have you eaten all the pizza yet, you human garbage disposal?”

“You snooze, you lose.”

“What are we supposed to be so grateful for?” Nick asked.

Stokes pointed a finger at him. “Boss, I told you this was gonna come down to a chick, and I was right.”

He dug a slice of pepperoni out of the box and sat down on the credenza.

“Marc Mercier was at that country bar, Outlaw,” he said between bites, “on the south side of Luck Saturday night, dancing with the wrong girl, and her husband took exception. They had a little dustup.”

“Is there video?” Nick asked.

“Oh, yeah. I emailed a copy to myself.”

“Let’s go see it.”

Stokes wolfed down the last of his pizza on the walk back to the bullpen, then made a show of sitting down behind his keyboard like he was some kind of piano virtuoso sitting down to play at Carnegie Hall, cracking his knuckles before reaching for his mouse.

“This should be good,” Deebo said. “Now the boss gets to see all the Pornhub emails Chaz gets sent to his work computer.”

“Give me a little credit, please,” Chaz said. “I’ve got a fake account for that.”

“I catch you looking at porn in this office, you and your Johnson are parting ways,” Nick grumbled.

“Damn, Nicky,” Stokes complained. “No one ruins a joke quite like you.”

He opened his email and clicked on the attachment.

The camera in the bar was situated high up on a wall, giving a broad view of the dance floor. People were dancing, smiling, laughing, passing a good time on a Saturday night as people in south Louisiana were wont to do.

“This is Marc Mercier, right here,” Stokes said, reaching a finger toward the monitor.

He was dancing with a curvy little blonde, who was laughing and smiling, her thick braid bouncing over her shoulder down the front of her tight T-shirt.

“And here comes the angry husband,” Chaz said, pointing to a male coming across from the far side of the room, making a beeline to the dancers.

He was tall, athletic-looking, with broad shoulders and trim hips. He clamped a hand on the girl’s shoulder and yanked her back away from her dance partner, shouting something in her face. The girl cringed away like a whipped dog.

Annie felt a sickening chill run through her.

The angry husband surged in front of his wife to get in Marc Mercier’s face. Mercier didn’t back down. They were evenly matched for size. A pair of young bulls intent on squaring off. Words were exchanged but couldn’t be heard. Then shoves were exchanged. The husband threw a punch, landing hard enough to snap Mercier’s head around before a bouncer intervened.

“And who is this guy?” Nick asked.

Annie answered before Chaz could draw breath. “That’s Cody Parcelle.”