Chapter 25

25

Annie held up her badge and navigated past the local news vans and around the SO deputy’s car blocking the way to the crash scene. She pulled over the best she could considering there was no shoulder to speak of on this road and parked behind a white state police patrol car as she got her first good look at the wreck.

Danny Perry’s car had landed on a cypress stump. Its nose was smashed in like a cheap accordion up against the trunk of another full-grown tree. An incongruous sight in this wilderness, to say the least. Mother Nature: 1, police car: 0.

News of Perry’s crash had come before first light, Nick having been alerted because the car Perry had been pursuing matched the description of a vehicle that had been reported stolen—Robbie Fontenot’s vehicle—although the tags came back to another vehicle entirely.

Annie had hurried through her morning routine, grabbing a giant travel mug of coffee and a granola bar on her way out the door, leaving Nick to the parental duties of getting Justin up and ready for school.

She got out of her car now, jammed her hands in the pockets of her jacket, and hunched her shoulders against the damp chill. The temperature had dropped near freezing in the night. It would be another couple of hours before the sun gathered enough strength to do any good.

This was a place humans had no real business intruding upon. The road had been built on a human-made berm, splitting the swamp in two. On either side of the thin ribbon of asphalt there was nothing but water and trees. The early-morning sun filtered down through the canopy, pale, diluted, lemonade yellow against the shadowed black of the cypress trees.

A great white egret sailed in and landed on a cypress knee near the crashed vehicle, hunching its shoulders and folding its wings, curious about this unnatural metal creature lying broken in its habitat. The bird made its unmelodic, ratchet-like gwok! sound as if to protest. In the branches above, songbirds tried to drown out the noise with prettier tunes, unconcerned by the goings-on of the humans below them.

Annie started toward the state trooper, who was busy checking distances between evidence markers with a measuring wheel on a stick. Farther down the road, two black trucks from the Department of Wildlife and Fisheries sat side by side, blocking any possible traffic coming from the north, the Wildlife agents standing, watching, their breath rising in clouds as they chatted.

“Detective Broussard, Sheriff’s Office,” Annie said. “Good morning, Sergeant.”

“Not for the officer driving this car, I’m afraid,” the trooper said. He was a tall thirtysomething Black man who looked like he might have stepped out of a recruitment poster in his crisp dark blue uniform. The brass name tag on his jacket read grant . “Have you heard any update on his condition?”

“He’s critical at Lafayette General.”

“I’m surprised he’s alive,” he said, making a notation on his clipboard. “He had to be doing sixty or better to land where he landed. That was some nasty impact. Do you know him?”

“Yeah, I do.”

“Is this just a courtesy call, then?”

“No,” Annie said. “The vehicle he was pursuing might belong to a missing person I’ve been looking for. An older blue Toyota Corolla. The plates came back to a different vehicle, but I believe the officer knew the car. So what do you think happened here?”

The trooper drew breath to answer, then stopped, his focus going over Annie’s shoulder. She turned to see Dewey Rivette running toward them, his hair sticking up like he’d just rolled out of bed. He stopped five feet short of them, puffing like a steam engine.

“I—just—heard,” he gasped, bending over, holding his side. “What—the hell—happened?”

“Sergeant Grant, this is Detective Rivette from the PD,” Annie said. To Dewey she said, “Dude, you need to start working out. Or did you run all the way from town?”

He narrowed his eyes at her. “This—isn’t—funny.”

“No, it isn’t.”

Dewey straightened with his hands jammed at his waist and stared at the wreck, looking like he might get sick.

“I was told—he was in pursuit—and—the guy—wouldn’t pull over.”

“Where was he supposed to pull over on this road?” Annie asked.

“He could have—just stopped,” Dewey said, still gasping. “Was it—Fontenot’s car?”

“Sounds like it,” Annie said. “But the tags came back to a Ford Taurus.”

She turned to the trooper. “You were about to explain what you think happened, Sergeant.”

Grant nodded. “This is just preliminary, you understand. I have a lot of questions, but come look at these skid marks.”

He led them to a cluster of evidence markers on the pavement.

“It looks to me like the two vehicles made contact here,” he said, pointing. “The lead car skidded sideways. You can see the arc of the skid marks as the rear end of the vehicle slid away going toward the water, then straightened and kept going. The police vehicle veered to the right and went off the road at a high rate of speed and ended up where it did.”

A chill ran through Annie that had nothing to do with the temperature as the trooper’s words sank in. “You’re saying the officer tried to run the other car off the road?”

“I’m just telling you the story the evidence is telling me.”

“That can’t be right,” Dewey said. “Danny was just trying to pull him over. Maybe he was trying to pass and get ahead of him. Maybe the Toyota swerved into him.”

“If that was the case, the police vehicle would have more likely been diverted to the left,” Grant said. “He would have gone off the other side of the road. Or he wouldn’t have gone off the road at all. He should have hit the brakes, but there’s no evidence of that. I believe he was accelerating, not trying to slow down. It doesn’t make any sense to me, but it looks like he might have been attempting a pit maneuver.”

“There’s no way you’d do that here,” Dewey said. “It wouldn’t be safe.”

“Exactly,” Annie said. “One or both cars would end up in the swamp.”

If a pit maneuver was executed properly, the target vehicle generally spun sideways off the road. If executed at too high a rate of speed, there was too great a chance of rolling the target vehicle. No cop in his right mind would have tried it on this narrow, winding road, heading into a tight curve to the left, no less…unless rolling that vehicle into the swamp had been his goal.

“You can’t say that’s what happened,” Dewey protested.

“I have more investigating to do,” Grant admitted. “I’m just telling you how it looks at a glance. Those skid marks tell a story.”

“Well, it’s ridiculous,” Dewey argued.

“That’s beside the point. The evidence is the evidence,” Grant said. “I’ll sit down with the measurements and do the calculations. He should have had his dash cam on. Once we get the vehicle, that’ll tell the whole story. And that video should have uploaded to your server at the police station, anyway, so there it is.”

“If he had the camera on,” Annie said.

“Why wouldn’t he have the camera on?” Dewey asked aggressively. “Of course he did.”

“And we’ll also have the data recorder from the police car,” Grant said. “Provided it wasn’t damaged in the crash. That’ll give us the speed, throttle position, brake usage. We’ll put this together. It’ll take a few days. I expect it’ll take the better part of this day just to extricate the vehicle.”

Never mind extricating the vehicle, Annie thought. She didn’t even want to imagine the process it must have required to extricate Danny Perry from the car to get him to the ambulance, the time they would have lost just navigating the terrain while his life hung in the balance.

She had spoken to Sergeant Rodrigue on her way to the site, knowing he always had the scoop. He told her Perry had misspoken the name of the road, reporting to dispatch he was pursuing a possible stolen vehicle on Cypress Canal Road rather than Cypress Island Road, delaying support vehicles from finding him by precious minutes. Likely unconscious from the impact, he hadn’t answered his radio calls as dispatch had tried to contact him for his correct location.

First responders had requested AirMed, knowing Perry would stand his best chance at the level-one trauma center in Baton Rouge, but there was no good place for them to land in this wildlife management area, and it was determined the most expedient choice was to send him by ambulance to Lafayette General, a level-two trauma hospital, and if they could stabilize him there, then chopper him to Our Lady of the Lake.

“This is a nightmare,” Dewey declared, more to himself than to anyone. He looked at Annie. “This is on Fontenot.”

“Oh, it’s his fault Danny Perry tried to run him off the road?” Annie asked, incredulous.

“You don’t know that’s what happened!” Dewey barked. “Why didn’t he just pull over?”

“Why didn’t he?” Annie asked. “Out here in the middle of fucking nowhere in the dead of night? Why didn’t Danny just follow him?”

“Why would Danny run him off the road?”

“To kill him is the first thought that comes to mind,” Annie said.

“That’s insane! You’re accusing a police officer of attempted murder? What the hell is wrong with you, Broussard?” he demanded, then caught himself. “Oh, I forgot. You’ve made a career out of that.”

“Oh, fuck off, Dewey,” Annie snapped, irritated he would dredge up the ancient history of the time she had arrested Nick for assaulting a suspect. “I wasn’t wrong then, and I won’t look the other way for a bad cop now. I’m not the problem here. I’m not the one who tried to run someone into the swamp!”

Dewey’s little eyes bugged out of his head. “Keep your voice down!” he ordered in a harsh whisper. “There are TV cameras rolling on this.”

“The two of you can take this fight elsewhere,” Sergeant Grant said in a stern voice. “I’ve got work to do here.”

“Apologies, Sergeant,” Annie said. “Thank you for the information.”

She started for her vehicle. Dewey rushed up alongside her.

“Where are you going?”

“To do my job,” Annie snapped back at him. “You might think about trying that instead of following me around like a lost puppy. Or are you stalking me, Dewey? Is that what this is? I’m sniffing around something you don’t want me to find?”

“I don’t like you accusing our officer of shit he didn’t do. Danny’s a good cop.”

“It’s not looking that way,” Annie said, yanking open her car door.

“Where are you going?” he asked again.

She got behind the wheel and looked up at him.

“Lafayette,” she said, and slammed the door, muttering fucker under her breath. She’d had more than enough of Dewey Rivette this week. Of course, now he was going to think she was going to Lafayette in the hopes of getting some kind of dying declaration out of Danny Perry. Good, she thought. She hoped the idea gave him diarrhea.

She turned her car around, glaring at him the whole time, and wound her way back through the growing mess of law enforcement vehicles, media vans, reporters, and gawkers. She needed to focus on the possible good news of the day: that Robbie Fontenot might be alive and well.

Danny had been sitting on the Mercier house when he spotted the Toyota prowling the neighborhood. That truth brought back the conversation she’d had with Nick the night before—his exploration of the seemingly wild possibility that Robbie might have been hired to kill Marc. She wanted to reject that idea out of hand, but she couldn’t. What did she really know about Robbie Fontenot’s state of mind? How could she know what he was capable of doing? She had two views of him: his criminal record and his mother’s opinion. Neither of those things was the whole truth.

He was a man with no job and few prospects and by his mother’s own admission could have been nursing a grudge against Marc Mercier for a decade. But would he kill a man for money?

That seemed like a big leap, but she couldn’t stop seeing that pile of cash—$2,450. People had done the same job for a lot less. And that might have just been the down payment.

Where had he been headed, coming down that winding, dangerous road? she wondered as she turned onto the highway to Lafayette. That road through the wildlife management area went on for another mile or more beyond the crash site before coming to a T intersection that would have let him go anywhere. Or had he chosen that road thinking there was a chance that exactly what had happened would happen?

How could he have orchestrated that? This wasn’t some Fast and Furious movie. Robbie Fontenot wasn’t a trained stunt driver driving some mega-muscle car. He was a regular guy driving an old Toyota, being pursued by a souped-up cop car.

Annie really didn’t want to think that Danny Perry was some movie villain rogue cop, either, but as Sergeant Grant had said, the evidence was the evidence. Or had Danny thought he could just scare Robbie into pulling over by bumping his car, then pulling back?

But he hadn’t pulled back. He had been accelerating as the Toyota skidded sideways, and his cruiser had sailed off the road because he had miscalculated.

It was an easy mistake to make, she thought, recalling her own attempts at the pit maneuver when she’d been in training. You had to hit the target car in just the right spot. Too far forward and you could roll them. Too far back and they might be able to control the skid and keep going. Danny Perry had miscalculated, and the result had landed him in an ICU in critical condition.

She shouldn’t have reacted, she told herself. She should have kept a poker face when Grant had been laying out his theory of the accident, but she hadn’t been able to stop herself from reacting in front of Dewey. She had no way of knowing what Rivette’s connection to any of this might be. She had no way of knowing yet if his story about giving Robbie money as an informant was true at all. He and Danny and Robbie could have all been up to their ears in something illegal.

What a mess.

She checked her rearview mirror as a car came up fast behind her, then checked its speed and dropped back a few yards. She couldn’t see the driver. Was it Dewey following her? She could have called in to check the tags, but she didn’t. She’d know soon enough if it was him. They were on a busy highway going to a busy hospital. Even if he’d had the cojones for it—which she doubted—Dewey wasn’t going to try anything here.

The car stayed behind her as she left the highway for surface streets in Lafayette, navigating her way to the sprawling campus of the Lafayette General Medical Center, but kept going when she turned in at the parking area for the orthopedic hospital. Danny Perry would be in the ICU down the street in the main building. Annie had no need to go there. She wouldn’t have been allowed to see him even if she’d thought she might get something out of him, anyway. And she had no doubt the waiting area would be populated by off-duty BBPD officers who would not welcome her intruding on their tribe.

She checked the directory as she went into the building and took the elevator to the floor where Dr. Robert Fontenot II had his offices. Several people were waiting in the chairs, reading old magazines and watching Food Network quietly playing on the television. Annie went up to the reception desk with a pleasant smile.

“Hi, I’m Detective Broussard with the Partout Parish Sheriff’s Office,” she said softly. “I need to see Dr. Fontenot.”

“Do you have an appointment?”

Annie held up her badge. “This is my appointment. I’m so sorry to interrupt your day, but I need to speak to Dr. Fontenot regarding his son. And this needs to happen sooner rather than later. I promise it won’t take long.”

The receptionist’s eyes went round. She popped up from her desk and disappeared down the hall behind her, returning a moment later to open the door.

“Thank you,” Annie whispered as they walked toward Dr. Fontenot’s office.

“I didn’t know he had a son,” the woman confessed in a whisper.

Annie just smiled.

“Dr. Fontenot will be right with you.”

Annie glanced around the office as she waited. It looked like any other—a nice desk, a cushy executive’s chair, a pair of generic armchairs for visitors, framed diplomas on one wall, and another wall with a gallery of photos presumably of patient athletes. On closer inspection, a fair number of the photos were of Dr. Fontenot himself participating in athletic events as a runner and a cyclist.

Annie had looked him up on the web. He was soap opera handsome with chiseled features and black hair shot through with just the right amount of silver. Tall and lean, defying his age with athletics and a much younger girlfriend. As attached as she had become to B’Lynn, Annie had taken an instant dislike to her ex just on principle. There was B’Lynn all these years, struggling with Robbie and his addiction. And there was Dr. Bob, riding bikes in Italy and drinking wine with a honey twenty years his junior. Asshole.

The office door opened, and Bob Fontenot walked in looking annoyed and full of himself.

“Dr. Fontenot,” Annie said. “I’m Detective Broussard with the Partout Parish Sheriff’s Office.”

He didn’t offer to shake her hand, just gave her a look and walked around behind his desk. “You could have made an appointment and not disrupted anyone’s schedule.”

“And you could have returned my phone calls and spared me the trip up here, but here we are,” Annie said bluntly.

He arched a dark brow. “Does Gus Noblier know how rude his detectives are?”

“Why don’t you call him and ask?” Annie suggested. “I’m sure he’d be thrilled to hear from you. He had so many interesting things to say about you when I spoke to him about your son’s case.”

“As did my ex-wife, I’m sure,” he said. He took a stance with his feet apart and his arms crossed over his immaculate white coat.

“She hasn’t really had much to say about you at all, to be honest,” Annie said. “I gather she’s well used to having no support from you in a crisis. How many years have you been divorced?”

He didn’t like having a woman clapping back at him. Robert Fontenot was the kind of man used to being treated like a prince. She could see him struggling already with his temper.

“Seven years. Not that it’s relevant. I’m sure B’Lynn has told you, Robbie and I have no relationship, and haven’t had in many years.”

“She did tell me that,” Annie said. “I thought maybe she was just trying to paint you in a bad light.”

He looked away with a tight forced smile, a muscle working in his jaw. There was no comeback that didn’t make him seem like an even bigger asshole.

“I’m not sure how I can help you here, Detective.”

“Well, I have to touch all the bases, you know. Do my due diligence. Robbie hasn’t tried to contact you at all? Not here or on your personal phone?”

“No. He knows better than to call here, and he doesn’t have my cell number.”

Annie let her brows sketch upward even though this was not news to her. “And do you have his number? I only ask because we’re going through his cell phone records.”

“No, I don’t. B’Lynn might have texted it to me once. I would have deleted it. I’m sure you find that cold.”

Annie said nothing.

“Do you have children?” Fontenot asked. “I’m guessing you do.”

“I have a son.”

“And you can’t begin to imagine not supporting him, not loving him, not helping him no matter what,” he said. “You haven’t dealt with addiction.”

“You don’t know what I’ve dealt with,” Annie said. “And it’s not relevant anyway. It’s your son I’m trying to find.”

“I walked away,” he said. “I’m not proud of the way that looks, but Robbie was destroying everyone and everything in his life, and there came a point when I had to say no. No more. I wasn’t going to let him ruin my life as well as his own. Maybe one day, if he ever gets himself straightened out for good, we can try again, but I’m not betting on that. He’s been to rehab more times than I can count. He’ll bankrupt his mother.”

“You don’t contribute?”

“No. B’Lynn got a generous settlement in the divorce, and I got my freedom.”

There were so many things Annie wanted to say, but she chewed them all back.

“I’m sure you’ve seen it in your line of work,” Fontenot said. “What addicts do, what they stoop to. Lying, cheating, stealing to get high. Robbie stole from his own family, hocked family heirlooms, stole from neighbors, from friends. And we had to keep making the excuses, making the apologies, begging friends not to press charges. It was humiliating.”

And imagine what it was for your son , Annie thought. How desperate Robbie must have felt, how afraid he must have been. He was a child. And all his father cared about was how he looked to his neighbors.

“The last straw,” he said, “was when he stole a prescription pad from my office, forged my signature, and sold the pages to other druggies. I could have lost my license to practice medicine. I had to call in every favor anyone ever owed me to get out of that one—including favors from your boss, in case he didn’t tell you. That was it for me. I was done. I could have lost my livelihood.”

“Well, lucky you,” Annie said. “You only lost your child.”

“I think we’re done here,” Fontenot said, stone-faced.

Annie nodded. “Yeah. I’ve certainly heard all I care to. I just have one question. You’re a doctor. You knew the risks involved with those painkillers. Why did you let your son take them in the first place?”

“It’s a perfectly safe drug if you don’t abuse it.”

Robbie had been seventeen with his whole world crashing in around him, desperately in need of the support of his parents, of this man he had probably idolized. And Robert Fontenot’s answer had been to punish his son for being an embarrassment and an inconvenience when he could have prevented the tragedy from happening altogether.

Annie shook her head and started for the door.

“Not everyone is cut out to be a martyr,” Bob Fontenot said, as if that was a viable defense.

“Or a parent,” Annie returned, and walked out.

She wanted to go take a shower, to wash off the oily narcissism of Robert Fontenot. She knew it wasn’t her job to judge this man or anyone else. And she certainly knew enough about the desperate struggle of families dealing with addiction to know that there were few good answers and too many tears, and people did what they thought they had to do to survive it. But this guy…wow.

Well, now she knew the whole story anyway, she thought as she got in her vehicle. The story Gus had let hang in the air with no explanation when Annie had spoken to him. The reason B’Lynn had thought she could appeal to him to take Robbie’s case. No part of that story had ever made it into an arrest report, at least not one that had survived. Gus had killed it. A crime that would have warranted serious felony charges with serious prison time. Poof! Gone.

She wasn’t sure how she felt about it. Uneasy was the best word she could come up with. It was like Gus had taken a truth and turned it into a lie, and everyone involved had just gone on with their lives. She wanted to be okay with it because she felt sorry for B’Lynn and Robbie, but that wasn’t how the system was supposed to work. It was, however, how privilege worked, over and over.

Sometimes the ways of the world just drained the optimism right out of her. But there was nothing for it except to keep putting one foot in front of the other and hoping she could make a difference every once in a while.