Chapter 3

3

Timing. Life was all about timing, Annie Broussard reflected as she waited for the traffic light to turn green. Time: a complex and delicate dance of nanoseconds orchestrated by an unseen force beyond the ordinary person’s control or understanding.

A schedule, a plan, a timeline—all were just illusions people were allowed to believe in to let them feel like they were in control of their lives. A million tiny things happened every day to direct the dance. Move a split second faster here, hesitate briefly there, and the outcome could change dramatically. That annoying delay could save you from being in the wrong place at the wrong time, avoiding catastrophe. Life was all about timing.

The driver behind her beeped his horn. The light had turned green.

She drove down the main drag of Bayou Breaux, with its eclectic mix of brick and clapboard buildings. Several dated as far back as the mid-eighteenth century, before the first Acadian refugees—the people who would eventually come to be known as Cajuns—had arrived as exiles from Canada. Some businesses boasted second-story galleries reminiscent of New Orleans’ French Quarter, with ornate wrought iron railings and window boxes trailing ivy and the last geraniums of the season. Some had been restored over the years; others looked like they hadn’t seen a coat of paint since God was a child. All of it passed by Annie unnoticed. Her mind was elsewhere.

This would be her first day on the job in weeks. It seemed like forever since the night she’d been attacked. It seemed so long ago that memory might have been a dream—no, a nightmare, as surreal as any horror movie.

Don’t go there without me. She could still see the text in her mind’s eye. But it had been getting late, the tail end of a terrible day. Tired, wanting to make that one last stop and be done, she had run out of patience.

R U coming or what?

She had sent the message, then sent it again, trying to annoy Nick into answering, but no answer had come. Impatient, she had typed:

Going on…Need this day to be over…Come when you can…

What if she had waited just a little while longer?

If just one person involved in that series of events had made a different choice that night, someone who had died might have lived, but someone who had lived might have died. She might have died. It could have been her family grieving, her son without a mother. The possibilities tumbled in an endless cycle in her battered brain these days—what if this, what if that?—driving her crazy to the point that she questioned every decision she had to make no matter how trivial, trapped in a state of anxiety over potentially making the wrong choice.

Her doctor assured her this was not abnormal. She had suffered a serious concussion. Her brain was sorting itself out, healing, rewiring itself, rebalancing its chemistry. Add to that the post-traumatic stress that came in the aftermath of what had happened, the shock of the things she had seen. She needed to be patient with herself, and patience was all about time. Too much time.

She had already tried once to go back to work too soon and had ended up on an additional two weeks of doctor-ordered rest—no activity, no working out, no driving a car, no heavy lifting. Not able to read a book or to follow the plot of a TV show for the pounding in her head, she had nothing to do but lie around and think. What if this? What if that?

The pain and the anxiety chased each other around and around in her head like two squirrels racing up a tree. She tried to distract herself with positive thoughts—the fact that what had happened had given her and Nick a reboot at a time when their marriage had been struggling a bit. Nothing like a near-death experience to refocus on the things that were truly important in life. She smiled a little now, thinking about the night before, the two of them slow-dancing on the lawn, making love and falling asleep together. So comforting, so peaceful…until her brain had awakened her shortly after to spin and fret and keep her up…

Sick to death of herself, she felt an almost giddy sense of excitement as the law enforcement center came into view. She needed to get out of her own head and get back to work. She needed the distraction of other people’s problems. She needed to make herself useful to humankind. Even if she spent the day doing nothing but counting paper clips, it would be better than being alone with her endless thoughts.

Later she would wonder, what if she had waited just one more day?

—

“I need to speak with the sheriff,” B’Lynn Fontenot announced.

She sounded authoritative, in complete control of herself. What a joke. She was trembling inside like a terrified Chihuahua. Her mouth was parched. Her heart was pounding. She’d been accused more than once in recent years of having a loose screw. She felt as if that screw was about to fall free and let her come apart like a cheap watch, springs and gears flying to every corner of the Partout Parish sheriff’s outer office.

“Do you have an appointment?”

The woman on the other side of the counter—Ms. Valerie Comb, according to the nameplate on the countertop—was a very deliberately put-together package wrapped in too-tight clothes with a shellac of too much makeup and Aqua Net. Her hair was streaked white-blond with harsh dark lowlights and cut in a severe, angled style B’Lynn’s daughter, Lisette, referred to as the “Internet Karen,” Woman Most Likely to Demand to Speak to a Manager. A sure red flag for trouble.

Ms. Comb’s gaze ran down B’Lynn from head to toe like a cold shower of disapproval, taking in the dull brown hair that had barely seen a brush in days, taking in the dark circles under bloodshot eyes and the lines of strain etched permanently into her face. She looked like hell because she’d been through hell. She had given up trying to hide it long ago.

“No, I don’t have an appointment, as I’m sure you know,” B’Lynn started, unable to keep the irritation out of her voice. “But it’s imperative I speak with him—”

“Sheriff Noblier is a very busy man,” the secretary declared condescendingly. “If you’d like to make an appointment—”

“I don’t want to make an appointment,” B’Lynn snapped as the tension wound tighter inside her. “This is urgent. I—”

“If you have an emergency, I can direct you down the hall to the sergeant’s desk,” Ms. Comb said with maddening calm.

“I have been down the hall,” B’Lynn said, her small hands balling into fists at her sides. “Days ago. They didn’t help me. I want to speak to the sheriff.”

“Well, I’m afraid I can’t help you unless—”

“No,” B’Lynn interrupted curtly. “You won’t help me.”

Valerie Comb arched a penciled brow. “I beg your pardon?”

“You have made no effort to help me,” B’Lynn said. “You haven’t even pretended to help me. The least you could do would be to pick up the damn phone and pretend to speak to the sheriff before you blow me off.”

Ms. Comb gave a little huff of offense. “Ma’am, I have no idea why you’re speaking to me this way.”

Because I’m terrified. Because I’m angry. Because I haven’t slept in days.

B’Lynn didn’t know if she was being unreasonable. Maybe she was. Maybe she was being rude and unfair. She knew she was beyond caring. Her frustration and her fear hadn’t just sprung up at the start of this conversation with the sheriff’s secretary. It had begun days ago, weeks ago, years ago. The pressure had been building all that time. Just in the last week alone she had been discounted, dismissed, patronized, and ignored by people she had gone to for help. Fair or not, Ms. Valerie Comb, with her overabundance of attitude and blue eyeshadow, was on the last shred of B’Lynn’s final remaining nerve.

“At any rate,” Ms. Comb went on, tipping her head back to look down her slender nose, “Sheriff Noblier is out of the office this morning.”

“I don’t believe you.” The words blurted out of B’Lynn’s mouth before she could even realize she was thinking them.

“Excuse me?”

“I don’t believe you.”

She couldn’t believe the sheriff wasn’t in his office because she needed him to be in his office. She had nowhere left to turn.

Her heart was racing, her pulse pounding in her ears. Panic swelled in her chest like a balloon, making it hard to breathe. She went to the closed door of Sheriff Noblier’s office and banged on it with her fist. She tried the knob without success, twisting it, yanking at it, tears welling in her eyes.

“Ma’am! I’m going to have to call a deputy!”

Valerie Comb sounded faraway, in another dimension. The last of B’Lynn’s control crumbled. Tears spilled over, and she gasped for breath even as she pulled at the doorknob with one hand and pounded on the door with the other.

Oh, my God. Oh, my God. He’s not here. He can’t help me. No one can help me.

“No, no, NO!” she cried.

“Ma’am! Ma’am!” the secretary shouted, rushing out from behind her counter.

B’Lynn spun around and bolted for the hallway, pushing past Valerie Comb, knocking her sideways. She was beyond thinking rationally now, running in blind panic like an animal. Her surroundings took on a macabre, distorted funhouse quality. The faces of the people she passed twisted in shock. Her legs felt like rubber, her arms as heavy as lead. Her lungs were on fire.

She pulled up in front of the desk sergeant’s counter. Two uniformed deputies in the area behind him turned to stare at her.

“Help me!” B’Lynn sobbed, pounding her fists on the counter. “Why won’t anyone help me?! Oh, my God! Oh, my God!”

—

The cry stopped Annie in her tracks. She was only cutting through the squad room to go to the HR office because she had an insurance question. A question she could have gotten answered over the phone, but it was a beautiful morning, and she was happy to walk over to the main building from the Pizza Hut, as they called the small separate building that housed the detective division. Maybe Katy in HR would be ready for a coffee and they could catch up.

The sound of anguish seemed too big to have come from the small, dark-haired woman. Hooker, the desk sergeant, three times her size in all directions, stood flat-footed, his little pig eyes as wide as they would go.

“I’ll help you, ma’am,” Annie said, rushing forward as the woman doubled over, sobbing. Annie caught hold of her shoulder and sank to the floor with her. “Are you ill? Do you need medical attention?”

“She’s out of her mind!” Valerie Comb exclaimed. “She was demanding to see the sheriff. She nearly knocked me flat!”

Annie ignored the secretary. “Do you need an ambulance, ma’am?”

“No. No,” the woman said, shaking her head, struggling visibly to pull herself together. She wiped the tears from her cheeks with trembling hands and drew in a shaky breath. “I’m fine.”

“?‘Fine’ seems like a stretch,” Annie said. “Do you have an emergency? Should I be sending deputies somewhere?”

“I wish I knew.”

“I’m Detective Broussard,” Annie said. “Let’s go sit down and you can tell me what’s going on. Can you stand up, ma’am?”

The woman nodded and pushed to her feet on shaky legs. Annie rose with her, steadying her.

She must have been around fifty or so, Annie thought, petite, birdlike, with delicate features. Deep worry lines bracketed her mouth and creased her brow.

“What’s your name, ma’am?”

“B’Lynn,” she said softly. “B’Lynn Fontenot.”

Annie glanced back at Valerie Comb’s sour face. “Valerie, could you please bring us some coffee? Thank you so much.”

Without waiting for a response, she led the way to the interview room across the hall. B’Lynn Fontenot took the seat on the far side of the small table and wrapped her black quilted jacket around herself as if she were freezing. She swept a hand back over her shoulder-length hair self-consciously, as if to smooth away the tangles and wipe away the gray streaks.

She looked rough, like she hadn’t slept, or maybe she drank or had a drug habit. Maybe she was panicking because she needed a fix. Maybe she was shivering because she was going into withdrawal. But if B’Lynn Fontenot was a drug-seeking addict, then she would have gone to the ER, not to the sheriff’s office.

“Can you spell your name for me, ma’am?” Annie asked as she took her seat and settled in with the yellow legal pad and pen that had been left there.

“Fontenot. F-O-N-T-E-N-O-T. Beverly Lynn. B-E-V-E-R-L-Y L-Y-N-N. I go by B’Lynn.”

“I don’t mean any offense, Ms. Fontenot, but I have to ask: Are you under the influence of any alcohol or narcotics right now?”

The woman’s laughter was sudden and slightly hysterical. “Oh, my God! I wish! I wish I was on drugs and this was all some kind of bad trip! Wouldn’t that be nice? Or maybe this is all just a bad dream, and I’ll wake up, and everything will be…different,” she said, her voice trailing off. “I wish…

“I’m sure I seem like a lunatic,” she said. “I’m sorry. I just…I’m just at the end of my rope,” she said, her voice tightening and trembling, tears rising again in her eyes, “and I don’t know what else to do.”

“It’s all right,” Annie assured her. “What is it you need our help with?”

“My son is missing. My son is missing, and no one seems to care but me.”

Oh, God, not another case with a kid, Annie thought, anxiety tightening like a fist in her chest. She wasn’t sure she could take another. The last one had nearly done her in, literally and emotionally.

“How old is your son?”

“He’s twenty-seven.”

The fist released, and she could breathe again.

“And what’s his name?”

“Robbie. Robert James Fontenot III.”

“Where does he live?”

She gave an address. A run-down area of blue-collar businesses over by where the Mardi Gras floats were stored, not far from the old sugarcane processing plant. Who the hell lived over there? People who had no choice.

The lining of B’Lynn Fontenot’s jacket was signature Burberry plaid. Expensive. The diamond engagement and wedding set she wore carried larger-than-average stones. Why did her son live in a shithole?

“That’s within the Bayou Breaux city limits,” Annie began.

B’Lynn’s back stiffened. “Don’t tell me I need to go to the Bayou Breaux police,” she said sharply. “I have been to the Bayou Breaux police. Several times. They told me a twenty-seven-year-old man doesn’t need his mother’s permission to go somewhere.”

And they were correct. Robbie Fontenot was an adult, free to come and go as he chose, with or without the knowledge and consent of his mother. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t be missing.

“When were you last in contact with your son?”

“Halloween. I spoke with him on the phone around three. He was supposed to meet me for dinner the next day, but he didn’t show up and I didn’t hear from him. I haven’t heard from him since.”

Nine days.

“And he hadn’t said anything about taking a trip anywhere?”

“No.”

“Have you spoken to any of his friends?”

“I don’t know Robbie’s friends anymore,” she confessed. “I don’t know if he has any.”

“Does he have a girlfriend? A boyfriend?”

She shook her head.

“Where does he work?”

She glanced away. “He’s…between jobs.”

Annie wrote unemployed on her legal pad.

“So he could have just decided to—”

“He didn’t.”

“He normally stays in touch with you?”

“He calls me every day, twice a day.”

“You’re close.”

“We have a deal,” B’Lynn said plainly. “He calls me every day, twice a day, and we have dinner on Sunday. Every Sunday.”

Deal?? Annie noted.

The door swung open, and Valerie Comb came in with a single mug of coffee and two thimble-size containers of fake creamer. She gave Annie the side-eye as she set the cup on the table in front of B’Lynn.

“So sorry, Annie, I couldn’t carry everything,” she said with saccharine sweetness.

“That’s all right, Valerie,” Annie replied with a phony smile. “I wouldn’t have drunk it anyway.”

Valerie narrowed her eyes and pressed her lips together in a pissy line as she turned on her high heel and left the room.

“She doesn’t like me,” Annie confessed casually when the secretary had gone. “I know too much about her sordid past.”

“She doesn’t like me, either,” B’Lynn said as she peeled back the tops on both creamers and dumped them into the coffee. Her hands were still trembling. She wrapped them around the mug and raised it to her lips. “But I did call her a liar and almost knock her flat.”

“She’s been called worse,” Annie said. “She said you wanted to see Sheriff Noblier. Do you know him?”

“I’ve met him. My husband knows him, has supported him in the past. I was hoping if I could appeal to him directly, maybe something would happen.”

“Your husband, he didn’t try to reach out to the sheriff himself?”

“No.”

A short answer with a long story behind it, Annie suspected.

“Robbie’s father isn’t involved in his life anymore.”

“So your son wouldn’t have reached out to him?”

“No.”

Annie wrote Divorced? but didn’t ask the question yet, glancing again at the rock on the woman’s left hand. Remarried, perhaps, not that it mattered.

“This deal you have with your son,” Annie started, trying to pick her way through a minefield of wrong words. Why was a grown man that much under his mother’s thumb? She needed the story without putting the woman on the defensive. “Tell me more about that. It seems very formal. Is there a reason behind it?”

B’Lynn frowned and looked away again, considering her answer. Would she tell the truth? Would she tool the truth to suit her needs? It was a straightforward question, Annie thought. There should have been a straightforward answer.

“My son has had his issues.”

“What kind of issues?”

She set the mug down a little too hard and smiled a brittle smile. “Here we go! This is where I tell the truth and you stop listening, and nothing more happens because you’ve made up your mind. That’s exactly what happened with the town police. That’s exactly what happened when I came here the first time.”

“I can’t help you if I don’t know the whole story,” Annie said.

“And when you know the whole story, you won’t want to help me.”

“You don’t know that,” Annie said, leaning forward, resting her forearms on the table. “I’m a mother, too. And I literally came into work this morning because I wanted to be able to help someone. That’s why I do what I do. But I need to have all the facts—good and bad.”

B’Lynn Fontenot stared at her for a long moment, pretending to weigh her options when she actually had none.

“My son has a drug problem,” she began. “He’s had a drug problem off and on for a long time. He’s been in and out of trouble, in and out of jail, in and out of rehab. He’s been clean recently,” she hastened to add. “He’s been checking in with me every day, twice a day. That’s our deal since he got out of rehab this time. I’ll help him out with money, and in any other way I can, but he has to stay clean, and he has to stay in touch.”

“How long has he been out of rehab?”

“Five months, and he’s been doing well. He had a job at the lamp factory, but they had layoffs recently…”

Annie kept her expression carefully neutral. An addict just out of rehab needed stability and little successes to keep them encouraged and moving forward one small step at a time. Losing a job might easily have been enough of a stressor to send Robbie into a depression, looking for an escape, looking for something to numb the pain of his disappointment.

“He was looking for another job,” B’Lynn said. “He was optimistic. He told me he had a line on something.”

“Do you know what?”

“He didn’t say.”

“You heard from him on Halloween at what time?”

“Around three in the afternoon.”

“Did he have plans for the evening?”

“Not that he said.”

“There’s a lot of parties on Halloween,” Annie pointed out. “Monster Bash going on downtown,” she said, referring to the huge annual street festival that took over downtown Bayou Breaux for the holiday every year, where costumed revelers wandered from bar to bar, street vendor to street vendor, enjoying food and drink and live music. “Old patterns are easy to fall back into.”

B’Lynn shook her head, her jaw set at a stubborn angle. “He knew better. He’s been on the straight and narrow. He was optimistic, upbeat. He’s been talking about going back to school part-time, working toward getting his degree.”

Or so he told his mama, who was helping him out financially. It was painful to watch the range of emotions pass across her face—anger, determination, hope, fear—an endless cycle for the mother of an addict.

“Does he have a car?” Annie asked.

“Yes. It’s a blue Toyota Corolla, eight or nine years old.” She rattled off the tag number by heart.

“Is it registered to him or to you?”

“It’s in my name. For the insurance.”

“And you gave this information to the police?”

“Yes, of course.”

Meaning there should already have been an order for local law enforcement to be on the lookout for the car.

“When did you first report him missing?”

“Last Tuesday. I never heard from him that Sunday. I waited through Monday, hoping, thinking…” She shook her head. “I went to the police first thing Tuesday morning. They weren’t interested in helping me. They said Robbie would turn up. He didn’t. I went back on Thursday, and they said it wasn’t a crime for him to go wherever he wanted. Then I came here, and I was told it was a city police matter and that he’d likely turn up on his own when he was ready.”

“Who did you speak to here?”

B’Lynn scowled, gesturing toward the door. “That man at the desk.”

“Sergeant Hooker,” Annie said, doodling an angry face on her legal pad. “Did you report the car stolen?”

“No,” B’Lynn said, confused. “Why would I? It’s Robbie’s to use.”

Annie hesitated to answer, trying to formulate the right words.

B’Lynn’s eyes widened. “Do you mean to tell me the police will look harder for a stolen car than for a missing person?”

“That’s not exactly how I’d say it,” Annie said. “But you already know the police think your son is free to go wherever he wants. However, he is not free to go in a stolen car.”

“Then the car is stolen!” B’Lynn said urgently. “It’s definitely stolen!”

“Okay. We’ll file that report right away.”

“But not the missing persons report?”

How to say that a drug addict gone off on his own wouldn’t be considered as much a priority as a suspect in a felony theft? Annie chose not to try.

“So you spoke to Robbie late in the day on Halloween, and he said he didn’t have any plans. Did you believe him?”

It wasn’t hard to imagine an addict, down on his luck, feeling blue, catching up with some old buddies at a party. Life seemed so much better high. Maybe just this one night…He’d get sober again the next day…Then one pill became two or someone offered to share a needle…

B’Lynn didn’t answer, which was answer enough. She wasn’t sure. She couldn’t be sure.

“What’s his drug of choice?”

“Oxycontin, or anything like it.”

“Heroin if he can’t get it?” Annie asked.

Painkillers eventually became a difficult habit for a lot of people to sustain. What might have started as a legitimate prescription for a necessary drug quickly became an addiction. But prescriptions ran out, and addicts turned to other sources. Demand kept the street price high—$30 to $50 a pill, depending on strength and brand name. Those who couldn’t afford the cost of pills from dealers often turned to heroin for a more affordable high. But heroin was now often cut with fentanyl, a synthetic opioid fifty to a hundred times more potent than morphine. Overdoses were depressingly common.

The mother shook her head. “He doesn’t do needles. It’s practically a phobia. He would never inject anything. He might try something else, but he wouldn’t shoot up.”

Annie said nothing, mentally ticking off the long, depressing list of the many other things an addict might try.

“I know what you’re thinking,” B’Lynn Fontenot said softly. “I’ve thought it, too. I’m not unrealistic, Detective. I know what addicts do. I know the promises they make and break. I am well aware he could be lying dead somewhere.

“Ten years we’ve been struggling with this—Robbie’s addiction. There’s nothing I don’t know about dealing with an addict. My son has disappointed me and disappointed himself again and again. And I know exactly how pathetic I’m gonna sound when I say this, but he was truly doing better this time. He was trying so hard. We were trying hard together, and I’m not gonna give up on him now, no matter where he is or why he’s there. But I need help. Please help me.”

Ten years. Robbie Fontenot had been seventeen, just a boy, when addiction had taken hold of his life. And here was his mother, a decade later, still fighting for him, begging for help.

Annie had started the day wanting the distraction of someone else’s problems. B’Lynn Fontenot had a boatload of them. Careful what you wish for, Annie , she thought. This situation wasn’t liable to have a happy ending.

“I’ll help you, Mrs. Fontenot,” she said simply, though she had a feeling there wouldn’t be anything simple about it.

B’Lynn Fontenot blinked back tears. “Thank you.”

“Do you have a key to his place?” Annie asked.

“Yes.”

“Okay.” She nodded, pushing to her feet. “Let’s go.”