Chapter 34

34

“You let that little girl take your gun away from you,” Nick said. It was a statement, not a question.

They sat in the conference room, meeting to put the latest puzzle pieces together while the details were still fresh in the mind. It was just the three of them—Nick, Stokes, and Annie—the rest of the squad having already called it a night. Annie resisted the urge to glance at her watch, knowing her son was already tucked in bed at her cousin Remy’s house. She tried to dodge the twinge of motherly guilt. She already had enough emotion weighing her down from the events of the day and evening.

Stokes pressed a hand to his chest and looked offended, ever the victim. “She attacked me! I couldn’t see that coming! One minute she was scooping horse shit off the floor, and the next thing I know she’s gone all lesbian ninja on me and rams me in the gut with the handle end of a shovel!”

“And we all know lesbian ninjas have superhuman strength,” Annie remarked dryly. “Especially those little ones that maybe weigh a hundred pounds soaking wet.”

Stokes cut her a look. “Let her ram you in the belly with a shovel. See how you do.”

“Why would I?” Annie returned. “I would know better, for starters. And by the way, there’s no reason to remark on her sexuality, of which you know nothing.”

“Well, I don’t know any regular girls that strong.”

“You don’t know any horse girls, then,” Annie said. “You’re lucky she didn’t pick you up over her head and throw you somewhere.”

“You’re lucky she didn’t shoot you,” Nick said. “Desperate people do desperate things.” He looked at Annie. “You’re both lucky.”

“I want her charged with assaulting an officer,” Stokes pouted.

“Get over yourself,” Annie shot back. “The only thing wounded here is your pride, and you had that coming.”

Stokes looked incredulous. “Do I need to remind you she’s a killer?”

“She shot a man who had assaulted her and was beating the shit out of his wife,” Annie said. “Plenty of people will think she deserves a medal.”

Nick arched a brow. “And you’re one of them?”

“Pardon me if I don’t shed a tear for Cody Parcelle, who thought it was his God-given right to beat his wife like a rented mule,” Annie said, unrepentant. “He literally announced he was going to kill her before he broke the glass in the kitchen door. That’ll be on their doorbell video, for sure.”

“Do we know this wife doesn’t have a big insurance policy on him?” Nick asked.

“I’ll check into it tomorrow,” Annie said, “but I doubt it. I doubt Tulsie would have ever done anything but take his abuse and blame herself for it. She was still saying tonight in the hospital that she shouldn’t have gone out that night, she shouldn’t have danced with Marc Mercier, she shouldn’t have made Cody jealous, and on and on. She’s terrified she’s gonna lose everything they worked for. That doesn’t sound like someone with a million bucks of insurance money waiting at the end of this rainbow. My guess is they live pretty hand-to-mouth. They’re not rolling in dough from the horse-training business. Cody worked a day job with the family construction business doing demolition and remodels.”

“That explains the Mercier business card in his pocket,” Nick said.

“According to Tulsie, they did business all the time, selling salvaged materials to the Merciers.”

“Well, I’m telling you,” Stokes grumbled, “this whole mess is just another example of why not to get married.”

Annie rolled her eyes. “I don’t think you have to worry.”

“You’re gonna wind up on the wrong end of a jealous husband, is what’s gonna happen to you,” Nick said.

“We don’t know that isn’t what happened to Marc Mercier,” Stokes said, pointing at the timeline on the whiteboard. “There’s still a couple of hours unaccounted for between Cody Parcelle punching him in the mouth at Outlaw and these women blowing Cody’s face off. He could have gone and done Marc in before he went home to beat the missus.”

“He could have, but I don’t think so,” Nick said. “Our new wrinkle here is that I have video of Marc Mercier leaving Goal Post Saturday night, and the first car that leaves that parking lot after he walks out of sight is a blue Toyota Corolla.”

Annie sat up like she’d been shocked. “What?”

“It’s the same car Danny Perry chased out of the Merciers’ neighborhood last night. So, if that’s Marc, he’s still alive.”

“What the fuck?” Stokes said, tipping his hat back on his head.

“Robbie Fontenot’s car,” Annie said, feeling sick.

“Couldn’t see the driver or if there was a passenger,” Nick said. “Is there any reason to think the two of them would be holed up together somewhere?”

Annie thought of the conversation she’d had with Eli McVay about the accident he didn’t believe had been an accident, about the rift that had come between the friends after.

“No,” she said, a terrible sense of dread filling her. “Eli McVay saw Robbie talking to Dozer Cormier Halloween night, walking away from downtown, like they were leaving the party. That’s the last anyone saw Robbie. He also told me he never believed what happened to Robbie was an accident. He knew Marc needed that opportunity to quarterback the team, to get noticed, to have a chance at a scholarship, and that Dozer was always loyal to Marc.”

“Jesus,” Stokes said. “He wrecked that kid’s life to get a scholarship?”

“And Dozer became an alcoholic after that,” Nick said. “And he’s been drinking again. Heavy. Like he’s trying to drown something.”

“He’s the weakest link, for sure,” Stokes said.

“I pressured him hard today,” Nick said. “I’ve got a deputy sitting on his place tonight. If he knows where Marc is at, I reckon he’ll go there soon. There’s a bunch of camps out on the far edge of that wildlife management area past Cypress Island.”

“Where Danny Perry ran off the road,” Annie said.

Nick nodded. “He had to be headed that way for a reason, yeah?”

“But if you go far enough down that road, eventually you hit that east-west state highway and end up anywhere,” Stokes pointed out.

“That’s true, but I’m thinking if that was Marc in that car, he’s parked his truck and boat somewhere out of the way. Somewhere no one would bother to notice. I alerted the Wildlife agents to keep an eye out in that area, be on the lookout for those vehicles, but not to get too close if they see something. I don’t want him spooked, and I don’t want him trying to run in the dead of night. If he’s holed up there, let him sit and think he’s safe. Either Dozer leads us to him, or we send the marine unit out there tomorrow and see what we can see.”

“If it’s Marc, why is he riding around in Robbie Fontenot’s car?” Stokes asked.

“The simple answer is he doesn’t want to be seen in his,” Nick said. “No one in his neighborhood would recognize that Toyota. Maybe he wanted to have a look and see for himself if his wife is having an affair.”

“And if he has Robbie’s car,” Annie said, “does he have Robbie’s cell phone as well? If we eliminate the murder-for-hire plotline, there’s no reason Robbie would have called Marc’s wife in the middle of the night.”

And if he had Robbie’s car and Robbie’s phone, then where was Robbie? She hated to voice the question, but she had to. “Why does he have that car at all?”

“No good reason,” Stokes said. “If you ain’t been seen in a week or more, but someone’s driving your car around, it’s probably because you don’t need it no more.”

“Eli told me when he ran into Robbie this summer that he made a joke about him being an investigative reporter, because that’s what Robbie used to say he wanted to be back when they were in school,” Annie said. “And Robbie said, yeah, that he was deep undercover investigating police corruption in Bayou Breaux.”

“But he’s not a reporter,” Stokes said. “He’s an unemployed drug addict.”

“I know,” Annie said. “But why would he say that? Even as a joke, why would he say that? I sent that cash I found to the lab to get dusted for prints. Dewey Rivette admitted some of it came from him, paying Robbie as a CI. Fifty here, a hundred there, he said. Where’d the rest of it come from?

“What if Danny Perry chased that car last night because he believed it was Robbie driving?” she asked, hating to say it out loud. “It looked like he tried to roll that car into the swamp. Why would he do that?”

“We’ll ask him if he ever wakes up,” Nick said. “Rivette said Fontenot had a line on copper thieves. Could Perry have been mixed up in that? If the Mercier brothers and Dozer Cormier are involved, if Danny Perry was involved in theft and fencing stolen goods, that’s a big motive for any of them to get rid of Robbie Fontenot.”

Annie thought of B’Lynn, sitting home hoping against hope her son was still alive. After all she’d been through, after she’d fought with him and for him and put all her strength into pulling him through his addiction and out the other side…After all of that, to find out he’d been murdered for knowing the wrong thing about the wrong people…

She pulled in a big breath and blew out a sigh, the last of her energy going with it as she swept her hair back from her face. “Man, this day just gets better and better.”

“You want happy endings, you’re in the wrong business, Broussard,” Stokes said.

“Yeah. I used to be happy to settle for justice,” Annie said. “This time, that’s not gonna feel like enough. Not by a long shot.”

—

“Don’t tell me not to make it personal,” Annie warned as she walked with Nick toward their respective vehicles.

“When have I ever told you that, ’Toinette?” he asked. “It’s all personal if you care. And if you don’t care, you shouldn’t be on this job. It’s too hard, and it means too much to just go through the motions for a paycheck. Best you can do is learn how to put it in a box and close the lid at the end of the day.” He gathered her close and pressed a kiss to her lips. “Let’s go home and do that, bébé . Try to get some rest. I have a feeling tomorrow is gonna be a day.”

“You go ahead. I’ll catch up,” she said. “I’m gonna swing by B’Lynn Fontenot’s and give her an update, such as it will be.

“You know, the first thing I thought when B’Lynn told me the story of her son was that he was probably dead of an overdose somewhere,” she said. “I thought I was all set for a bad outcome, but now the closer that comes to being true, the less ready I feel to accept it. There’s a part of me that wants to tell B’Lynn there’s still some slim hope. Would that be a bad lie or a good one?”

“Either way, I’m sure she knows a lie when she hears one, good or bad.” Nick brushed her hair back from her face and gave her a sad smile. “I know you want something good to happen for her, chère , but she hasn’t just been down this road before; she’s lived on it for a decade. She knows every monster. She’s followed her son into every dark alley. She has, no doubt, prepared herself for the worst many times. It won’t be your fault if that’s the bad news you end up having to give her. She knows that.”

That was an ironic truth, Annie thought as she drove to the Belle Terre neighborhood—that the woman she wanted to protect from her son’s fate was better equipped to handle the truth than Annie was to give it.

The day had absolutely drained her. A low-grade headache was beginning to throb in the back of her skull, reminding her of the last time she’d made a late-night house call on a troubled mother of a troubled son.

This wasn’t the same thing at all, she knew. The anxiety that idled in the background of her psyche these days began to rise to the fore now just because she was too tired to fend it off, not because B’Lynn posed any threat to her. Fatigue and her brain chemistry were a bad combination.

She parked in front of the Fontenot house and sat for a minute to pull herself together and push the anxiety back in its box. She wasn’t in danger. She didn’t need to be afraid. She wasn’t alone. Nick had followed her in his vehicle—to assuage his own nerves as much as to assure her. They both had their scars to deal with from that night in September.

The neighborhood was aglow with expensive landscape lighting around the grand houses. Across the street, a man was walking his spaniel and talking on his phone. This was just an average night for the above-average people who lived there. Most of them were likely sitting in their living rooms watching TV, their thoughts far removed from drug addiction and police corruption and murder, unless that was the plot of a prime-time cop show.

Her legs felt leaden as she climbed the front steps to B’Lynn’s porch. She wanted to just go sit on the porch swing and not ring the bell, but she pushed the button just the same.

B’Lynn answered the door in leggings and an oversize cashmere hoodie the color of moss, her hair up in a messy bun, a cut crystal glass of bourbon in one hand.

“You look like you could use this,” she quipped, the worry in her eyes belying her tone of voice.

“I just wanted to stop by and give you an update,” Annie said. “It’s been a long day.”

“Coffee, then? Tea?”

“Nothing, thanks. I won’t be long.”

“I saw the story about that police officer crashing in the swamp,” B’Lynn said, leading her into a cozy front parlor with a fire in the fireplace and a pair of comfortable blush pink velvet love seats facing each other on either side of an antique mahogany coffee table that had probably been sitting there for a hundred years. Soft music played in the background. They each took a seat, B’Lynn curling her legs beneath her like a deer, both hands wrapped around her glass as if she took some comfort just holding it.

“That was Robbie’s car he was after, wasn’t it?”

“We think so,” Annie said. “Although the license plate came back to another vehicle.”

“You think the car’s been stolen. Isn’t that what they do with stolen cars? Change the license plates?”

“Sometimes, yes. It’s something to do if you don’t want a car recognized for one reason or another.”

“You don’t think it was Robbie driving.”

“We have reason to believe someone else has been driving the car,” Annie admitted. It was painful to watch the hope come and go from B’Lynn’s face, like a faint little light brightening and dimming as it began to fail.

B’Lynn pulled in a big breath, bracing herself.

“I can’t say who it might be,” Annie said. “We don’t know enough, don’t have any concrete identification, but we’re working on it.”

“Well, that’s more than anyone else has done,” B’Lynn said primly, and took a sip of her drink. “Thank you.”

“You don’t need to thank me,” Annie said. “I wish I had something better to report. At this point, I still have a lot of questions and not enough answers.”

“I imagine you didn’t get anything useful out of my ex-husband. He felt compelled to complain in a text that I had sicced you on him, like an attack dog. A mental image that brought a smile to my face, I have to say.”

“He’s quite the perpetual victim, isn’t he?” Annie said.

“Oh, yes. Poor Robert, the star of every tragedy to befall our family. Not to say that he didn’t suffer at the time. He did. We all did. Was he at all helpful to you?”

“No,” Annie said. “He didn’t have anything to contribute.”

“That’s the story of his role as a parent, right there in a nutshell: nothing to contribute.”

“I confess, I have a hard time imagining you married to him.”

“Me, too,” B’Lynn conceded. “But that was a lifetime ago. I don’t know who that girl was anymore. Not me, that’s for sure.”

“I also spoke with a guy Robbie went to school with,” Annie said. “Eli McVay.”

B’Lynn nodded. “I remember Eli. Nice boy. Nice family. How is he?”

“He’s well. He’s a civil engineer for the city of Lafayette.”

“Good for him.”

That had to be one of the ongoing injuries to an addict’s parents, Annie thought: having to hear how well his peers were doing. Sacred Heart graduated crop after crop of kids who went on to be doctors and lawyers, architects and engineers. And every time B’Lynn Fontenot ran into one of those parents of the kids Robbie had gone to school with, she had to hear how well they’d done, because the kids were their one connection and the subject of the kind of small talk people engaged in at the grocery store or the bank or the charity events that were their common social life. And she had to relive over and over the awful, embarrassing truth of her son’s life, which she would have to encapsulate in vague answers that didn’t include words like addiction and rehab and jail time .

“He was telling me Robbie used to talk about becoming an investigative journalist,” Annie said.

“Oh, yes. Or a documentary filmmaker. Or a sports photographer. After he retired from his stellar career in the NFL, of course,” B’Lynn said. “He loved making little films on his phone. He had so many dreams, so much potential. That’s what children are, you know—dreams and potential.”

“You said he had talked about going back to school. Was that a focus for him? Becoming a reporter or a filmmaker?”

She smiled a sad smile. “He was so bright, so talented, such an incredible spirit. Who knows what he might have done if he’d had the chance.

“Oh, my God.” She closed her eyes as if in pain, and when she opened them again, they were shining with tears she wouldn’t let fall. “I’m talking about him in the past tense. He’s dead, isn’t he?”

“I don’t know,” Annie said, her throat tightening against her own need to cry.

“You’re far too kind for this job, Annie.”

“I’m gonna tell the truth, B’Lynn,” Annie said. “I don’t have a lot of hope for a good outcome here, but until I have proof otherwise, he’s still alive to me, and I’m still gonna try to find him. And if the worst has happened, I’m still gonna fight to get you justice.”

“I wish I believed there was such a thing.”

“If someone has hurt your son, they’ll pay for it.”

B’Lynn shook her head. “That’s retribution, not justice. If we lived in a just world, none of this would ever happen.”

“I wish I had something wise to say,” Annie said. “But I guess I haven’t lived long enough to have wisdom.”

“Honey, I’m old enough to be your mother,” B’Lynn said softly. “And I don’t have anything wise to say, either. Wisdom is something that never arrives until it’s too late.”

“I’m gonna go now,” Annie said, pushing to her feet. If she stayed much longer, she was going to end up in a puddle of tears, crying on the shoulder of the woman she was supposed to be comforting. “But I’d like to come back tomorrow and go through Robbie’s room properly, in case he might have left something else up there that could help us.”

B’Lynn nodded as she rose. “I’ll be here. Where else would I go?”

—

B’Lynn saw Annie Broussard to the door and thanked her again and gave her a hug because she looked like she needed it. Pauvre ’tite bête , her mamere Louisa would have said. Poor little thing, dragged unaware into the unending downward spiral of the Fontenot family. And for what? The ending to this story should have been obvious from a mile away. The only unknown there had ever been was the timing. Anything Annie Broussard could have done would only have postponed the inevitable.

All the time, and all the effort, and all the heartbreak, living and reliving the endless loop of Robbie’s story, like Sisyphus pushing that damn boulder up the hill again and again, and none of it was going to matter at all in the end. He was gone. Just like that. She felt it with a terrible kind of certainty.

Annie didn’t want to say it, bless her heart. She didn’t want it to be true. But for the first time, B’Lynn felt her son’s absence in a way she never had before. She thought about the night she had awakened in his bed, so sure he was in the house, and what he had said when she’d spoken to him: You can’t help me now. I’m so sorry, Mama.

A dream. A hallucination. Wishful thinking. His spirit visiting her from the next dimension, as if she believed in such a thing. It didn’t really matter, did it?

She locked the door and walked slowly through the house, sipping her bourbon and checking doors and windows, wondering why she bothered. What could anyone steal from her that meant more to her than what she’d already lost?

Feeling strangely numb, she went upstairs to Robbie’s room, turned on the lamp on the nightstand, and sat on his bed, looking around at all the memorabilia of the milestones in his younger life, all the hopes and dreams that had never made it out of this room, and never would. No one would ever know what he could have been, the contributions he could have made, if only things had turned out differently.

What a strange feeling, to think that her child was dead but that the world continued to turn as if nothing had happened at all. The sun would come up in the morning like it always did. To think this happened every day to countless people, their grief ignored by most of the world. She wasn’t even special in her pain. The fabric of her life was torn, a hole left where her son used to be.

How many times had she prepared herself for this in the past ten years? She had long ago lost count. Yet somehow, she still wasn’t ready. How many times had she told herself in anger that it might actually be a relief, then felt sick with guilt for thinking it? Now the reality was here, and relief was not the emotion. Not at all.

She pulled her phone out of the pouch of her hoodie and dialed Robbie’s number, just to listen to his voice message. She wanted to tell him that she loved him, that she forgave him, that she hoped he forgave her. But the mailbox was full, and she couldn’t have left a message even if he had been alive to hear it. And somehow that seemed sadly perfect.

Restless, she turned out the light and left the room. She went back downstairs, grabbed a blanket from the TV room, and went out the kitchen door to sit on the back porch steps. Bundled against the damp chill of the night, she sat looking at the backyard in the dim silver moonlight and the ground-level glow of the landscape lighting. She stared out to the far reaches of the yard, where darkness crept in and stole her vision, hoping against hope to see his shadow there, just out of reach.

How many times had she sat on these steps, watching him play, watching him run, watching him practice passing the football, throwing spiral after spiral through the old tire that still hung from a limb on the oak tree, never once imagining how wrong it could all go, thinking only good things for a bright future? What a pleasant lie, a necessary lie, because the truth, as it had turned out, was just damn near unbearable.

Why did it have to all go so terribly wrong?

At least she had those good memories, she thought. At least she could close her eyes and remember when she had a beautiful boy and joy and hope. She could close her eyes and imagine him there, putting his arms around her, and she could tell him with her heart what a privilege it had been to be his mother.