Chapter 39

39

Annie dropped Justin off at her cousin Remy’s in time for breakfast and headed into the office early. Deebo had texted her that he had connected with Kenneth Wood of Ravenwood Trust and was getting access to the video from the security cameras on the house behind Robbie Fontenot’s. She both hoped and dreaded it would give them something to go on—hoped for answers and dreaded what those answers might tell them.

B’Lynn had told her she was too kindhearted for this job, and that day she felt like that might be true. There was just so much sadness to unpack in these past few days. That Robbie Fontenot was dead was all but a foregone conclusion now, though she would hang on to the very last thread of hope until she absolutely had to let it go. She would have to go over to the jail that day to see Izzy Guidry and to the hospital to check on Tulsie Parcelle, hoping she could play a role in getting them if not a great outcome, at least a less terrible one. And she had yet to locate any next of kin for Rayanne Tillis, who lay dead in the morgue at Our Lady. It didn’t please her to add a dirty cop to that pile of misery.

What a hell of a week this was. The kind of week that made her think about opening a flower shop or having another baby. Anything life-affirming to save her from falling into a pit of despair.

“Danny Perry didn’t make it,” Deebo said as she walked into the Pizza Hut.

Annie felt like someone had knocked the wind out of her. She gave him a look. “Could I get a ‘Hi, how you doing, Annie’ before the death notices, please?”

“Sorry,” he said, having the grace to cringe a little. “I figured I might as well lead with it and get it out of the way, before you sit down and look at this video.”

“You met with this Mr. Wood?” she asked, pouring herself a cup of coffee.

“Yes, ma’am. That house on Lafourche is his grandmother’s house. She’s gone into a nursing home recently and they needed to liquidate her assets so she could qualify for Medicaid. That’s how it ended up in this trust, so it’s still in the family. Mr. Wood had the security cameras installed on account of the sketchiness of that neighborhood. There’s nothing much in the house, but he didn’t want squatters or druggies or whatever taking up residence.”

Annie pulled a chair up beside him and sighed as she settled in. “So what have we got?”

“I went directly to Monday morning,” he said. “Who knows what else we might find going back, but I figured to cut straight to the chase and get it over with.”

He brought the video up on his computer screen and made a sad face while he petted his scraggly beard as if for comfort.

Robbie Fontenot’s back porch was some distance in the background, but there was no mistaking that the person unlocking the house to let Rayanne Tillis inside was a Bayou Breaux uniformed officer, square and stocky. Danny Perry.

It was what Annie had expected, but still she felt the weight of disappointment.

Deebo shook his head. “What the hell? I reckon we give him points for creativity, giving his snitch a bonus without dipping into his own pocket, right? ‘Here, Rayanne, have this TV out of this guy’s house. He ain’t been around for a few days, and he’s probably dead anyway.’?”

“Ah, Danny,” Annie murmured. “I was happier thinking you were just a fool.”

“I’m gonna bet he was up to his ears in drug business,” Deebo said. “Could be your Mr. Fontenot knew all about it.”

Annie thought of the money she’d found in Robbie’s bedroom, feeling sick at the idea that he might have been involved in the business. That was the last thing she wanted to have to tell B’Lynn.

“Thanks for getting this, Deebo,” she said. “This gives me enough to get a search warrant for Danny’s house, I should think.”

“Well, good luck with that,” he said. “Danny’s house burned to the ground early this morning.”

“What?”

“I heard it from a dispatcher. What were you hoping to find at his place?”

“Robbie Fontenot’s MacBook,” Annie said. “He made a joke to someone recently that he was investigating police corruption in Bayou Breaux, and he used to have a hobby of making videos, like documentary-type things. I’m gonna hope he saved some evidence for us.”

“Annie, did he have an iPhone?” Wynn Dixon asked, peering around her computer screen.

“Yeah. I was told he used to make videos all the time on his phone. But we think his phone is with his car, wherever that may be.”

“We can get a warrant for his iCloud content,” Dixon offered. “If he was making videos with his iPhone, that automatically saves to the cloud. You don’t need the phone or his computer. The content from all his Apple devices goes to his iCloud account.”

“I hadn’t even thought about that,” Annie admitted. “He has an old Mac desktop sitting at his mother’s house, too.”

“If the operating system is up to date enough and if you’ve got his passwords, you should be able to access his content from that machine,” Wynn said. “Even if you don’t have the passwords, we can always hack into it. It’ll just take longer.”

“And that computer is sitting in his mother’s house,” Annie said, standing up. “We may not need a warrant at all.”

She picked up her phone and texted B’Lynn to let her know she was on her way over.