Chapter 5

5

B’Lynn was standing in her son’s tiny bedroom at the back of the house, looking small and lost and drained in an unguarded moment. As soon as she saw Annie, she pulled herself up taller and put on her game face like a warrior putting on armor. She had to be exhausted, bone-weary after a week of worry and anger, fighting to get anyone to listen, much less care, about her missing son.

“They haven’t done a goddamn thing!” she said, pointing toward the backyard. “He’s been gone more than a week and they haven’t done a goddamn thing!”

“I’m sorry, B’Lynn.”

“It’s not your fault. You’re the first person to even listen to me.”

“Have you looked around?” Annie asked. “Is anything missing?”

“I don’t know. It’s hard to tell,” B’Lynn said, turning around in a circle.

The room was messy but not dirty. The bed was unmade, a tangle of blue sheets, a single pillow. A side chair held a pile of cast-off clothes.

The closet door stood open. An assortment of shirts hung on the rod. A gray roll-aboard carry-on-size suitcase sat on the floor, tucked back in the corner behind a pile of sneakers. If Robbie Fontenot had taken a trip, he was traveling light.

Annie pulled on a pair of gloves and opened the drawer of the single nightstand, bracing herself for a stash of pill bottles, but there were none. There was nothing but a half-dozen foil packs of condoms, which made her wonder again about the possibility of a girlfriend or boyfriend. Or maybe he preferred to pay for his pleasure with his friendly neighborhood prostitute, Rayanne. Could be that was how she knew about the TV.

On top of the nightstand, a cheap glass ashtray held a few spent butts.

“Is Robbie one to keep cash around?” she asked, bending over for a quick look beneath the bed, checking for a stash or a body, finding nothing but dust.

“He’s unemployed. Where would he get any cash to speak of?”

Selling drugs. Selling himself. Fencing stolen goods. The list of unlawful cash sources rolled through Annie’s head, but she said none of it.

“What about any valuables? Watches, rings, neck chains—anything like that?”

“We gave him a nice watch when he graduated from high school,” B’Lynn said. “He sold it to buy drugs.”

On the dresser, a plastic dish held loose change and a matchbook from the Quik Pik convenience store on the south side of town.

“Is he a drinker?”

“He’s not supposed to be. I know he’ll have a beer now and again, but other than that, he doesn’t drink in front of me.”

“No DUIs on his record?”

“When he was eighteen he totaled his father’s Porsche. He was drunk and high. That prompted his first trip to rehab,” B’Lynn said as they moved from the bedroom to a bathroom the size of a phone booth. She stood in the doorway while Annie checked the medicine cabinet. “He lost his license for two years the next time it happened, but it hasn’t happened since…that I know of.”

As young bachelor bathrooms went, this one was better than average in terms of cleanliness. It smelled of mildew, but so did the rest of the old house. A used bath towel hung over the shower curtain rod instead of being left in a crumpled heap on the floor. The toilet seat was up, but the bowl was flushed. The medicine cabinet held a razor, shaving foam, a bottle of Advil, a bottle of mouthwash. No hard drugs. Of course, Rayanne Tillis could have helped herself to any prescription bottles on a prior visit.

The tiny kitchen was suspiciously tidy. Someone had taken the trash out. There were no dirty dishes in the sink, no food left out on the counters. Nothing had boiled over on the 1970s vintage stove and been left to crust over. Junkies generally lived in squalor, their only concern being their next high.

Annie glanced at B’Lynn. “Is this the way he left it?”

“No,” she admitted. “I washed a few dishes and took out the trash last week.”

Took out the trash and any evidence that might have been in it.

“I wasn’t going to leave it and get roaches. This place is bad enough as it is.”

“You didn’t take any pills out of here, did you?” Annie asked bluntly. “Or drug paraphernalia?”

“No. Absolutely not. What good would it do me to lie about it?”

“None,” Annie said. “But that doesn’t stop people doing it.”

In her experience, people often preferred to hold on to a fairy tale about a loved one than admit a brutal truth, to protect the loved one’s reputation or simply to protect their own feelings. B’Lynn Fontenot didn’t strike her as one of those people, but at the same time, she was a mother wanting to believe her son was staying on the straight and narrow when he had run his life into a ditch again and again.

“I quit lying to myself about Robbie a long time ago, Detective,” she said wearily. “I’m sure as hell not going to lie about him to you. I want him back, whatever state he’s in. I’m not going to sabotage the effort by painting a pretty picture.”

“Good.”

They moved on to the front room of the house, a small living room with stained wallpaper, old linoleum, and furniture that stank of decades of cigarettes. There was a conspicuous blank spot on a console table where the television had been and a disconnected gaming station on the shelf beneath. There was nothing personal in the room, no photos, no mementos.

“I don’t see his laptop anywhere,” B’Lynn said. “It’s a silver MacBook.”

An item to list on the search warrant for whatever shithole Rayanne Tillis lived in, Annie thought. That was something, anyway. Or he might have made a habit of taking the laptop with him when he left the house, considering the neighborhood he lived in.

The house wasn’t giving her much else to go on. It hadn’t been tossed. There was no evidence of a violent struggle. There was no wall calendar with a big red circle around the date Robbie Fontenot had disappeared, no cryptic scribbled note with a phone number or a name on it. Those were things people Robbie Fontenot’s age kept in their smartphone instead of conveniently leaving them lying around the house for the cops to find.

It looked like he had simply gone out and not come back. Danny Perry had been telling nothing but the truth when he said the welfare check executed by himself and Detective Rivette had given them no cause for concern. The only interesting part of that story was that Rivette had shown up at all. A simple welfare check was not usually of any interest to a detective. Maybe Rivette was making more of an effort than B’Lynn realized.

“All right,” Annie said on a sigh. “Let’s go.”

“That’s it?” B’Lynn asked. “Aren’t you going to dust for fingerprints or something?”

“Aside from the TV thief, this doesn’t appear to be a crime scene.”

A hint of panic crossed B’Lynn’s face. “Oh, here we go again! There’s no crime!”

“I can’t process the house as a crime scene when it doesn’t appear a crime has been committed here,” Annie explained calmly. “My time will be better spent pursuing other leads. Does your son have a bank card or credit cards? Where would those statements be kept?”

“As far as I know, he only has a debit card. He does his banking online,” she said.

“What about his cell phone? Is it part of your family plan?”

“Yes.”

“Good,” Annie said, knowing it was only good if Robbie Fontenot was using the phone his mother provided for him and didn’t have another she knew nothing about, or wasn’t using a burner phone for drug business. There were a lot of very unhelpful possibilities, and the possibility that a twenty-seven-year-old man with a history of drug abuse was walking the straight and narrow was the least likely of them all.

They locked up the house, and as they started across the weed-patch lawn for Annie’s vehicle, an unmarked city police sedan pulled up on the street.

“Did Detective Rivette ask you for any of this information?” Annie asked. “About Robbie’s phone, his credit cards, any of that?”

“No,” B’Lynn said, staring at the car as Dewey Rivette got out on the driver’s side. “He didn’t ask me a damn thing.”

“Let me talk to him,” Annie said.

“I don’t have anything more to say to that man.”

That was certainly a lie, but Annie could only hope B’Lynn would contain herself for the time being. She pulled in a deep breath and started toward the detective.

Dewey Rivette was in his mid-thirties, an unremarkable sort of guy—medium height, medium build, medium-brown $20 haircut. In his khakis and a button-down shirt, he had the slightly rumpled look of a single man who had never mastered the steam iron. Spoiled by his mama, no doubt. He had a round face and the petulant expression of a cranky toddler.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing here, Broussard?” he demanded as he walked up to stand toe to toe with her.

“Good morning to you, too, Detective Rivette,” Annie said calmly. “I’m here doing my job. How about you? Did you just drop by to say hello?”

“Am I supposed to be amused?” he snapped. “You come waltzing in here to take my case, and I’m supposed to be amused by you?”

“Well, I’ve never known you to have a sense of humor,” Annie remarked. “So, no, I shouldn’t think you’d be growing one now. And just what case are you referring to? Because when I looked, Robbie Fontenot had not been reported missing, his car had not been reported stolen, and according to his mother, you have done jack shit to find him, which is why Mrs. Fontenot came to the sheriff’s office first thing this morning, begging for someone to help her.”

“We took her complaint.”

“And did what with it? Line a birdcage?”

“We put a BOLO out on his car.”

“Oh, goodness!” Annie feigned amazement. “I hope you didn’t strain yourself getting that done!”

Rivette scowled. “I can do without your sarcasm.”

“Well, then you should probably leave, because I’ve got a bucket of that stuff for you, Dewey Done-Nothing.”

His face had begun to redden in blotches. “I took her complaint. I did a welfare check.” He ticked these points off on his short, stubby fingers. “If you’ve been inside the house, you saw for yourself there’s no reason to think anything other than that he just left.”

“So, case closed!” Annie said, dusting off her palms. “Pat yourself on the back, Dewey! What do you care what I’m doing, then?”

“You can’t just come into town and do whatever the hell you want!”

“Actually, yes, I can. Last I checked, Bayou Breaux is in Partout Parish, which is my jurisdiction, not just yours, town boy.”

“My investigation is ongoing,” he insisted. “Mrs. Fontenot can’t just go shopping for another law enforcement agency because I didn’t return her every fucking phone call.”

“Seriously? Are you new to the real world?” Annie asked. “Because you didn’t return her every fucking phone call, Mrs. Fontenot came to the SO this morning to speak directly to Sheriff Noblier, as is her right.”

Rivette suddenly looked sick. “She spoke with Sheriff Noblier?”

Annie said nothing and let his imagination run off.

“Fucking hell,” he muttered.

“Yeah, I hope you wore your chain mail drawers today,” Annie said. “I imagine Johnny Earl is gonna be looking for someone to sink his teeth into after Gus calls him.”

“Jesus Christ.” Rivette turned around in a little circle with his hands on his head as if trying to stop his brain from exploding. “You’re making me look bad!”

“Don’t be such a child,” Annie snapped back. “I’m not doing anything to you. B’Lynn Fontenot came to the SO looking for help. I’m helping her. The fact that you didn’t is a you problem, not a me problem.”

“What was I supposed to do?” he asked. “The guy is an adult. He can go where he wants. There’s nothing to say anything happened to him at all!”

“Nothing except for his criminal record and his history of drug abuse.”

“I asked around. I looked,” he insisted.

“Asked who? Looked where?”

“Around!”

“ Around is not a person or a place,” Annie pointed out. “You drove around to the local shithole bars looking for his car? Checked a couple of drug houses? What?”

“I don’t need to tell you!”

Annie rolled her eyes, exasperated. “What are you? Five years old? A person is missing, and this is how you behave?”

“I can’t pull a lead out of my ass!”

“I’m sure not,” Annie said. “There’s no room for one, what with your head shoved up there.”

“Robbie Fontenot done picked up and left!” he argued. “That’s what’s happened, and who can blame him? He’s a grown-ass man with his mama watching him like a hawk every minute of the day. I’d run off, too, with her breathing down my neck.”

“Then why don’t you, and we can all be happy?” Annie suggested. “You think this is a nothing case, then leave it alone. I may well come to the same conclusion, but I don’t mind holding Mrs. Fontenot’s hand along the way.”

“And what am I supposed to tell Chief Earl?”

“I can’t solve all your problems for you, Dewey,” Annie said. “Tell him you had no case. Tell him you’re still on it. I don’t care what you tell him. I’m gonna do what I’m gonna do, and B’Lynn Fontenot is no longer your problem.”

She stepped back and gave him a little salute. “You have yourself a beautiful day!”

Rivette stood there, red-faced with his hands on his hips. She could feel his eyes boring into her back as she went to her vehicle. She tried to feel sorry for him for a second without much success. He had blown off a mother worried for her son, as if Robbie Fontenot didn’t deserve that concern, or as if B’Lynn should have been past caring. Whatever little effort Dewey Rivette had put into this was no more than half a tick past outright laziness. He deserved whatever ass chewing Johnny Earl might give him.

She was halfway back to her vehicle when the passenger door opened and B’Lynn popped up like a jack-in-the-box. Her laser stare blasted right past Annie.

“You’re a tool, Dewey Rivette!” she shouted.

“I guess you had something more to say after all,” Annie said as she rounded the hood of the car. “I appreciate that you didn’t rush over and punch him in the throat. Though I admit I would have enjoyed watching that.”

“His day may yet come,” B’Lynn muttered, settling back down in the passenger seat.

One way or another , Annie thought as she started the car and shifted into reverse. She watched Dewey Rivette in the rearview mirror as she drove away, standing in the sorry little yard like a lost soul, growing smaller and less significant by the second. She hoped he would stay that way.