Chapter 7

7

Bayou Realty, once housed on the first floor of a small historic building in downtown Bayou Breaux, had grown and prospered its way to one of the newer business complexes on the north side of town. A cluster of single-story Caribbean-style brick buildings, Bayou Professional Park boasted an architecture firm, a mortgage and title business, a trio of accountants, and an interior design firm, with the realty office the centerpiece of the complex.

Nick parked in the lot and sat for a moment, sorting through his thoughts. What to say, what not to say to Melissa Mercier. He had a corpse with no ID, no vehicle nearby, no cell phone, and no face. The business card with a dollar amount written in Marc Mercier’s hand found in the pocket of the dead man could have been an estimate given to a customer, but it could just as easily have been a price given to the junk dealer by someone wanting to sell something.

He had nothing concrete to indicate the body was that of Marc Mercier, and if it turned out to be Marc Mercier, the wife would be on the list of potential suspects, if what his family members had said was anything to go by. To try to glean as much information as possible while giving away as little as possible was the best tack, but that would be a tricky dance to accomplish.

Word that a mutilated body had been found south of town would be burning up the gossip grapevines by now. Stokes had already texted him to say KJUN radio had the news on the air.

Alphonse Arceneaux had unknowingly bought them some time ahead of the media by calling his friend Sergeant Rodrigue directly, but the subsequent callouts to deputies and the crime scene unit had been picked up by police scanners, and two TV news vans had shown up as they had processed the scene. Though they had been kept at a distance and had been given no official comment to run with, the lack of details wouldn’t stop them from going on air with what little information they had. There was a chance Melissa Mercier had already heard the news.

A young woman with a bright pageant-girl smile lighting her face greeted Nick from behind the reception desk as he walked into the office.

“How can we help you to have a great day today, sir?” she asked as if the prospect thrilled her.

“I’m here to see Mrs. Mercier.”

She looked puzzled for an instant. “Mrs.?”

“Melissa Mercier.”

“Oh! Melissa!” She waved a hand at him, laughing. “We just aren’t so formal here!”

“I’ll just go back to her office, then,” Nick said, as if he had been there many times before. The receptionist let him go, turning her attention to a ringing telephone.

“Bayou Realty, Shavon speaking. How can we help you to have a great day today?”

He passed through an open area of comfortable couches and chairs and coffee tables strewn with glossy real estate ads, then went down a hallway past a pair of small conference rooms with open doors. Laughter floated out into the hall several doors down—a man and a woman sharing a joke.

“What would I do without you to cheer me up, Will?” the woman asked in an accent not from Louisiana.

Nick stopped outside the open office door. The man stood near the window, tall, lean, and handsome, in his mid-thirties with a full head of deep auburn hair and a wide white smile. The woman sat behind the desk, just a few feet away, beaming up at him. They looked like a toothpaste ad. Her honey-blond hair was swept back from her delicate face in a ponytail that bounced when she laughed. She caught sight of Nick in the corner of her eye and turned and looked at him expectantly.

“Can I help you?” she asked pleasantly. She was pretty with a heart-shaped face and big green eyes. Her mouth tipped up slightly higher on one side than the other, a charming quirk.

“Melissa Mercier?”

“Yes?”

“Lieutenant Fourcade with the sheriff’s office,” he said, holding up his badge. “I need to ask you a few questions.”

What was left of her smile fell away and the color left her face. She sat up straight.

“Oh, my God, has something happened? Is it Marc? He’s crashed that stupid truck, hasn’t he?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Is he in jail?!” she asked, incredulous.

“Maybe let the man speak, Miss,” her friend said gently, resting a hand on her shoulder. “This could be nothing.

“I’m Will Faulkner,” he said to Nick. “I’m the boss around here most days.”

“Mr. Faulkner.” Nick acknowledged him with a nod, noting that his hand lingered with comfortable familiarity on Melissa Mercier’s shoulder.

“Mrs. Mercier, have you been in contact with your husband today?”

“No, I haven’t. Why?”

“When was the last time you spoke with him?”

“I really wish you’d answer my question,” she said anxiously. “Has something happened to Marc?”

“Not that I’m aware of,” Nick said. “His family is concerned, though. They say they haven’t been able to reach him.”

“Oh, my God,” Melissa muttered, suddenly exasperated as she sat back in her chair. “They called the sheriff’s office? Seriously?”

“They say they haven’t heard from him since Saturday. Have you?”

“No, I haven’t, but—”

“And is that normal?”

“I wouldn’t call it normal, no.”

“But you’re not concerned?”

“I didn’t say that!”

“Whoa!” Will Faulkner said, holding up a hand and taking a half step forward, putting himself ever so slightly in front of Melissa Mercier. “Let’s slow this down and start from the beginning here. This is sounding like an interrogation.”

“Not at all,” Nick said calmly. “I’m just trying to get a sense of things. Have you been in contact with Mr. Mercier?”

“Me? No.”

“Are you friends?”

“I’ve known Marc for years.”

An answer that wasn’t an answer.

Nick stared at Faulkner for a moment, letting the silence hang to see if he would say something more, wanting to see how uncomfortable he might become with the scrutiny. Faulkner glanced at Melissa and took a step back.

“When did you last speak with your husband?” Nick asked.

“Saturday night.”

“About what time?”

“Six thirty, quarter to seven.”

“And then what?”

“He left. We had an argument,” she admitted quietly, “and he left.”

“Have you tried to contact him since?”

“No,” she said, pressing her fingertips to her temples as if to rub at a sudden headache. “Because I was angry. I’m still angry. And now I’m scared, too.”

Tears filled her eyes, and she looked down at the desktop.

“Mrs. Mercier, would you be more comfortable having this conversation in private?” Nick asked.

She shook her head, composing herself. “No, it’s fine. There’s nothing about Marc and me Will doesn’t already know. He’s probably sick to death of hearing about it, though.”

“Not at all,” Faulkner said, touching her shoulder again to reassure her. “That’s what friends are for.”

“What was the fight about?” Nick asked.

She sniffed and swiped at an errant tear. “He came home pulling that stupid boat and announced he was going to go hunting yesterday with his brother, but yesterday was my birthday, and I thought I should outrank shooting things.” She forced a sad, crooked smile. “Turns out, I don’t. Marc stormed out. I assumed he went to Luc’s house.”

“Luc says he hasn’t seen or heard from him,” Nick said. “And when he didn’t come home last night, what did you do?”

“I made myself a nice dinner and had a glass of wine,” she said with a touch of defiance.

“His mother says she called you last night and got no answer.”

“I wasn’t interested in making my evening worse by having a conversation with Kiki.”

“At that point you were still not concerned about your husband’s whereabouts?”

“No. I didn’t expect him to come home, just to spite me.”

“And you didn’t wonder where he might be at? Or did you have an idea?”

“Like I said, I thought he was with Luc. Anyway, Marc has a lot of friends,” she said, “and plenty of places to stay.”

“Did you call any of those friends looking for him?”

“No.” She shook her head again. “The first time Marc did this, I called everyone I could think of, looking for him. I called the area hospitals, thinking he might have had an accident. I was beside myself. I was six months pregnant at the time…And when he came home, he was angry with me for calling his friends and making a big deal out of nothing.”

A fresh sheen of tears glazed her eyes as she looked up at him. “I don’t make a big deal out of nothing anymore.”

There was a lot of pain in that statement. Hurt feelings, hurt pride. She was a young bride with a new baby. She wanted to be the most important person in her husband’s life, but that didn’t seem to be the case. Luc Mercier had said Melissa didn’t want to be there in south Louisiana, but her husband had been lured back to help his family, and the family and the place were hanging on to him. She had to feel very alone there…except for her good friend, Will Faulkner.

“I’m sorry to ask,” Nick said, “but do you think he’s seeing someone?”

“Yeah,” she said with a bitter laugh. “All his old friends from high school. I had an adult husband who was smart and ambitious, and then we moved here, and he magically turned into an eighteen-year-old boy with mommy issues and a bunch of overgrown adolescent drinking buddies. Of course, he calls them business connections now, and hanging out with them is networking .”

“That’s Marc reliving his glory days,” Will Faulkner remarked. “It’s sad when a guy thinks he topped out in high school.”

“He didn’t, though,” Melissa argued. “That’s what makes this so frustrating.”

“I understand the family has a fish camp down on Lake Aucoin,” Nick said. “Could he have gone there?”

“No. We had renters there for the weekend. They checked out late in the day yesterday.”

“So he could have gone there last night.”

“I suppose he could have, but my cleaning crew should have been there this morning. No one mentioned anything to me.”

“Is he into any kind of risky behavior?” Nick asked. “Gambling, drugs?”

She looked confused. “Drugs? Marc? No, nothing like that.”

“Is there anybody he hasn’t been getting along with?”

“You mean besides his brother? Or me?”

“The brothers don’t get along?” Nick asked, opening that door a crack.

“Luc resents him for coming back here,” she said. “Marc’s the golden boy of the family, if you didn’t already catch that from his mother.”

“But Marc and Luc, they were still going hunting together?”

“Oh, sure. Hunting and fishing transcends all. If there’s a living creature they can kill, the Mercier boys are right there for it. Don’t ask them to agree about anything else, though.”

“How has it been for him, coming back into the family business?”

“It was a mess when we got here,” she said. “His dad, Troy, had let things go for who knows how long. He’d been ill for a couple of years already. Luc doesn’t have any interest in dealing with paperwork, and Kiki had her hands full trying to take care of Troy and Noelle.”

“A lot of pressure on Marc, then, to straighten it all out, yeah?”

“Yes. I offered to help him sort out the business accounts and the tax situation, but that wasn’t well received.”

“Not well received by whom?”

“Any of them,” she said. “Mercier Salvage is Mercier business, and I’m a Mercier in name only, so…” She shrugged. “Never mind my business degree.”

“So it all fell on Marc,” Nick said. “That’s a lot of stress, yeah? His dad was dying. He’s saddled with the business problems. Family tensions. A new baby. An unhappy wife. That’s a lot. Is there any reason to think he maybe just didn’t want to deal with it anymore?”

Melissa stared at him for a moment before the realization of what he was saying fully hit her, and she gave a little start, as if she’d had an electrical shock. Her green eyes widened.

“Marc wouldn’t hurt himself!” she said, but a hint of uncertainty in her voice made it sound slightly more like a question than an answer. She glanced up at Will Faulkner as if for reassurance, then turned back to Nick. “He wouldn’t. That’s ridiculous! Why would you even suggest that?”

“I’m not suggesting anything,” Nick said. “I have to be open to all possibilities.”

“Well, that is not possible!” she said, trying to sound emphatic instead of on the verge of panic.

“Really, Detective,” Faulkner said. “That’s some pretty wild speculation. Marc’s off on a temper tantrum. He’s probably sitting out in the basin somewhere, shooting ducks and perfectly happy to think he’s got people worried sick. He’s made himself the center of attention even when he’s not here.”

“So there’s no reason to think Marc might have come to harm by his own hand or anyone else’s?” Nick asked.

“Who would want to hurt Marc?” Faulkner asked.

“No one,” Melissa snapped. “It’s ridiculous. This is all ridiculous!”

She snatched up her iPhone from the desktop and made a call, setting it to speaker, looking at Nick while she waited for the connection to pick up. The call went straight to voicemail.

“This is Marc. Leave a message.”

“It’s me,” Melissa said. “You need to call me back, Marc. People are worried sick about you. Your mother called the sheriff’s office, for God’s sake! I’m sitting here with a detective who’s asking me if someone might have killed you! Call me. Call someone , damn it! Let us know you’re all right, you selfish prick!”

She ended the call and covered her face with her hands for a second before looking up at Will Faulkner. “Oh, my God, I shouldn’t have said that! What if something has happened to him? He could be dead in a ditch or drowned in the swamp, and I’m sitting here pissed off at him for being a jerk!”

Faulkner squatted down beside her and squeezed her hand. “Let’s not panic.”

“Why did we have to come back here?” Frustration and anger and fear boiled up and spilled over. “God, I hate this place!”

“I’m sorry this is upsetting for you, Mrs. Mercier,” Nick said.

“Are you?” she asked, getting to her feet. Needing to burn off some of her anxious energy, she shifted her weight from one foot to the other even as she wrapped her arms around herself to hold herself together. “Why are you asking these questions? Would somebody want to hurt Marc? Would Marc hurt himself? What aren’t you telling us? Marc’s dead, isn’t he?”

“I don’t know that,” Nick said. His free question time was up. He would have to tell her, and she would react, and everything would shift, but there was no avoiding it. “This morning a body was found along a dead-end road outside of Luck.”

Melissa went still. Her face blanched chalk white. She pressed a hand across her mouth, as if to keep the emotion welling inside her from spilling out.

“Is it Marc?” Will Faulkner asked.

“We don’t have a positive ID at this time.”

“Didn’t Kiki give you a picture of him?” Melissa asked. “I-I can give you a picture of him.”

She scooped up her cell phone with trembling hands and fumbled to bring a photo up on the screen. “This is him,” she said, shoving the phone at Nick. “Is it him? Oh, my God!”

Will Faulkner stepped close and put an arm around her shoulders to steady her.

“I’m sorry there isn’t a better way of saying this,” Nick began. “But due to the nature of the injuries, we are unable to make an identification from a photograph.”

Melissa’s eyes widened, and a strange, primal sound of anguish wrenched itself out of her as her knees gave way. Her boss held on tight as he helped her slide back down onto her chair.

“Does your husband have any identifying marks on his body?” Nick asked. “A tattoo, a scar, a birthmark, anything like that?”

“Oh, my God. I can’t believe this is happening,” she said to herself. She was hyperventilating now, and a sheen of perspiration glazed her face. “Um, he…has a…scar…on the back of his left hand. He fell out of a tree. Deer hunting.”

She indicated the left hand. The hand Nick’s victim had held up in a vain attempt to block a shotgun blast.

“He broke his wrist,” Melissa added. “Our freshman year. I didn’t really know him that well at the time. He had a cast on his arm. He played it up to get sympathy from girls,” she said with a sad little smile of remembrance. “I fell for it.”

She curled over on herself as if she were in pain and started to cry. Will Faulkner bent down and murmured something to her as he pressed a clean handkerchief into her hand.

“What about his truck?” he asked Nick.

“There was no vehicle at the scene.”

“So what was this? Some kind of carjacking?”

“We don’t know at this point,” Nick said. “And I want to be clear, Mrs. Mercier: We don’t know that this is or isn’t Marc. Your husband may be alive and well. I encourage you to keep trying to call him and contact whatever friends you think might be in touch with him if he’s just gone off on his own for a time.”

He placed a business card on her desk. “And call me if you hear from him.”

Melissa nodded and dabbed at her eyes with the handkerchief. She rose slowly to her feet, still shaky. “If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to the ladies’ room to try to pull myself together…or just fall to pieces. One or the other.”

“Do you want me to walk you?” Faulkner asked.

She shook her head. “No.”

“Do you want me to get Shavon to go with you?”

“God, no. I don’t need her trying to help me have a great day today,” she said sarcastically. “I just need a moment alone.”

Nick stepped aside to let her pass. Her emotions seemed genuine. Uncommonly honest, he thought. In his experience, people more often than not tried to paint an image of perfect normalcy when speaking to law enforcement, no matter what a train wreck their lives might actually be. They lied, even about things that didn’t matter, because they were afraid of being judged or because they wrongly assumed the cops were out to get them, even when they’d done absolutely nothing wrong. But Melissa Mercier was either honest or one of the better actresses he’d come across.

“Well, this day has certainly taken an unexpected turn,” Will Faulkner said as they followed Melissa into the hallway. She turned left. Faulkner turned right. “Can I buy you a free cup of coffee, Lieutenant?”

“Thank you,” Nick said, following him to another office. If Faulkner had something more to say, he would listen.

“Have a seat,” Faulkner offered as he went behind his desk and busied himself with an expensive-looking espresso machine tucked into the built-in cabinetry. “I don’t want you getting the wrong idea about Melissa.”

“What idea would that be?”

“That she doesn’t care about Marc or that remark about hating it here…I mean, she does hate it here, but not without reason. I don’t want you to hold that against her. This place doesn’t always make strangers feel welcomed, and Marc’s family hasn’t helped with that. They’d just as soon she leave Marc and the baby here and go back to Philadelphia, never to be seen or heard from again. Marc’s mother would swallow him whole to keep him here if she had to. Melissa is the enemy.”

“And what is Marc’s feeling on being here, staying here?”

“I don’t know,” he said, dropping a pod in the coffee maker and punching a button. “He’s stuck in the middle. This has been a rough year for both of them.”

“You’re good friends, yeah?” Nick asked.

“We all went to Tulane—Marc, Miss, and I,” he said, raising his voice a bit to be heard above the hissing and spitting of the espresso machine. “Of course, I was years ahead of them, but I worked with a group of the business students in a mentorship program when they were there, and we got to know one another. Little did any of us know at the time they would end up moving back here. That wasn’t the plan. They graduated and moved up north, went to work for Missy’s dad. He has an investment firm. I would never have expected them to come back. Then Marc’s dad got sick, and everything changed.

“Cream? Sugar?” he asked.

“Black is fine, merci .”

“I get it, you know?” he said as he handed Nick the steaming mug. “The mixed emotions of coming back to the hometown when you thought you were getting away. You thought the world was your oyster; then suddenly here you are, right back where you started. That’s not easy.”

“That’s what happened for you?” Nick asked, glancing around the room. One entire wall was covered in framed photos and award plaques and civic commendations for good works in Bayou Breaux and around the parish. Will Faulkner had a full life here.

“Yep. You know my older sister, Lindsay, she started this business. She and her partner, Pam Bichon. That’s one sad story after the next.”

“I remember.”

Pam Bichon had been brutally murdered, a case that had taken Nick down a rabbit hole of obsession—the killer’s and his own. Less than two years later, Lindsay Faulkner had fallen victim to a serial rapist and died from her injuries.

“I came back when Lindsay died,” Will said. “I had a good job in New Orleans, had a life there, but someone had to deal with this business, and our parents were just broken by it all…”

“And you ended up staying.”

“I did. I was back and forth for a while,” he said, dropping another pod in the coffeemaker. “I still have business interests in New Orleans. But I’m from here. My family is here, old friends are here. Bayou Breaux was growing, and I saw opportunities…So I see it from both sides—getting pulled back but wanting to outgrow the place at the same time. Torn between duty and desire,” he said, dropping a pair of sugar cubes into his mug.

“Is that Marc?”

He sighed as if he were long since tired of the subject of Marc Mercier.

“Marc’s a good guy,” he said. “He is. I just get frustrated with him on Missy’s behalf. Marc needs to be the hero. He always has. Leading the high school football team to victory in the state championships, winning a scholarship to Tulane, being the first in his family to get a college degree. Of course it’s all commendable, but sometimes it’s at the expense of others, you know?

“I can’t fault him that he came back when his family needed him, but it’s been awful hard on Melissa. She doesn’t know anyone here but me. She doesn’t fit in here. Small-town life is not as easy as people want to believe. In fact, it can be damned complicated. She might as well have moved to France. It’s just as foreign to her.

“She never thought they’d be here this long. She believed they would be moving back up north at the end of the summer. She was ready to start packing. Then she read in the local paper Marc had volunteered to coach youth football this fall. It was big news, you know. The hometown hero saving the day for a team whose coach—Marc’s old coach—had a heart attack. Marc couldn’t say no to him, but then he didn’t have the nerve to tell Missy. That went over like the proverbial lead balloon, let me tell you.”

“I can imagine.”

“My mother always says wives don’t like surprises unless they come in a box from a jewelry store.”

“You gave Melissa a job when they moved here,” Nick said. “What does she do for you?”

“She needed something to do or she’d lose her mind,” Faulkner said. He took a sip of his coffee and sighed. “I’m lucky to have her. She manages my vacation rentals, takes care of the marketing, booking, all of it. It’s something she can handle even with having the baby and all. I’d be happy to have her stay for my own selfish reasons,” he admitted. “But I understand why she’d rather go.”

“And if Marc didn’t want to go with her?”

He shrugged. “Marriage is hard—or so they tell me.”

“You’re single?”

“Much to my mother’s chagrin,” he joked, then sobered. “This dead body. Do you think it’s Marc?”

“I don’t know,” Nick said, setting his cup aside as he stood to go. “But I’ll find out who it is, and I’ll find out why he’s dead, and I’ll find out who made him that way. Thank you for the coffee, Mr. Faulkner. And thank you for your time.”