Chapter 8

8

The Pizza Hut, a low snot-green cinder block building with bars on the windows and doors, had originally been the offices of a road construction business back in the seventies and eighties. The property had been swallowed up by the expansion of the law enforcement center in the early nineties and the building given over to the sheriff’s office’s small squad of detectives. It had been christened the Pizza Hut due to the amount of pies delivered there on a regular basis.

The large front office housed a bullpen of half a dozen beat-up Steelcase desks loaded down with computers and paperwork and the assorted oddities cops collected as souvenirs over their careers. Annie sat at her desk in the middle row, picking the fried shrimp out of a po’boy, hoping the calories would bring a fresh surge of energy. The morning had drained her.

Only two other desks were occupied. Wynn Dixon sat in the back of the room, deep in concentration as she hammered away at her keyboard. A tall, athletic woman with a shock of short hair recently dyed purple for LSU homecoming, she was their designated tech person. The desk to Annie’s right was occupied by Deebo Jeffcoat, their guy on the Acadiana multiagency drug task force. In his early thirties, he was small and wiry, with a greasy mullet and an atrocious, scruffy neck beard he had grown as part of his undercover meth-head look. Eyes closed, grooving to the music on his AirPods, he bounced in his seat, playing imaginary drums with a pair of pencils.

Annie thanked God for keeping Nick out of the office for the time being. She wanted a clearer picture of what she was dealing with regarding the disappearance of Robbie Fontenot before she had to make her argument to pursue the case on her own.

She started with the story of Robbie Fontenot as told by his arrest record, an unsentimental version of a drug addict’s history, from possession to petty theft. She inserted B’Lynn’s version of the story between the lines, the weight of a mother’s sadness pressing down on her heart even as her trained detective’s eye marked the cold hard facts.

He had been in and out of jail at least as much as he had been in and out of rehab. Never for very long. Never for very much. His possession charges never crossed the threshold for serious prison time. He had never been charged with the intent to sell a controlled substance. His stealing had never risen to the level of a felony.

Curious, Annie thought, though what she really meant was “suspicious.” All those not-quite-enough charges sent up little red flags in her mind. Robbie Fontenot was the son of a doctor, a white man with money and connections, a man who had known and supported Sheriff Noblier for long enough that his ex-wife felt she could appeal to him personally on her son’s behalf.

She grabbed her phone and punched in the number B’Lynn had given her for Robbie’s father. The call went straight to voicemail. She left a message asking for him to call her back at his earliest convenience, and wondered if he would. According to B’Lynn, he had been divorced from his son longer than he had been divorced from his wife.

It might have been easy to judge him harshly for that, but Annie had seen many versions of the addiction story, all of them sad, all of them difficult. She tried to reserve judgment on Dr. Robert Fontenot, even if her instincts as a mother conditioned her to side with the child. She had never been the parent of an addict, but she had dealt with enough of them to know that it was no easy path, not even for families with every advantage at their disposal.

Still, she couldn’t help but think that if Robbie Fontenot had been of a different complexion and from a different part of town, he would have been doing hard time. A chronic abuser who sometimes augmented his income by theft—the state penitentiary at Angola was chock-full of them. He was either too smart or too valuable to someone to be shoved out of society to toil in the fields at the notorious prison unaffectionately known as the Farm.

Ten years an addict. That was a lot of hard life experience with people constantly at odds with the law—and with people enforcing the law. She looked at the names of the arresting officers over the years, both from the SO and from Bayou Breaux PD, some cops she knew and some she didn’t. The name of Officer Derwin Rivette jumped out at her from an arrest five years past. And another arrest two years before that, long before Dewey had made detective.

So Dewey and Robbie Fontenot were not unknown to each other, she thought, nibbling on a shrimp. Was there enough familiarity there for Dewey Rivette to know where Robbie Fontenot might go, who he might hang out with, do business with, buy drugs from? Or were the arrests just two in a pile of hundreds Rivette must have made over the years?

She thought about how many arrests she had made as a patrol deputy and how many of them had been memorable. Some had been, for sure. Cops on the job long enough all had, as Danny Perry had said of Rayanne Tillis, their frequent fliers, the repeat offenders who stood out for one reason or another. Were two arrests two years apart reason for Robbie Fontenot to qualify for that status with Dewey Rivette?

She picked up her cell phone and brought up the photo B’Lynn had texted her. It was a recent picture taken in a kitchen, Robbie smiling reluctantly as he stood with his arm around an elderly woman. Probably the day he got out of rehab, Annie imagined, coming home and hugging his grandma. The kind of obligatory picture every mother would take. He was a good-looking young man with an angular face, high cheekbones, and straight brows over weary, wary dark eyes. Eyes that belonged in a much older face, Annie thought. Ages-old, seen-too-much, heart-wrung-out kind of eyes. The windows to a soul that had weathered a hard road despite its privileged start.

She wondered if sometimes that wasn’t as painful in its own way as a dirt-poor start to a hardscrabble life. Robbie Fontenot had grown up a much-loved child of comfort and opportunity. Smart, talented, he had the world rolled out in front of him like a red carpet. On his way to big things until that red carpet had been yanked away. He had lost it all. Thrown it away, some would say, though addiction wasn’t as simple as choice. Resentment of privilege more often than not erased the sympathy of casual observers to a train wreck life. That was just how people were—jealous and petty. But life was only black and white to those lucky enough to never have been faced with real adversity. Strife was a layered and complex thing, no matter how much money you had.

As a mother, Annie could look at Robbie through B’Lynn’s eyes and see the face of a five-year-old, as innocent as a puppy, as sweet as pure love. She could imagine him as that teenage boy, his mental maturity scrambling to grow into his tall, lanky developing man’s frame. She could imagine his hurt and disappointment as his dream was dragged away, leaving him bereft and wondering who he might be without that success. He’d been thrown down a hard road with no preparation, with no one to feel sorry for him but the woman who had brought him into the world. And Annie surmised that even his mother’s love had been conditional during the worst of it. That was what addiction did—it shredded the fabric of even the strongest relationships.

Guilt was at the core of B’Lynn Fontenot’s worry now. She held it tight inside her, thinking it couldn’t be seen behind her shield of determination, but it was there, part of the aggregate of the foundation of motherhood. That was why she was still there now in her son’s life when everyone else—including his father—had long since given up on him.

Annie sighed and rubbed a hand across her forehead, trying to massage the tension away in the hopes of cutting a headache off at the pass. She didn’t have time for it now.

With a few keystrokes, she brought up Rayanne Tillis’s record on her computer screen. As Danny Perry had said, possession, shoplifting, and the odd twenty-dollar blow job. A petty criminal, the same as Robbie Fontenot was a petty criminal, though Annie doubted Rayanne’s mama was beating anybody’s door down trying to get her help or steer her onto a better life path.

Rayanne claimed not to know Robbie, but she had known he wasn’t at home. She had found her way into his house—which B’Lynn swore had been locked up when last she’d been there. Somehow she couldn’t picture Rayanne picking a lock.

She looked over at Deebo Jeffcoat, still grooving to his tunes. He had abandoned his pencil drumsticks to play a mean air guitar solo.

“Deebo!” Annie called. “Deebo!”

She grabbed a fried shrimp and tossed it at him, bouncing it off the side of his face. He jumped a foot off his seat and looked at her wide-eyed, shocked to be brought back to the mundane reality of the office. Annie pantomimed pulling AirPods out of her ears.

“Hey, Annie. What’s up?” he shouted, following her instructions by plucking the earphones out and killing the noise.

“Do you remember a pillhead named Robbie Fontenot? You collared him for possession three or four years ago.”

“Him and a few hundred others.”

She held up her phone and showed him the snapshot. “He got out of rehab a couple of months ago. Have you seen him around?”

He squinted at the photograph and shook his head. “I don’t think so. Why?”

“He’s missing.”

“Missing from where?”

“Here in town. Hasn’t been seen or heard from since Halloween.”

“A missing drug addict?” He shrugged. “Go figure.”

“He just got out of rehab a couple of months ago. His mother says he’s been clean.”

“That’s what mothers always say. It’s their job,” Deebo said. “He’s probably told her he’s clean, but he’s an addict and addicts are liars by default, and they make liars of everyone close to them, too. If his mother has been through this enough times, she’ll tell you he’s clean in the hopes you won’t just write him off.”

“That’s sad but true,” Annie admitted on a sigh. “And she’ll think it’s a good lie because it serves a good purpose.”

“And the addict is a bad liar because his lies only serve himself, or so he thinks as he spirals down that hole. What’s this one into?”

“Oxy.”

Deebo made a pained face. “I hope he’s got a trusted source. We’re up to our asses in fentanyl overdoses these days. Every goddamn thing is laced with fentanyl. I don’t get it myself,” he confessed. “These dealers are killing off their customers, but there’s no shortage of them, I guess. The high is too seductive, and nobody thinks they’ll be the one to die. I’d buy stock in Narcan if I had money. That shit should be in vending machines on every street corner. Have you checked the morgue at Our Lady?”

“Not yet.”

“They found a dead body down by Luck this morning,” he said. “Maybe that’s your guy.”

“What?” The word came out on a hard breath, like she’d been punched in the stomach.

“White male. Twenty-five to thirty-five. You didn’t hear?”

“I’ve been busy all morning.”

She felt sick at the idea that B’Lynn Fontenot might have finally found someone willing to help her on the same morning her son’s corpse was discovered.

“Was there a vehicle?” she asked.

“Nope. The body was dumped. No crime scene. No witnesses—so far, at least.”

“Any obvious cause of death?”

“Shotgun blast to the face.”

“Oh, Lord.”

“Makes me think there ain’t one,” Deebo said. “It’s a cruel world. I spent last night with the parents of a kid who OD’d on heroin and choked to death on her own vomit. Wasn’t no higher power looking out for her.

“You gonna eat that sandwich or peck it to death?” he asked, his attention on her po’boy.

“Help yourself,” Annie said, shoving her lunch toward the edge of her desk as she stood up. “I’m going over to the jail…and then to the morgue.”

—

She thought of B’Lynn as she walked across the yard toward the jail. What would her reaction be if the news was that her son had run afoul of someone with a shotgun? Shock? Sadness? Disappointment? Anger? Relief? All of the above? In the last ten years she had probably braced herself for the worst outcome many times, only to have hope restored, only to have to start the cycle all over again. No wonder she looked wrung out.

Three trustees were washing sheriff’s office vehicles outside the garage. Annie glanced at them as she passed. They all had mothers somewhere, just like Robbie Fontenot. Just like Deebo’s dead junkie from the night before. Too bad Hallmark didn’t make a Mother’s Day card for Sorry, Your Kid Screwed Up .

She had called ahead to the jail and asked that Rayanne Tillis be taken from the holding cell to an interview room to wait for her. Annie watched her now on a video monitor down the hall, reading her body language. Rayanne paced around the small white room, restless, anxious, looking like she wanted to crawl out of her own skin and melt under the door to escape. She sat down at the little table that was bolted to the wall, stood up, turned around, did another circuit around the room, then stopped to pick at the acoustic foam on the back wall.

She would be thinking about how much she wanted to get high, and thinking about how that wasn’t going to happen anytime soon, and starting to panic a little bit. She hadn’t asked for an attorney yet. Annie suspected she had held off in order to make sure she got fed lunch. That timing could work to Annie’s advantage if she was lucky.

Don’t say the L word. Don’t say the L word…

Rayanne went back to the chair, sat down, pulled her feet up on the seat, looked up at the camera, and gave it the finger.

Annie went down the hall, paused outside the interview room, took a deep breath, and opened the door.

“Don’t say anything!” she said as she walked in. She held up a hand as if that might forestall any statement from her prisoner.

“I ain’t gotta talk to you!” Rayanne shouted, popping up from the chair.

“That’s exactly right. Don’t say anything. Listen for a change.”

“I don’t gotta do that, neither!” she said, jutting her chin out defiantly. “I know my rights!”

“Before you repeat them back to me, do you want to get out of here?” Annie asked.

Don’t say the L word, don’t say the L word . One mention of a lawyer and their conversation would be over.

“I can get you out of here,” she said, “but you have to shut up and listen for a minute.”

Rayanne squinted at her. “You done arrested me! You ain’t gonna let me go! You’re full of shit! You’re just messing with me, bitch.”

“I’m not,” Annie said. “You can shut up and listen to me for a minute, or I can turn around and walk out of here and you can stay a guest of the parish. Your choice, Rayanne.”

She took a step backward toward the door. Rayanne shifted her weight from one dirty foot to the other, her expression wavering between suspicion and belligerence.

“Why would I trust you?” she asked.

“You got nothing to lose by listening, so why wouldn’t you?”

Rayanne wrapped her hands in the stretched-out hem of her Fuck Your Feelings T-shirt and rocked side to side, thinking. “This is some kind of trap.”

Annie shook her head. “No trap. This is just us talking. Maybe something good comes of it, maybe not. Up to you.”

Rayanne glanced up at the camera on the wall above the door. “Who’s watching us?”

“Nobody’s listening in,” Annie said. “Why would they? We’re talking about a petty burglary. You haven’t even been charged with anything yet. Maybe you won’t be. Mrs. Fontenot got her TV back. And there wasn’t any sign you broke into that house—”

“I didn’t break in!” Rayanne insisted. “I just went in the back door. It was open.”

“So what am I supposed to charge you with?” Annie asked. “Trespassing? This ain’t worth the paperwork to me. If I can convince Mrs. Fontenot to let it go, you’ll be a free woman.”

Rayanne turned around in a little circle, contemplating her options. She chewed on a dirty thumbnail and stared at Annie. “What do you want?” she asked. “You ain’t gonna just let me go for no reason.”

“All I want is an honest conversation.”

“You’ll use it against me.”

“How? If you haven’t done anything worse than I know about, how will I use it against you?” Annie asked. “I’m trying to get you out of here with no charges.”

“Why?”

Annie gave a small shrug. “Maybe I think you deserve a break, Rayanne.”

“Yeah, right.”

“All I see every day on this job is people getting knocked down in life. Maybe I can give you a hand up, and maybe you do something good with it. And you’d save me doing a lot of paperwork, so…”

“You think that bitch would drop the charges?”

“I think if I can put it to her right. If I can tell her you were helpful to me…She’s pretty pissed right now, though.”

“Rich bitch,” Rayanne muttered.

“What makes you think she’s rich?” Annie set her notebook and phone down on the table and took a seat.

If Rayanne Tillis didn’t know Robbie Fontenot, how did she know anything about his mother?

Rayanne glanced away and shrugged. “She got that look, that skinny rich bitch look.”

“If she’s rich, how come her son is living on your street?”

“How would I know? Maybe she don’t like him.”

“She’s worried sick,” Annie said. “She hasn’t seen or heard from him since Halloween. Have you?”

“I told you, I don’t know him!”

“But you’ve seen him around, yeah? Coming and going.”

“I guess.”

“You live right next door. You must look out the window every once in a while. When do you remember seeing him last?”

“I don’t.”

“You knew he wasn’t home this morning, though.”

“His car was gone. It’s been gone. I thought he maybe just up and left. People do,” she said defensively. “All the time. They can’t pay their rent and they just leave, and they leave all their stuff, and somebody might as well have it.”

“Have you seen anyone else going in and out of that house?”

“Like who?”

“Like anybody. Friends of his. Girlfriends. Family.”

Rayanne squirmed a bit on her chair, scowling down at the floor. “Am I supposed to be the neighborhood watch or what? I don’t know nothing about that house.”

“Have you seen the cops going in and out of there?” Annie asked. “Your good friend Danny Perry?”

“Oh, yeah,” she said on a harsh laugh, “?’cause I should rat out cops! That’s a good one!”

“Rat them out for what?” Annie asked calmly, though her heart beat a little bit harder at Rayanne’s choice of words. “Robbie Fontenot was reported to the Bayou Breaux police as a missing person. I would expect them to go to his house. I just don’t get the impression that they’re taking this seriously. That’s why I wonder have they been around.”

“Oh, well…I guess I seen them there once or twice.”

“Danny Perry?”

“Yeah…He’s around.”

“Do you know their detective? Dewey Rivette?”

“Why would I know a detective?” she asked, laughing again as she looked up at the camera on the wall. “Like I’m some kind of criminal mastermind or something. Can I get a cigarette?”

“There’s no smoking in here,” Annie said. “Sorry. I’ll make sure you get a pack on your way home.”

“When’s that gonna be?”

She was getting restless, shifting around in her seat. Annie wondered if it was her need for a smoke or her discomfort with the line of questioning. Either way, the clock was running down on her chance to get any useful information from Rayanne Tillis.

“You said that back door was open this morning. Mrs. Fontenot says that door was locked last night. You didn’t see anybody over there this morning messing with it?”

“No. I was having my beauty sleep,” Rayanne said, and she struck a pose like a model and smiled, showing off a dental wasteland of yellowed, snaggled, and missing teeth.

She might have been pretty once, Annie thought. The physical transformation brought on by addiction was like a time-lapsed horror show of sinking features, skin lesions, sores and scars, rotting teeth and gum disease. Rayanne Tillis was only twenty-three years old. She could have passed for forty-three.

“Rayanne, did you take anything else out of that house this morning besides that TV?”

“No!”

Annie held her hands up in surrender. “It doesn’t matter. I’m not gonna hold it against you if you did. Just tell me now. If you did, we’ll take it back. No harm, no foul. Nobody needs to know.”

“I didn’t take nothing!”

“Then I won’t find anything in your house when I take you home—like a laptop computer, for instance?”

“Fuck you!” Rayanne bolted up out of her chair and started pacing, agitation winding her tighter and tighter. “No, I don’t have no fucking laptop computer. And now I don’t have no TV, neither. This has been a fucking day, and I ain’t got nothing to show for it!”

She bent over, snatched a filthy flip-flop off one foot, and hurled it at the camera on the wall with amazing accuracy.

“Fucking cops! I want out of here!” she shouted at Annie. “You said you’d get me out of here! You fucking liar!”

She grabbed her other flip-flop and threw it at Annie, who batted it aside before it could hit her in the face. She jumped up out of her seat as Rayanne started toward her, her face twisted with rage.

That fast, the door swung open and a deputy the size of a minivan burst into the room, shouting at Rayanne, “Hey! Back off! Right now!”

Rayanne pedaled backward, leaning around him, red-faced. “You lying bitch! You said no one was watching us!”

“I said no one was listening to us,” Annie said. “That doesn’t mean you get to assault me!”

“I didn’t touch you, you lying cow!”

The deputy stepped in front of her again. “You need to sit down and shut up, miss.”

“Kiss my ass, you fat fucking whale!” Rayanne barked back. “I don’t take orders from you!”

The deputy glared at her. “You’re gonna take an order right now and shut your filthy mouth.”

“Deputy, it’s all right,” Annie said calmly. “We’ve just had a little misunderstanding, Miss Tillis and I. Give us another couple of minutes here.”

He looked at her like she was out of her mind.

“She’s not armed—other than the flip-flops,” Annie pointed out. “We’ll be fine.”

The deputy looked from Annie to Rayanne and back. “Something happens to you, ma’am, Lieutenant Fourcade will cut my liver out and eat it with onions.”

“Nothing’s gonna happen,” Annie assured him, her gaze steady on the woman. “Isn’t that right, Rayanne?”

Rayanne had retreated to the farthest corner of the small room to sulk, her stringy hair falling around her face like a shabby curtain.

“Miss Tillis will be going home shortly,” Annie said.

The deputy shook his head in amazement. “Whatever you say, Detective.”

“Thank you.”

“I’ll be right outside the door.”

Annie nodded. “Thank you.”

He threw one last disapproving look at Rayanne. “You mind your manners,” he said as he backed out of the room.

Rayanne gave him the finger—but only after the door had shut.

Annie drew a slow, deep breath and sighed as he closed the door. “You realize I could have him take you back to a cell.”

Rayanne rolled her eyes. “Yeah, you’re a regular Saint Annie of the Bayou.”

“A simple thank-you will do.”

“Oh, please. It’s not like you don’t want something for it. You’re just like everybody else—give something to get something. Else you wouldn’t give me the time of day.”

“Well, I haven’t gotten anything besides a headache so far,” Annie pointed out, rubbing at the tension in the back of her neck.

Rayanne pursed her lips and batted her eyelashes. “Boo-fucking-hoo. Can we go now?”

Trust was something Rayanne had little of, and she wasn’t going to give it away.

Annie picked up her things and moved toward the door. “I’m gonna step out and make a phone call to Mrs. Fontenot. And if she agrees to drop the charges on the TV, I’ll drive you home. I told you I’d get you out of here, and I will. I keep my word, Rayanne. I hope you’ll remember that in the future.”

—

“You live here alone?” Annie asked as Rayanne preceded her into the shabby little shotgun house—a twin to the one next door. Squalid as it was, she still had a hard time imagining Rayanne Tillis being able to afford the rent on her own. Twenty-dollar blow jobs didn’t add up fast, and drug habits were expensive.

“I had a roommate.” Rayanne shook a cigarette out of the pack Annie had bought her at the Quik Pik, along with a bag of junk food and a thirty-two-ounce vat of Diet Coke. She lit up with a Bic lighter off a chipped, cluttered end table.

“What happened to her?”

She took a deep drag, blew out a long stream of smoke, and shrugged. “She just didn’t come back one day. I don’t know where she went. I don’t care. She was a lying hoebag anyway. I heard she maybe OD’d.”

“What’s her name?” Annie asked.

“What do you care?”

“Someone should.”

“Why?” She looked at Annie, puzzled for a second, then took another drag on her cigarette. On the exhale she said, “Beth. Beth Unger.”

People in Rayanne’s life were transient and disposable. She didn’t value herself, no one valued her, she didn’t bother to value anyone else. It surprised her when someone else did.

“How long has she been gone?”

“I don’t know. A month or so,” she said, pacing back and forth behind the worn-out rust plaid sofa that looked like a relic from the eighties. “She used to talk about moving to New Orleans. Maybe she did.”

“Did she take her stuff with her?”

Rayanne didn’t answer.

Annie glanced around the front room, with its furniture that belonged in a landfill. The place smelled of cigarettes, mold, and mice. It was a mess. Dirty drinking glasses and take-out food wrappers sitting around on every surface. An overflowing ashtray on the coffee table. Looking through to the kitchen, she could see dirty dishes and food left out on the counter. The sour smell of neglected garbage drifted in. The place was a cockroach paradise.

On the upside, she didn’t see anything sitting around that might have come from Robbie Fontenot’s house.

“Do you have a job, Rayanne?”

“I got laid off.”

“From where? The lamp factory?”

“Don’t you have someplace else to go?” Rayanne asked irritably, tapping the ash off her smoke into an open beer can.

“Why?” Annie pushed back. “Are you expecting guests or something? I sprung you out of jail. I brought you home. I bought you cigarettes. I think you can answer a question or two. Did you get laid off from the lamp factory?”

“Yeah. So? Who cares?” she complained, pacing. “Shit job. Shit pay. Now I get unemployment. Works for me!”

“Robbie Fontenot worked at the lamp factory. Did you know him from there?”

Rayanne rolled her eyes dramatically and heaved a sigh worthy of a teenager. “I done told you a hundred and ten times already: I don’t know him! Jesus Christ!”

“All right,” Annie conceded. “I’ll let you get on with your busy social calendar. But I want you to call me if you see anything going on next door,” she said, handing her a business card. “Can you do that one thing for me, Rayanne?”

Rayanne took another pull on her cigarette as she looked at the card, frowning.

“And you call me if you need me. For anything,” Annie said. “I mean that.”

“Sure. Whatever.”

Annie let herself out, breathing the fresh air deeply to flush the smoke out of her sinuses. Farther down the street to her left, some kids were riding their bikes around in circles, popping wheelies. Nothing much else was going on. There were no houses directly across the street, so no doors to knock on for possible witnesses to anything going on at Robbie Fontenot’s place. She wondered if that might have been a deliberate choice on Robbie’s part. B’Lynn had said he didn’t want her spying on him, but he might not have wanted anyone else watching him, either.

She walked next door to his house and went around the back. Standing on the sagging porch, she looked across the alley, where another shitty house with peeling paint squatted in a yard full of weeds.

Just looking at it, she couldn’t know if the place was inhabited. The building looked like someone should have pushed it with a bulldozer into a hole. But that was certainly no guarantee that someone didn’t call it home. Not in this part of town.

The curtains were drawn on the back window. The back door was covered with a rusted white security screen door.

Trying to ignore the low-level hum of anxiety in her head, Annie crossed the alley. The windows along the side of the house were covered with weatherworn warped plywood sprayed with random vulgar graffiti. The front yard was as weed-choked as the back, and strewn with litter. Someone had chucked a blown-out tire into the tall grass to collect rainwater and grow mosquitoes. There were no cars parked out front.

Same as in the back, the curtains were drawn on the front window, and the front door was decked out with a rusty white security door, a twin to the one around back. There were no obvious signs of life. Still, Annie’s heart beat a little faster as she climbed the steps.

She wondered how long before her situational anxiety would wear off. It was only her first day back on the job. She should have been more patient with herself, but the irrational fear that it might not ever go away had taken root in the back of her mind. She criticized herself for that, too.

She raised her hand to knock on the door, pausing as something caught her eye, just to the right of the doorframe—the button for a video doorbell.

That seemed a very odd thing on a house that appeared abandoned. No one could be bothered to mow the lawn, but someone had gone to the trouble of installing a security gadget. Why?

Drug house, she thought. Conveniently located on a block of addicts.

She went ahead and rang the bell, her pulse whooshing in her ears as she stepped to the side of the door and waited. No one came. She made herself ring it a second time, watching for a twitch of the front window curtains, but there was none. Somewhere, someone might have been watching her on an app on their phone, but nothing happened.

A kid of about ten or so cruised past on a bike as she stepped down off the front stoop, staring at her openly as he went by. Annie watched him make a wide U-turn and come back, still staring at her.

“Do you know if anybody lives here?” Annie asked as she walked toward him.

The kid turned the bike in a slow circle. He wore a dirty white New Orleans Saints T-shirt, and his dark hair stood up every which way, like he’d stuck his finger in a light socket.

“I don’t talk to no po-po,” he said, and he gave her the finger and took off, standing on the pedals, the bike swaying side to side as he raced away.

Good little lookout, Annie thought. It made her sad to be so cynical about a little kid, but it was a real possibility. If he was, he would report to some higher-up that there was a cop poking around, asking questions. She could ask Rayanne about the place, but she doubted she’d get an answer. At any rate, she’d used up her time with Rayanne Tillis for one day. If she pushed too hard, she would never get anything out of her.

She walked back down the side of the house and around the back, taking a closer look at the back porch, looking for and spying a white security camera the size of a deck of cards, mounted up high on the wall. It was angled to spot anyone coming up on the back porch. Whether Robbie Fontenot’s back door might have been in its line of sight was anybody’s guess, but it was worth finding out.

Her phone pinged to signal the arrival of a text message as she walked back to her vehicle. Nick.

At the PH. Where are you??

Somewhere you won’t like , she thought with a little knot of dread forming in the pit of her stomach.

On my way back , she typed, adding a smile emoji, as if that might soften him up. Fat chance , she thought, heading back to her vehicle.