Chapter 9

9

“You’ve been awfully busy for someone who was supposed to be counting paper clips today, no?” Nick said, closing the door behind her as Annie walked into his office. The space was spare and impersonal, organized immaculately down to the last detail, a perfect reflection of its occupant: private and carefully compartmentalized.

Annie cringed a little inwardly at the undertone of irritation in his voice.

“Yeah, I got sidetracked into serving the public,” she said, turning to face him.

He had left the house that morning looking crisp and pressed and ready for court. Now his shirtsleeves were rolled up, the knot in his tie had been pulled loose, and he had undone the collar button of his shirt.

“I gather your day hasn’t exactly gone to plan, either.”

“ Mais non ,” he confessed. “Got called to a dead body on my way in.”

“What happened to court?”

“They cut a deal. They didn’t need me after all.”

He looked her over from head to toe, his dark gaze intense, missing nothing—not in a sexual way, but assessing, judging, looking for any sign she wasn’t physically fit to be there. Annie pulled her shoulders back and stood up as tall as she could, the way people were said to do when facing off with a panther. That was her husband—the human embodiment of a big cat: powerful, athletic, intense.

“How you feeling, ’Toinette?” he asked softly, stepping closer.

Annie held her ground, looking him dead in the eyes. “I’m fine.”

He frowned, his brows drawing together above his aquiline nose. “Me, I don’t quite believe you. You look tired.”

“ You look tired,” Annie countered. “Maybe you should go home and have a lie-down.”

“How’s your head?”

“It’s fine.”

“Fine. You know I don’t like that answer,” he complained. “That word doesn’t tell me anything, yet you toss it out like a shiny object, as if it might distract me when you know better. Should I have to interrogate you like a suspect?”

“I don’t know,” Annie said softly, widening her eyes and batting her lashes. “Will that involve some kind of restraints? Lieutenant Fourcade, you shock me!”

He wagged a finger at her. “Don’t you try plying me with your womanly wiles, Antoinette.”

“You didn’t seem to mind that last night,” she murmured, taking another step toward him.

He gave her a warning look. They had always been scrupulously careful to draw a line between their professional and personal relationships, for the sake of both their reputations and the emotional balance of the squad.

“We’re at work,” he reminded her. “And I’m your boss.”

“Then you should act like it,” Annie said, stepping back, pleased with herself for getting him to make her point for her. “I’m no different than any other employee coming back from time off. You wouldn’t have Deebo or Chaz in here, asking them if they were tired from five hours of nothing much.”

Nick arched a brow. “?‘Nothing much’? I hear you suddenly have a missing persons investigation going on, and you somehow managed to arrest someone this morning. Me, I wouldn’t call that nothing much .”

“I’m a highly productive member of your team, then. You should be so pleased.”

“ Tête dure ,” he grumbled, going behind his desk.

“My hardheadedness is what you love about me,” Annie said, taking a seat.

“Not at the moment,” he muttered, settling into his chair.

“I’m concerned for your well-being as your boss, and, yes, as your husband,” he confessed. “And I admit I’m having a hard time drawing the line between those two roles just now, which is a bigger problem than you want to realize.”

“I do realize,” Annie said quietly.

The issue sat between them all the time, like a small elephant only they could see. The night she had been injured on the job, he had made several decisions as a husband rather than as her superior. Decisions he would not have made if the fallen officer hadn’t been his wife. Nothing that had changed the outcome of the case, but those choices bothered him, nevertheless. The walls between his carefully constructed compartments had been breached, and he didn’t like it. Not one bit.

“We’ve made this work for a long time,” Annie reminded him. “And work well.”

He had recommended her for the detective squad when she had still been in a uniform. He had mentored her. They had worked hundreds of cases since, all without a problem until that one night.

Don’t go there without me…

But she had.

He said nothing for a moment, and she couldn’t read him. She doubted he was thinking anything positive, but in the end, he just moved on.

“Tell me how you came to be involved with this missing person situation,” he said, “after you promised me you would behave yourself if I let you come back to work.”

“I didn’t go looking for trouble, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“ Mais non , you never go looking for trouble, ’Toinette,” he said, “but when trouble comes calling, you are seldom out of earshot.”

“I swear I was minding my own business,” Annie said. “I was on my way to HR. This woman was literally on the floor in front of Hooker’s desk, sobbing, begging for help to find her son. Was I supposed step over her body and keep going?”

“This is a missing child?”

“No. He’s an adult. Hooker needs his ass kicked, by the way,” she added. “Today was the second time that woman had come here looking for help. He turned her away last week.”

“Why would he do that?”

“He told her it was a BBPD matter because she had gone to them first.”

“So this is their case?”

“They don’t want it,” Annie insisted. “There’s no missing persons report anywhere. They didn’t do anything more than a welfare check and put out a BOLO on his car. Dewey Rivette couldn’t be bothered to return the mother’s phone calls, for God’s sake. He never asked her for the most basic information.”

“So you just snatched their case away from them.”

“What case?” Annie challenged. “They weren’t doing anything! Dewey as much as told me he thinks this is an addict who just took off, and God knows he’s probably holed up somewhere doing drugs or he’s already OD’d, and he’s dead someplace. And that may well be true, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to find him.”

“You spoke to Rivette directly?”

“Yes.”

“And he’s happy to have us take this over?”

“No,” Annie admitted. “Like any man with the maturity of a three-year-old child, he only wants the toy he was ignoring after someone else picks it up. He’s done fuck all in a week, but he was Johnny-on-the-spot to yell at me while I was at the missing man’s home.”

“So he does want the case.”

“He does want me to butt out so he can continue to tell B’Lynn Fontenot there’s nothing to be done,” Annie said, her frustration rising. “He’s lazy and a misogynist, and time’s a-wasting, so yes, I took his case away, if that’s how you want to look at it.”

Nick heaved a sigh. “It’s not about how I want to look at it. Tell me about this missing guy.”

“Robbie Fontenot. He’s twenty-seven, recently out of rehab, longtime opioid abuser. He has a close relationship with his mother, speaks to her daily. She says he’s been on the straight and narrow, and she watches him like a hawk. She hasn’t heard from him since Halloween.”

“Halloween,” Nick repeated. “So he might have gone to a party, fell off the wagon. Addicts do what addicts do…”

“Maybe so,” Annie conceded. “What does it matter? We shouldn’t try to find him because he’s an addict?”

“Did I say that?”

“No.”

“But he’s an adult,” he pointed out, “and free to do as he will.”

“That doesn’t mean he can’t be missing!” Annie argued.

“ C’est vrai ,” he said. “But you can’t just hijack a case.”

“Oh, please,” Annie said, rolling her eyes. “You would have done the exact same thing if you’d seen this woman, and you would now be scraping Dewey Rivette off the bottom of your shoe. So spare me the bullshit lecture on professional courtesy.

“Anyway,” she added, “it’s not like we don’t have jurisdiction. If Rivette was doing his job, we should have been in on it anyway. So I don’t see the problem here.”

Nick shook his head. “You kicked over a hornet’s nest and you claim not to hear the buzzing. Johnny Earl will be on the phone to Gus, and there’ll be hell to pay.”

“Don’t be so sure about that,” Annie said. “The mother came here this morning to speak to Gus in person. Her ex-husband is some old crony of his, a campaign supporter from back when. Do you think Gus would have turned her away? I don’t. I think he would have especially jumped at the chance to make Johnny Earl’s head spin. He just happened to be gone to Baton Rouge this morning is all.”

“Why the husband didn’t come to Gus in the first place?” Nick asked.

“ Ex -husband,” Annie corrected him. “He’s not in the son’s life anymore. It’s been a long road with this kid. The addiction started in high school, and I gather they’ve been to hell and back too many times. The marriage broke up. The husband lives in Lafayette now. Anyway, the mother went to the police thinking they would help her, because that’s what they’re there for . When they didn’t, she came here, and Hooker bounced her back to them. The poor woman is at her wit’s end, Nick. I just want to help her. Is that so wrong?”

Nick swiveled back and forth in his chair, his expression inscrutable.

“I’ll get him in the NCIC database,” Annie said. “I’ll request his phone records, financial records. Talk to his employer. Talk to people he worked with, see if I can find out who his friends are…Somebody must know something.”

She took a big breath and sighed. “Of course, this might all be moot anyway if my missing guy turns out to be your dead guy in the morgue.”

“That would be simple for us,” Nick agreed. “Two birds with one stone.”

“If that’s him, his murder is already our case, and we’ll need to do the background investigation anyway,” Annie pointed out.

She hated the thought of Robbie Fontenot being dead—murdered, no less. “I can’t tell you how much I don’t want that to be the case. His mother has been through so much, and she’s fighting so hard for her son.”

“There aren’t a lot of happy endings to be had for stories like hers,” Nick said. They had both seen too many of those stories to delude themselves.

“I at least want her to have someone on her side to help cushion the blow if it comes to that,” Annie said. “I get the impression she doesn’t have much in the way of a support network. Ten years dealing with addiction. The husband bailed. People don’t like to ride that roller coaster if they don’t have to.”

“This body in the morgue,” Nick said. “It has no face to speak of. One brown eye. Dark hair.”

“That fits.”

“That fits ninety percent of the local population. How tall is your guy?”

“Six-two, athletic build.”

Annie wanted him to stop her there, to tell her his victim was a short guy with a potbelly, but he didn’t. Her heart sank a little lower as she began to imagine breaking the news to B’Lynn.

“He has a surgical scar on his left knee,” she added. “And his prints are on file. He’s been in and out of jail.”

“We’ll know quick enough if he has that scar or doesn’t,” Nick said, rising. “Let’s go find out.

“I’ve got a potential missing person myself,” he said as they walked down the hall.

“Connected to this dead guy?”

“Don’t know. We were following a lead—a business card from a junkyard found in the dead man’s pocket—and come to find out someone from that business is missing since Saturday night.”

“So he could be your dead guy?”

“I don’t know,” he said, opening the front door and holding it for Annie to pass. “Marc Mercier. Right age, right size, right coloring. No prints on file, no tattoos, distinguishing marks—not sure. But I don’t want to bring the family in to look without good reason. If he can be eliminated from consideration some other way and spare them the trauma, better for all concerned.”

“Marc Mercier. That name sounds familiar.”

“He was in the local paper a few weeks ago. Maybe you saw him there,” he said as they headed to his SUV. “The savior of youth football in Bayou Breaux, much to the surprise of his wife.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Marital strife. It’s a long story, but the short version is the marriage is in trouble. They had a fight Saturday night. He stormed off. He was supposed to meet his brother out at the Corners early Sunday morning. They were headed out west to some hunting land. The brother was late. There was no sign of Marc when he got there. Hasn’t been seen or heard from since,” he said, pulling open the passenger door for her.

“If he was at the Corners,” Annie said, climbing into the vehicle, “he should show up on Uncle Sos’s security video.”

The Corners was a local institution. A combination convenience store, café, bait shop, landing for swamp tours, and boat launch for sport fishermen, it had been run for decades by Sos and Fanchon Doucet, the people who had raised Annie after her mother’s death when Annie was just nine years old—and before that, truth be told. Sos and Fanchon had taken in Marie Broussard when she had been lost and pregnant and prone to long bouts of depression. Annie had been raised calling them uncle and tante , her family by love rather than by blood.

“We could run out there tonight for supper,” Annie suggested as Nick got behind the wheel. “They’d love to see Justin, and Uncle Sos will be in his glory to help with an investigation.”

A small smile tugged at the corner of Nick’s mouth. “ C’est vrai . I can hear him now, telling his cronies how he helped solve the case.”

With his own parents long deceased, Nick had grown to love Sos and Fanchon almost as much as Annie did, spending time on the water fishing with Sos when he could, helping him with his boats and with repairs around the place. Sos considered him as much a son as he considered Annie a daughter.

Sos and Fanchon had never been blessed with children of their own, but that hadn’t stopped them from making a family of nieces and nephews and strays. The love they had for that family was fierce and unconditional. There was nothing they wouldn’t do to protect or save one of their own, and their love never wavered, even in the hardest of times.

A wave of emotion rolled over Annie as she thought of them. Tears welled in her eyes. She cursed herself for forgetting her sunglasses. Sudden strong emotions had been a side effect of her head injury. Her doctor told her that would eventually subside, but while it lasted, she hated it. Nick watched her like a hawk for any sign of an issue, any reason he could add to his arsenal of why she shouldn’t be going back to work, and there she was on her first day back, ready to burst into tears in front of him.

He glanced over at her then as they sat at a red light.

“You all right, bébé ?” he asked, reaching a hand over to touch her shoulder.

“Just thinking I’m awfully lucky,” she said, blinking back the tears as she checked her phone for any sign of a callback from Robert Fontenot II. “Not everyone has family that loves them.”

“ Mais non ,” he agreed, stroking a hand over the back of her head. “We’re lucky, that’s for true.”

“That’s why I want to help B’Lynn Fontenot. She’s fighting tooth and nail for her boy when no one else will. His father can’t even be bothered to return my phone calls.”

“That’s a hard road, dealing with an addict,” Nick said. “People do what they have to do to survive it.”

“I know, but can you imagine any circumstances where you’d just give up on Justin? Just cut him out of your life like he never existed?”

“No, but you should know not to pick sides before you even meet the man, no? That’s your mama bear claws coming out.”

“I suppose you’re right about that.”

“I imagine you left a few marks on Dewey Rivette,” he teased.

“Maybe one or two,” Annie admitted, finding a weary smile.

“Me, I would have paid money to see that.”

“So you’re not mad at me after all?” Annie ventured.

He made a noncommittal sound as he cut her a glance, his eyes hidden by the mirrored lenses of his sunglasses. The jury was still out.

In the center of the driveway leading up to Our Lady of Mercy hospital, a pristine white statue of the Virgin Mary greeted all comers with open arms. A groundskeeper knelt at her feet, using a hand clipper to trim the low ring of boxwood that circled her base. Built in the seventies during the oil boom, the L-shaped two-story hospital was still the pride of Partout Parish, with its manicured gardens and broad, oak-studded lawn sweeping down to the bayou, the one institution that had withstood the economic roller-coaster rides of every decade since.

Nick pulled the SUV into a parking spot reserved for sheriff’s office vehicles near the entrance to the ER and cut the engine.

“Come here, chère ,” he said, leaning toward her. She met him halfway, and he kissed her softly, sweetly.

“I love you,” he murmured.

She sensed a but coming at the end of that sentence, but he didn’t voice it, and she decided to take that as a positive for the moment.

“Let’s go get this over with,” he said.

The small flock of reporters loitering outside the ER entrance jumped to attention as Annie and Nick approached. They all cackled at once, parroting the same question: “Detective Fourcade! Do you have an ID on the body?”

“Not yet,” Nick said, not slowing down. “You’ll know as soon as I do.”

“Are there any leads?”

“What about missing persons?”

“Is this drug related?”

A uniformed deputy stepped forward to clear the way for them to pass through the glass doors. The noise died by half as the doors swished closed behind them.

—

They passed through the emergency room waiting area, where half a dozen people of varying ages and maladies sat looking miserable as they waited their turn—an elderly man holding a bloody rag to his forehead, a teenage girl with a tearstained face clutching an injured arm against her body.

One woman caught Annie’s eye as familiar—someone she’d dealt with on a domestic call. The woman quickly turned her face away, embarrassed, ashamed, not wanting the attention of a cop. That was part of the job—not being a welcome sight, people avoiding eye contact in public. Also part of the job: automatically assuming the worst, wondering if a black eye or a broken arm was the result of violence.

“Someone you know?” Nick asked as they turned down the hall that led to the morgue.

“Yeah. Just another reluctant customer.”

“At least they’re out front and not back here,” Nick said as he pulled the morgue door open.

The room was all white tile and stainless steel, sterile and silent. A twentysomething man in purple scrubs with a shock of red hair sat using a gurney as a desk, his nose buried in a book as he scribbled notes. He glanced up as Nick spoke his name.

“Caleb, we need to have a look at that body, s’il vous pla?t .”

“Sure thing.” He stuck his pen in his textbook and hopped off his stool. He was built like a fireplug, with the muscular arms of a man who spent too much free time in the gym. An easy smile split his square face. “Hey, Annie, how you?”

“Hey, T-Rouge, I’m good,” Annie said. “How’s your mom and them?”

His family were cousins to the Doucets by marriage. Annie had known Caleb McVay all his life.

“Mostly good. Nonc Claude, he’s got the shingles on his face,” he said, going to a wall of small stainless steel doors. “I told him before to get the vaccine, but he wouldn’t listen. Why listen to the medical professional in the family when you can get your medical advice from conspiracy nuts on the Internet? He thinks vaccines are a government plot to install tracking devices in everyone. Meanwhile, he’s walking around with a cell phone twenty-four/seven.”

“What can you do?” Annie asked with a shrug.

“Well, you can’t pick your relatives,” Caleb said with a laugh, opening a door and rolling out their murder victim. “Here you go. We got everything done you needed done ASAP—fingerprints, photos, X-rays, pulled blood, fluids. The only personal effects was his jeans and his socks. Detective Stokes bagged that stuff and took it.”

“Autopsy when?” Nick asked.

“First thing in the morning.”

Annie took a deep breath and braced herself. The victim wasn’t the worst she had ever seen—not even close. She’d seen bloated bodies pulled out of the swamp, half eaten by wildlife. She’d seen the bodies of people who died alone in the dead of summer in an attic with no air-conditioning. Her first murder victim was a woman who had been nailed to a wood floor, tortured, and eviscerated. Still, there was always a jolt of shock seeing what was left after one human being had snuffed out the life of another.

“That’s nasty,” she muttered, staring at what was left of this man’s head. It was a sight from a horror movie, one brown eye staring out of a shell of shattered bone and pulverized flesh.

“No mystery what killed him,” Caleb remarked, leaning back against the wall and setting his hands at his waist.

“ Mais non ,” Nick said. “The secret is who he is and who did this to him.”

“Well, he’s not Robbie Fontenot,” Annie said with no small amount of relief as she looked at the dead man’s bare knees. “No surgical scars.”

“Robbie Fontenot?” Caleb asked. “Why’d you think it was him?”

“Is he a friend of yours?” Annie asked.

“Not mine. He went to school with Eli. They both played football for Sacred Heart.

“Man, that kid Robbie was a baller,” he said. “He would have been a Division I quarterback if he hadn’t blown out his knee.”

“Is Eli still friends with him?”

“Nooo,” Caleb said, shaking his head. “Robbie ran off the rails way back when. Drugs. In and out of jail. Eli bumped into him in town not long ago. He only mentioned it because he hadn’t seen him in so many years. He was shocked the guy was still alive. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised if this was him, all things considered.”

“Where’s Eli at now?” Annie asked. “Is he still in Houston?”

“He moved to Lafayette this summer. He’s a civil engineer for the city.”

“You bunch of brainiacs,” Annie teased, pulling out her phone and entering Eli McVay as a new contact. “Your folks must be pleased he’s closer to home. What’s his phone number?”

Caleb recited the number. “Why you looking for Robbie Fontenot? Is he wanted for something?”

“He’s missing,” Annie said. “Have you heard anything about him recently?”

“No. We don’t run in the same circles.”

“Do you know for a fact he’s still into drugs?”

He shrugged his meaty shoulders. “Those tigers don’t change their stripes as a rule, do they?”

So everyone but Robbie Fontenot’s mother wanted to think.

“If you happen to hear anything about him, you call me, all right?” Annie said, handing him a business card.

Caleb tucked the card in the breast pocket of his scrubs. “Sure, but all I do these days is study. Unless he shows up here, I’m not liable to be much help.”

“I’m gonna hope for his mama’s sake, then, I don’t hear from you,” Annie said. She turned to Nick, but his attention was still on Caleb.

“Caleb, do you happen to know Marc Mercier?” he asked.

“Sure, I know Marc.” His blue eyes widened suddenly, and he turned to look at the body on the gurney. “You don’t think this is Marc, do you?”

“I don’t know. Could it be?”

“No!” he said, incredulous at the idea. “It can’t be!”

“It can’t be because the body doesn’t look like him,” Nick asked, “or it can’t be because you don’t want to believe it could be him?”

“Well, I ain’t never seen Marc naked, for starters,” Caleb said. “And I don’t know what to say about that head. That doesn’t even look real, let alone resemble an actual person. If you put Marc’s face on that mess, could it be him? Maybe. But who would shoot Marc? Why?”

“He’s not a man with enemies?”

“Hell no. Nice guy, fun guy, give-you-the-shirt-off-his-back kind of a guy. Everybody knows he moved back here to help out his family.”

“You know him well?”

“I know him to say hey. He was Eli’s friend. I was just the little brother. They were the big men on campus at Sacred Heart, that football team. Marc led them to the state championship. They were my idols.”

“They all knew each other?” Annie said. “Eli and Robbie Fontenot and Marc Mercier? They were all friends?”

“Eli and Marc were always tight. And Robbie to a lesser degree before his life went south. I remember Robbie was more of an introvert—quiet, serious.”

“Was Marc Mercier into drugs?” Nick asked.

“No,” Caleb said. “Him and Eli were student leaders of the DARE program, and they took it to heart. Not that they didn’t drink their share of beer back then, but drugs? No. If I remember right, Marc had lost a cousin to an overdose or something like that. He was dead set against drugs.”

“So when Robbie went down that path, his friends weren’t going with him,” Annie said.

“Not Eli’s crowd, that’s for sure.”

That had been the start of the Robbie Fontenot life avalanche, Annie thought: the injury that had taken away his sport, the drugs he had become dependent on to numb the pain, the social isolation of losing his peers and disappointing his family. Down the slippery slope he went.

“Have you seen Marc recently?” Nick asked.

“I saw him on Halloween at Monster Bash,” Caleb said. “He was dressed up as Hawkeye, you know, from the Avengers, with the bow and arrows and everything.”

“Was he with anyone?”

“The Incredible Hulk. Dozer Cormier.” He rolled his eyes. “That was some typecasting there.”

“Dozer. That’s a nickname?”

“Yeah. The Bulldozer. Then it got shortened and everyone just called him Dozer. They still do. I don’t even remember what his real name is.”

“Does he live around here? Do you know what he does for a living?”

“I don’t really know him other than by sight. You can’t miss him. Bald head like a cinder block and he’s the size of a farm implement.”

“You didn’t see Robbie Fontenot by chance that night, did you?” Annie asked as Nick stepped away to look at his phone.

“I don’t think I’d know him,” Caleb said. “It’s been years.”

Annie pulled up the photo on her phone and showed it to him.

He frowned and shook his head. “Sorry.”

“ Merci , Caleb,” Nick said, turning toward Annie. “We’ve got to go. Gus is back.”