by Tami Hoag
Of course, he wouldn’t have been wrong in that assumption—a truth that made her even more irritated with herself.
He tipped back his head and blew out a sigh. “Mon Dieu.”
Annie’s temper spiked another notch. “Oh, I’m sorry my feelings are so tedious for you.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You didn’t have to.”
“It’s the middle of the damn night,” he said wearily. “Do we have to fight now?”
She didn’t want to fight at all, but that seemed to be their new normal of late: too many sharp words and tense silences. It seemed the only place they didn’t rub each other the wrong way was in bed, where the tension between them seemed only to ratchet up the sexual heat. What transpired between them during sex was explosive and incredible as they both tried to reach beyond their frustration to connect as they always had on this other plane of being that was beyond words. Out of bed they were out of step with each other, like awkward dancers hearing two different beats.
They both blamed their jobs and the heat, the stress of Fanchon’s stroke, and Nick’s difficulties with a sexual assault case he’d been working all summer and fall to no conclusion. The various pressures had rubbed their nerves raw.
It was an unfamiliar place for them to be, this awkward limbo. To the bemusement of many, they had a rock-solid marriage—six years now. Considering their relationship had essentially begun when Annie had arrested Nick for assaulting a murder suspect, it wasn’t surprising that people had doubted they would last. She was a hometown good girl, while Nick had a long reputation as a difficult man with a checkered past.
Plenty of people had believed he was more than a little disturbed and dangerous when he had first come to Bayou Breaux—many thought that still. He had a volatile nature, always teetering on the edge of darkness. His temper was a thing of legend, and he did not suffer fools. But he was the way he was, not because he was crazy but because he cared too much about what he did and the people he did it for.
“Bobby Theriot called last night,” he confessed.
“Oh, Nick.” Annie sighed, her annoyance with him instantly gone. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“What’s to tell? The man wants justice for his daughter, and me, I can’t give it to him.”
“It’s not your fault.”
“Whose fault is it, then? It’s my case. That buck stops with me, does it not?”
“You can’t give him what you don’t have.”
“And therein lies my failing.”
The Theriot case was a straight-up whodunit. The sexual assault of Vanessa Theriot, a nonverbal girl with autism, who was unable to communicate what had happened to her. If she knew the identity of her molester, that secret was locked inside the labyrinth of her mind. The forensics had given them nothing to go on. No witness had come forward to point the investigation in any direction. They had no clear suspects.
“The Theriots want someone to blame,” Nick said. “Until we have the person who hurt their daughter, I’m it.”
Annie’s protective instincts rose up like hackles. She knew how hard Nick was working the case. She knew how much sleep he’d lost, the toll it had taken on him. She wanted to rush to his defense against Bobby Theriot’s verbal abuse, which had steadily escalated over the past month, but Nick wouldn’t have it.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, sliding her arms around his lean, hard torso, pressing her cheek to the thick muscle of his chest.
“Me, too,” he murmured, softly kissing the top of her head. He wrapped his arms around her tight and whispered, “Je t’aime, mon coeur, ma jolie fille.”
He had grown up a swamper’s son, speaking French at home as a fair number of families in these parts did. French was still his preferred language. He thought in French, spoke French to their son, made love in French.
“I love you, too,” Annie whispered.
“Come back to bed, ’Toinette,” he said. “I need to hold you for a while.”
She tipped her face up to look at him and met his lips with hers. He kissed her slowly and deeply. As always, the wave of heat was instantaneous, washing over her, through her, pooling deep within her body. When he lifted his mouth from hers, she murmured, “I think you may need to do more than just hold me.”
He groaned deep in his throat and took her mouth again, with more urgency, sweeping a hand down the curve of her side and pulling her hips hard against his.
Across the room, his cell phone came to life on the nightstand. They both sighed in frustration. A call this late at night to a sheriff’s detective was never anything good or anything quickly resolved.
Outside, lightning cracked like a whip across the night sky. Thunder boomed like distant cannon fire behind it.
“I’m going to go check on Justin,” Annie said, as Nick moved to answer the call.
She slipped into her robe and padded barefoot down the hall. She could hear their son stirring in his sleep, whimpering softly as she cracked open his bedroom door. At five, he was still afraid of thunderstorms, most times ending up tucked between her and Nick in their bed. He was a sweet, sensitive little boy—a little too sensitive to the recent tensions between his parents, making him moody and clingy. Bad timing, as he started kindergarten. Another stressor for Annie, another pang of guilt.
The nightlight allowed her to see his face. He was a miniature of Nick with his straight dark eyebrows and full lower lip. He was frowning in his sleep, just as his father did. Her heart swelled to overflowing with love every time she looked at him.
“I gotta go,” Nick said, suddenly behind her.
Annie jumped and turned to face him.
His expression was set in the grim lines of a comic book hero’s: the high cheekbones and iron jaw, a hawkish nose, brows lowered over dark eyes. He had pulled on a black T-shirt and a pair of camouflage cargo pants. His badge hung on a ball chain around his neck. This was what he wore to death scenes: the badge hanging for easy identification, the cargo pants for the usefulness of the pockets.
“You’re up, too, cher,” he said. “That thunder’s not the only storm brewing tonight. Our victim is a little boy.”
THREE
The house was less than a mile from town, a small, sad rectangle of cheap siding and asphalt shingles squatting on concrete block pilings in a yard of dirt and weeds. It was one of those houses that would inevitably end up miles down the bayou when the next flood came. The nearest neighbor wasn’t near enough. The property lines out here were defined by trees and scrub—nature’s privacy fencing—all trembling now as the wind picked up and shook the branches.
There were no streetlights on this road, just a yellow porch light on the house and the headlights and red-and-blue roof lights of two Partout Parish sheriff’s cruisers parked on the road. What was left of the moon shone intermittently as the clouds scuttled past in advance of the coming storm.
Nick pulled in his Jeep at an angle alongside one of the radio cars and got out, slinging his backpack over one shoulder. A deputy sat sideways out of the driver’s seat of the cruiser with his head in his hands, sobbing, the anguished sound punctuated by staccato bursts of noise from the radio. A second deputy was patrolling a line of yellow crime scene tape across the driveway. He shined his flashlight in Nick’s face as he approached.
“Detective Fourcade,” he said, turning the bright beam to the side. “Hell of a night this is.”
“It’s about to get worse, Ossie,” Nick said. His words were followed by a drumroll of thunder and the rattle of tree branches in the wind.
“I don’t see how,” Ossie Compton said grimly. He was a veteran on the job, nearer to retirement than not. He had seen a lot of crime scenes in his day. If he thought one was bad, there was no need to doubt him.
“You were first on the scene?”
“No. Young Prejean here.” He waved his fl
ashlight toward the deputy sobbing in the car. “His first murder, poor kid.”
“What do we know?”
“The call come in from a house down the road. The mother ran there for help. I guess they don’t have no phone here, or the lines were cut or something.”
“No cell phone?”
Compton shrugged. “Anyway, Prejean got here first. He was coming out the house, hysterical, when I pulled up.”
Nick glanced over at the young deputy, his head still bowed beneath the rolling blue-and-red lights of his vehicle. He remembered his first murdered-child call. He remembered all the time, even now, so many years later. A little girl, three years old, scalded to death by her mother’s boyfriend for wetting her pants. He saw that baby girl’s face in his nightmares still, more than a dozen years later. Hers and too many others. He wanted to go to Deputy Prejean and tell him to get out now, to go get a job selling shoes or working on a shrimp boat or something where death didn’t look you in the face on a regular basis and follow you home at night.
“Anyone else in the house?” he asked.
“No. I went in, seen what I seen, and come back out to wait for y’all,” Compton said. “Made me sick, too. I’m not ashamed to say it. What kind of evil bastard kills a little child that way?”
“The devil,” Nick said as a black Dodge Charger pulled up.
“A junkie kills another junkie for drugs,” Compton said. “One man kills another for messing with his woman. A robber shoots a store clerk to get rid of a witness. There’s always a reason. But to kill a l’il child . . .”
“There’ll be a reason for that, too,” Nick said. “Just not a good one.”
“Hell of a night this is,” Chaz Stokes grumbled as he joined them. “A call out on something like this in the middle of my beauty sleep and it has to fucking rain on top of it. I’ve got to rethink my career choices.”
He was in the same clothes he had worn to work the day before—gray slacks and a black button-down, a thin red tie pulled loose at his open collar. There was a good chance he hadn’t been home—not to his own home, at any rate.
They had been working together for the better part of a decade. Stokes, the department lothario, quick with a joke and a strategy to benefit himself. Fourcade, the department time bomb, dark and brooding, always on the edge. Somehow, they balanced each other out. Nick tolerated Stokes, and Stokes had sense enough to stay just on the right side of Nick’s boundaries most of the time.
“Any sign of a break-in?” Nick asked Compton.
Compton shrugged his thick sloped shoulders. “The back door is locked, but the front door was wide open when we got here. And half the windows are open. The air-conditioning don’t seem to be working.”
He pulled a handkerchief from his hip pocket and mopped the sweat from his forehead.
“Young Prejean!” Nick called out to the deputy in the car. “Make yourself useful and get the lights out your trunk. We need to light this yard up as best we can and see what we can see before this rain comes down.”
“Where’s our fearless leader and his toy box?” Stokes asked sourly, ducking under the crime scene tape.
“Lost, if we’re lucky,” Nick muttered.
They were a small department in a small rural parish—just six full-time detectives to cover everything. Most of their crimes were the small-time variety: break-ins, thefts, petty drug deals. Personal crimes generally involved people known to one another—barroom brawls, domestic violence, disputes between neighbors or rivals.
The detectives had always done their own evidence collection at crime scenes. Nick preferred it that way. They were trained to do it, had the experience of many cases. Having too many people at a scene was a recipe for trouble, as far as he was concerned. He wanted people he knew and trusted. He wanted to know exactly who found what, who touched what, who stepped where. When they had a big scene, a complicated scene, they had the option to call in the state police crime scene unit to collect and process the evidence. It was a system that worked well. He saw no need to change it.
The new sheriff, however, had won the office on bold promises to bring the Sheriff’s Office into the new millennium. Part of that promise had been a dedicated crime scene unit—something the voting public had decided was essential after Dutrow had told them that it was. People liked to think they knew about such things because they watched CSI on television. But the reality of the shiny new van purchased with grant money was a staff of one Dutrow-recruited seasoned crime scene investigator, a retired deputy, and a handful of trainees who had little experience and a steep learning curve. And they were on their way to Nick’s murder scene.
“Y’all walk the outside,” Nick ordered as he dug a pair of latex gloves out of a pocket on his cargo pants and pulled them on. “Find a point of entry. Find some footprints.”
“How about a bloody knife with fingerprints on it?” Stokes asked sarcastically. “And a driver’s license with an address.”
“That’d be good, too.”
Pelted by the first fat, slow raindrops of the storm, Nick hustled up the steps to the sagging little front porch. A crack of lightning, a boom of thunder, and the porch light went out. He swore under his breath and held up his flashlight to examine the doorjamb. Several bloody smears stained the peeling paint where someone might have grabbed hold on their way out the door. The assailant? The mother?
Was the assailant someone known to her? A spouse, a boyfriend, an angry ex? Or was this the rare monster in the dead of night, intent on harm, preying on a mother home alone with her child? Every woman’s worst nightmare.
Nick could still feel the tension in the air as he entered the house. Violence had an energy that lingered. It made the hair stand up on the back of his neck.
He took a pair of paper booties out of a pocket on his backpack and pulled them on over his boots. The beam from his flashlight illuminated the room in vignettes: a broken lamp and a chair on its side; streaks of blood on the wall and a picture hanging askew, belongings scattered on the floor. The aftermath of a struggle.
He turned and made his way down a short hall, careful not to step in any of the blood smears on the floor. Tension dug into his shoulders like talons as he made his way toward the first of the bedrooms. Acid burned in his stomach and up the back of his throat in anticipation of what he was about to see. Dread pressed down on him like a giant hand.
Because he was human, a part of him wanted to turn around and leave now, before it was too late. Because he had a duty, he moved forward, knowing that what he was about to see would change him. The dead always did that. What lingered of their souls grabbed hold and tore away a little piece of him, never to be recovered. The last breath of the victim’s pain and fear seeped into him like a stain. He had never become immune to it.
He stopped at the open doorway to the first bedroom and shined his flashlight inside. The first thing he saw was a kitten. A little black-and-white kitten, two or three months old, walking back and forth in the small puddle of light, looking up at him expectantly. It meowed at him and arched its back, padding in a figure eight, its white-tipped tail straight up in the air.
Nick stared at it, allowing himself to be mesmerized for a moment. He hadn’t expected to see a kitten, something innocent and alive. He let himself be distracted by it, just for a few seconds. Then slowly he realized the cat was rubbing itself along the pajama-clad leg of a small boy lying motionless on the floor.
Spider-Man pajamas. His own son had gone to bed wearing a pair just like them.
“I like Spider-Man ’cause he’s a good guy and he helps people and he can climb everywhere on everything. I wanna be Spider-Man when I grow up.”
“I thought you wanted to be Karate Kid.”
“I can be Karate Kid when I’m not Spider-Man. I can turn into Spider-Man and then turn back into Karate Kid. Right, Papa?”
“You can be an
ything you set your mind to, but what you need to be right now is asleep.”
Nick thought his heart would burst every time he watched Justin fall asleep. Until the birth of his child, he had never imagined it possible to contain that much love within his being. He loved his wife with all his heart, but even that love paled in comparison. It amazed and terrified him every day.
Now he stood over the lifeless body of another father’s son, trying not to imagine what he would feel if this boy were Justin.
Lightning split the sky outside, as bright as day in a black-and-white movie, as bright as the explosion of an old-fashioned camera flashbulb. The illuminated image burned itself into the backs of his eyes. It would be there for eternity. He would see it every day for the rest of this life and the next.
The boy lay on the bedroom floor, one arm outflung, one hand curled on his bloody chest; one leg straight, one bent at the knee. A dancer’s pose, frozen in death. He might have been six or seven—a little bigger than Justin, but still just a little boy. He should have been a picture of innocence, not a picture of violence. He should have been asleep in his bed, not dead on the floor. He shouldn’t have been painted in red by a madman’s brush.
Nick didn’t know how long he stood there. It could have been a minute. It could have been an hour. He felt detached from his body, as if the essence of him might float free of its shell and go wherever this child’s being had gone.
At least the boy was free of the pain that had been inflicted upon him. He had been stabbed again and again. Wounds to the upper chest, to the arms, to the face. It was impossible not to imagine his terror. He had gone to bed in his Spider-Man pajamas, curled up with his kitten, dreaming the sweet, simple dreams of childhood. He had awakened to a nightmare. Now he would never wake again. He would never grow up. He would never drive a car or drink a beer or kiss a girl.
As he stared at the body, the smell of blood coagulated into a thick knot in Nick’s throat that threatened to gag him. Tears burned hot against the backs of his eyes. He felt like he couldn’t breathe. He sank to his knees on the floor beside the boy, reached out, and touched the child’s dark hair. The pain that rolled over him was crushing.