by Tami Hoag
“Nick. Hey, Nicky, come on,” Stokes said softly, carefully resting a hand on Nick’s shoulder. “Let’s take a breather, man. I need a cigarette. You need a cigarette? Come on, dude. Let’s step outside.”
Nick flinched away from the touch as if it hurt. Slowly, he got to his feet.
“When I find the person who did this,” he said, his voice low and rough with emotion, “I’m gonna send him to hell, if I have to carry him there myself.”
He was trembling. He felt hot and cold and sick and angry. His pulse was roaring in his ears. He wanted to hit someone, smash something, scream.
“You’re gonna have plenty of help with that, my friend,” Stokes muttered. He groaned and swore as he shined his flashlight down at the dead boy. “Fucking hell. I really do need that cigarette now.”
“Did you find anything outside?”
“No,” Stokes said. “Dude, it’s pouring rain out there.”
Beyond the open bedroom window, the rain came in a pounding downpour, erasing any small hope of finding footprints outside the house or tire tracks in the driveway. Nick went to the window that had been propped open with an old paint stirring stick, cursing whatever entity had brought the weather this night of all nights. Carefully, he lowered the window to preserve the crime scene as best he could.
“There’s no screen,” he noted.
He shined his flashlight on the floor near the window, wet now with rain, looking for footprints, seeing none. The floor was covered in old gray linoleum tile that looked like it hadn’t been truly clean in decades.
“There’s no screens on half the windows,” Stokes said. “This place is a fucking dump.”
“Check the other bedrooms.”
Had the killer come in through this window because it was the easiest access point? he wondered. Had the child been killed for the sake of silencing him before he could alert anyone else in the house? That made some kind of cold, heartless sense, at least. If the assailant had come in through the window of the mother’s room, would the mother be the one dead on the floor? Or had the killer been invited in? Or living here?
What would have been the point of breaking into this house anyway? These people clearly had nothing of real value to steal—unless there might be drugs somewhere. Or unless the motive had been a sexual assault. Had the mother been assaulted? How had she managed to get away? She had somehow made it to a neighbor’s house to beg for help.
Who murdered a small child and let an adult escape?
“The window in the other bedroom is painted shut,” Stokes said, coming back into the doorway.
“Does it look like anything happened in there?”
“Looks like a bomb went off in a women’s boutique, but I didn’t see any blood.”
Nick shined his light on the unmade bed and the tangle of bloody sheets. The attack had initiated on the bed. The child must have awakened, possibly screamed, certainly struggled, tried to get away, ended up on the floor . . .
Another wave of sick fury washed over him.
“Do you know anything about these people?”
“Me?” Stokes said with surprise. “Why would I?”
“’Cause you’re nosy, that’s why.”
Stokes was always in everybody’s business at work and beyond, just on the off chance that knowing something might in some way give him an edge down the road. It wasn’t a bad trait for a detective to have, as far as that went.
A frown curved his mouth inside the framework of his neatly trimmed mustache and goatee. “Man, I don’t even know where the hell we’re at. This ain’t my neighborhood.”
“The mother ran for help,” Nick said. “Where’s the father?”
“Who’s to say there is one?”
“There’s one somewhere.”
“Where’s the mother now?”
“At the hospital. ’Toinette’s there with her.”
As much as he hated to disrupt their son’s life with the grim reality of their profession, as lead detective he knew whom he wanted interviewing a female victim or witness: Annie. Unlike himself, she was good with people. She had a way of putting them at ease and getting them to talk. And she was nobody’s fool. She knew bullshit when she heard it.
She had taken Justin to her cousin Remy, their designated babysitter on the rare occasion they both got called out at night, and had proceeded to Our Lady of Mercy.
“What’s the mother’s condition?” Stokes asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Why ain’t she dead?”
“I don’t know.”
“How’d she get away?” Stokes asked. “There’s a car sitting in the side yard, but Ossie said she ran to a neighbor’s house down the road.”
“There’s blood in the hallway,” Nick said. “The front room looks like there’s been a fight.”
“Let’s see.”
Nick looked down at the dead boy. He didn’t want to leave the child alone. As if it mattered now.
“Come on,” Stokes prodded. “Tick-tock, man. Time’s a-wasting. We gotta see what we can see before Dutrow gets here.”
They made their way down the short hall, flashlight beams bobbing and crossing each other as they hit on the evidence of a struggle: blood smeared on the wall, on the floor; furniture tipped over and shoved aside. A chair had been overturned near a small dining table toward the back of the main living space. The table itself was loaded down with stacks of mail and magazines, a pile of unfolded laundry, an opened bag of Cheetos, an abandoned can of soda, a half-drunk glass of who-knew-what.
Nick leaned over and sniffed at it. Whiskey and Coke.
An open doorway led into a small, cramped kitchen that smelled of grease and garbage. Dirty dishes filled the sink and were stacked on the counter. A woman’s handbag sat on a tall stool near the back door.
Nick fished forceps out of his backpack. Stokes shined his flashlight in the handbag as Nick picked through it with the tool. Kleenex, gum, a handwritten grocery list, two prescription bottles of pills, a wallet, car keys.
He carefully plucked out the wallet with his gloved hand and opened it to see a small amount of cash and several credit cards. A woman’s Louisiana driver’s license was tucked into a clear plastic window.
She was pretty. Brown hair, brown eyes. Five feet, six inches. One hundred fifteen pounds. Twenty-seven years old.
“Genevieve Gauthier.” He pronounced the name the French way: Jhun-vee-ev Go-tee-ay.
The address was not the house they were standing in or even the parish they were in. The address was a good hour away, a small town down in Terrebonne Parish. He wondered how long she had been living here and why she had come, trading one small town for another. Mostly, people moved from one place to another for a fresh start. Genevieve Gauthier had moved all the way to Bayou Breaux to have her little boy murdered in the night.
Setting the wallet aside, he reached back into the handbag and plucked out one of the pill bottles and held it in the beam of the flashlight. Xanax (benzodiazepine) prescribed to Gauthier, Genevieve. Antianxiety medication. What was she anxious about? Her job? Her life? A bad boyfriend? A threat?
He dropped the bottle back in the bag and picked out the other one. Oxycodone, a narcotic painkiller. An opioid—the prescription drug of choice among abusers these days. This bottle was prescribed to Marcel, Clarice. The address was in town. There were three pills in the bottle.
“Pill freak?” Stokes asked.
“Could be.”
“That’s a popular combo: Oxy and benzos. The house is a mess. Looks like she don’t have a pot to piss in nor a window to pitch it out of.”
Common traits for an addict. They were too strung out to bother with housekeeping and spent what money they had on drugs. Oxy wasn’t cheap on the street—about a buck per milligram, fifteen to thirty dollars per pill, depending on the do
se. That added up as resistance built and the addict needed more and more to achieve the kind of high they wanted.
Nick put the bottle back in the handbag and stared at the dark window in the back door. Lightning brightened the yard beyond, giving him the briefest glimpse of a small car parked in front of a ramshackle little garage.
“Her car keys are in her purse. She left the bag on this stool,” he mused. “She must come in and out through this door. But for some reason she didn’t try to leave this way tonight.”
“Probably she was being chased,” Stokes ventured. “But then why he didn’t catch her?”
Nick walked past Stokes as if he were invisible, back into the main room, shining his flashlight from the doorway to the hall, across the trail of a struggle. If the killer came in through the boy’s window . . . If the commotion brought Genevieve out of her room . . . A struggle down the hall into the living room . . . Escape out the front door . . .
He stepped onto the front porch. The rain was still coming down, though the worst of the storm had already moved north. The lightning flashed, but without the sharp bullwhip crack! The thunder rumbled, rolling away into the distance.
“What neighbor did she run to?” he asked as Stokes joined him.
“Up the road this way,” Ossie said. “Half a mile or so.”
He pointed to the right. Deeper into nowhere. Headed into the swamp. Nick looked to the other direction, to the glow of town in the night sky, less than a mile away with the promise of more houses and more people between here and there. Had she run east for cover of darkness? Had she run to hide in the brush? There was another house less than fifty yards away. Had no one been home to answer her cries for help?
How had a small woman on foot, presumably injured, escaped? Had the killer panicked? Had he chosen to run over risking a second murder? Had something or someone interrupted him, spooked him?
“It doesn’t make sense,” he muttered.
“Yeah, well,” Stokes said, nodding in the direction of headlights and strobe lights coming down the road. Dutrow and the crime scene unit. “If you think it doesn’t make sense now, hang on to your hat, partner. Here comes the damn circus.”
FOUR
Kelvin Dutrow pulled his Suburban to the side of the road, shoved it into Park, and stared at the house. It seemed to crouch in the darkness just beyond the reach of the portable lights that had been set up along the driveway. The storm that had knocked out the power was trailing away, rolling on toward Lafayette, but the rain continued.
The Suburban’s windshield wipers beat against the glass, keeping time with the pounding in Kelvin’s head. He was tired and anxious, thinking about the scene he was about to enter. A child murder. Everyone in Partout Parish—everyone in south Louisiana—would be watching, waiting, wanting answers. The burden would fall on his shoulders. He welcomed it. He did. He would show the voters they had chosen well when they had chosen him to be their sheriff.
The house lights came on suddenly, revealing two figures standing on the porch. Stokes and Fourcade. Stokes smoking a cigarette at a crime scene. Fourcade—instantly recognizable by his fighter’s build—powerful shoulders, hands jammed at his narrow waist. He was staring out across the yard, straight at Kelvin’s vehicle. Kelvin imagined he could feel Fourcade’s dark gaze, intense with the detective’s dislike for him.
The man had an edge that hinted at potential problems. He had a history—albeit an old history—of crossing lines that shouldn’t be crossed during his days with the New Orleans PD and in his early time with the Sheriff’s Office here. He had famously once beaten a murder suspect senseless, six or seven years past. The story went that the female deputy who had later become his wife—now Detective Annie Broussard—had arrested him at the scene.
Gus Noblier had told Kelvin that Fourcade was best left to his own devices, that he didn’t play well with others but was a first-rate detective, well worth the headache of having to deal with his volatile personality. He had gone so far as to promote Fourcade to Detective Sergeant, giving him a certain amount of power and autonomy within the division. The other detectives answered to Fourcade. Fourcade answered to no one save the sheriff himself.
Noblier’s philosophy made Kelvin uncomfortable. He liked to run a tight ship. Nonconformists didn’t fit into his picture. A former military man, he wanted order and respect from the people beneath him. But Fourcade was by far his most experienced detective, and the squad functioned well with him as their unlikely leader. Fourcade: the antihero.
And so, he kept Fourcade on.
Against my better judgment, he reminded himself as he opened his car door. He settled his hat on his head as he stepped out, the rain pecking at the plastic cover and running down his slicker. He was immediately sweating inside the jacket. Damn this weather.
The crime scene unit pulled up, stopping with the van’s nose on the yellow warning tape that had been stretched across the driveway to the house.
This was not going to go well. Kelvin already knew that. Fourcade had automatically—and defiantly—called the state police to request their assistance processing the scene. That had been their standard operating procedure for years with complex crime scenes. Cops liked to cling to their ways. Kelvin had come to the Partout Parish Sheriff’s Office with the determination to modernize and expand the department in creative ways he believed would ultimately benefit the community. He had written the grant proposal for the CSI van while Gus Noblier had still been sheriff.
Kelvin believed having their own crime scene unit would free up the detectives to do their investigating instead of losing valuable time collecting fingerprints and fiber evidence. On a case where they would ordinarily call in the state CSI unit and then have to wait for them to arrive, there would be no wait time. Having their own unit provided jobs and encouraged local young people to pursue schooling as technicians and stay in a parish that steadily lost its population to more metropolitan areas for lack of opportunity. And contracting with nearby rural parishes and municipal police departments to attend their crime scenes would mean revenue for Partout Parish.
Kelvin was a visionary. Nick Fourcade was not, nor was he going to accept this progress without a fight. That was a fight Kelvin was prepared to have.
A heavyset black deputy in a bright yellow rain slicker stood at the driver’s-side window of the crime scene van, shaking his head and gesticulating with his hands.
Compton, Kelvin recalled. He prided himself on memorizing the names of as many of his personnel as possible. When he had first come to the Partout Parish SO as Noblier’s second-in-command, he had set up a flashcard program on his computer with the ID photos of all his deputies, detectives, and unsworn employees. He went through sections of it every day as a mental exercise. It was good for morale and inspired loyalty for the people beneath him to feel a personal connection to him.
“Is there a problem here, Deputy Compton?” he asked.
“No, sir,” Compton answered. “Not as long as the van stays on this side of the tape.”
“That’s bullshit,” Keith Kemp declared.
The senior crime scene investigator, Kemp was a lean, hard stick of a man with a sour expression that spoke of his general outlook on humanity.
“We’re supposed to collect evidence and carry it all the way across this yard in the goddamn rain?” Kemp asked.
“Unless you can fly,” Compton replied. “Detective Fourcade set the perimeter, and here it is. Storm came before we could get a good look around. He don’t want no vehicles in the yard in case we might find some tracks or something once we can see again.”
“So we make footprints everywhere instead? That’s fucking genius,” Kemp said sarcastically.
Compton shrugged, unconcerned with Kemp’s opinion.
Kelvin glanced up at the house, at Fourcade, who was still standing on the front porch, staring at them.
“
This is ridiculous,” Kemp complained. “I didn’t move to this fucking backwater to get bossed around by some coonass detective.”
“That’s enough,” Kelvin warned.
“How am I supposed to do my job?” Kemp demanded.
The sheriff turned toward Compton. “Take the tape down, Deputy.”
Compton hesitated, frowning. “Detective Fourcade’s crime scene—”
“Is now my crime scene,” Kelvin said. “Take the tape down. That’s an order.”
“Yassir,” Compton said, then muttered half under his breath as he turned away, “Lord have mercy.”
He moved like molasses as he reached for the tape.
Instantly, Fourcade was off the porch, coming toward them at an aggressive pace.
“Is there something about a perimeter you don’t understand?” he demanded. He wore no hat or jacket. The rain soaked his dark T-shirt, plastering it to his chest and shoulders.
“No,” Kelvin returned. “Is there something about authority you don’t understand, Detective?”
“No. My crime scene, my authority.”
“That’s easily remedied.”
Fourcade arched a brow. “Oh? You gonna investigate this case yourself, Sheriff, or what? Maybe you wanna do all our jobs for us.”
“I can do without your attitude.”
“Likewise.”
Kelvin weighed his options. Push the issue into an all-out battle or find some more diplomatic way to work around the detective in front of him. Fourcade wouldn’t back down, and he wasn’t entirely wrong. The detective in charge took control of a scene and established the perimeter. No one was allowed inside the perimeter without his knowledge and consent. That was procedure for a reason. Nor was it all that unusual for a detective to take a proprietary attitude toward a murder scene. Emotions ran high in the aftermath of a crime like this one.
Still, Kelvin could see Ossie Compton and Keith Kemp and the trainee in the van’s passenger seat watching him, waiting.