by Tami Hoag
“Give me your flashlight,” he said to Kemp.
The crime scene investigator handed him a heavy black Maglite through the van window. Kelvin ducked under the yellow tape and swept the beam of light back and forth over the dirt and crushed shells and muddy puddles of the driveway, looking for discernable tire tracks, something with a tread pattern, anything they could use.
“There’s nothing here,” he declared. “We’ve got a crime scene to process. I want this van as close to the house as possible.”
“I don’t want these people touching my scene,” Fourcade said loudly.
“You got no say in that, Detective.”
“I called the LSP—”
“And I canceled them,” Kelvin said. “We have our own crime scene unit—”
“That don’t know a damn thing about a scene like this!”
“Fuck you, Fourcade!” Kemp shouted out the van window.
Fourcade didn’t spare him a glance.
“Kemp has plenty of experience—” Kelvin started.
“Not on my scenes, he doesn’t.”
“Coonass motherfucker!” Kemp yelled, half hanging out the window of the van. “Come over here and say that!”
Kelvin wheeled on him and shouted, “Shut up!” then turned back to Fourcade. “Kemp’s been running crime scenes for years. I can vouch for him myself.”
“And the rest of them?” Fourcade asked. He pointed at the kid in the passenger seat. “Is that one old enough to vote? I don’t want—”
“It’s not up to you, Detective,” Kelvin said. “The taxpayers of this parish are paying for a crime scene unit. I won’t have them double-billed by the state of Louisiana for no good reason.”
Fourcade’s eyes widened. A muscle pulsed at the back of his square jaw. “No good reason?” he said, his tone of voice dangerously quiet, somehow more unnerving than rage. He stepped to within a few feet of the sheriff. “There’s a dead child in that house. Someone came into his bedroom and stabbed the life outta him. You want to turn his justice over to a pack of amateurs?”
“Every person on this team is a trained professional.”
The detective barked a laugh. “Oh, right. For what? Five minutes? Five weeks’ training and a fucking Wheaties box top? They’re certified? The hell!”
“Stand aside, Detective,” Kelvin said. “Don’t make me say it again.”
Stokes finally joined the party then, reaching out carefully to touch Fourcade on the shoulder. “Hey, Nicky, come on. It ain’t like you can’t stand right there and watch ’em do the job. Come on. Let’s go back inside.”
Fourcade shrugged him off violently, cursing in French. He threw his hands up in the air, waving them off, as if they might just go away and leave him, then he turned and stormed off toward the house.
“You need to put a leash on him,” Kelvin snapped.
Stokes laughed without humor. “Yeah, right, boss. I’d sooner crawl up an alligator’s ass and work my way out through its teeth. He barely tolerates me—and I’m his partner going on seven years.”
“He can rein in that temper or he won’t make that anniversary.”
“It’s a kid,” Stokes said.
“What?”
“The victim. It’s a little boy. Nicky’s got a boy about the same age.” He tilted his head and gave a shrug. “Just sayin’.”
Kelvin swallowed back his anger. The aftertaste was bitter.
“Our people are going to process this scene,” he said. “If Fourcade doesn’t like that, he can leave. His choice.”
“You’d have better luck taking a bone from a pit bull,” Stokes said. “Nick won’t walk away before he gets justice for this boy.”
He motioned toward the road as a hearse drew near. “Great,” he said without enthusiasm. “The coroner’s here, too. We got us a regular goddamn three-ring spectacle. Let the shit show begin.”
* * *
* * *
INHALE. FOCUS. CALM. Patience. Exhale. Focus. Calm. Patience. Inhale.
Nick moved around the boy’s bedroom, forcing himself to breathe slowly, in through his nose, out through his mouth, counting the seconds—four seconds in, four seconds out—focusing on his watchwords in the attempt to disconnect from his temper.
His heart was still beating too hard, too quickly. His hands were still trembling with rage as he photographed the scene. His thoughts kept racing over the top of his mantra.
The hell if Dutrow’s people were coming in this room before he was finished. He wouldn’t have it. Dutrow would have to have him physically removed, and there was no one here stupid enough to lay hands on him except maybe for Kemp. What a welcome diversion it would be to beat that cracker asshole to a bloody pulp.
Four seconds in, four seconds out. Inhale. Focus. Calm. Patience. Exhale. Focus. Calm. Patience. Inhale.
He looked at the screen on the back of the camera. The truth seemed less real reduced to two inches by three inches. The boy looked like a doll that had been cast aside by some careless child. Even so, Nick could feel the emotions amplifying inside him: anger rising to rage, sadness sinking to despair. He pulled in another long, slow, deep breath. Inhale. Focus. Calm. Patience. Exhale. Focus. Calm. Patience. Inhale.
He photographed the body from all angles, moving as quickly as he could. He photographed the floor, the bed, the window, the doorway to the hall. With the electricity back on, he was able to see the details that had been left to the imagination in the dark. Blood spatter on the wall and ceiling. Cast-off spatter from the blade of the weapon as the killer pulled it out of the victim and raised his arm to deliver another blow. Blood smeared on the floor where someone had stepped and slipped. A partial shoe print.
He crouched down, zoomed in, and snapped several pictures. The tread of a sneaker, maybe. Just a few wavy lines. Probably too small to discern much in the way of identification. He would follow the blood trail into the hall and to the front room in hopes of finding a better example.
“Damn.”
He looked up to see the sheriff standing in the doorway, sober-faced as he stared at the dead boy.
In his late forties, Dutrow stayed fit in the gym, where people could see him. He had the physique of someone who lifted too much iron, with his black uniform shirts tailored to advertise that truth. Despite the fact that he was really a politician with an office job, he favored the black uniform and boots of a tactical squad leader, as if there was some chance of his needing to be ready to fight danger at a moment’s notice. It was a costume, a fraudulent image the public gobbled up with a spoon. Kelvin Dutrow: Man of Action.
He had removed his raincoat and left it somewhere and had put paper booties on over his boots so as not to track anything into the crime scene. Fastidious and vain were the words that came to Nick’s mind when he looked at the sheriff, as if the booties were to protect Dutrow from the gore of the crime scene instead of the other way around.
“You have a son, don’t you?” the sheriff asked as Nick went to photograph what might have been a palm print in blood on the wall near the door.
The answer stuck on Nick’s tongue for a moment. Somehow, sharing that information seemed too intimate, as if it was knowledge that might be used against him. Dutrow looked at him expectantly. His small dark eyes were hard and bright beneath straight dark brows that were a stark contrast to his close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair.
“Oui,” Nick admitted.
“About the same age?”
“He’s five.”
Dutrow nodded. “My fiancée has a son. He’s fourteen. She’d lose her mind if something like this happened to him.”
Nick said nothing. He didn’t give a shit about Kelvin Dutrow’s fiancée. He didn’t like Kelvin Dutrow, even though Gus Noblier had recruited the man from Houma PD to be his chief deputy. Nick loved Gus like an uncle and had respected him as sheriff,
but he had pegged Dutrow as an opportunist and a showboat from the start, and nothing that had happened since had changed his mind. How Gus hadn’t seen that was beyond him.
Dutrow embraced the spotlight and was a creature of social media. Following in the footsteps of several Louisiana law enforcement personalities who had gained national attention doing so, Dutrow had built a following on the Internet as the tough-talking star of his own YouTube videos, calling attention to himself in the name of fighting crime. It was a style that grated on Nick like a rasp.
“If someone did this to my boy,” he said, “me, I’d kill ’em with my bare hands, and I’d take my damn time doing it.”
Dutrow’s brow knit with disapproval. “That’s not the wisest thing to tell your boss, Detective.”
Nick shrugged a shoulder. “C’est vrai. That’s for true, but true it is.”
He looked at the boy on the floor, took a measured breath, and released it slowly. Inhale. Focus. Calm. Patience. Exhale. Focus. Calm. Patience. Inhale.
“If you wouldn’t do that for your child, you shouldn’t have one,” he said.
“You’d condone murder?” Dutrow said. “Vigilantism?”
“It would be my obligation to avenge my family. Let the law call that what it will.”
Dutrow scowled. “That attitude has gotten you in trouble before. You—or any man in this parish—would go to prison for taking the law in his own hands. I’d make sure of it.”
“A man has to be willing to do the right thing,” Nick said, “regardless of the consequences or the moral injustice of the price he might pay. That’s the definition of sacrifice, is it not?”
Dutrow’s face was growing red. “You’re sworn to uphold the law, not advocate for vigilante rule. If you’re going to have a problem with that, you shouldn’t be working for me.”
“I do my job,” Nick said calmly. “I do it well. That doesn’t mean my societal obligations and my higher beliefs always mesh. Inner conflict is the evolving man’s daily struggle, no?”
Dutrow clearly didn’t know what to make of him. Nick knew he made the man uncomfortable. He made most people uncomfortable. Sometimes it seemed to be his purpose in life to make people uncomfortable, to make them step back and question. He accepted that role, embraced it, even. What else could he do? He was the way he was.
“Professionally, I am on the side of law enforcement, if not the side of the angels,” he said. “The two are not always the same, are they?”
“Both answer to a higher power,” Dutrow said. “Remember that.”
“‘You get justice in the next world. In this one you have the law,’” Nick said, quoting William Gaddis, not that Dutrow would recognize it.
He sighed and went to look more closely at the partial handprint on the wall. The shape was right; the pattern was wrong. Not the random lines and whorls, which demarked human flesh. Not the smooth smearing of a glove. The pattern had almost a stamped quality, like a stencil. Strange . . .
“Detective Broussard is with the mother?” Dutrow asked, surrendering the philosophical discussion for the moment.
“At Our Lady.”
“Do we know the extent of her injuries?”
“No. She was able to make it down the road to a neighbor before she collapsed, but she’s a mother trying to get help for her child. In my experience, there is no more fierce a creature on the earth. She might have dragged herself there with no legs.”
“Why didn’t she call nine-one-one?”
“There doesn’t appear to be a phone in the house.”
“Cell phone?”
“Haven’t seen one yet.”
“What do we know about this woman?” Dutrow asked.
“Her name. Genevieve Gauthier. Moved here from Terrebonne Parish. Don’t know when.”
“Where?”
“Dulac. You know it? It’s not far from Houma.”
The sheriff seemed to ponder the question—or the answer to it. The kitten chose that moment to dash from under the bed and pounce at the dead boy’s bloody bare foot.
“Jesus!” Dutrow startled. “What the hell? Get that cat out of here! We can’t have animals running around a crime scene!”
Nick scooped up the kitten in one hand and held it close to his chest. It curled against him and immediately began to purr, a sound that might have offered him some comfort if not for the voices coming from the front room of the house.
“The coroner is here,” Dutrow announced.
Nick muttered a curse. A small, rural parish, Partout Parish had no medical examiner, only a coroner, an elected official who got the job by default because he had no natural aversion to touching dead bodies. Ulysse Wilson was neither a doctor nor a forensic pathologist, and yet he had the power to determine where a body would go and what would be done to it.
“You’re gonna send a murdered boy to the funeral home with that old fool?” Nick asked. “Let him decide whether or not there needs to be an autopsy? I want the body sent to Lafayette.”
“The cause of death is not exactly a mystery here,” Dutrow said. “We don’t need to send this boy out of the parish to know he was stabbed.”
“Right,” Nick said. “But what was he stabbed with? A knife? A screwdriver? How long was the blade? How wide? Was it smooth? Was it serrated?”
“I take it you haven’t found the murder weapon.”
“Your powers of deduction are astonishing,” he snapped, his voice dripping sarcasm as his blood pressure began to rise again. “It’s a damn good thing you’re a politician—”
“You can leave the rest of that statement in your mouth, Detective,” Dutrow snapped back. “I’ll request the body go to the morgue at Our Lady for the time being. And if you have so little faith in my decision making, I can assign you duties elsewhere in the department and this case will cease to be a problem for you. Do you understand me?”
Nick looked down at the kitten sleeping against him. He looked down at the little boy lying broken on the floor. If he had any sense, he would get himself fired and find another line of work. Instead, he would swallow his temper because it was already too late for him to back away. This boy was his boy now, his responsibility. He had made a promise. He would no more walk away than he would stop breathing.
“I asked you a question,” Dutrow said. “You might be my best detective, but you are not my only detective. I won’t have you question my authority every time I turn around. I’m damned tired of it already. I know you’re used to Gus letting you run your own show, but I am not Gus Noblier. I run the show now. Do you understand me, Detective Fourcade?”
Nick said nothing, too stubborn to concede defeat, his attention still locked on the boy.
“Detective?” Dutrow asked with irritation.
“I heard you.”
“Good,” Dutrow said, with more satisfaction than the answer warranted. “Now you stand back and let these other people do their jobs.”
FIVE
I don’t know how coherent she’ll be,” Travis Benton said.
They walked down the ER hallway toward a private examination room, shoulder to shoulder, their voices hushed. He’d been a grade behind Annie in school, the annoying little brother to her first big junior high crush, Big Ben Benton. Big Ben had tragically died of lymphoma at the tender age of nineteen. Travis had gone off to college and come back to Bayou Breaux with a medical degree.
“Has she said anything about what happened?” Annie asked.
“Not that’s made much sense.”
The hospital was quiet. Weeknights in Bayou Breaux, the sidewalks were rolled up by ten. The population consisted of working people who saved their hell-raising and sport heroics for the weekend. The only lights on in the hallway were down low, giving the polished floor a pearly glow. The conversation going on among staff at the front desk faded behind them.
The hair on the back of Annie’s neck rose as she became aware of an eerie, soft keening in the distance.
“That’s her,” Travis said. “She’s been going back and forth between near-catatonia and hysteria since the ambulance brought her in. She wouldn’t say anything at first, then all of a sudden she jumped off the gurney and tried to run, screaming like a banshee. It took three of us to hold on to her ’til the drugs kicked in.”
“Do you think she was high on something?”
He shrugged as they approached the closed door. He’d been at Our Lady of Mercy long enough to have seen pretty much every kind of chemically induced high that had made it to the bayou country in the past five years.
“Could be. But her pupils were normal. She doesn’t smell like she’s been smoking anything. Maybe a little whiskey on her breath. I guess we’ll see what the tox screen says. But the woman has been through something horrific. That can be worse than any bad drug trip.”
“What are her injuries?”
“Knife wounds. She’s got cuts on her hands and forearms, consistent with defense wounds. She’s got a deep cut on the top of her left shoulder. The knife must have come down like this,” he said, pantomiming a downward chop with his right hand to his left shoulder and slicing toward his chest. “Actually nicked the collarbone. Missed her jugular by a few millimeters.
“Other than that, she has a lot of bruises and abrasions, a couple of cracked ribs. Her feet are cut up pretty bad from running barefoot down a gravel road. I want to get a head CT. She might have a fractured orbital. Her left eye is just about swollen shut. Looks like she took a pretty nasty punch.
“I’ve called the CT tech,” he said. “He lives up in Plaquemine, so he won’t be here for a while.”
“Sexual assault?”
“She wouldn’t consent to the exam. Freaked out when I even made a move in that direction. That could mean she was raped, could mean she wasn’t. For what it’s worth—just as a visual observation—I didn’t see any obvious outward signs of a violent sexual attack. No ligature marks, no finger marks on her throat or her thighs. But that certainly doesn’t mean she couldn’t have been raped.