by Tami Hoag
Sharon and her son had moved to Bayou Breaux as soon as the school year had ended in Houma. After three years of dating, Kelvin had finally popped the question on Valentine’s Day. Sharon had immediately set to work planning like a general preparing an invasion. They would be married in Bayou Breaux. It only made sense for her to move here and get established as soon as possible.
Unable to fault her logic, Kelvin had moved himself into a small apartment near the Sheriff’s Office to avoid the appearance of impropriety until their wedding, which would take place in February, a year to the day since his proposal. He came to the house for meals most nights and spent time there on the weekends, easing into the idea of having a family, something that still felt awkward to him.
Sharon brought him a cup of coffee—strong and black, the way he liked it—and turned back to fetch him a plate.
“Morning, Cameron,” he said to the boy sitting across the table from him.
Sharon’s son from her first marriage, Cameron favored his mother with his fair skin and his slightly almond-shaped eyes and wide mouth, though his hair was a brighter shade of red. At fourteen, he was in that awkward stage of growth when a boy’s arms and legs seemed too long and spindly for his body. His feet had outgrown three shoe sizes practically overnight. His body was morphing into a young man’s, though he still had the face of a boy with his freckles and teeth that seemed a little too big for his mouth.
The boy glanced up at him without lifting his head and mumbled, “Morning, sir.”
“Sit up straight,” Kelvin admonished, irritated. “You need to look a man in his face when you speak to him.”
“Yes, sir.” Cameron pulled himself up in his chair, seeming to grow by six inches. “I’m sorry, sir.”
“That’s better. You’re a young man now, Cameron.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Ninth grade already.”
“Yes, sir.”
The boy didn’t seem to know what to do next. He looked down at his plate, not sure if he should eat or not.
“Go on with your breakfast,” Kelvin ordered impatiently.
He had never seen himself as a father. He had always dedicated himself to his work. He was a natural leader, but this more intimate role had yet to settle on him. He didn’t understand children. Never had. When he was Cameron’s age, he was in his first year of military school. No one had ever coddled him. He had been expected to toe a certain line and be a little man. That wasn’t the way of parenting nowadays, much to the detriment of society, in his opinion.
He had suggested to Sharon that Cameron might benefit from going away to school at this point in time, as he and Sharon began the new chapter in their own relationship as man and wife, but she wouldn’t hear of it. Cameron had been through too much in the past few years—the unexpected death of his father from a sudden brief illness, his mother’s new relationship a year later, the upheaval of moving from Houma to Bayou Breaux, where he knew no one. It wasn’t easy to be the new boy in a small town, and Cameron was shy and awkward.
In Kelvin’s opinion, the boy was timid, and his mother enabled him. He had told Cameron to step up and join some clubs at school and to go out for the junior varsity football team to toughen him up. Weeks into the school year, he still didn’t seem to have any friends, and he came home from football practice dejected, sometimes crying, according to Sharon, looking like he’d been used for a tackling dummy. Sharon wanted to let him quit. Kelvin insisted he stick it out. The topic was an ongoing sore point between them.
“You look a mess, Kelvin!” Sharon said, setting his plate in front of him. “Did you not shave this morning?”
“I haven’t had the chance,” he said, self-consciously rubbing a hand across the stubble on his jaw. “I’ve been at a crime scene half the night. There was a murder not far from here.”
Across the table, Cameron’s eyes went wide. His freckles stood out like copper pennies in a bowl of cream.
“A murder?!” Sharon said, wringing her hands in her apron. “What is this world coming to?”
“I don’t want to frighten you,” Kelvin said, “but it’s better you know the truth than don’t. We don’t know all the circumstances of the people involved, but a small boy is dead and his mother is hospitalized.”
He dug into his scrambled eggs, suddenly realizing his hunger.
“What do you mean when you say ‘not far from here’?” Sharon asked.
“Half a mile or so as the crow flies. Out in the country on a little bayou road.”
“Is it anyone we know?” she asked, sinking down onto the chair between him and her son.
“I shouldn’t think so.”
“What’s the name?”
“Gauthier,” he said, watching for her reaction. “The woman is in her late twenties. The boy was about seven or eight.”
“Oh, my word!” Sharon exclaimed, pressing a hand to her heart. “Who would do such a thing? Kill a little boy!”
“We don’t know. The investigation is just beginning.”
Kelvin glanced at Cameron, who was staring down at his plate. He had lost some color and looked younger than he had a minute before. He had a purple bruise on the crest of his cheekbone, one of many souvenirs from football practice. It stood out against his pale skin like a grape stain.
“People do terrible things, Cameron,” Kelvin said. “It’s my job to find out why and to bring those responsible to justice. We’ll find who did this. I’ll make sure of it.”
“Was it a robbery?” Sharon asked. “Did someone break in? Should we be worried?”
“We don’t know the motive at this point. I don’t want people to be frightened, but everyone should be vigilant. Keep the house locked, be mindful of strangers, and so on.”
“Is the mom gonna die, too?” Cameron asked with tears in his eyes, clearly frightened.
“No. She’s in the hospital, but she’ll be all right,” Kelvin said. “She was hurt, but she managed to run for help.”
“Does she know who did it?” Sharon asked.
“She seemed not to last night. The detectives will speak to her again today. Needless to say, she was badly shaken.”
“The poor thing!” Sharon exclaimed. “She’ll wish it had been herself that died. No mother should have to bury a child. What of her husband? Was he not home?”
“Not married,” Kelvin said, snapping a piece of bacon in two. It was the perfect degree of crispness.
“Does she have family here?”
“I swear, I should hire you for the detective division,” he muttered. “I don’t have answers at this point. I haven’t spoken to the woman. This only just happened last night. I shouldn’t even be talking about it except that I want y’all to be safe. I’m sure we’ll learn more today.”
“Find out if she belongs to a church.”
“That is the least of my concerns.”
“She’ll need the support of friends and community,” Sharon said. “She’ll have to make arrangements for a funeral. I can’t even begin to imagine how terrible it would be to face that alone.”
Kelvin said nothing, his mind on a more immediate issue: where to stage the press conference—in the briefing room or in front of the building.
Sharon made a little huffing sound. “Never mind. I’ll find out for myself. I volunteer at the hospital today anyway.”
Focused on his career, Kelvin had never been tempted to marry earlier in life. Girlfriends had come and gone over the years, filling his needs, all of them gradually giving up on the idea of becoming Mrs. Dutrow. He was older now, established. As an officer working his way up the ranks, a wife and family would have been a distraction, a burden, even. As sheriff, it made more sense for him to be married than not. If he wanted to have as long a career as his predecessor, he needed to have roots in the community, to be invested in life here.
Sharon had come to his attention at just the right time. She had been working as a secretary in the Houma PD when she first caught his eye. He had recently made captain, overseeing the anti-crime community relations unit. She had set her cap for him, to be sure, but he had admired her purposefulness. When Gus Noblier had lured him to Bayou Breaux, he had decided he would marry her rather than start over in a new town. She suited him well enough.
The boy was a drawback, but it wouldn’t be that long before he was grown and gone to college. In the meantime, Kelvin would negotiate his way through parenthood as best he could.
“Cameron, finish your breakfast,” he admonished. “You’re going to be late for school.”
“I don’t feel good,” the boy whined, pushing his plate away.
Sharon heaved a sigh. “Oh, Cameron . . .”
Kelvin checked his watch, impatient to escape the oncoming exchange between mother and son. Cameron had a nervous stomach. The least upset and he wanted to stay home. Weak was the word that came to Kelvin’s mind. It irritated him to no end. And the more irritated he became, the more anxious Cameron was and the more Kelvin wanted away from the whole situation.
“I have to go,” Kelvin said, shoving his chair back. He took a last drink of his coffee. “Don’t count on me for supper. We’ve got crime to fight.”
“We’ve got crime to fight” was his closing line from his YouTube videos. Strong. Positive. Inclusive. His was the voice of authority that instilled a sense of confidence in the public. That he included them in the idea of fighting crime fostered a stronger sense of community. A murder in a small town would shake people to the core. The people of Partout Parish would look to him for answers and leadership.
He left the house, pulling in a big deep breath of humid air, rich with the scents of earth and wet grass, not wanting to think this might be what it felt like to walk out of jail a free man. Thinking it just the same.
EIGHT
Nick stood on the road at the end of the Gauthier driveway watching Annie drive off toward town. She would pick Justin up from her cousin Remy and take him to school, where she would speak with the principal and with the Gauthier boy’s teacher. He envied her the first part of that. After the hours spent on this crime scene, focused on a murdered child, the thing he wanted most to do was hold his son and feel the life pumping through his little body. Death needed to be countered with life.
The day had dawned with a clear, electric-blue sky. Early as it was, the air was already as heavy and warm as summer, magnifying the fecund smell of the sluggish bayou across the road. A desultory breeze stirred the treetops. A flock of ducks cut across the blue above them. Down the way, an armadillo poked its nose out of the weeds and waddled across the road toward the water.
The world didn’t look any different than it had the previous day. This patch of countryside was unchanged by the violence that had been committed in the shabby yellow house the night before. The fabric of the lives of the people involved had been torn asunder, never to be the same again, but the rest of the world went on about its business.
Nick found that at once disturbing and comforting. He looked at one side of the coin, and then the other by turns. A life had been stolen and snuffed out. Whatever this child might have contributed to the world was gone, his potential forever unrealized. But the world would keep turning, nevertheless, largely oblivious to the tragedy, no more impacted by the death of this boy than by the death of an armadillo that had crossed the road to get a drink only to become breakfast for an alligator.
“Whatcha thinking, boss?” Stokes asked, walking toward him from the yard. He had retrieved one of his many straw fedoras from his car on the excuse of cutting the sun. Nick suspected it was as much that as his hairline had begun to recede in the past year or so.
“‘Nature is neither cruel nor kind, but utterly indifferent to all suffering,’” he said, quoting the Darwinist Richard Dawkins.
Stokes blinked. “Huh?”
“But nature and human nature are not one and the same,” he went on, not giving a shit one way or the other if Stokes understood him. “There’s a practical reason for everything in nature. There is no intension of cruelty, only survival. Evil for evil’s sake is an invention of man.”
“Dude, seriously?” Stokes said wearily. “It’s too damn early in the morning for philosophy. Where’d your wife go?”
“To take Justin to school. She’ll tell the principal what happened here and speak with the dead boy’s teacher. Hopefully get some background on the family.”
He looked past Stokes to the Gauthier yard, where deputies and the younger crime scene investigator were doing a grid search for anything that might remotely resemble evidence. Kemp had finished in the house and left with the van as soon as Dutrow had gone. Nick couldn’t decide whether he should be relieved or pissed off that the incompetent ass had skipped out, leaving a green boy to finish his job for him.
“You find anything?”
Stokes made a face. “Yeah, a whole lotta nothing. The trash can in the backyard blew over in the storm. There’s garbage all over the damn place.”
“Anything under the boy’s window?”
“Nope, and I’m going cross-eyed staring at the ground. Let’s go knock on some doors. I’m craving human interaction here.”
Nick stared at the house with its sagging front porch. He could see Genevieve Gauthier’s car sitting in front of the ramshackle garage at the back of the property. Her keys had been in her pocketbook in the kitchen.
“What makes the most sense from the scene is that she struggled with the killer in the front room of the house and came out the front door and ran. Ran for cover or ran for the neighbor’s house. Whichever—she turned south toward the swamp instead of north toward town.”
“If this killer was chasing her, she had to run where she could,” Stokes said. He pointed toward the next property, half-obscured from the road by scrub and trees. “Young Prejean said he knocked on this door last night and wasn’t nobody home.”
“So she had to keep going,” Nick said. “But if the killer was chasing her, why he didn’t catch her? She’s hurt, bleeding, getting weak. Say she goes to this house and there’s nobody home. Why didn’t the killer catch her there?”
“Maybe he wasn’t chasing her. Maybe he split.”
“Why would he leave her alive? That don’t make sense. But for the sake of argument, say he wasn’t chasing her. Why would she run deeper into the countryside? If he wasn’t chasing her, why run at all? Why not take her car and go for help?”
Without waiting for Stokes to answer, Nick started walking, his gaze automatically sweeping back and forth along the ground in front of him. Genevieve had been wounded, cut, bleeding. Unfortunately, the rain had washed away any blood trail she might have left—or any evidence of anyone chasing her.
“If she has a head injury, she might have been confused,” Stokes said. “It sounded to me like she wasn’t in her right mind when Annie was talking to her. She said she was attacked by a demon from hell. That ain’t exactly rational.”
“That doesn’t make it untrue.”
“Oh, really? When was the last time you arrested a demon?”
“Somebody stabs a child in the eye and kills them, what else do you call them?” Nick asked. “You wake up in the middle of the night with someone trying to kill you, someone’s attacking your family, how rational are you gonna be?”
“She could have been high, too,” Stokes pointed out as they turned in the driveway. “You get fucked up enough, you don’t know frigging up from sideways.”
Nick arched a brow. “Is that the voice of experience talking?”
“As a man of the world, I plead the Fifth. Life is short, my friend. You gotta grab it by the balls every once in a while, you know what I’m saying?”
He knew Stokes lived in his own zone where rules were as easily bent as wil
low switches. Stokes felt that drawing a paycheck for wearing a badge somehow gave him a free pass to step over certain lines, as long as he stepped back quick enough. Not that Nick hadn’t crossed a line or two in his time, but his excuses had been founded in his own fundamental truth. Stokes’s capacity for rationalization was capricious. Nick considered that a weakness. Stokes considered it a talent. They could not have been more different philosophically and remained in the same species.
“What all did you find in the medicine cabinet?” Nick asked.
“Children’s Benadryl. Cold medicine. Cough syrup. A second bottle of Xanax, half a dozen Vicodin—”
“Her ’script or someone else’s?”
“No bottle, in a shot glass on the top shelf. There wasn’t enough of any one thing to scream ‘addict,’ but that don’t mean she ain’t one.”
“It makes no matter right now,” Nick said as they went up the steps to the front porch of Genevieve Gauthier’s neighbor. “We’ll find out soon enough from the ER if she was on anything last night.”
Other than having been painted a now-faded dark blue sometime in the past decade, this house looked no better or different than the Gauthier home. The porch floor was sagging with rot. The yard was full of weeds.
He went to knock on the front door and hesitated as he saw a smear of blood on the peeling white paint of the doorframe. Another smudge striped the door.
Stokes arched his thick brows. “I guess that answers that question. She came here knocking.”
“Who’s to say that’s her blood?” Nick said, his voice low.
He slid his weapon out of its holster. It could have been the killer’s blood. It could have been the child’s blood, smeared there by the hand that had wielded the knife. There could be a shotgun waiting for them on the other side of this door.
“Shit, man,” Stokes muttered, drawing his weapon. He took a position up against the wall on the far side of the door.
Nick stepped to the other side of the door and knocked hard. The cop knock. Bam, bam, bam! “Sheriff’s Office! Come to the door!”