by Tami Hoag
“Well, what?” Nick prompted. “Don’t be shy, Genevieve. Whatever thought you have, please share it. It’ll be up to us to decide do we need to pursue it or not.”
“Well, he would . . . look at me. If I was out in the yard with KJ and he came by, he would . . . look at me . . . the way men do.”
“It made you uncomfortable?”
She nodded, uncomfortable now for talking about it.
“But you didn’t hesitate to run to that house for help last night.”
“It was the nearest house. I needed help,” she said. “You think he did it, don’t you?”
“No,” Nick said. “I think if Mr. Perez wanted you dead then you’d be dead, but here you are. So, no, I don’t think he did it.”
“Then why are you asking me about him?”
“Bad men have bad friends,” Stokes said. “Maybe one took notice of you.”
She looked away toward the window and the last glow of the waning sunset, searching her memory. “I don’t remember anyone.”
“Genevieve,” Nick said, drawing her attention back to him. “You told me this morning there was nothing out of the ordinary about last night. It was just a usual night at home for you and your son.”
“Yes.”
“Do you normally drink heavily in the evening?”
Her whole body jolted, as if the question had been delivered by cattle prod. “What? Why would you ask such a thing?”
“The attending physician in the ER last night remarked that he detected the smell of alcohol on your breath,” Nick said, keeping his voice at the same low, calm pitch.
“No. He was mistaken!”
He shook his head, grimacing a bit. “The thing is, he wasn’t mistaken, Genevieve. Your tox screen came back with a point-oh-six blood alcohol content. That’s considerable.”
“That’s not possible.”
“Blood tests don’t lie.”
Her pulse was racing. He could see it beat in the carotid artery along the delicate line of her neck.
“I’m not saying it’s a lie,” she said. “I just— I had a Jack and Diet Coke after supper,” she confessed. “Just to relax a little. It was a hard day at work. But I never drank that much! I swear!”
“It’s all right, Genevieve,” Nick assured her, keeping his gaze steady on hers. “It’s not against the law to have a couple of drinks in your own home.”
“You could still drive a vehicle on point-oh-six,” Stokes pointed out. “And believe me, no one understands needing a drink after work better than cops, right, Nicky?”
Nick hummed a note of agreement. “Did anything in particular happen at work that stressed you?”
“No,” she answered, a little too quickly. She looked down at the sheet that covered her to the waist and picked at the wrinkles with her good hand. “It was just a busy day is all, and KJ was wound up, and . . .”
Tears rose in her eyes, one spilling from each to roll like clear pearls down her cheeks.
“I understand your son had some challenges,” Nick said gently. “Hard to deal with all that by yourself—having a job, being his mother, no support . . .”
“He wouldn’t settle down,” she said so softly, Nick had to lean closer. “He wouldn’t mind. I just didn’t have the energy to deal with it. I had such a headache . . .”
“Just one of those days,” Stokes said, shrugging it off. “The best thing you can do with a bad day is put an end to it. Have a drink and go to bed. We get that.”
“The problem is, Genevieve, you didn’t just have a drink, did you?” Nick asked. “You had a drink and a couple of pills, too, yeah?”
She wanted to deny it and knew she couldn’t.
“You had a pill bottle of Clarice Marcel’s for Oxycodone,” he prompted.
“I was just going to get that refilled for her—”
Nick raised a finger and shook his head. “Don’t lie to me, Genevieve,” he said softly. “We’re not the drug police. Nobody’s gonna bust you for having three Oxy tablets in your handbag. I am not your enemy. But if I’m to find the person who killed your son and injured you, I need the truth. I need the truth to find the truth. Do you understand me?”
She stared at him, frantically weighing her options.
“You take a deep breath and calm yourself,” he instructed. “Breathe in slowly. Breathe out slowly.”
She inhaled too quickly, her breath hitching in her throat.
“You’re all right,” Nick said. “Just slow down.”
She tried again and did a little better, her gaze hard on his, afraid to look away.
“Tell me why’d you take that pill last night?” he asked in a near whisper, drawing her closer, into his confidence, as if her answer would be just a small secret between them.
“I g-get migraine headaches,” she said, wiping a tear from her bruised cheek. “I d-don’t have insurance. Sh-she— Aunt Clarice, she gave those t-to me. Sh-she wouldn’t t-take them anyway.”
“How often do you take it? Every night?”
“No!”
“Once a day?” he asked. “More than once a day?”
“No!”
“How many times have you had that ’script refilled?” Stokes asked.
“Just once.”
“You know we’ll check the drugstores, yeah?” he said.
Genevieve looked from Stokes to Nick and back, frantic. “I’m not lying!”
“Do you ever get pills from anyone else?” Nick asked.
“No!”
“You in and out of a lot of rooms at Evangeline Oaks. You don’t maybe pick up an Oxy here, a Vicodin there?”
“I’m not a thief!” she insisted, but she didn’t quite meet his eyes.
“Do you know anyone there who does that?”
“No!”
“And you’ve never bought pills off anyone here in town?”
“No!”
“How about when you lived down Dulac?” Stokes asked.
“Oh, my God, I can’t believe you’re asking me these things!” she said, looking like someone trapped in a nightmare, unable to wake. “You’re acting like I’m the criminal!”
Nick sat back a little, releasing the pressure on her. He looked at Stokes and then away. Genevieve watched him the whole time, swiping at one tear and then another with a trembling hand.
The news was playing silently on the television. He caught a glimpse of Jaime Blynn, Annie’s friend, the second-grade teacher, and the principal of the elementary school, Ms. Samuels Young, the two of them standing on the edge of the playground, answering questions, their expressions earnest and sad. Then there he was, himself, looking angry as he snapped at Kimberly Karstares on his way into the hospital.
He took a deep breath and sighed.
“Genevieve, we’re not picking these questions out of the sky,” he said, turning back to her. “You had drugs and alcohol in your system last night. That’s a fact. That suggests to us you might be living a risky lifestyle.”
“I’m not!” she insisted. “I had a headache. I was tired. I just had a drink—”
“And you have a possession charge on your record from a few years ago,” Nick said. “What are we to make of that?”
“No!” she said on a little gasp of shock, tears welling up anew. “That’s a mistake! That’s not right! Why are you doing this to me? I haven’t done anything wrong! Someone killed my son!”
“That’s exactly right,” Nick said. “Someone came into your home last night and murdered your child and attacked you. This wasn’t an accident, Genevieve. It wasn’t random. This killer didn’t just wander in off the street. He came to your house for a purpose.
“Maybe he’s someone who saw you from afar at the supermarket and spun up a fantasy about you. But maybe he’s someone who knows you, has some connection to you.
And when I see these possible connections to the drug culture, I have to go there and dig in that hole. It can’t matter to me if that offends you or upsets you. And it shouldn’t matter to you, either.
“You want me to find who killed your boy, yes?” he asked.
“Yes,” she whispered.
“Then we want the same thing,” he said softly. “I have a little boy, too. If something happened to him, me, I’d move mountains with my bare hands to find out who hurt him and why. I’ll do the same for your boy.
“I’m sorry if that’s hard on you, Genevieve. I’m sorry I have to ask you hard questions. But nothing is harder than losing your child, right?”
“Nothing.”
“So you need to trust me,” he said, leaning closer, holding her gaze. “And I need to be able to trust you to tell me the truth, no matter what that truth might be. For KJ,” he whispered. “For your boy.”
She nodded, closing her eyes against a fresh wave of tears and grief. She looked exhausted, wrung out by the emotional roller-coaster ride he had just taken her on.
“C’est assez,” Nick murmured. “That’s enough. You get some rest.”
As he rose, he reached out and gently touched her uninjured shoulder in a gesture of sympathy and reassurance. She seemed as slight as a bird. It was hard to imagine her fighting off an armed assailant, but people often found physical strength beyond imagining when faced with the choice of life or death.
He started to turn toward Stokes when she reached out and touched his hand, catching hold of his fingers.
“Where is KJ’s kitten?” she asked. “I got him a kitten for an early birthday present. He hadn’t even named him yet.”
“We have him at the office,” Nick said. “He can stay until you get settled somewhere.”
“Thank you. You’re a kind man. I know you’re going to help me, Detective Fourcade,” she said, looking up at him with hope and something else, something like admiration, something that at once fascinated him and made him feel vaguely uncomfortable.
“I don’t have anyone else,” she said. “You’ll have to be my hero.”
TWENTY-TWO
I stood right there and watched that go down, and I still don’t know how you did it,” Stokes said, looking at Nick sideways as they headed down the hall toward the elevators. “I don’t get it. You all but called her a crack whore, and that girl is in love with you now.”
He batted his eyelashes and clutched at his heart and said in a breathless falsetto, “You’re my hero, Detective Fourcade!”
Nick saw no need for a reply. He was already replaying the interview in his mind, picking apart and analyzing Genevieve Gauthier’s every response and reaction.
Stokes hit the button to call the elevator. “I personally don’t find you all that charming.”
“Perhaps she thinks it’s to her benefit to fall in love with me,” Nick said. “Just as it may be to her benefit to fall in love with her boss—and to try to get him to fall in love with her.”
Stokes bobbed his thick eyebrows as he took the point. “This is exactly why I don’t do single moms,” he said. “That’s a spiderweb, man. I don’t care how juicy the bait is. I ain’t getting wrapped up in that.”
“Well, God forbid any woman would want you to be a father to her children,” Nick said. “That’s reason to call Child and Family Services, right there.”
“Hey, I know my limitations.”
“Why does she think she knows you?” Nick asked as the bell dinged and they got on the elevator.
“The hell if I know.”
He watched Stokes’s face carefully, never quite trusting him to tell the whole truth where it involved a woman. “You didn’t maybe run across her while trolling ladies’ night at the Voodoo Lounge?”
“No, sir. My hand to God.”
“God should have withered that hand off your arm by now,” Nick said. “You a walking advertisement for atheism, you are.”
“Pagans have more fun,” Stokes said with a grin. “If I’m lyin’, I’m dyin’.”
“I want the records on her cell phone,” Nick said. “And tomorrow I want to go down Terrebonne Parish and talk to her former employers. Something doesn’t add up to me. She told me this morning she moved here to take a job. Now she says she moved up here and needed a job, then she takes a grunt job when she’s qualified by past experience to make more money working in an office. That doesn’t make sense to me.”
“You think she came here for some reason other than this auntie in the old folks’ home?”
“According to the office manager, she was never a regular visitor to Clarice Marcel before she moved here. Why the sudden devotion?”
“And now the woman is giving her an unlimited supply of Oxycodone,” Stokes said. “Every pill head should have such a fairy godmother.”
They got off on the ground floor and headed for the main exit, Nick already bracing himself mentally for what would probably greet them as they walked outside. He didn’t hold out any hope that the news crews had given up and gone back to where they had come from, not when they knew they would have a second chance to poke a stick at him and get him to respond.
“Try not to get into a fistfight on the way to the car,” Stokes said. “I’m fucking starving, man. I got a shrimp po’boy in my sights. I’m making a beeline for Po’ Richard’s, with or without you.”
The doors whooshed open, and they stepped out into the electric sun of artificial lights, and a cloud of noise that seemed louder than before. Nick squinted hard against the glare and walked forward, not allowing himself to sort out individual voices. He had no intention of answering any of them.
“Detective Fourcade!”
“Detective Fourcade!”
“Detective!”
“Detective!”
“Fourcade!”
Bobby Theriot’s voice cut through the others like a thunderbolt—loud, deep, raw with emotion, cigarettes, and whiskey. He came directly at Nick, emerging from the center of the light like an avenging angel.
He was big—well over six feet—with the thick, practical muscle of a man who used his body for a living and the gut of man who self-medicated with too much beer and fried food.
“You bastard!”
He came at Nick like a charging bull, roaring, and stopped just short of making contact, looming over Nick, leaning down into his face, his breath sour, his eyes half-wild, half-glazed.
“You just forget about my little girl,” he said. “You don’t even have the balls to call me and tell me you’re moving on?”
“Bobby, this is not the time or the place,” Nick said, trying to keep his voice low so as not to be picked up by a microphone.
“You don’t want to admit it on television?” Theriot said, bumping him with his belly, trying to make him step back. “You’re not man enough to say it to my face?”
“Bobby, man, step back,” Stokes said, moving in like a referee, even as the cameras crowded closer.
Theriot swung toward him, shoving him back with a pair of rough hands the size of war hammers. “Fuck off, Stokes, you useless piece of crap. This is between me and Fourcade—if he has anything to say for himself.”
“If you want to sit down and talk, Bobby, let’s go do that,” Nick said calmly. “We’re not gonna do it here.”
Theriot spat on the ground and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, grimacing at the taste. He had a rawboned face, lined and chapped from working in the elements. A grizzled mustache and goatee bracketed his mouth. “You’re a fucking coward, Fourcade.”
“You’re drunk,” Nick said, moving a couple of feet to his right.
Theriot stepped awkwardly to match him. “What are you gonna do? Arrest me?”
“Let’s not make it come to that,” Nick said, moving back the other way. Just a few steps. Just to make Bobby Theri
ot track him with bloodshot eyes that didn’t quite want to focus.
“You’d do it, too,” Theriot said, turning, slightly unsteady, his speech just this side of beginning to slur. “You’d arrest me and let the man who molested my daughter walk scot-free.”
“We’re doing everything we can to find the person—”
“You’re doing jack shit!” he shouted. “But here you are, in the big spotlight,” he said, flapping his arms at his sides. “The big man. The big detective. Moving on to the big murder investigation. My daughter doesn’t mean shit to you. Fuck you!”
Theriot hauled his arm back, winding up for a haymaker of a punch. Nick caught the big man’s fist as it came at him and stepped deftly aside, letting Bobby’s momentum take him forward. Off balance and overcommitted to the punch, clumsy in cowboy boots, he went down face-first on the pavement. Nick rode him down to the ground, twisting Theriot’s arm up behind his back to hold him in place.
“Oh, man, this is gonna look great on the ten o’clock news,” Stokes muttered, leaning down close, offering Nick a pair of handcuffs.
Hospital staff poured out the doors to see the commotion. The TV cameras rushed in on both sides. The shouts of the reporters came like the loud, rapid fire of a machine gun.
“Are you arresting him?”
“Is he under arrest?”
“Detective!”
“Detective!”
Nick glanced over to see Kimberly Karstares standing off to the side, speaking directly into the camera from her station, composed in the way of someone who might have been expecting exactly what had happened.
Beneath him, Bobby Theriot was sobbing out his frustration and rage in a barely intelligible litany of grievances and profanity.
“You fuckers don’t care! . . . My baby girl! . . . Ain’t no justice! . . . Fuck all y’all, you fucking fucks!”
“Bobby, you have the right to remain silent.” Nick began the Miranda warning quietly, wishing to God Theriot would take the advice. Around them, the news people were still chattering.
“Detective, will he be charged?”
“What will he be charged with?”