The Boy

by Tami Hoag

  “Detective Fourcade!”

  In his peripheral vision he caught a glimpse of two deputies running toward them from the ambulance bay. He glanced up at Stokes.

  “Help me get him up.”

  Together they struggled to get Bobby Theriot to his feet. Twice he let his knees buckle and tried to drop back down to the ground, crying, tears and snot and blood running down his face. He had busted his lip in the fall and had scraped his face on the concrete, leaving bright red abrasions, bleeding in spots.

  “Take him to the ER,” Nick ordered the deputies as they arrived. “Get him checked out.”

  “Then what?”

  “Take him in and book him for public intoxication. He can sleep it off in the drunk tank. I’m not sending him home like this.”

  Stokes had begun herding the reporters backward, telling them there was nothing more to see, that they needed to pack it up and move it along. Only Kimberly Karstares evaded him, staying off to Nick’s left, away from the others.

  “Detective Fourcade, can we have a moment?”

  “No,” Nick snapped, shooting her a hard look then turning it on the videographer. “Get that fucking camera out of my face.”

  The young man jumped backward like a skittish horse, dropping the camera.

  “Turn it off.”

  The red light blinked off.

  “Detective Fourcade,” Karstares pressed. “This is your opportunity to say something for yourself—”

  “No,” he said. “But I have a question for you, Miss Karstares.”

  “Of course.” She had the nerve to smile a tight little professional smile, as if they were strangers and she hadn’t already fucked him over half a dozen times on the Theriot story.

  “Do you have no human decency whatsoever?” he asked.

  “I’m not the one manhandling the father of a victim,” she shot back.

  “Nor was I, but you’ll be all too happy to show that clip at ten and let people think what they will, won’t you?”

  “You’re good television, Detective.”

  “You want good television?” Nick asked. “Then let’s talk about how Bobby Theriot came to be here. What would possess him to come to Our Lady tonight? Did he just happen to turn on your channel for the six o’clock news to see you badgering me on my way inside? Or did you give him a little heads-up on that, Miss Karstares?”

  “What are you implying?”

  “I am inferring from past experiences that you, Miss Karstares, are a shit stirrer,” he said. “And if I find out from Mr. Theriot that you called him and told him maybe he might want to come over here and confront me tonight, I’m gonna make damn sure you have to lick that spoon.”

  “Are you threatening me?” she asked, pretending affront.

  “No. I’m telling you that your actions and your words have consequences,” Nick said. “Not just for you personally, although you can’t seem to see beyond that pretty little nose on your face. You’re messing with people’s lives. Bobby Theriot is going in the ER now, to get his busted lip stitched up because he came here tonight to try to punch me in the face. What if he’d brought a gun? Hmmm? What then? Did you think of that?”

  His question was met with a carefully blank look. She reached up with a nervous hand and pushed a stray lock of her hair behind her ear.

  “You think he doesn’t have a gun?” Nick asked. “You think he doesn’t have ten guns? You think if somebody pokes at his raw nerves enough he might not just up and decide to kill somebody? Is that what you want? Is that ‘good television’? You gonna crawl up out of obscurity on my dead body, on Bobby Theriot’s dead body, and get yourself a big job in New Orleans?”

  “Hey, Nicky,” Stokes said, coming alongside him. “Let’s go. I don’t want to get chewed out on an empty stomach. Come on.”

  Nick’s gaze didn’t waver from Kimberly Karstares.

  “You go look up Hunter Davidson,” he said. “He’s gonna die in prison because he took a gun and killed an innocent man he thought was guilty.”

  She didn’t blink. “And whose fault was that?”

  The barb found its mark, though he refused to show it. She had already done her homework. Of course she had. Of course she knew he had been obsessed with the idea that an architect named Marcus Renard had murdered local real estate agent Pamela Davidson Bichon. He had nearly killed Renard himself at one point. Pam’s father, despondent with grief and frustration at a justice system he thought had failed him, had shot and killed Renard on the very night the real killer had revealed herself. The weight of that tragedy still hung on him all these years later.

  “Mine,” he admitted. “And I won’t have it happen again.”

  Stokes tugged at his shirtsleeve. “Nicky, let’s go.”

  “You have a lovely evening, Miss Karstares,” Nick said, backing away. “Maybe you go looking for your soul before the ten o’clock news.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  What did I tell you?” Dutrow asked, his voice crackling with temper. “What did I tell you about talking to the press?”

  “Don’t,” Nick said dispassionately.

  He stood in Dutrow’s office, formerly Gus Noblier’s office, unrecognizable now that it had been stripped of Gus’s accumulation of twenty-some years of crap and dust: the ancient case files and stacks of old Field & Stream magazines, giant ceremonial ribbon-cutting scissors and lacquered alligator heads, Mardi Gras beads and a jarful of tiny plastic baby dolls discovered in King Cakes over the decades.

  Gus’s office had been a museum of weird relics. Dutrow was a man who appreciated order. It was practically the only thing he and Nick had in common.

  The sheriff sat behind his desk, still wearing his black tactical costume, projecting an image of square-jawed authority, something that made no real impression on Nick, since he only acknowledged Dutrow’s authority in the most basic way. He stood with his hands on his hips, his feet slightly spread apart. He had not been invited to sit. This was Dutrow calling him on the carpet, literally, in a vain attempt to shame and embarrass him.

  “Don’t talk to the press. Is some part of that sentence incomprehensible to you, Detective?”

  “No.”

  “And yet you had to shoot your mouth off.”

  “I wouldn’t call it that.”

  Dutrow’s face turned a darker shade of red. “I don’t care what you might call it. I care how it looked and how it sounded.”

  There was a sarcastic remark to be made about style and substance, but Nick kept it in his mouth. He was tired and irritated, and the last place he wanted to be at the moment was standing here listening to Kelvin Dutrow.

  “I asked for compassion for the mother of a murder victim,” he said. “Or did you miss that part?”

  Of course, that was only his six o’clock sound bite. If Kimberly Karstares ran true to form, his ten o’clock sound bite would be “Get that fucking camera out of my face,” followed by an edited shot of him sitting on Bobby Theriot as he handcuffed the sobbing father of a molested autistic girl.

  “Do. Not. Talk. To. The. Press,” Dutrow said, enunciating each word. He pressed his hands on his blotter, his fingers splayed wide as if he was trying to hold down the desk.

  “I’m willing to bet money that Karstares woman made sure Bobby Theriot showed up tonight,” Nick said, moving on.

  Dutrow arched a brow. “Am I done reprimanding you?”

  “I sincerely hope so, as it’s a waste of your time and mine,” Nick said impatiently, shifting his weight to one side and then the other, wanting to walk away. “And speaking for myself, I don’t have time to lose over this nonsense or anything else. I have a murder investigation ongoing.”

  Dutrow shook his head. “You have got a set of brass ones on you, Fourcade.”

  “You don’t want me talking to the press,” Nick said. “Me, I don’t w
anna talk to the press. That suits me fine. If you can arrange for them to be elsewhere, that’d be great. Maybe they can follow you around all day, filming whatever you do, recording everything you say. You’re better suited to it than me. If not, I’ll do the best I can. I can’t promise more than that. My focus is on catching a murderer. I don’t give two shits about TV ratings or the public’s opinion of me. Can we now move on to issues pertinent to the case? Sir.”

  He added the title as a discordant afterthought. Dutrow looked at him for a long moment, mentally sorting the slights and insults, trying to decide which to disregard and which to take exception to. In the end, he gave up.

  “What did you do with Theriot?”

  “Charged him with public intoxication. Stokes is booking him.”

  “He attempted to assault a law enforcement officer. On camera, I assume,” Dutrow said. “It’s probably all over the Internet already.”

  “I’m none the worse for wear,” Nick said. “And charging him for it would be highly unpopular in the court of public opinion, which I’m sure is where your primary concern lies here. Let it go. Make a public statement about compassion, if you feel the need. Bobby Theriot wasn’t the most malicious person there tonight. At least his motivation was pure, which is more than I can say for Kimberly Karstares.”

  “Would you be so charitable if he had landed that punch?” Dutrow asked.

  “Bobby Theriot is not my enemy, nor am I his,” Nick said.

  Giving in to the need to move, he went to Dutrow’s wall of fame and let his gaze scan the photographs—Kelvin Dutrow with every politician to draw breath in Acadiana for the past decade or so, giving awards, accepting awards, posing with prominent citizens and civic groups and other cops. In a suit, in a uniform, younger, less gray—the pose and the smile were always exactly the same.

  Nick’s eye landed on one framed newspaper article in particular. The date was nine years past, stamped beneath the newspaper headline from the Houma Times:

  HOUMA OFFICERS DEDICATED TO COMMUNITY SAFETY

  R.A.D.—RAPE AGGRESSION DEFENSE SYSTEM:

  TEACHING SELF-DEFENSE TACTICS TO AREA WOMEN

  The photo showed Dutrow instructing a woman to target an assailant’s eyes in her attempt to escape an attack. The officer playing the role of the assailant was Keith Kemp. There was no mistaking the crew cut and the sharply chiseled features. It was Kemp in uniform, leaning back and turning his face toward the camera as the woman reached out to gouge at his eyes.

  “He’s a father hurting for his child,” Nick said, turning back around to face Dutrow. “He couldn’t be there when she needed him most. He thinks he let her down. That’s why he lashes out. He wants someone else to blame, but there isn’t anyone—just a ghost, for now. He’s alone with all that hate inside. He directs it at me. I’m the surrogate until the case gets solved.

  “That day was like any other,” he said. “He went to work like he has every day of his adult life. There was no reason for him not to. He couldn’t know. No one could—except maybe the person who committed the crime, and maybe not even them. His wife went on about her day like she did every day. She only left the girl alone for an hour or so . . . Now he hates her for it.

  “I wish I could give him the thing he needs,” he said. “But now my focus has to be on the Gauthier murder.”

  “And where are you at with that?”

  “Nowhere, yet. Given where Ms. Gauthier lives, I don’t believe this was a random act. The killer may not have gone there to murder a child, but he almost certainly went there on purpose.”

  “Suspects?”

  “She claims to have no enemies here.”

  “You don’t believe her?”

  “Unless she did this thing herself, she has one enemy, for true. Who that might be is a mystery. We’re working a possible drug angle. She seems to have a liking for Oxy. And she has an ex-con drug dealer living next door.”

  “Do you like him for it?”

  “Not really. If he wanted her dead, why ain’t she? If he went there to rape her, why didn’t he? Why kill a child and get nothing for it? It makes no sense, and yet, I feel like there might be something there. I just don’t know what.”

  “What about boyfriends, exes, the boy’s father?”

  “She says no on all counts.”

  “Have you spoken to the father?”

  “She refuses to give us his name. It’s not on the birth certificate. She says he’s not in the picture at all.”

  “And you believe her?”

  “Me, I think Miss Gauthier has a lot of secrets. The question is, does she want to keep those secrets more than she wants justice for her child?” Nick frowned and gave an almost imperceptible shrug. “We’ll see.”

  “You said ‘unless she did this thing herself,’” Dutrow said. “Do you think that’s possible?”

  “Anything is possible. She’s a single mom, struggling to make ends meet. Maybe has a drug problem. The boy was a handful. Maybe she just had enough.

  “Am I getting my autopsy?” he asked.

  Dutrow heaved a big sigh. “The coroner isn’t inclined. He says he doesn’t need to desecrate the child’s body to determine either the cause or manner of death.”

  “And you agree with him?”

  “It’s his call. He’s the coroner.”

  “And you’re the sheriff,” Nick said, his temper rising. “And I’m the detective. I want a tox screen at least.”

  “You think the boy was popping pills, too? A seven-year-old child?”

  “I want to know did his mother drug him,” he said impatiently. “I want his body examined and X-rayed for old injuries that might suggest a pattern of abuse.

  “Do you have some sort of objection to being thorough?” he asked, his tone dripping sarcasm. “Is that how they do things in Houma? Half-assed?”

  “Of course not!”

  “Then why are we having this conversation?” Nick asked, his patience worn to threads. “A boy was murdered. There needs to be an autopsy. End of fucking story!”

  Dutrow pushed to his feet. “Keep a civil tongue in your head when you’re talking to me! You forget I’m not the subordinate here, Detective. You work for me, not the other way around.”

  “I work for the victim,” Nick corrected him.

  “And I’m just here to supervise, is that it?” Dutrow asked, his face growing red. “I’m just here to sign off on the paperwork?”

  “Mais yeah!” Nick snapped back, ready to explode with frustration. “That is what you do! You can put on a uniform and march around like a goddamn general and have all the power of a dictator, but you are in fact a supervisor!”

  Dutrow stiffened. “You are perilously close to losing your job, Detective Fourcade,” he said softly.

  “I am trying to do my job,” Nick said, matching the sheriff’s tone. “I am trying to go through the proper channels to get what I need to solve a murder. I don’t think I should have to jump through hoops every time I need something that should be a given in a murder investigation. But if that’s what you want—”

  “This isn’t about me.”

  Nick pressed a hand across his mouth to stop himself from cursing at the absurdity of the statement. The fucking gaslighting narcissist. This conversation wasn’t about anything other than him. His needs, his demands, his own overblown opinion of his importance in the world.

  Inhale. Control. Focus. Exhale. Control. Focus.

  Nick could barely articulate the mantra in his conscious mind. He couldn’t seem to slow his pulse or his respiration.

  “I wonder,” Dutrow murmured. “Will your wife choose to continue working for the SO if I fire you?”

  Nick wanted to hurl himself across the desk and wrap his hands around the man’s throat. He was literally trembling from the effort to remain still. The fils de pute, bringing
Annie into this. What kind of man did that? No man of honor. Whatever abstract scrap of respect he’d ever had for Dutrow turned to ash in that second.

  “Is that how you operate?” he asked quietly. “You threaten a man’s livelihood, threaten a man’s family? That’s who you are?”

  “I’m just telling you how it is, Detective,” Dutrow said. “That’s how the food chain works. I am the apex predator here. And if I decide I don’t want to put up with your attitude, you will be nothing but a bad memory to me. What impact that has on you and your family is not my problem.”

  He wouldn’t quit. No matter how much he disliked Dutrow, he wouldn’t quit. No matter how much Dutrow disliked him, he wouldn’t quit. As a matter of principle and pure damn Cajun stubbornness, he would ride this fight into the bowels of hell and outlast the devil himself.

  He spread his hands wide in a gesture of false surrender and cocked his head to one side. “Me, I’m just trying to do my job to the best of my ability,” he said. “I confess to being guilty of overzealousness in the pursuit of justice for my victims.”

  “Is that supposed to be an apology?”

  “If need be.”

  Dutrow looked at him, weighing his options. “You’re an arrogant son of a bitch,” he announced.

  “Yes,” Nick admitted. “But not without cause. I will solve this case. I need that autopsy.”

  The sheriff gave an exasperated half laugh, shaking his head. “I’ll speak with the coroner.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Where is Detective Broussard this evening?” Dutrow asked, seating himself again, content for the moment with his thinly veiled threats and emotional manipulation.

  “She went to talk to people at the boy’s school and to talk to the boy’s babysitter,” Nick said, matching Dutrow’s calm tone. If that was the game he wanted to play . . . “To see if there was any indication of something amiss yesterday or leading up to yesterday.”

  “And your next move?”

  “Provided I still have a job, Stokes and I will go tomorrow to Dulac and Houma and talk to Genevieve’s former employers and fill in the blanks on her background. You might be able to help with that, actually.”