The Boy

by Tami Hoag

  He shook his head in amazement. “How you ever got that sweet girl to marry you, I will never know. How is Annie?”

  “She’s well,” Nick said. “It was a tough summer.”

  “I heard her tante had a stroke. Is she all right?”

  “Better, yeah, but that was hard on Annie.”

  Gus shook his big head. “I’ll tell you what, son: it sucks getting old. There ain’t no upside, except it beats being dead—or so I think. I’m gonna be seriously pissed off if I get to the other side and find out being dead is the best time of my life and that I gave up cigarettes and fried food for no good reason.”

  Nick arched a brow at Gus’s belly. “When did you give up fried food?”

  “Oh, you’re a smart-ass comedian now, too? You gonna take that act on the road or what?”

  “I might have to.”

  “Did Dutrow fire you?”

  “Not yet, but the day is young.”

  “You gotta keep that coonass temper of yours in check,” Gus said, wagging a finger at him. “How many years have I been telling you that?”

  “Too many.”

  “And you are too goddamned hardheaded to learn.”

  He scooped up a measure of sweet feed from the cart and dumped it in the bin of the first horse on the row. It smelled of molasses. The horse dove into the food with murderous intent, its ears pinned flat to its head.

  “I suppose you didn’t come here for a lecture or to hear about my arthritic knees, did you?” Gus asked, moving the cart to the next stall.

  “No. Have you heard from Dutrow?”

  “No. Why would I? He’s running his own show. He doesn’t need my help, I’m happy to say. He’s shaking things up, making people take notice. Looks to me like he’s got it all under control—except for you, of course.”

  “You can’t think that YouTube showboat bullshit is a good thing,” Nick challenged, though he knew exactly where this conversation would go. They’d had it already, more times than he cared to remember.

  “Can’t I? He’s made a name for himself. He’s already got the attention of all the people he needs to impress. It took me years to do that.”

  “Because you earned it.”

  Gus shrugged off the comment and pushed the cart to the next stall. “Let’s not reinvent history. I was just as full of shit as anybody. I just didn’t have social media to help me craft my image. I had to do it the old-fashioned way—kissing babies and eating rubber chicken dinners. Dutrow is the modern model of a political animal.”

  “You say that like it’s a good thing.”

  “It’s a necessary thing,” he said, moving on to the next horse.

  “How well did you know this guy before you brought him on?” Nick asked.

  “Personally? Not at all. I know the chief down in Houma—Owen Irvin. Known him for years. Owen talked Dutrow up, said he was ambitious, squeaky clean, cut out for leadership—exactly what I was looking for.” He scooped up another measure of grain. “Why? Is he cramping your style? As if I need to ask. I told him to give you a wide berth or stock up on antacids.

  “I suppose he didn’t take my advice, either,” he groused, dumping the feed. “Why would anybody listen to me? I only survived that job for twenty years despite the best efforts of all my enemies.”

  “Did it occur to you that Dutrow had probably been angling for Owen Irvin’s job and the chief just wanted rid of him?” Nick asked.

  “Of course. And that suited me fine, didn’t it? I handpicked my successor, and by all accounts except yours, he’s doing a bang-up job. What’s your problem with him now—besides you never wanting to yield to authority?”

  “He’s an asshole.”

  “You been on the record with that opinion for quite some time now,” Gus said. “I don’t think that’s why you’re in my barn at the crack of dawn. What’s this really about?”

  Nick blew out a sigh and looked out the end of the barn at Gus’s little post-retirement sanctuary. The yard was well-tended, neat as a pin. A pair of Brittany spaniels wove in and out of the banks of red and white flowers around the brick house, their noses to the ground. Gus’s fire engine red Ford F-350 dually truck sat in the driveway, spotless.

  He was enjoying his life after having been the most powerful man in the parish for nearly two decades. He had his horses and his bird dogs and his bass boat. He helped his wife with the gardening and took her out dancing every Saturday night. He had grandkids to indulge. While he had been very adept at the political gamesmanship required for attaining and hanging on to office in south Louisiana, and he had been very successful at the job itself, the job had never defined Gus Noblier. He was the same man with or without the badge. When he had decided to walk away, he had done so without a glance back.

  Nick couldn’t envision Kelvin Dutrow ever doing that. It seemed to him that every second of every day Dutrow worked to craft and maintain an image. It was all calculated, from the part in his hair to the crease in his trousers. He orchestrated every minute of his day like it was an elaborate stage production. Last night, Annie had gotten a glimpse of what might exist behind the curtain, and Dutrow hadn’t liked that at all.

  “You don’t have to like him,” Gus said. “Hell, there can’t be but five or six people in the world you can stand to tolerate at all. You just have to work with him—or around him.”

  “He threatened Annie last night,” Nick confessed.

  Gus’s face momentarily went blank, as if the news came as such a shock that it briefly shorted out his brain. “He what?”

  “She saw something he didn’t want her to see, and he made it very clear that she’d do well to forget about it.”

  “The hell!” Gus exclaimed, genuinely shocked. “What’d she see?”

  “A domestic situation between Dutrow, his fiancée, and her son. Annie said they were scared to death of him.”

  “No,” Gus scoffed. “She had to have misread that.”

  “She didn’t misread anything. She’s been on a thousand domestic calls. She knows what she’s looking at. And it’s no stretch to think it, either,” Nick said. “He’s a controlling, manipulative bully.”

  “Well, now,” Gus said, shifting from denial to rationalization. “People have said worse than that about me, for God’s sake.”

  “We’re not talking about you,” Nick said. “There were no red flags of any kind with this guy in Houma?”

  “No! I’m telling you, squeaky clean. Commendations out the wazoo. You’re barking up a wrong tree here because you don’t like the guy. Do you really think I’d bring the man on board if I had any doubts about his character?”

  “No, but then, maybe you liked the package well enough you didn’t bother to look too close under the hood.”

  Gus chucked the feed scoop down into the cart, his face flushing red, just like old times. “You have got a hell of a cheek on you, Fourcade! I gave you a job when no one would touch you with a goddamn barge pole, and you’re questioning my judgment bringing in a man with a wall full of awards?”

  “I’m saying there’s more to any man than meets the eye, and you know that, too.”

  “Why are you on about this, anyway? Don’t you have a murder to solve?”

  “A murder related to a woman who used to work in Houma, as it happens,” Nick said. “A woman with a police record and a missing arrest report.”

  “Oh, my God. And you’re gonna somehow try to twist this all around until Kelvin Dutrow is a suspect? Because he rubs you the wrong way?”

  “I never said he was a suspect,” Nick said. “And my relationship with him has got nothing to do with it.”

  Gus rolled his eyes. “Oh, no. I can see you’re as impartial as ever. You don’t like Dutrow. He offends your delicate investigative sensibilities. Now you’ve got it in that thick Cajun head of yours he insulted your wife—”
>
  “He threatened her!”

  “And you want to kick his ass!”

  “Mais yeah!” Nick barked, letting his temper slip. “For that? Yeah! Me, I want to take him apart for that. He can do whatever he will to me, but to my wife? No. Hell no!”

  Gus nodded in a way that seemed more in confirmation of his own thoughts than in validation of Nick’s. Nick clenched his jaw and walked away, frustrated with himself for falling into the trap. Now he looked like a fool and sounded like a hothead.

  Gus moved his cart and fed the next horse, and the next, unconcerned. He finished his chore, parked the cart, and wiped his hands on his jeans.

  “It’s a bad one, this murder, yeah?” he said quietly.

  “Oui,” Nick murmured. He reached out and touched the velvet nose of a blaze-faced horse with bright, curious eyes. Its flared nostrils sniffed then blew a warm breath across his hand.

  “Any suspects—other than your sheriff?”

  “I never said he was a suspect for the murder,” Nick snapped.

  “Don’t sulk,” Gus ordered. “It’s not all about you.”

  Nick cut him a look and started to pace. “The mother is as good a suspect as any. She killed a baby when she was fourteen. She’s abusing alcohol and opioids. She had an arrest for a DUI eight or nine years ago—would have been about the time she got pregnant with her son—and that may have had a drug charge attached, but it went away. I need to know more about that. Did she flip on somebody? I don’t know. There’s something hinky about it. Differing versions of the charges, depending on where you look. Dixon hasn’t been able to get her hands on the original arrest report. I asked Dutrow to reach out to his old department and get it for me. He tried to blow me off, but I insisted. Best-case scenario: I don’t think he’ll bother. Worst-case scenario: he doesn’t want me to see it.”

  “He’s got bigger fish to fry,” Gus said dismissively. “He’s not gonna use his time to track down some moldy old arrest report on a DUI—”

  “That might turn us in a direction in a murder investigation?”

  “That seems like a big stretch.”

  “Oh, well, then why fucking bother, right?” Nick said sarcastically. “Let’s only look at obvious explanations for someone killing a child—oh wait! There aren’t any.” He threw his hands up in the air. “Oh, well.”

  Gus scowled. “Bitchiness does not become you, Nick.”

  “Apathy does not become you, Gus,” he returned. “I get that you’re happily off the job, and you have so many better things to do now, like shovel horse shit and prune the azalea bushes. And maybe your old friend Owen Irvin, he won’t bother to take your calls anymore ’cause he’s out celebrating being rid of the arrogant prick heel-biter he foisted off onto Partout Parish. The guy you’re all too happy to paint as the second coming of Jesus H. Christ just so you can retire.

  “But never you mind, Gus,” he said bitterly. “It’s just a dead seven-year-old child. Thanks for nothing.”

  Fuming, he started for the Jeep. He maybe shouldn’t have expected more. Gus Noblier had always been both practical and self-serving by nature. But he had also been like family. Nick didn’t care to think it, but subconsciously he may have wanted that support as much as he wanted anything when he’d pulled into Gus’s driveway.

  “Oh, hang on,” Gus called as Nick reached for the door handle. “Turn your high horse around and come back here. I never said I wouldn’t make a phone call, for God’s sake, you hotheaded, temperamental Frenchman.”

  Nick turned and looked at him, making him wait.

  “Come on,” Gus urged. “Let’s go in my office. I need a cup of coffee . . . and a bottle of Excedrin for the pain in my ass.”

  His office was a tack room with a large, old oak desk and a kitchenette on one end. One wall was lined with well-oiled western saddles; another hung with bridles. A shelving unit held piles of saddle blankets and other assorted horse paraphernalia.

  Gus poured them each a cup of strong black coffee from an ancient Bunn coffeemaker on the counter of the kitchenette as Nick took a seat at the desk.

  “Write down what you need,” Gus ordered, setting down the thick ceramic mugs on the desktop. He eased himself into his leather-padded chair. “What’d you do with Bobby Theriot last night?”

  “Booked him as a drunk and let him sleep it off,” Nick said as he jotted down the information on a notepad.

  “He assaulted you on live television.”

  “And you think there might be somebody in this town didn’t think I had it coming? Or that I wasn’t in the wrong for subduing him?” he asked, glancing up at his old boss.

  “Dutrow thought we should charge him with assaulting an officer. Mark that on your calendar. The one and only time Kelvin Dutrow ever stuck up for me,” he said with a chuckle.

  “Are you getting anywhere with their daughter’s case?”

  “No. Maybe,” he corrected himself. He didn’t know which would be worse, having another lead turn out to be nothing, or having this particular lead come to fruition—a child sexually assaulted by another child.

  He looked over what he’d written. GENEVIEVE GAUTHIER, the dates in question, the questions he wanted answered. At the bottom of the page, he added the name KEITH KEMP.

  “What’s that last bit?” Gus asked, reading upside down as he sipped his coffee.

  “Kemp is the man Dutrow brought up from Houma to run his brand-new shiny crime scene unit. He used to be on the force down there. They worked together. I want to know why he isn’t still carrying a badge.”

  “People change jobs.”

  “Mm-hmm,” Nick said with no conviction. “This is the kind of guy who would have gotten off on writing tickets, clubbing suspects, and running lights-and-sirens down the road. He couldn’t give two shits about crime scene investigation. But here we all are in Partout Parish with a brand-new crime scene van.”

  “Joining the modern era of police work,” Gus said. “That unit will bring in revenue for the parish.”

  “Whatever,” Nick said, getting to his feet.

  Gus turned the notepad around and glanced at the list. “And I suppose you need this ASAP.”

  “You can finish your coffee first.”

  “That’s big of you.”

  “De rien,” Nick said with half a shrug. “Don’t mention it.”

  He took a swig of his coffee and set the mug back down. “Merci—for the coffee and for the help. I gotta go see if I can solve this thing before I have to file for unemployment.”

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Annie pulled in the driveway at 14 Blue Cypress and cut the engine, sitting for a moment, scanning the front of the garage, spotting the security camera. Dutrow would be the kind of man who spied on his family, she thought.

  Never mind the Roy Carvilles and Roddie Perezes of the world, uploading the private moments of strangers for sleazy instant porn. Kelvin Dutrow would be the kind of twisted, controlling creep who watched to make sure his fiancée wasn’t secretly eating Snickers bars and drinking Coca-Cola while watching The View. He’d be spying on her to make sure she was starching his shirts herself and not sneaking bags from Alouette Dry Cleaners into the house.

  His black Suburban had already been parked in his reserved spot in front of the SO when Annie had driven past at seven twenty-five. He might have spent the night there for all she knew. He could have been sitting in his office right that minute, drinking his coffee and watching her sit in his driveway via an app on his cell phone. Except that he had to be very busy this morning with the media. Between the Gauthier case, the fiasco at the hospital with Bobby Theriot, and coordinating the search for Nora Florette with the BBPD, he shouldn’t have time to sit around stalking his fiancée.

  Annie hoped so, at least. Otherwise, she was going to have to start considering other lines of work. Slushy machine attendant at the Qui
k Pik, under-endowed dancer at Club Cayenne . . .

  She walked up the sidewalk to Sharon Spicer’s front door, taking in the careful arrangement of festive fall décor. Life was all about appearances for people like Kelvin Dutrow and his fiancée. The right house, the right clothes, the right car, the just-right wreath for the front door. But it was all just a pretty house of cards if the foundation wasn’t rock-solid.

  Annie checked her watch as she rang the doorbell. Seven thirty-seven—by design, way too early for a social call. People were easier to read when they were caught off guard. They were more apt to trip up if their inclination was to lie. There was no lead time for them to get their story straight. There was no time to arrange the pretty curtains over a false façade. She rang the bell a second time to create a sense of urgency.

  A muffled call came from somewhere inside: “I’m coming!”

  Sharon Spicer appeared at the sidelight a moment later, her expression a mix of concern and consternation. She was already dressed in a loose, calf-length khaki linen skirt and a long-sleeved crisp white blouse that tied at the waist. No sloppy sweats for Sharon.

  “I’m sorry to disturb you so early, Ms. Spicer,” she said as Sharon cracked open the door. “I have some additional questions I’m hoping you can help me with. May I come in?”

  “I really don’t see how I can be of any help, Detective,” Sharon said with the faintest of polite smiles, ready to close the door.

  “That’s what people always think,” Annie said. “But sometimes it’s the smallest, most seemingly insignificant detail that turns an investigation in the right direction.”

  “I really don’t—”

  “I won’t take much of your time,” Annie promised earnestly. “We’re trying to put together a timeline that’s as detailed as possible to account for Nora Florette’s whereabouts right up until the time she went missing.”

  “I thought you said last night she had run away,” Sharon said, annoyed that she was being forced to have even another few sentences of conversation.

  “She may have,” Annie conceded. “The thing is, whether she’s missing by choice or by some other means, she’s a child, and she’s in danger. I’m sure as a mother you can imagine the panic of having your child missing.”