by Tami Hoag
“I won’t tell! I won’t tell! I won’t tell!” KJ had chanted over and over the night of his murder. What could a seven-year-old have known that would have been worth killing for?
Annie had suspected the boy, Dean, could have done something to his sister, but now she believed it was Dean Florette lying on a slab at Evangeline’s Rest.
He checked the phone again. Still no answer.
He would go to the Florette house and wait for her. They would go to Dutrow’s fiancée together.
Decision made, he hustled down the steps and jogged across the parking lot, weaving between vehicles to get to the Jeep, his head ducked down as he ran against the rain, fishing in his pocket for his keys.
He didn’t see it coming. He sensed it, throwing up an arm to block the blow before he had any conscious idea of what was happening. A fraction of a second too late.
The ground rushed up at him before he could even realize he was falling, and everything went black.
FORTY-EIGHT
Annie stepped out onto the Florettes’ front porch and leaned back against the wall, the ridges of the clapboards pressing into her aching back. Moths flung themselves at the light above. Beyond the porch cover, the rain came down hard enough that the drops bounced high as they hit the pavement under the streetlight.
The sounds of the household drifted out through the screen door—Family Feud playing on the television in the living room, a pair of overtired toddlers who should have long since been in bed fighting over a toy, Jojean crying in the dining room, and her relatives trying to console her and talking angrily of injustice and revenge.
She had identified Dean by photos Annie had taken on her phone at the funeral home of a birthmark and a particular curved scar Dean had gotten falling out of his high chair as a baby. The shock had been a terrible thing to watch. Jojean’s focus all day had been on her missing daughter. To find out that while she was worried for one child another had been murdered had to have been a nightmare come to life. Then to realize, after the initial shock, that her daughter was still missing . . .
Nora was out there somewhere, Annie thought, staring at the rain. Was she alive? Was she dead? Did she have shelter? Was she exposed to the elements? Was she alone? Was someone torturing her right this very minute? Had she gone willingly, or had she been taken? What, if anything, did her disappearance have to do with the death of KJ Gauthier—and now the death of her brother, Dean?
Annie had been halfway to convincing herself that Dean might have gone further than bullying, that he might have harmed his sister. He was at an age when boys started having urges they didn’t entirely understand or know how to control. He had no adult guidance and an appetite for violence and pornography. She didn’t want to think a kid could be a killer, but she knew plenty of cases that proved otherwise. But with Dean not just dead, but brutally murdered, she was back to square one.
For a brief moment she tried to entertain the idea that Nora could be the focus as a suspect rather than as a victim, that she could have hurt KJ, that she had hated her brother, who tormented her endlessly. But her brain just couldn’t make that plausible. Nora Florette was a silly tween girl who dotted her i’s with little hearts and made friendship bracelets in her spare time. Annie couldn’t reconcile that girl with someone so consumed with rage as to be able to bash Dean’s head in with a rock to the point that he didn’t even look real. She had to doubt Nora would have possessed the physical strength, for starters.
Cameron Spicer might have been physically able. He certainly had motive to kill Dean. It wasn’t hard to imagine months of fear and resentment fermenting inside him and pouring back out like a geyser of hatred, the kind of rage that wouldn’t quit with one or two blows.
Jaime Blynn had seen Cameron in the park during the search for Nora. No one had seen him since. But could he have gotten the better of Dean in a fight?
Annie thought back to the day before and the look of misery and dread on Cameron’s face as Dean had called him names and made fun of him in the park after school. She thought back to the night before, and the same look on the boy’s face as he had waited for whatever punishment Kelvin Dutrow had been about to unload on him. A terrified child, trapped in a hell of his mother’s making.
She couldn’t find herself feeling anything but pity for Cameron Spicer.
She pulled her phone off her belt to check her text messages, finding two from Nick: Don’t go there without me. Where are you now?
The texts had arrived seven minutes ago, while she had been speaking with the Florettes, in answer to the text she had sent him from the funeral home.
She wrote him back: Ready to leave the Florettes. Where y’at?
He had gone from the murder scene in the park to speak again to Genevieve, armed with information regarding Keith Kemp’s days as an officer with the Houma PD.
Kemp, the slimy piece of shit. Nick’s instinctive dislike of the man had been well founded, as it turned out. Few things disgusted Annie more than a cop abusing his power over vulnerable people. As a law enforcement officer, she was well aware of her position in society and her responsibility to live up to the highest standard that position demanded. But as a woman, she knew what it was to feel helpless against a man with bad intentions. She could too easily imagine the sick fear a young woman like Genevieve would have felt alone on a dark side road with a man like Keith Kemp.
That feeling called Annie’s mother to her mind. Marie Broussard had never confessed her story to anyone, as far as Annie knew, but Annie had always suspected her mother had come to Bayou Breaux to hide from a man. To hide from Annie’s father, whomever he was. Why had Genevieve come here?
Annie yawned and sighed, feeling exhausted in every way possible. Her body ached, and her brain felt fuzzy from lack of sleep. She wanted to go to Sharon Spicer to assure her they were looking for Cameron, to get any helpful information she could, and then go home and collapse for a few hours. The day had been long and hard, and tomorrow was going to be doubly so. They now had two missing children and two murders to solve. And they would have less manpower if Dutrow had his way and fired Nick . . . not that Nick would listen to him. He had not one shred of respect left for the man.
She might have felt vaguely sorry for Dutrow if she hadn’t despised him so. She thought of the expression on his face tonight as he had tried to deal with Sharon, his fiancée, out of her mind with panic for her son. Disgust, annoyance. Sharon had inconvenienced him, embarrassed him in front of his true love—the television cameras. Asshole.
Annie checked the screen of her phone again—no answer—and looked at the time. It was after ten.
She texted Nick again: R U coming or what?
She sent it and sent it again, trying to annoy him into looking at his phone. No answer was forthcoming. She stood and stared at her lock-screen picture of Justin for a few minutes, missing him.
Out of patience, she decided to just go. She wouldn’t be with Sharon long—less than an hour, she thought. If Dutrow’s vehicle was in the driveway, she would wait in the car for Nick. He couldn’t be that far behind.
She texted him again: Going on to Sharon Spicer. Need this day to be over. 14 Blue Cypress. Come when you can.
* * *
* * *
THE INITIAL BLOW knocked him down. Hitting the pavement knocked him out. A fist woke him back up. All in a span of seconds.
Move!
He scrambled to get to his hands and knees, his brain telling him to explode forward and upward, the messages shorting out on the way to his muscles, making his reactions hesitant and his movements slow.
Something as hard as steel hit him a glancing blow across the tops of his shoulders, just missing the back of his head as he lurched forward. The blow dropped him to the wet pavement again, and his breath left him as the toe of a boot caught him in the ribs.
“Coonass motherfucker, take that!”
<
br /> Kemp.
“Think you’re gonna mess with me?”
He was drunk.
“You think you’re gonna ruin me? Fuck you!”
He swung a foot back to deliver another kick, and Nick rolled over, swept his arm around, grabbed Kemp’s standing ankle, and yanked it out from under him.
Kemp hit the pavement on his ass but rolled away quickly and scrambled back to his feet and came forward, throwing a knee that caught Nick in the jaw as he tried to rise. The taste of blood filled his mouth like warm red wine as he slammed sideways into the door of the Jeep. He threw up a hand and caught hold of the bracket of the rearview mirror and pulled himself to his feet.
The rain was pouring down, blurring his vision as much as the blows to the head had done. Kemp was backlit by a sodium vapor light twenty yards away, like a silhouette from a black-and-white movie. He saw the man’s arm draw back and up, something long and slender in his hand.
A tactical baton.
Move!
Nick rolled to the side, out of the way a split second before the baton struck the Jeep’s window and shattered it.
“I will fucking kill you!” Kemp shouted.
As he swung the baton again with murderous intent, Nick stepped toward him instead of away, caught Kemp’s arm, turned his body, and twisted his shoulders. The throw was easy, effortless, lacking the violence he wanted to deliver. Kemp flipped over gracelessly, landing hard on his back, the baton bouncing from his hand.
Nick was on him in a heartbeat, straddling Kemp’s chest, his thighs tight against his rib cage, weight on his diaphragm, restricting his breathing. Weapon drawn, he pointed the barrel of the gun straight between Keith Kemp’s eyes.
“I told you not to fucking touch me, Keith!” he shouted. “I warned you, now look what you’re making me do!”
“Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!” Kemp screamed, gasping.
“You think you’re gonna kill me, you low-life piece of shit?” Nick yelled down at him, adrenaline burning through him like rocket fuel. “I’m not some seven-year-old child you can just stick a knife in! I’m not some young girl you can rape in the back seat of your squad car!”
“I’ma be sick!”
“Good! Lucky me, I’ve got a front-row seat to watch you aspirate and drown in your own vomit.”
Kemp struggled beneath him, trying without success to twist one way and then the other, trying to buck upward as he started to gag. At the last second, Nick eased his weight off just enough for the man to twist over onto his belly, spewing his stomach contents onto the pavement. Then he rode the asshole flat down to the ground with a knee in the small of his back.
Pressing Kemp’s face down into the puddle of vomit with a hand to the back of his head, he leaned close and murmured in his ear, “How do you like it, Keith? How do you like being the victim? Hmm? How does it feel to be the weak one? I can do anything I want to you right here, right now. Ain’t nobody here to stop me. I could kill you right here and get rid of your body. Ain’t nobody gonna look for you, fils de putain. Ain’t nobody gonna mourn the passing of the likes of you.
“How does that feel in the bottom of your shriveled little black heart, Keith? Hmm?”
He let the question hang for a moment, let the rain pound down on one side of Kemp’s face while the other side was buried in a puddle of bourbon and bile.
“Jesus, Nicky!” Stokes said somewhere behind him. “What are you doing riding that jackass out here in the rain? The least you could do is get a room, man. I can’t unsee that shit!”
“Just having a little Come to Jesus meeting with Mr. Kemp here.”
Stokes laughed. “Jesus don’t want no part of that, son! Put it in a holster, and let’s go inside.”
Nick holstered his weapon and rose to his feet, one boot firmly planted between Keith Kemp’s shoulder blades.
“Cuff him,” he said to Stokes.
“Then we’re all of us gonna sit down and have a chat with our good friend Keith here. And he’s gonna tell us every single thing we want to know. Aren’t you, Keith?”
He didn’t wait to hear an answer but started toward the Pizza Hut, in search of a dry shirt, checking his phone for a response from Annie as he went: Going on to Sharon Spicer. Need this day to be over. 14 Blue Cypress. Come when you can.
FORTY-NINE
Sharon paced in her kitchen, her whole body rigid with dread.
When the deputy had first brought her home, she had walked the house, hurrying from one empty room to the next to the next, hoping against hope that Cameron would be in every room she entered. Maybe he wasn’t gone at all. Maybe she had just missed seeing him. Maybe he had come back to the house while she had been out looking for him.
I DON’T WANT TO BE HERE!!!
The reminder printed on his bedroom mirror had brought a fresh surge of terror, so strong she’d had to vomit.
When Detective Broussard had called to tell her the dead boy from the park wasn’t Cameron, the sense of relief had been dizzying. She had fallen to the floor sobbing, limp, her heart racing. She didn’t know how long she had lain there before the dread had come back.
Her son was missing in a town where two children had died in three days and another had vanished.
How could this be happening to her? Two days ago, her life had been nearly perfect. She had been planning her dream wedding to a wonderful man, establishing her place in her new community, making a lovely home for herself and her son. Then, in the blink of an eye, her perfect dream had become a nightmare. There would be no wedding. Her fiancé was a monster who would throw her out of her home. Her son was missing and possibly dead.
I should have done more to protect him.
Trembling uncontrollably, Sharon dragged herself to her feet and started to pace again, forcing herself to put one foot in front of the other.
She stayed in her beautiful kitchen, her favorite room in the house, corralled by granite countertops and the glow of under-cabinet lighting. She walked around and around and around the center island, her arms banded around herself like the sleeves of a straitjacket.
She felt like she might need one as her world spun out of control, and her mind along with it.
She needed to think. She needed a plan. She always felt better when she had a plan.
* * *
* * *
THERE WAS NO sign of the sheriff’s Suburban at 14 Blue Cypress. Annie breathed a sigh of relief. Hopefully, he was holding court somewhere. He would have a lot to say to the press after the scene in Lafayette Park.
He had called Annie earlier and left a message requesting information on the identification of the body. She had texted him back that she believed the body was Dean Florette, but that they would not have a positive ID until morning. It was late, and the Florettes at least deserved to have the privacy of their grief for one night. The spotlight would find them all over again tomorrow, and everyone with a television or radio or newspaper or computer in Partout Parish and well beyond would take in the news with shock and morbid fascination. The Florettes would be celebrities for their dual tragedies, like a two-headed freak in a circus.
She parked in the driveway and checked her phone, irritated there was still no message from Nick. Surely, he had long since finished questioning Genevieve. Had he gone back to the office? Was he, at that very minute, confronting Dutrow with what he knew about Keith Kemp?
It couldn’t matter. She was tired, and she wanted this over with. She dashed through the rain to the door of the house and rang the bell and waited.
Sharon Spicer opened the door, wide-eyed and pale as a ghost.
“I’m sorry it’s so late,” Annie said. “May I come in?”
“Do you . . . have . . . news?” she asked, dragging out the question as she tried to brace herself for a bad answer. Her knuckles were white as she clung to the door.
; “No,” Annie said. “I’m sorry. No news. I need to ask you some questions about Cameron. We need as much information as possible to help us look for him.”
She let out a trembling sigh. “Yes, of course. Come in.”
“How are you doing, Sharon?” Annie asked as Sharon led the way to the kitchen. Annie imagined that would be the room where she would feel most in control—command central for moms everywhere.
“Is there someone you can call to come be with you tonight?” Annie asked. “You shouldn’t be going through this alone.”
“No, no. I’m sure Kelvin will be stopping by later,” Sharon said, forcing a brittle smile.
“Do you think that’s a good idea—for Kelvin to come here tonight?”
“Of course! He’ll know what to do. He always does.”
Annie held her tongue.
“Would you like a cup of coffee?” Sharon asked, ever the hostess. A well-raised Southern girl, she fell back on good manners and familiar routine.
“Sure. Yes, thank you,” Annie said, watching her set about the task, putting a fresh filter into the coffee machine on the counter. She surreptitiously unclipped her phone from her belt, glanced at the screen, and placed it facedown on a place mat as she took a seat at the table.
“I know everyone wants those instant machines now,” Sharon chattered. “But I don’t believe in that. It’s wasteful, and nothing beats a well-brewed cup of fresh coffee! I’m sure you agree. I imagine you drink a lot of coffee. It goes with your job. Kelvin practically has coffee in his veins, he drinks so much!”
“Sharon, can you think of anywhere Cameron might go to hide?” Annie asked. “I know you said he doesn’t have many friends, but—”
“Any friends,” Sharon corrected her. “He doesn’t have any friends. He goes to school, and he comes home, and no one calls him, and he never asks to have anyone over—not that I could allow that. Not now. Not yet. Kelvin is unused to having children around. I think it’s best to ease him into that role. That’s only fair.”