A Thin Dark Line Read online

  "Mama, Mama! We're home! Look what Uncle Sos got me at Disney World! It's Minnie Mouse!"

  The kitchen door banged shut and she stopped in her tracks.

  The person sitting at the kitchen table wasn't her mother. Father Goetz rose from the chrome-legged chair, his face grave, and Enola Meyette, a fat woman who always smelled of sausage, came away from the sink drying her hands on a red checked towel.

  "Allons, chérie," Mrs. Meyette said, holding out one dimpled hand. "We go down the store. Get you a candy, oui?"

  Annie had known right then something was terribly wrong. The memory still brought back the same sick twisting in her stomach she had felt that day as Enola Meyette led her from the kitchen. She could see herself clearly at nine, eyes wide with fear, a choke hold on her new stuffed Minnie Mouse, as she was pulled away from the truth Father Goetz had come to deliver: that while Annie was on her first-ever vacation trip with Tante Fanchon and Uncle Sos, Marie Broussard had taken her own life.

  She remembered the gentle lies of well-meaning people, and the sense of isolation that grew with each of those lies. An isolation she had carried inside her for a long, long time.

  Annie had taken it upon herself to answer Josie's questions when the sheriff's office had sent its representatives to break the news to Hunter Davidson and his wife. And Josie, perhaps sensing a kindred spirit, had made an instant and yet-to-be-severed connection.

  "You could have come to the sheriff's office and asked for me," Annie said.

  Josie tapped the alligator again and watched it swing. "I didn't want to be with people. Not if I couldn't see Grandpa Hunt and ask him what really happened."

  "I was there."

  "Did he really try to kill that guy?"

  Annie chose her words with care. "He might have if Detective Fourcade hadn't seen the gun in time."

  "I wish he had shot him dead," Josie declared.

  "People can't take the law into their own hands, Jose."

  "Why? Because it's against the rules? That guy killed my mom. What about the rules he broke? He should have to pay for what he did."

  "That's what the courts are for."

  "But the judge let him go!" Josie cried, frustration and pain tangling in a knot in her throat. The same frustration and pain Annie had heard in Hunter Davidson's broken sobs.

  "Just for now," Annie said, hoping the promise wasn't really as empty as it felt to her. "Just until we can get some better evidence against him."

  Tears welled up in Josie's eyes and spilled over. "Then why can't you find it? You're a cop and you're my friend. You're supposed to understand! You said you'd help! You're supposed to make sure he gets punished! Instead, you put my grandpa in jail! I hate this!" She hit her hand against the steering wheel, blasting the horn. "I hate everything!"

  Josie scrambled from the driver's seat and dashed toward the law enforcement center. Annie hopped out of the Jeep and started after her. But she pulled herself up short as she caught sight of Belle Davidson and Thomas Watson, the Davidsons' attorney, coming out the side door.

  Belle Davidson was a formidable woman in a demure sweater-and-pearls disguise. A steel magnolia of the first order. The woman's lips thinned as her gaze lit on Annie. She disconnected herself from Josie's embrace and started across the lot.

  "You have an awful nerve, Deputy Broussard," she declared. "Throwing my husband in jail instead of my daughter's murderer, then playing up to my granddaughter as if you have a right to her devotion."

  "I'm sorry you feel that way, Mrs. Davidson," Annie said. "But we couldn't let your husband shoot Marcus Renard."

  "He wouldn't have been driven to such desperation if not for the incompetence of you people in the sheriff's department. You let a guilty man run free all over town due to carelessness and oversight. By God, I've got half a mind to shoot him myself."

  "Belle!" the lawyer whined as he caught up with his client. "I told you, you hadn't ought to say that in front of people!"

  "Oh, for God's sake, Thomas. My daughter has been murdered. People would think it strange if I didn't say these things."

  "We're doing the best we can, Mrs. Davidson," Annie said.

  "And what have you come up with? Nothing. You're a disgrace to your uniform—when you're wearing one."

  She gave Annie's faded T-shirt a sharply dubious look that had likely sent many a Junior Leaguer home in tears.

  "I'm not working your daughter's case, ma'am. It's up to Detectives Fourcade and Stokes."

  Belle Davidson's expression only hardened. "Don't make excuses, Deputy. We all have obligations in this life that go beyond boundaries. You found my daughter's body. You saw what—" She cut herself off, glancing down at Josie. When she turned back to Annie, her dark eyes glittered with tears. "You know. How can you turn your back on that?

  How can you turn your back on that and still show your face to my granddaughter?"

  "It's not Annie's fault, Grandma," Josie said, though the gaze she lifted to Annie's face was tainted with disappointment.

  "Don't say that, Josie," Belle admonished softly as she slipped an arm around her granddaughter's shoulders and pulled her close. "That's what's wrong with the world today. No one will take responsibility for anything."

  "I want justice, too, Mrs. Davidson," Annie said. "But it has to happen within the system."

  "Deputy, the only thing we've gotten within the system so far is injustice."

  As they walked away, Josie looked back over her shoulder, her brown eyes huge and sad. For an instant Annie felt as if she were watching herself walking away into the painful haze of her past, the memory pulling out from the core of her like a string.

  "What happened, Tante Fanchon? Where's Mama?"

  "Your maman, she's in heaven, ma 'tite fille."

  "But why?"

  "It was an accident, chérie. God, He looked away."

  "I don't understand."

  "Non, chère 'tite bete. Someday. When you get older..."

  But she had hurt right then, and promises of later had done nothing to soothe the pain.

  3

  "We'll get him one way or another, Slick."

  Fourcade cast Chaz Stokes a glance out the corner of his eye as he raised his glass. "There's plenty of people who think we already tried 'another.' "

  "Fuck 'em," Stokes declared, and tossed back a shot. He stacked the glass on the bar with the half dozen others they had accumulated. "We know Renard's our man. We know what he did. The little motherfucker is wrong. You know it and I know it, my friend. Am I right or am I right?"

  He clamped a hand on Fourcade's shoulder, a buddy gesture that was met with a stony look. Camaraderie was the rule in police work, but Fourcade didn't have the time or the energy to waste on it. His focus was, by necessity, on his caseload and himself—getting himself back on the straight and narrow path he had fallen from in New Orleans.

  "The state ought to plug his dick into a socket and light him up like a goddamn Christmas tree," Stokes muttered. "Instead, the judge lets him walk on a fucking technicality, and Pritchett throws Davidson in the can. The world's a fucking loony bin, but I guess you already knew that."

  Par for the damn course, Nick thought, but he kept it to himself, choosing to treat Stokes's invitation to share as a rhetorical remark. He didn't talk about his days in the NOPD or the incident that had ultimately forced him out of New Orleans. As far as he had ever seen, the truth was of little interest to most people, anyway. They chose to form their opinions based on whatever sensational tidbit of a story took their fancy. The fact that he had been the one to find Pamela Bichon's small amethyst ring, for instance.

  He wondered if anyone would have suspected Chaz Stokes of planting the ring, had Stokes been the one to discover it. Stokes had come to Bayou Breaux from somewhere in Crackerland, Mississippi, four years ago, a regular Joe with no past to speak of. If Stokes had found the ring, would the focus now be solely on the injustice of Renard walking free, or would the waters of public opinion have been
muddied anyway? Lawyers had a way of stirring up the muck like catfish caught in the shallows, and Richard Kudrow was kingfish of that particular school of bottom feeders.

  Nick had to think Kudrow would have cast aspersions on the evidence regardless of who had recovered it. He didn't want to think that his finding it had tainted it, didn't want to think that his presence on the case would block Pam Bichon from getting justice.

  Didn't want to think. Period.

  Stokes poured another shot from the bottle of Wild Turkey. Nick tossed it back and lit another cigarette. The television hanging in one corner of the dimly lit lounge was showing a sitcom to a small, disinterested audience of businessmen who had come in from the hotel next door to bullshit over chunky glasses of Johnnie Walker and Cajun Chex mix served in plastic ashtrays.

  There were no other customers, which was why Stokes had suggested this place over the usual cop hangouts. Nick would have sooner done his brooding in private. He didn't want questions. He didn't want commiseration. He didn't want to rehash the day's events. But Stokes was his partner on the Bichon case, and so Nick made this concession—to pound down a few together, as if they had something more in common than the job.

  He shouldn't have been drinking at all. It was one of the vices he had tried to leave in New Orleans, but it and some others had trailed after him to Bayou Breaux like stray dogs. He should have been home working through the intricate and consuming moves of the Tai Chi, attempting to cleanse his mind, to focus the negative energy and burn it out. Instead, he sat here at Laveau's, stewing in it.

  The whiskey simmered in his belly and in his veins, and he decided he was just about past caring where he was. Well on his way toward oblivion, he thought. And he'd be damn glad when he got there. It was the one place he might not see Pam Bichon lying dead on the floor.

  "I still think about what he did to her," Stokes murmured, fingers absently peeling away strips of the label from his beer bottle. "Don't you?"

  Day and night. During consciousness and what passed for sleep. The images stayed with him. The paleness of her skin. The wounds: gruesome, hideous, so at odds with what she had been like in life. The expression in her eyes as she stared up through the mask—stark, hopeless, filled with a kind of terror that couldn't be imagined by anyone who hadn't faced a brutal death.

  And when the images came to him, so did the sense of violence that must have been thick in the air at the time of her death. It hit him like a wall of sound, intense, powerful, poisonous rage that left him feeling sick and shaken.

  Rage was no stranger. It boiled inside him now.

  "I think about what she went through," Stokes said. "What she must have felt when she realized ... what he did to her with that knife. Christ." He shook his head as if to shake loose the images taking root there. "He's gotta pay for that, man, and without that ring we got shit for a bill. He's gonna walk, Nicky. He's gonna get away with murder."

  People did. Every day. Every day the line was crossed and souls disappeared into the depths of an alternate dimension. It was a matter of choice, a battle of wills. Most people never came close enough to the edge to have any knowledge of it. Too close to the edge and the force could pull you across like an undertow.

  "He's probably sitting in his office thinking that right now," Stokes went on. "He's been working nights, you know. The rest of his firm can't stand to have him around. They know he's guilty, same as we do. Can't stand looking at him, knowing what he did. I'll bet he's sitting there right now, thinking about it."

  Right across the alley. The architectural firm of Bowen & Briggs was housed in a narrow painted brick building that faced the bayou; flanked by a shabby clapboard barbershop and an antiques store. The same building that housed Bayou Realty on the first floor. Bowen & Briggs was likely the only place on the block inhabited tonight.

  "You know, man, somebody ought to do Renard," Stokes whispered, cutting a wary glance at the bartender. He stood at the end of the bar, chuckling over the sitcom.

  "Justice, you know," Stokes said. "An eye for an eye."

  "I shoulda let Davidson shoot him," Nick muttered, and wondered again why he had not. Because there was still a part of him that believed the system was supposed to work. Or maybe he hadn't wanted to see Hunter Davidson sucked over to the dark side.

  "He could have an accident," Stokes suggested. "It happens all the time. The swamp is a dangerous place. Just swallows people up sometimes, you know."

  Nick looked at him through the haze of smoke, trying to judge, trying to gauge. He didn't know Stokes well enough. Didn't know him at all beyond what they had shared on the job. All he had were impressions, a handful of adjectives, speculation hastily made because he didn't care to waste his time on such things. He preferred to concentrate on focal points; Stokes was part of the periphery of his life. Just another detective in a four-man department. They worked independently of one another most of the time.

  Stokes's mouth twisted up on one corner. "Wishful thinking, pard, wishful thinking. Idn' that what they do down in New Orleans? Pop the bad guys and dump 'em in the swamp?"

  "Lake Pontchartrain, mostly."

  Stokes stared at him a moment, uncertain, then decided it was a joke. He laughed, drained his beer, and slid off the stool, reaching into his hip pocket for his wallet. "I gotta split. Gotta meet with the DA on Thibidoux in the morning." The grin flashed again. "And I got a hot date tonight. Hot and sweet between the sheets. If I'm lyin', I'm dyin'."

  He dropped a ten on the bar and clamped a hand on Nick's shoulder one last time. "Protect and serve, pard. Catch you later."

  Protect and serve, Nick thought. Pamela Bichon was dead. Her father was sitting in jail, and the man who had killed her was free. Just who had they protected and what purpose had been served today?

  "Pritchett's fit to kill somebody."

  "I'd suggest Renard," Annie muttered, scowling at her menu.

  "More apt to be your idol, Fourcade."

  She caught the sarcasm, the jealousy, and rolled her eyes at her dinner partner. She had known A. J. Doucet her whole life. He was one of Tante Fanchon and Uncle Sos's brood of actual nephews and nieces, related by blood rather than by serendipity, as she was. As children, they had chased each other around the big yard out at the Corners—the cafe/boat landing/convenience store Sos and Fanchon ran south of town. During their high school years, A.J. had taken on the often unappreciated role of protector. Since then he had gone from friend to lover and back as he proceeded through college and law school and into the Partout Parish District Attorney's Office.

  They had yet to agree on a description for their current relationship. The attraction that had come and gone between them over the years seemed never to come or go for both of them at the same time.

  "He's not my idol," she said irritably. "He happens to be the best detective we've got, that's all. I want to be a detective. Of course I watch him. And why should you care? You and I are not, I repeat, not an item, A.J."

  "You know how I feel about that too."

  Annie blew out a sigh. "Can we skip this argument tonight? I've had a rotten day. You're supposed to be my best friend. Act like it."

  He leaned toward her across the small white-draped table, his brown eyes intense, the hurt in them cutting at her conscience. "You know there's more there than that, Annie, and don't give me that 'we're practically related' bullshit you've been wading in recently. You are no more related to me than you are related to the President of the United States."

  "Which I could be, for all I know," she muttered, sitting back, retreating in the only way she could without making a scene.

  As it was, they had become the object of speculation for another set of diners across the intimate width of Isabeau's. She suspected it was her blackening eye that had caught the other woman's attention. Out of uniform, she supposed she looked like an abused partner rather than an abused cop.

  "It's not the cops Pritchett should be pissed at," she said. "Judge Monahan made the ruling. H
e could have let that ring in."

  "And left the door open for appeal? What would be the point of that?"

  The waitress interrupted the discussion, bringing their drinks, her gaze cutting from Annie's battered face to A.J.

  "She's gonna spit in your etouffee, you know," Annie remarked.

  "Why should she assume I gave you that shiner? I could be your high-priced, ass-kicking divorce lawyer."

  Annie sipped her wine, dismissing the subject. "He's guilty, A.J."

  "Then bring us the evidence—obtained by legal means."

  "By the rules, like it's a game. Josie wasn't far wrong."

  "What about Josie?"

  "She came to see me today. Or, rather, she came with her grandmother to see Hunter Davidson in jail."

  "The formidable Miss Belle."

  "They both tore into me."

  "What for? It's not your case."

  "Yeah, well..." she hedged, sensing that A.J. wouldn't understand the strong pull she was feeling. Everything in its place—that was A.J. Every aspect of life was supposed to fit into one of the neat little compartments he had set up, while everything in Annie's life seemed to be tossed into one big messy pile she was continually sorting through, trying to make sense of. "I'm tied to it. I wish I could do more to help. I look at Josie and..."

  A.J.'s expression softened with concern. He was too handsome for his own good. Curse of the Doucet men with their square jaws and high cheekbones and pretty mouths. Not for the first time, Annie wished things between them could have been as simple as he wanted.

  "The case has been hell on everyone, honey," he said. "You've done more than your part already."

  Therein lay the problem, Annie thought as she picked at her dinner. What exactly was her part? Was she supposed to draw the boundary at duty and absolve herself of any further responsibility?

  "We all have obligations in this life that go beyond boundaries."

  She had already gone above and beyond the call involving herself with Josie. But, even without Josie, she would have felt this case pulling at her, would have felt Pam Bichon pulling at her from that limbo inhabited by the restless souls of victims.