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“Really? He got in a fight over a girl, got punched in the face, and he got thrown out of the bar. I think you’d remember him telling you that.”
“Then he must not have.”
“Do you know Cody Parcelle?”
“Yeah. What about him?”
“Cody Parcelle busted Marc right in the mouth for dancing with his wife.”
Dozer shrugged. “Am I supposed to care?”
“You maybe should, yeah,” Nick said, “ ’cause you’re telling me you haven’t heard from your best friend since Saturday night, when he apparently dumped your sorry ass to go dancing, and the last anyone saw of him was him getting punched in the face and thrown out of a bar, and now some people think he’s lying in the morgue atOur Lady with his face shot off with a shotgun. So yeah, me, I think you would care about that. You have a curious lack of response, Mr. Cormier. I wonder why that is.”
“Maybe we’re not as close as you think,” Dozer said.
“Maybe you’re the one killed him,” Nick said, mostly just to see the reaction.
The shock on Dozer’s face seemed genuine. “What?! No! No fucking way! Are you out of your head? Why would I kill Marc?”
“I don’t know. Maybe you were mad he went dancing without you. Maybe you were mad he didn’t invite you to go hunting Sunday. You’ve demonstrated to me here tonight that you have a temper when you drink, you’re impulsive, and you don’t make the best choices.”
“Jesus fucking Christ,” the big man muttered to himself, turning around in the kitchen as if to look for witnesses to this madness. “You’re crazy, Fourcade.”
“You’re not the first to say it,” Nick remarked. “But a lot of them that did, they’re sitting in prison now. So the joke is on them, yeah?”
He smiled that unnerving, predatory smile.
A fine sheen of sweat glazed Cormier’s bald head. “I need to go to the bathroom,” he said, looking longingly down the dark hall.
The little burner phone on the table began to vibrate, and Dozer’s face dropped.
“And there’s that phone you told me you don’t have,” Nick said. He picked it up and tossed it across to Cormier, who caught it like he was catching a hand grenade.
“You really shouldn’t lie to me, Dozer,” Nick said. “That’s not gonna work out for you.”
Dozer stared at the phone like it might explode.
“Aren’t you gonna answer?”
“No. They’ll call back,” he said stupidly.
“I bet they will,” Nick said, moving toward the door. “If it turns out to be Marc, you give him my regards and tell him to call his wife.”
23
“The fightat Outlaw tookplace around eleven thirty Saturday night,” Stokes said, snagging the last cold piece of sausage pizza from the box. “They both got thrown out of the bar. They both went somewhere else. The wife went home. She says Cody got home around two, two thirty. Plenty of time in that window to get up to all kinds of mischief.”
Nick poured himself a cup of coffee and took a long pull on it. He’d sent Annie on to pick up Justin from her cousin Remy and get him tucked into bed at a reasonable hour. She’d gone without argument, emotionally drained from the day. Nick had stayed to make some notes and get the debriefing from Stokes on the Parcelles. It was just the two of them now in the conference room.
“I tried calling Cody Parcelle,” Stokes said. “The call went straight to voicemail and the mailbox was full. I tried calling the uncle in Houston, same thing. Tried calling the sales office for the auction, and they were closed for the night.”
“If you can’t get him or the uncle first thing in the morning,” Nick said, “call the local sheriff’s office there. They can send a deputy to the sales barn.”
“You really think he’d kill a man for dancing with his wife?”
“I don’t know. We don’t know what the history there might be. Maybe that wasn’t the first time. We know they did business together as well. Maybe he already had a beef with him. I know we need to talk to him.”
“What about that business card on the corpse?” Stokes asked. “If that was an estimate Mercier gave—”
