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“Do I at least get to have my moment for making the Cody Parcelle connection?”
“Maisyeah,” Nick said. “You had it, well done, and now the moment is over. Move on. We’ve got cases to solve.”
“You’re a heartless bastard, you know that?”
“Whatever.”
“All right,” Stokes said, giving up. “I’m outta here.”
“Hot date?”
“With my own bed,” he said, stretching his arms up over his head and twisting at a kink in his back. “I’m still seeing that body when I close my eyes. That’s enough to make a man celibate. For a minute, anyway. You heading home?”
“I’ll swing by the Mercier house first. Make sure those town boys are on duty, then go home to my wife and son. Try to be normal for a few hours.”
“Nicky, you weren’t ever normal, man,” Stokes pointed out.
“C’est vrai,” Nick said, turning out the lights as they left the conference room. “True enough.”
—
It was after ten when Nick drove into the Quail Run neighborhood. The streets were quiet, residents tucked into their lovely homes, watching the late news on TV. The lights were on in the Mercier family room. Will Faulkner’s BMW sedan sat in the driveway. He wasn’t going to abandon Melissa Mercier just for the sake of appearances. If Marc Mercier was still alive somewhere, he was losing ground on his marriage.
Nick thought again about the scene in the Mercier living room, the picture of Melissa Mercier and her baby with Will Faulkner sitting on the arm of the love seat. It was difficult to imagine either of them killing someone, but it wouldn’t have been the first time Nick had put handcuffs on the least likely suspect. People found all kinds of excuses to do the most terrible things.
The call to Melissa from Robbie Fontenot’s phone…She claimed not to know him. Dozer Cormier claimed Marc and Robbie weren’t friends. How would Fontenot have had Melissa Mercier’s number…unless she gave it to him or Marc gave it to him? And why would Marc give his wife’s phone number to a man he didn’t associatewith? Could Robbie Fontenot have a different role in this than anyone had considered? A longtime addict, out of work, needing money…$2,450 Annie had found in a box in his bedroom at his mother’s house…What had he done to earn that money?
Murders had been committed for a lot less. And while Melissa Mercier had no reason to know Robbie Fontenot, Will Faulkner was a native to Bayou Breaux who admitted to knowing Robbie’s mother. It wasn’t a stretch to think he might know Robbie as well.
Nick turned these thoughts over in his mind as he circled the block of the Mercier house, looking for anything out of place, spotting the police department patrol car sitting down the side street from Quail Trace. The officer had a good vantage point to see any cars that might come prowling around. He wouldn’t be able to see anyone approaching the house on foot from the rear, but he was just seconds away in the event of a 911 call.
Nick still would have rather had one of his own sitting on the house, but this would have to do. He drove past the patrol car on his way out of the development, briefly making eye contact with the officer at the wheel. At least he wasn’t sitting there looking at his phone.
The fifteen-minute drive out of Bayou Breaux was usually decompression time, time to put the day’s work in its compartment in his brain and shut the door for a few hours. But there was no escaping the endless questions in his head that night. The tangle of facts and theories spun around and around, moving like an elaborate three-dimensional shell game.
He tried to turn it off as he drove down the gravel road to his little piece of heaven on the bayou. The place had been a forgotten shambles when he’d bought it, an old-style Acadian house with rotting porches, all but swallowed up by weeds and vines. All he had cared about at the time was the peace of mind it gave him to be apart from civilization and a part of the natural wild beauty of this place. Reclaiming the house had been an exercise in catharsis. Then Annie had come into his life, and in the years since, with her as hispartner, they had remodeled and added on, and turned the house into a home, and turned the surrounding property into a sanctuary. His blood pressure dropped every time he turned down the driveway.
Annie had fallen asleep reading to Justin and lay curled around him in his bed, the light from the bedside lamp glowing softly on her skin. Nick reached out to pick up the book, hoping not to wake her, but her eyes fluttered open. She blinked to focus and looked up at him with a soft smile turning her lips.
“Go back to sleep,” he whispered, leaning down to kiss her forehead.
“No,” she said softly.
She disentangled herself from their son, and Nick helped her up, taking the opportunity to hold her for a minute before bending down to kiss his son good night.
“Did I miss anything?” she asked as they closed the door and headed down the hall to their room.
“The lab lost Marc Mercier’s DNA sample.”
“No.”
“I get to explain that to his family tomorrow. Two days and we still don’t have an ID on that body. That’s unacceptable.”
Annie slipped an arm around his waist and leaned into him. “You don’t control the lab.”
“Clearly not. I feel like I’m not controlling much of anything right now,” he said. “We’ve got a three-ring circus going on. That lab provides all the clowns.”
“Well, for what it’s worth, I do find the idea of you in britches and boots, cracking a whip, kind of a turn-on,” she said, giving him a sassy look.
