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“What?”
“I heard it from a dispatcher. What were you hoping to find at his place?”
“Robbie Fontenot’s MacBook,” Annie said. “He made a joke to someone recently that he was investigating police corruption in Bayou Breaux, and he used to have a hobby of making videos, like documentary-type things. I’m gonna hope he saved some evidence for us.”
“Annie, did he have an iPhone?” Wynn Dixon asked, peering around her computer screen.
“Yeah. I was told he used to make videos all the time on his phone. But we think his phone is with his car, wherever that may be.”
“We can get a warrant for his iCloud content,” Dixon offered. “If he was making videos with his iPhone, that automatically saves to the cloud. You don’t need the phone or his computer. The content from all his Apple devices goes to his iCloud account.”
“I hadn’t even thought about that,” Annie admitted. “He has an old Mac desktop sitting at his mother’s house, too.”
“If the operating system is up to date enough and if you’ve got his passwords, you should be able to access his content from thatmachine,” Wynn said. “Even if you don’t have the passwords, we can always hack into it. It’ll just take longer.”
“And that computer is sitting in his mother’s house,” Annie said, standing up. “We may not need a warrant at all.”
She picked up her phone and texted B’Lynn to let her know she was on her way over.
40
Nick watchedthe argument godown. He watched their faces, watched their body language, the gestures. He watched Marc Mercier start to pull the blue tarp off Robbie Fontenot’s Toyota, then turn to argue more with Dozer.
He was too far away to hear anything but the odd angry exclamation, but the one that counted most came through loud and clear:We killed a man!
He watched Dozer Cormier turn to walk away, and that fast Marc Mercier grabbed an axe off the top of the woodpile and swung it as hard as he could.
“Drop it! Drop it!” Nick shouted, bursting from the cover of the trees.
He drew his weapon as he ran, but the axe was already in motion, and the blade buried itself in the upper right quadrant of Dozer’s chest as he twisted around at the sound of Nick’s voice. He screamed and staggered sideways as the blade sank into his flesh, his momentum carrying the big man hard into the side of his truck. He flailed at the axe handle with his left hand, roaring like awounded elephant. As the axe dislodged and fell to the ground, blood gushed in a torrent, and Dozer dropped to his knees.
Nick barreled into Marc Mercier with the force of a freight train, running him sideways into the wood pile.
“Get on the ground! Get on the ground!” he shouted, riding Marc down face-first, his knee between Mercier’s shoulder blades, knocking the wind out of him as he landed.
“Marc Mercier, you’re under arrest. And you had better hope to God that man doesn’t die.”
41
It wasstrange to feelany kind of optimism, Annie thought as she pulled to the curb in front of the Fontenot house, but the idea of finding something on Robbie Fontenot’s computer had rekindled the tiniest ember of hope inside her. Foolish, she supposed. Robbie had accumulated a pile of money doing something, and that something was quite possibly illegal. But the offhand remark he had tossed at Eli McVay stuck with her: that he was investigating police corruption. She was going to hang on to that tiny sliver of maybe, for Robbie and for B’Lynn.
A tan sedan was parked in the shade in front of the house next door, but Annie didn’t think anything of it as she got out of her vehicle. Her mind was occupied, wondering if Robbie might have written his passwords down somewhere, or if B’Lynn might know them. She knew a few mothers who didn’t allow their teenagers to keep their passwords to themselves. It wasn’t hard to see B’Lynn as one of them, even if her son wasn’t a teenager anymore. The computer on Robbie’s desk dated to his school days.
She climbed the steps to the front porch, rang the doorbell, andwaited. B’Lynn had said she would be home, had answered Annie’s text withOK.
The heavy mahogany interior door stood open, which seemed a bit odd, but she might have wanted to let the fresh morning air in to lift the stagnant heaviness of her emotions from the house.
Annie rang the doorbell again as her anxiety began to stir. Slowly. Hesitantly. She tried to discount it. This was the Belle Terre neighborhood in broad daylight on a weekday. Next door, the neighbor’s gardeners were swarming around with lawn mowers and Weedwackers. The strong smell of gasoline perfumed the air. Just a normal day.
“B’Lynn?” she called through the screen door. “It’s Annie!”
The stillness of the place suddenly bothered her. What-ifs began to itch at the back of her mind. This woman had been through so much, all of it sad and crushingly disappointing. The night before she had come to the conclusion that the son she had fought so hard to save was very probably dead. She had spent the last ten years fighting for him, and just like that, her mission was over.
“B’Lynn?” she called again, trying not to imagine her dead by her own hand. “I’m coming in!”
“We’re upstairs, Detective!”
We? We who?Annie wondered. Had B’Lynn’s daughter come home? Or maybe she had called on her own mother to come for emotional support.
