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“Is he a hard drinker?”
Mercier shrugged. “Compared to what? He likes to toss back a few, like anybody.”
“And you’re sure he doesn’t have a girlfriend?”
“None that I know of,” Mercier answered, putting his attention to neatly rolling up the sleeves of his shirt, revealing an elaborate and colorful sleeve of tattoo ink.
“Your brother got ink like that?” Stokes asked.
“No. Marc, he wouldn’t mess with perfection.”
“What about the wife?” Nick asked. “She got a boyfriend?”
“I don’t know. Mama thinks she’s got something going on with her boss.”
“What do you think?”
“I don’t give two shits, but I don’t think Will Faulkner bats from that side of the plate, to be honest.”
“Where does she work?” Stokes asked.
“She manages vacation rental properties for Bayou Realty.”
“Y’all have a fishing camp Marc might have gone to?” Nick asked.
“Yeah, down the bayou on Lake Aucoin. He could be there if Missy didn’t Airbnb it up full of out-of-town sports this weekend,” Luc said, his attention going now to the road as a van pulled into the property on the bayou side. His tour group. “There’s never enough money to suit the princess.”
“You didn’t go down there and check?” Nick asked.
He heaved a sigh. “Me, I only got so much patience for Marc’s bullshit temper tantrums. I got a business to run, and I can’t just drop everything and go looking to see where my little brother’s sulking this time.
“I gotta go,” he said, pushing away from the truck.
Nick handed him a business card. “If you hear from him, give me a call. We’ll put out an alert on his vehicle.”
“You do that,” he said as he dropped the last of his smoke on the crushed shell and ground it out with the toe of his boot. Done with the conversation, he got in the truck and fired up the diesel engine to drive thirty yards across the road.
“How about that?” Stokes said as they watched him go. “Start the day with a Who Is It, now we got us a What the Hell, and it’s only lunchtime. What do you think the odds are our dead guy and our missing guy are one and the same? Could we get that lucky?”
“You know I don’t believe in luck, me,” Nick said, glancing back to see Kiki Mercier duck inside from the window. “Human nature, though…that’s something else again.”
He let the thought trail off. In his experience, crime almost always turned out to be depressingly, stupidly simple. Criminal masterminds were the stuff of movies and TV. People did what they did for simple reasons—money, lust, jealousy, fear. Pick a thread and follow it to the end. Luck was seldom necessary.
7
Bayou Realty,once housed onthe first floor of a small historic building in downtown Bayou Breaux, had grown and prospered its way to one of the newer business complexes on the north side of town. A cluster of single-story Caribbean-style brick buildings, Bayou Professional Park boasted an architecture firm, a mortgage and title business, a trio of accountants, and an interior design firm, with the realty office the centerpiece of the complex.
Nick parked in the lot and sat for a moment, sorting through his thoughts. What to say, what not to say to Melissa Mercier. He had a corpse with no ID, no vehicle nearby, no cell phone, and no face. The business card with a dollar amount written in Marc Mercier’s hand found in the pocket of the dead man could have been an estimate given to a customer, but it could just as easily have been a price giventothe junk dealer by someone wanting to sell something.
He had nothing concrete to indicate the body was that of Marc Mercier, and if it turned out to be Marc Mercier, the wife would be on the list of potential suspects, if what his family members had said was anything to go by. To try to glean as much information aspossible while giving away as little as possible was the best tack, but that would be a tricky dance to accomplish.
Word that a mutilated body had been found south of town would be burning up the gossip grapevines by now. Stokes had already texted him to say KJUN radio had the news on the air.
Alphonse Arceneaux had unknowingly bought them some time ahead of the media by calling his friend Sergeant Rodrigue directly, but the subsequent callouts to deputies and the crime scene unit had been picked up by police scanners, and two TV news vans had shown up as they had processed the scene. Though they had been kept at a distance and had been given no official comment to run with, the lack of details wouldn’t stop them from going on air with what little information they had. There was a chance Melissa Mercier had already heard the news.
A young woman with a bright pageant-girl smile lighting her face greeted Nick from behind the reception desk as he walked into the office.
“How can we help you to have a great day today, sir?” she asked as if the prospect thrilled her.
