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“Marc’s a good guy,” he said. “He is. I just get frustrated with him on Missy’s behalf. Marc needs to be the hero. He always has. Leading the high school football team to victory in the state championships, winning a scholarship to Tulane, being the first in his family to get a college degree. Of course it’s all commendable, but sometimes it’s at the expense of others, you know?
“I can’t fault him that he came back when his family needed him, but it’s been awful hard on Melissa. She doesn’t know anyone here but me. She doesn’t fit in here. Small-town life is not as easy as people want to believe. In fact, it can be damned complicated. She might as well have moved to France. It’s just as foreign to her.
“She never thought they’d be here this long. She believed they would be moving back up north at the end of the summer. She was ready to start packing. Then she read in the local paper Marc had volunteered to coach youth football this fall. It was big news, you know. The hometown hero saving the day for a team whose coach—Marc’s old coach—had a heart attack. Marc couldn’t say no to him, but then he didn’t have the nerve to tell Missy. That went over like the proverbial lead balloon, let me tell you.”
“I can imagine.”
“My mother always says wives don’t like surprises unless they come in a box from a jewelry store.”
“You gave Melissa a job when they moved here,” Nick said. “What does she do for you?”
“She needed something to do or she’d lose her mind,” Faulkner said. He took a sip of his coffee and sighed. “I’m lucky to have her. She manages my vacation rentals, takes care of the marketing, booking, all of it. It’s something she can handle even with having the baby and all. I’d be happy to have her stay for my own selfish reasons,” he admitted. “But I understand why she’d rather go.”
“And if Marc didn’t want to go with her?”
He shrugged. “Marriage is hard—or so they tell me.”
“You’re single?”
“Much to my mother’s chagrin,” he joked, then sobered. “This dead body. Do you think it’s Marc?”
“I don’t know,” Nick said, setting his cup aside as he stood to go. “But I’ll find out who it is, and I’ll find out why he’s dead, and I’ll find out who made him that way. Thank you for the coffee, Mr. Faulkner. And thank you for your time.”
8
The PizzaHut, a lowsnot-green cinder block building with bars on the windows and doors, had originally been the offices of a road construction business back in the seventies and eighties. The property had been swallowed up by the expansion of the law enforcement center in the early nineties and the building given over to the sheriff’s office’s small squad of detectives. It had been christened the Pizza Hut due to the amount of pies delivered there on a regular basis.
The large front office housed a bullpen of half a dozen beat-up Steelcase desks loaded down with computers and paperwork and the assorted oddities cops collected as souvenirs over their careers. Annie sat at her desk in the middle row, picking the fried shrimp out of a po’boy, hoping the calories would bring a fresh surge of energy. The morning had drained her.
Only two other desks were occupied. Wynn Dixon sat in the back of the room, deep in concentration as she hammered away at her keyboard. A tall, athletic woman with a shock of short hair recently dyed purple for LSU homecoming, she was their designated tech person. The desk to Annie’s right was occupied by DeeboJeffcoat, their guy on the Acadiana multiagency drug task force. In his early thirties, he was small and wiry, with a greasy mullet and an atrocious, scruffy neck beard he had grown as part of his undercover meth-head look. Eyes closed, grooving to the music on his AirPods, he bounced in his seat, playing imaginary drums with a pair of pencils.
Annie thanked God for keeping Nick out of the office for the time being. She wanted a clearer picture of what she was dealing with regarding the disappearance of Robbie Fontenot before she had to make her argument to pursue the case on her own.
She started with the story of Robbie Fontenot as told by his arrest record, an unsentimental version of a drug addict’s history, from possession to petty theft. She inserted B’Lynn’s version of the story between the lines, the weight of a mother’s sadness pressing down on her heart even as her trained detective’s eye marked the cold hard facts.
He had been in and out of jail at least as much as he had been in and out of rehab. Never for very long. Never for very much. His possession charges never crossed the threshold for serious prison time. He had never been charged with the intent to sell a controlled substance. His stealing had never risen to the level of a felony.
Curious, Annie thought, though what she really meant was “suspicious.” All those not-quite-enough charges sent up little red flags in her mind. Robbie Fontenot was the son of a doctor, a white man with money and connections, a man who had known and supported Sheriff Noblier for long enough that his ex-wife felt she could appeal to him personally on her son’s behalf.
She grabbed her phone and punched in the number B’Lynn had given her for Robbie’s father. The call went straight to voicemail. She left a message asking for him to call her back at his earliest convenience, and wondered if he would. According to B’Lynn, he had been divorced from his son longer than he had been divorced from his wife.
It might have been easy to judge him harshly for that, but Anniehad seen many versions of the addiction story, all of them sad, all of them difficult. She tried to reserve judgment on Dr. Robert Fontenot, even if her instincts as a mother conditioned her to side with the child. She had never been the parent of an addict, but she had dealt with enough of them to know that it was no easy path, not even for families with every advantage at their disposal.
Still, she couldn’t help but think that if Robbie Fontenot had been of a different complexion and from a different part of town, he would have been doing hard time. A chronic abuser who sometimes augmented his income by theft—the state penitentiary at Angola was chock-full of them. He was either too smart or too valuable to someone to be shoved out of society to toil in the fields at the notorious prison unaffectionately known as the Farm.
Ten years an addict. That was a lot of hard life experience with people constantly at odds with the law—and with people enforcing the law. She looked at the names of the arresting officers over the years, both from the SO and from Bayou Breaux PD, some cops she knew and some she didn’t. The name of Officer Derwin Rivette jumped out at her from an arrest five years past. And another arrest two years before that, long before Dewey had made detective.
So Dewey and Robbie Fontenot were not unknown to each other, she thought, nibbling on a shrimp. Was there enough familiarity there for Dewey Rivette to know where Robbie Fontenot might go, who he might hang out with, do business with, buy drugs from? Or were the arrests just two in a pile of hundreds Rivette must have made over the years?
She thought about how many arrests she had made as a patrol deputy and how many of them had been memorable. Some had been, for sure. Cops on the job long enough all had, as Danny Perry had said of Rayanne Tillis, their frequent fliers, the repeat offenders who stood out for one reason or another. Were two arrests two years apart reason for Robbie Fontenot to qualify for that status with Dewey Rivette?
She picked up her cell phone and brought up the photo B’Lynn had texted her. It was a recent picture taken in a kitchen, Robbiesmiling reluctantly as he stood with his arm around an elderly woman. Probably the day he got out of rehab, Annie imagined, coming home and hugging his grandma. The kind of obligatory picture every mother would take. He was a good-looking young man with an angular face, high cheekbones, and straight brows over weary, wary dark eyes. Eyes that belonged in a much older face, Annie thought. Ages-old, seen-too-much, heart-wrung-out kind of eyes. The windows to a soul that had weathered a hard road despite its privileged start.
She wondered if sometimes that wasn’t as painful in its own way as a dirt-poor start to a hardscrabble life. Robbie Fontenot had grown up a much-loved child of comfort and opportunity. Smart, talented, he had the world rolled out in front of him like a red carpet. On his way to big things until that red carpet had been yanked away. He had lost it all. Thrown it away, some would say, though addiction wasn’t as simple as choice. Resentment of privilege more often than not erased the sympathy of casual observers to a train wreck life. That was just how people were—jealous and petty. But life was only black and white to those lucky enough to never have been faced with real adversity. Strife was a layered and complex thing, no matter how much money you had.
As a mother, Annie could look at Robbie through B’Lynn’s eyes and see the face of a five-year-old, as innocent as a puppy, as sweet as pure love. She could imagine him as that teenage boy, his mental maturity scrambling to grow into his tall, lanky developing man’s frame. She could imagine his hurt and disappointment as his dream was dragged away, leaving him bereft and wondering who he might be without that success. He’d been thrown down a hard road with no preparation, with no one to feel sorry for him but the woman who had brought him into the world. And Annie surmised that even his mother’s love had been conditional during the worst of it. That was what addiction did—it shredded the fabric of even the strongest relationships.
Guilt was at the core of B’Lynn Fontenot’s worry now. She heldit tight inside her, thinking it couldn’t be seen behind her shield of determination, but it was there, part of the aggregate of the foundation of motherhood. That was why she was still there now in her son’s life when everyone else—including his father—had long since given up on him.
