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Annie sighed and rubbed a hand across her forehead, trying to massage the tension away in the hopes of cutting a headache off at the pass. She didn’t have time for it now.
With a few keystrokes, she brought up Rayanne Tillis’s record on her computer screen. As Danny Perry had said, possession, shoplifting, and the odd twenty-dollar blow job. A petty criminal, the same as Robbie Fontenot was a petty criminal, though Annie doubted Rayanne’s mama was beating anybody’s door down trying to get her help or steer her onto a better life path.
Rayanne claimed not to know Robbie, but she had known he wasn’t at home. She had found her way into his house—which B’Lynn swore had been locked up when last she’d been there. Somehow she couldn’t picture Rayanne picking a lock.
She looked over at Deebo Jeffcoat, still grooving to his tunes. He had abandoned his pencil drumsticks to play a mean air guitar solo.
“Deebo!” Annie called. “Deebo!”
She grabbed a fried shrimp and tossed it at him, bouncing it off the side of his face. He jumped a foot off his seat and looked at her wide-eyed, shocked to be brought back to the mundane reality of the office. Annie pantomimed pulling AirPods out of her ears.
“Hey, Annie. What’s up?” he shouted, following her instructions by plucking the earphones out and killing the noise.
“Do you remember a pillhead named Robbie Fontenot? You collared him for possession three or four years ago.”
“Him and a few hundred others.”
She held up her phone and showed him the snapshot. “He got out of rehab a couple of months ago. Have you seen him around?”
He squinted at the photograph and shook his head. “I don’t think so. Why?”
“He’s missing.”
“Missing from where?”
“Here in town. Hasn’t been seen or heard from since Halloween.”
“A missing drug addict?” He shrugged. “Go figure.”
“He just got out of rehab a couple of months ago. His mother says he’s been clean.”
“That’s what mothers always say. It’s their job,” Deebo said. “He’s probably told her he’s clean, but he’s an addict and addicts are liars by default, and they make liars of everyone close to them, too. If his mother has been through this enough times, she’ll tell you he’s clean in the hopes you won’t just write him off.”
“That’s sad but true,” Annie admitted on a sigh. “And she’ll think it’s a good lie because it serves a good purpose.”
“And the addict is a bad liar because his lies only serve himself, or so he thinks as he spirals down that hole. What’s this one into?”
“Oxy.”
Deebo made a pained face. “I hope he’s got a trusted source. We’re up to our asses in fentanyl overdoses these days. Every goddamn thing is laced with fentanyl. I don’t get it myself,” he confessed. “These dealers are killing off their customers, but there’s no shortage of them, I guess. The high is too seductive, and nobody thinks they’ll be the one to die. I’d buy stock in Narcan if I had money. That shit should be in vending machines on every street corner. Have you checked the morgue at Our Lady?”
“Not yet.”
“They found a dead body down by Luck this morning,” he said. “Maybe that’s your guy.”
“What?” The word came out on a hard breath, like she’d been punched in the stomach.
“White male. Twenty-five to thirty-five. You didn’t hear?”
“I’ve been busy all morning.”
She felt sick at the idea that B’Lynn Fontenot might have finally found someone willing to help her on the same morning her son’s corpse was discovered.
“Was there a vehicle?” she asked.
“Nope. The body was dumped. No crime scene. No witnesses—so far, at least.”
“Any obvious cause of death?”
