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“No,” Annie admitted. “Like any man with the maturity of a three-year-old child, he only wants the toy he was ignoring after someone else picks it up. He’s done fuck all in a week, but he was Johnny-on-the-spot to yell at me while I was at the missing man’s home.”
“So hedoeswant the case.”
“He does want me to butt out so he can continue to tell B’Lynn Fontenot there’s nothing to be done,” Annie said, her frustration rising. “He’s lazy and a misogynist, and time’s a-wasting, so yes, I took his case away, if that’s how you want to look at it.”
Nick heaved a sigh. “It’s not about how I want to look at it. Tell me about this missing guy.”
“Robbie Fontenot. He’s twenty-seven, recently out of rehab, longtime opioid abuser. He has a close relationship with his mother, speaks to her daily. She says he’s been on the straight and narrow, and she watches him like a hawk. She hasn’t heard from him since Halloween.”
“Halloween,” Nick repeated. “So he might have gone to a party, fell off the wagon. Addicts do what addicts do…”
“Maybe so,” Annie conceded. “What does it matter? We shouldn’t try to find him because he’s an addict?”
“Did I say that?”
“No.”
“But he’s an adult,” he pointed out, “and free to do as he will.”
“That doesn’t mean he can’t be missing!” Annie argued.
“C’est vrai,” he said. “But you can’t just hijack a case.”
“Oh, please,” Annie said, rolling her eyes. “You would have done the exact same thing if you’d seen this woman, and you would now be scraping Dewey Rivette off the bottom of your shoe. So spare me the bullshit lecture on professional courtesy.
“Anyway,” she added, “it’s not like we don’t have jurisdiction. If Rivette was doing his job, we should have been in on it anyway. So I don’t see the problem here.”
Nick shook his head. “You kicked over a hornet’s nest and you claim not to hear the buzzing. Johnny Earl will be on the phone to Gus, and there’ll be hell to pay.”
“Don’t be so sure about that,” Annie said. “The mother came here this morning to speak to Gus in person. Her ex-husband is some old crony of his, a campaign supporter from back when. Do you think Gus would have turned her away? I don’t. I think he would have especially jumped at the chance to make Johnny Earl’s head spin. He just happened to be gone to Baton Rouge this morning is all.”
“Why the husband didn’t come to Gus in the first place?” Nick asked.
“Ex-husband,” Annie corrected him. “He’s not in the son’s life anymore. It’s been a long road with this kid. The addiction started in high school, and I gather they’ve been to hell and back too many times. The marriage broke up. The husband lives in Lafayette now. Anyway, the mother went to the police thinking they would help her,because that’s what they’re there for. When they didn’t, she came here, and Hooker bounced her back to them. The poor woman is at her wit’s end, Nick. I just want to help her. Is that so wrong?”
Nick swiveled back and forth in his chair, his expression inscrutable.
“I’ll get him in the NCIC database,” Annie said. “I’ll request his phone records, financial records. Talk to his employer. Talk to people he worked with, see if I can find out who his friends are…Somebody must know something.”
She took a big breath and sighed. “Of course, this might all be moot anyway if my missing guy turns out to be your dead guy in the morgue.”
“That would be simple for us,” Nick agreed. “Two birds with one stone.”
“If that’s him, his murder is already our case, and we’ll need to do the background investigation anyway,” Annie pointed out.
She hated the thought of Robbie Fontenot being dead—murdered, no less. “I can’t tell you how much I don’t want that to bethe case. His mother has been through so much, and she’s fighting so hard for her son.”
“There aren’t a lot of happy endings to be had for stories like hers,” Nick said. They had both seen too many of those stories to delude themselves.
“I at least want her to have someone on her side to help cushion the blow if it comes to that,” Annie said. “I get the impression she doesn’t have much in the way of a support network. Ten years dealing with addiction. The husband bailed. People don’t like to ride that roller coaster if they don’t have to.”
“This body in the morgue,” Nick said. “It has no face to speak of. One brown eye. Dark hair.”
“That fits.”
“That fits ninety percent of the local population. How tall is your guy?”
“Six-two, athletic build.”
