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He shrugged. “I guess. I don’t run with either of them.”
“You haven’t spoken with him to ask him has he seen Marc?”
“No.”
“Have you done anything at all to try to find your brother?” Nick asked.
“Ain’t that your job?” Luc asked.
“You really don’t give a shit where he’s at, do you?” Nick said.
“I know Marc,” Luc said. “He’s gone off somewhere to pout and sulk, and when he decides we’ve all missed him enough, he’ll come home so we can fall all over ourselves with joy.”
“Or he never comes home at all,” Nick said. “And what then?”
He looked away, frowning. “Life goes on one way or the other, doesn’t it?”
That was how deep the resentment went, Nick thought. Down to the roots. Luc Mercier resented his brother for everything he was—the favored son, the popular athlete, the kid whose parents sent him to Sacred Heart, the college graduate who had his pick of lives. He could go away. He could come back. People loved him either way. While Luc was the guy who never went anywhere but to a titty bar ten miles from home, alone on Saturday night.
Luc was the one who stayed and worked the family business, and looked after his parents, and had no aspirations to leave this place or these people. And for his loyalty and his trouble, he was taken for granted and treated like hired help.
That was a big chip to carry on his shoulder all day every day while Marc walked around in his own beam of sunshine. That had to be exhausting.
The tension and anger and defensiveness had gone out of him now. He just looked tired and sad.
“How’s yourmamantoday?” Nick asked quietly.
“Hungover and hell to be around,” Luc admitted. “She thinks y’all ought to call out the National Guard and the Cajun navy tosearch for Marc with helicopters and infrared cameras and submarines and bloodhounds and all.”
“Search for him where?” Nick asked. “I can’t line people up across the state and look at every square inch of Louisiana south of I-10. We need a starting place, a sighting of him or his vehicle or the boat or a likely place he might have gone.
“I can tell you we’ve alerted all law enforcement agencies, including the Wildlife agents, to be looking for him. All media outlets have been notified, including television and social media,” Nick said. “It may seem to you that we don’t have the sense of urgency you would like to see, but we’re doing what we can with what we’ve got. And I will share as much information with your family as I can.”
The main thing families wanted in a situation like this was information, to feel included in the loop of the investigation. Shutting them out only fostered their frustration and anger. The trick was giving them enough to placate them without giving them anything that might compromise the investigation. At this point, Luc Mercier was as much a person of interest in his brother’s disappearance as he was a family member.
Luc nodded and sighed, calmer. “Did you get them dental records?”
“Yes. We hope to have a comparison by this afternoon. No guarantees, though. There’s a lot of damage to the face.”
Could he have done that? Nick wondered. Shot his own brother right in the face? The notion seemed both impossible and yet all too logical—the need to obliterate everything about that person.
“What about DNA?” Luc asked, pulling a cigarette out of his shirt pocket and hanging it on his lip. “Ain’t that the be-all-end-all?”
“It is, but it takes time to get results back. This ain’t television, where you get all your answers by the end of the hour. Labs are backed up, short-staffed, underfunded. There’s a whole line of cases ahead of this one with people waiting on those answers, too.”
Luc lit the cigarette, took a deep drag, and exhaled. “Mama,she’ll lose her mind if that’s Marc. She had it in her head she could make him stay here. She can’t stand the idea of losing that grandbaby.”
“And which way is Marc leaning? Stay or go?”
“Whichever direction the wind is blowing in the moment. Marc wants to please everybody. I got it all over him there,” he said with a bitter smile. “Me, I don’t give a shit who I piss off. The more the merrier.”
Ironic, Nick thought, that Luc was the Mercier who held grudges and made enemies, but it was the golden boy gone missing.
“I’ll be in touch when I know something,” he said. “Let’s go see about that apology to your sister.”
15
The Parcelles’Circle P Ranchwas located on a gravel side road down the bayou and two miles west of Bayou Breaux. Twenty acres carved out of the scrub, a horse barn that hadn’t seen a coat of paint in a decade, a collection of pipe corrals, a riding arena with a rusty steel roof for shade, and a newer double-wide mobile home. A professionally done sign stood at the entrance depicting the Circle P logo and three silhouettes of horses performing different tasks. Beneath the horses in neat lettering:
