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Annie sat down behind the desk. She wondered if there was any point in trying to get into the computer. Robbie had a laptop now, and only had access to this computer once a week.
“Did you get any useful information from our little thief?” B’Lynn asked.
“Not yet,” Annie said, opening a desk drawer to find the usual assortment of pens and pencils, markers and paper clips. “I’m going over to see her after I leave here. See if I’ve managed to seed a little trust. I’ve done her a couple of favors now. Hopefully, she’ll want to reciprocate.”
“I hope she’s appreciative,” B’Lynn said. “She went right back to living her life, such as it is.”
“How do you mean?”
“I couldn’t sleep last night. I drove over past Robbie’s, just in case he’d come back. Little Miss had company. I saw a man leaving her house about a quarter past one.”
“I suppose we can’t be surprised by that,” Annie said, pulling open the bottom left drawer, a deeper drawer filled with a stack of oldSports Illustratedmagazines. Funny they were kept in a drawer and not on the shelves of the bookcase with other similar collections.
“I can’t help but feel sorry for her,” B’Lynn said, “despite her attitude. I’m sure she came by that the hard way.”
“I’m sure she did,” Annie agreed. “I don’t condone a life of crime, obviously, but some people have a harder road than others, and it isn’t difficult to see how they end up the way they do. Your son is lucky he has you to fight for him.”
She peered down into the drawer, looking alongside the stack of magazines to the bottom. Not the bottom of the drawer, she thought; it wasn’t deep enough to be the bottom.
She pulled the magazines out a dozen or so at a time, setting them on the desktop until she had a stack a foot high. What had appeared at first to be the bottom of the drawer was an old dark stained wooden box, a finely crafted antique, about nine by twelve, and maybe four inches deep. Annie lifted it out of the drawer and placed it on the desktop.
“Oh, my,” B’Lynn said, getting up from the bed. “That’s my great-grandfather’s writing box.”
“Writing box?”
“That’s what we always called it. It held his stationery and pens and an inkwell and so on. I thought it was down in the library.”
There was a small, tarnished, ornate brass latch, but no lock. Annie took a deep breath and carefully worked the latch open, bracing herself to find a stash of drugs. But when she lifted the lid there were no pill bottles or plastic bags. The box was three-quarters full of cash. Twenties, fifties, hundred-dollar bills, all neatly stacked, banded together by denomination.
“What in the world?” B’Lynn muttered.
Annie fanned through the little piles, thinking there had to be a couple thousand dollars there. She looked up at B’Lynn.
“I have no idea,” B’Lynn said. “Where would he get that kind of money?”
“I don’t know,” Annie said, but she had a strong feeling it hadn’t come from anywhere good.
18
Dozer Cormierwas as advertised:a massive individual. Nick spotted him as soon as he got out of his vehicle at the construction site. Even from a distance, he dwarfed his co-workers by almost comic proportions. The sun had come out and shone off his bald dome as if it was made of titanium. Nick watched as he plucked a stack of two-by-fours off a flatbed truck and carried it to the house under construction like he was carrying a handful of yardsticks.
“Tommy Crawford?” Nick said, approaching the crew boss who stood at the cab of the flatbed, writing on a clipboard.
“Who wants to know?” The man looked up from under the wide brim of a straw hat, his eyes permanently narrowed against the harsh glare of the Louisiana sun.
Nick held his badge up. “Fourcade. Sheriff’s office.”
“Hell, there’s never a cop around when you need one, and when you don’t, here they come calling,” Crawford said. He set his clipboard aside and reached out to shake Nick’s hand. “Donnie called ahead to say you’d be stopping. You want to talk to Dozer, he said.”
“Yeah. It shouldn’t take long.”
“Has he done something?”
“Not that I’m aware of. Is he the type?”
“Not in the main,” Crawford said. “He’s a good kid. He gets to drinking, though, he’s been known to make some bad choices.”
“I’m hoping he might be able to shed some light on where Marc Mercier is at,” Nick said. “I understand they’re buddies.”
