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“I ain’t got a cell phone right now,” Dozer said. “I lost mine Halloween night. I can’t afford a new one until payday.”
“Sounds like you had quite a night that night.”
He narrowed his eyes. “What’s that mean?”
“You and Marc did Monster Bash,” Nick said. “You must have partied some after. Your crew boss says you missed a couple days’ work. That’s a big hangover.”
“It ain’t against the law to get drunk.”
“That all depends on what kind of trouble you get into while you’re over the limit, yeah?”
Dozer looked past him. “Can I go back to work now?”
Nick said nothing for a moment, just to fuck with him. He pulled out a business card and tucked it into the chest pocket of the big man’s overalls.
“You hear from Marc, you call me,” he said. “Thank you for your time, Mr. Cormier.”
Dozer started to move.
“One more thing,” Nick said.
Cormier turned back around, scowling.
“Did you happen to see Robbie Fontenot on Halloween?”
“Robbie?” he said, as if he’d never heard the name.
“Robbie Fontenot. You went to school with him.”
“No,” Dozer said. “I ain’t seen him in years.”
And he turned and walked away.
Nick watched him go, trying to sort out the man’s reactions and pick the truth from the lies.
His cell phone vibrated in his pocket. He pulled it out and looked at the text from Caleb McVay.
No go on the dental. Too much damage.
“Damn.”
19
Two thousandfour hundred fiftydollars. Where had Robbie Fontenot come by $2,450, and why had he hidden the cash at his mother’s house?
His paychecks from the lamp factory had gone by direct deposit to his bank account, B’Lynn said, not that he’d had a check in the last month. If he wanted to keep cash on hand, Annie supposed it wasn’t all that strange that he hadn’t wanted to keep it at his house in a shit neighborhood where his next-door neighbor was a thief and God knew what else went on. Where had the money come from was the pertinent question, and why did he want or need that much cash?
The obvious answer was that drugs were expensive and drug dealers liked cash, although some of them had taken to more modern forms of payment like Venmo, as weird as that seemed. If drugs were the answer, was Robbie keeping the cash to buy drugs or was he making the cash selling drugs? Neither answer was anything B’Lynn wanted to hear.
Annie felt the weight of that as she drove. The likelihood of this story having a happy ending was slim to none. She both hoped that Rayanne Tillis might have an answer and hoped that she wouldn’t.If she had an answer, the investigation would go forward in a direction that would end with Robbie Fontenot in jail at best and dead at worst. If she didn’t have an answer, B’Lynn could hang on to a sliver of hope, and the thing about slivers was that they were usually painful and often left a scar. It seemed to Annie that Robbie Fontenot’s mother had enough scars to last a lifetime. The look on her face as she’d sat on her son’s bed, considering the possibilities of this latest discovery, had made Annie’s heart hurt.
Barely twenty-four hours after coming back to work, she found herself up to her ears in emotional attachment to a case that had a snowball’s chance in hell of ending well. As much as she loved her job, and as much as she was good at it…some days…
At least she wasn’t thinking about her head injury.
She hit the blinker and turned onto Rayanne’s block, trying to formulate a plan. How best to work the conversation in a way that would invite an exchange of information, not put the girl on the defensive, where she was almost sure to lie. It took time to build a relationship with someone as short on trust as Rayanne, but time was a luxury Annie didn’t have.
B’Lynn had offered to pay Rayanne for any useful information she might have. Money was sure to be a motivator for a girl who had none, and any information she might have was more than they had at the moment.
