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“Broussard.”
“It’s Chris Skinner, Detective. I’m just calling to let you know she didn’t make it,” the paramedic said. “She went into cardiac arrest a second time in the bus, and we couldn’t get her back. The ER staff did all they could, but…she didn’t make it. I’m sorry.”
“Me, too.”
Annie thanked him, ended the call, and heaved a sigh. All the urgency drained out of her, and whatever hope she’d held on to for Rayanne went with it, leaving her feeling empty.
Danny Perry watched her, waiting for her to speak.
“She didn’t make it,” she said quietly.
“Oh, man,” he muttered. “That’s our fourth OD in two weeks. And people keep taking that shit.”
“Nobody thinks it’ll happen to them,” Annie said. “That’s the bad lie they tell themselves every time they pop a pill or shoot up or whatever they do.”
She sighed again and rubbed at the tension in the back of her neck.
“You can go, Danny,” she said. “I’ll close up here.”
“You sure?” he asked. “I don’t mind. I mean, you haven’t found her phone yet.”
“It’s okay. You’ve got patrol and a prickly chief. I’m good here. There’s no rush now. Thanks for your help, though.”
She saw him out as if she was a hostess. When he was halfway to his radio car, she remembered her other order of business for the day.
“Hey, Danny. Did you happen to see Robbie Fontenot Halloween night at Monster Bash?”
He turned around, appearing to search his memory. “I don’t think so.”
“Someone saw him talking to a uniform near Evangeline Bankand Trust,” she said. “I’m gonna go look at the CCTV video from the area, but I thought maybe…I might as well ask on the off chance…”
She let the rest of the sentence trail off, giving him a chance to rethink his answer.
“You know, I might have,” he said, shrugging. “There were only a few thousand people there that night. I try to do my thing as your friendly neighborhood po-lice man, you know. If I did see him, nothing stood out about it.”
“Okay. Well, I was just hoping to get a read on what his mood was that night.”
“Sorry.”
“It was worth a shot.”
Annie watched him get in his patrol car and drive away, wondering at his motives for showing up there. He’d gone right to the drugs and handled the package, potentially smudging any fingerprints that might have been left on the plastic bag. She didn’t like the way her mind was bending, but it wasn’t going that way for no reason.
A middle-aged woman was out on her porch next door in a sleeveless cotton housedress that showed off upper arms shaped like ham hocks, pretending to water a window box full of half-dead plants. Her gaze darted over in Annie’s direction every few seconds.
“Ma’am?” Annie asked. “Do you know the woman who lives here?”
The woman just scowled at her with a face like a blobfish, then turned and went back inside.
Annie went back into the house, back to the bedroom to have one last look for Rayanne’s phone. She stood in the doorway, looking around the shithole bedroom in this shithole house, wondering who would come for Rayanne’s belongings. There wasn’t anything in this house that shouldn’t have been put in a dumpster and taken to a landfill. Would anyone from her family even bother? Would they come to Our Lady to claim her body or leave her there like a sack of trash for the parish to dispose of?
No matter how Rayanne had ended up in her life, she had once been someone’s daughter, someone’s baby. Had she been wanted? Had she been raised with love? Or had she been a mistake, an accident, the result of something brutal?
Annie tried to imagine what Rayanne must have looked like as a little girl with her straight-as-sticks hair and petulant expression. It was hard to imagine her as sweet or innocent, but she probably had been before the world had gotten hold of her. She had had hopes and dreams at some point in her life. No child had ever gotten up in front of their third-grade class and declared they wanted to grow up to be a junkie prostitute, but that was how her life had turned out. Dead on the floor of a shithole in a Fuck Your Feelings T-shirt and no underpants.
No one deserved that, no matter how poor their life choices had been.
“I heard she didn’t make it.”
