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“Stop!” he barked. “Stay off this property. I’m not fucking around. I can have deputies here in two minutes, and your bosses will be dishing out bail money.”
“There’s police officers right across the street,” someone pointed out.
“They appear to be largely ornamental,” Nick said. “My deputies will be the real deal. Mind your manners.”
He went to his vehicle and shut out their voices, starting the engine and kicking the AC on high just for the white noise.
His phone vibrated from the arrival of a text from Wynn. The name belonging to the phone number Will Faulkner had given him. The number from the call that had terrified Melissa Mercier in the middle of the night.
Robert Fontenot III.
21
The callhad come toMelissa Mercier’s phone at 2:04 in the morning.
“Why?” Annie asked aloud. “Why would Robbie Fontenot call her? Why would he even have her number?”
“She says she never heard of Robbie Fontenot until she saw him on the news last night,” Nick said. “She was up when that call came in because she thought she heard someone trying to break into the house. Then she decided it was just the wind and a loose shutter. Will Faulkner says he walked around the yard when he came over—which would have been around two fifteen. He didn’t see anything suspicious. I looked. I didn’t see anything. But the yard is not secure, and there’s no security cameras on the house.”
“I think my brain has whiplash,” Annie muttered, rubbing her forehead, wincing as she touched the bruise on her cut eyebrow.
They sat in the conference room of the Pizza Hut, where they had organized the whiteboards for each of their three cases. The room was filled with the intoxicating aroma of the building’s namesake coming from a stack of boxes on the table. One veggie, one cheese,one sausage, one pepperoni. Four large pizzas for six detectives, but the boxes would be mostly empty before the night was over. Leftovers would be had for breakfast the next day.
“It looks like the phone has been turned off pretty much since Halloween night,” Wynn said. “Location services are turned off. It pinged off that cell tower west of town last night for the one phone call and went dark again.”
“So, maybe someone was there in that yard after all,” Nick said.
“And he called Marc Mercier’s wife, in the middle of the night, and said nothing,” Annie said. “Why? Just to freak her out? And again, why?”
“I don’t know,” Nick said. “I wanted to put a deputy on that house tonight, but Gus shot me down. He’s trying to play nice with Johnny Earl, who took exception to me saying his officers were largely ornamental.”
“Truth hurts.”
“I suppose they’re capable of sitting in a car and watching a house all night, if that keeps the peace.” He turned toward Wynn. “What about Marc Mercier’s phone?”
“Dark since Saturday evening. No calls. Location services off.”
“What was his last call?”
“To his brother at about six thirty in the evening.”
“And then he turned his phone off,” Nick said. “Why? Who does that? He went home for supper. He went out somewhere. He was supposed to meet his brother the next morning. Why wouldn’t he have his phone on?”
“The world was better for us when people were ignorant about their electronics,” Annie said, helping herself to a slice of sausage pizza. “Watch oneDatelinemarathon on TV and you’ll know enough to turn your phone off if you’re up to something.”
“What’s he up to, though?” Nick asked. “And what’s your guy up to with his phone off?”
“Nothing good. I found a pile of money in a box in his oldbedroom at his mom’s house. Twenty-four hundred and then some. A guy with no legit job.”
“Is he dealing?”
“I haven’t found any evidence of it or anybody to say it’s so. Deebo doesn’t think so. But I did get Dewey Rivette to confess he’s been running Robbie as a CI. Although he swears he never gave Robbie all that money. And really, where would Dewey get that kind of cash to throw around? Fifty here and there. A hundred right before Robbie disappeared. That, I can believe. He claims Robbie told him he could get info on some copper thieves, then he dropped out of sight,” she said. “And now he’s driving around in the middle of the night, calling up the wife of a guy he went to high school with a decade ago? I don’t get that.”
“No one in Marc’s world knows of any connection between Marc and Robbie in recent memory,” Nick said. “But the Merciers are in the junk business. Everyone says they’re on the up-and-up, but they may well know people who aren’t.”
He went to the whiteboard and wroteCOPPER??under both Marc Mercier’s name and Robbie Fontenot’s.
“The brothers had a fight Saturday morning,” he said. “Came to blows. All Luc will say is that they disagree on how to run the business. He wants Marc gone so he can run things his way. Maybe what he wants to do isn’t legal. Robbie Fontenot is shopping around info on copper thieves. Maybe that’s the connection.”
