AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“It still doesn’t explain why Robbie would call Marc’s wife at two in the morning.”
“Mais non. Did you look at any of that bank video from Monster Bash?” Nick asked.
Annie sighed her frustration. “I’ve looked at about an hour’s worth so far. Do you know how many people were in that parking lot that night? Most of them in costumes. I counted five dressed as cops, which makes me wonder if what Donnie Bichon saw was even really a city officer. And the quality of the video isn’t bad, but it’shard to make out faces the farther they are away from the camera. I can’t say I saw Robbie Fontenot. I’ve only seen him in a photograph. I don’t know how he carries himself, what gestures he uses.”
“You might need to have the mother look at the footage,” Nick said.
“I want to see the video from the camera on the other side of the parking lot first,” Annie said. “The different angle might help.
“I asked Danny Perry if he saw Robbie that night, and he got cute about it. No, unless there’s video, and then maybe he did, but if he did, it wasn’t any big deal. He probably thinks he’s protecting Dewey, but that ship has sailed. Dewey’s gonna be working security at the lamp factory if I have anything to say about it. He put Robbie Fontenot in harm’s way then turned his back on him.”
“I asked Dozer Cormier if he’d seen Robbie Fontenot,” Nick said. “He tried to act like he didn’t know who I was talking about.”
He turned to Wynn Dixon. “Wynn, when you go through the call logs, look for any contact between those three numbers: Mercier, Fontenot, and Cormier.”
“Got it.”
“We’ve got no legal cause to get Dozer Cormier’s phone records, but his number will show up as incoming calls on theirs, at least.”
Deebo Jeffcoat walked into the conference room looking like a vagrant in dirty, baggy trousers and an untucked flannel shirt, and made a beeline for the pizza. He took a slice of pepperoni and a slice of veggie and put the slices face-to-face, making a giant pizza sandwich.
“All my food groups right here,” he said with a big, satisfied smile as he held his creation up like a prize, then lowered the pointy end into his mouth and took a bite big enough to choke a horse.
“Deebo, you have the metabolism of a fruit fly,” Annie said. “I’m jealous.”
“Well, there’s gotta be some upside to being a scrawny runt,” he said, wiping the grease from his scraggly beard with a napkin.
“I have something for you,” Annie said, holding up the evidence bag with the drugs from Rayanne Tillis’s bedroom.
Deebo set his supper aside and squinted at the bag, his expression sobering. “Where’d you get this?”
“I had a girl—a possible witness—OD this afternoon over on Opelousas near the Mardi Gras warehouse,” Annie said. “Do you know what it is?”
“I know exactly what it is,” he said, taking the bag and turning it over. “They’re calling it Diablo, for the letter D on the pill. It’s counterfeit Oxy that’s coming up out of Mexico. It’s laced with fentanyl. Bad, bad stuff.”
“Where would a girl with no money come by that?”
“Santa Claus?” he suggested. “The Easter Bunny? The Great Pumpkin? This shit is expensive. Fifty bucks a pill so you can feel extra fancy while you die from it. They’re not giving out free samples of this at Costco, I’ll tell you that.”
“So, if she didn’t pay cash for this,” Annie said, “then someone gave it to her for a reason. As payment for something, or as a lovely parting gift to send her on to the next life.”
“This was the girl you picked up yesterday, caught stealing?” Nick said.
“Yes. Rayanne Tillis.”
“Ah, man,” Deebo said. “Rayanne’s dead?”
“You knew her?”
“Picked her up more than once myself. She was no stranger to a jail cell. Possession, prostitution, shoplifting. Mean as cat meat, but she could be funny when she wasn’t fucked up. That’s a shame.”
“Who would want to kill that girl?” Nick asked. “What threat could she be to anyone?”
“She was talking to me,” Annie said. “Mind you, she hadn’t actually told me anything useful yet. But now she never will.”
“What could she know that would be worth killing her over?”
Annie swiveled her chair, contemplating what she was about to say.
