A Thin Dark Line

8

As Annie had suspected, word of Renard's run-in with Fourcade had already hit the streets. Late-shift cops and nurses from Our Lady had carried what pieces of the tale they had to Madame Collette's diner, where the breakfast waitresses doled it out with announcements of the morning blue plate special. The smell of gossip and dissatisfaction was as thick in the air as the scent of bacon grease and coffee.

Annie endured a hail of barbed comments as she went to the counter for her coffee, only to be told by a hostile waitress the restaurant was "out of coffee." The patrons of Madame Collette's had passed judgment. The rest of Bayou Breaux would not be far behind.

They wanted someone to be guilty-in their minds if not in the courts, Annie thought. People felt betrayed, cheated by a system that seemed suddenly to favor the wrong side. They wanted to put this latest atrocity behind them and go on as if it hadn't happened. They were afraid they never would be able to do so. Afraid that maybe evil ran under the parish like an aquifer someone had tapped into by mistake, and no one knew how to plug the leak and send the force back underground.

At Po ' Richard's, the woman at the drive-up window handed Annie her coffee and wished her a nice day, obviously out of the news loop. The brew was Po ' Richard's usual: too black, too strong, and bitter with the taste of chicory. Annie dumped it into her spill-proof mug, added three fake creams, and headed out of town.

The radio crackled to life, reminding her that she was hardly the only person in the parish with trouble.

"All units in the vicinity: Y'all got a possible 261 out to the Country Estates trailer park. Over."

Annie grabbed her mike as she punched the accelerator. "One Able Charlie responding. I'm two minutes away. Out."

When no response came back, she tried the mike again. The radio crackled back at her.

"10-1, One Able Charlie. You're breaking up. Must be something wrong with your radio. You're where? Out."

"I'm responding to that 261 in Country Estates. Out."

Nothing came back. Annie hung up the mike, annoyed with the glitch, but more concerned with the call: a sexual assault. She'd caught a handful of rape cases in her career. There was always an extra emotional element to deal with at a rape call. She wasn't just another cop. It wasn't just another call. She went in not only as an officer, but as a woman, able to provide the victim with the kind of support and sympathy no male officer could offer.

The Country Estates mobile-home park sat in exactly the middle of nowhere between Bayou Breaux and Luck, which qualified it as country. The place bore no resemblance to an estate. The name suggested a certain tidy gentility. Reality was a dozen rusting relic trailer houses that had been plunked down on a two-acre weed patch back in the early seventies.

Jennifer Nolan's trailer was at the back of the lot, a pink and once-white model with an OPERATION ID crime-watch sticker on the front door. Annie knocked on the storm door and announced herself as a deputy. The inside door cracked open two inches, then five.

If the face that stared out at her had ever been pretty, Annie doubted it ever would be again. Both lips were ballooning, both split open. The brown eyes were nearly swollen shut.

"Thank God, you're a woman," Jennifer Nolan mumbled. Her red hair hung in frizzy strings. She had wrapped herself in a pink chenille robe that she clutched together over her heart as she shuffled painfully away from the door.

"Ms. Nolan, have you called an ambulance?" Annie asked, following her into the small living room.

The trailer reeked of tobacco smoke and the kind of mildew that grows under old carpets. Jennifer Nolan lowered herself with great care to a boxy plaid sofa.

"No, no," she mumbled. "I don't want… Everyone will look."

"Jennifer, you need medical attention."

Annie squatted down in front of her, taking in the obvious signs of psychological shock. There was a good chance Jennifer Nolan wasn't fully aware of the extent of her injuries. She probably felt numb, stunned. The mental self-protection mechanisms of denial may have kicked in: How could this terrible thing have happened to her, it couldn't be real, it was just a terrible nightmare. Already her logic was skewed: She worried about the appearance of an ambulance, but not the cop car.

"Jennifer, I'm going to call an ambulance for you. Your neighbors won't know what it's coming here for. Our main concern is your well-being. Do you understand? We want to make sure you're taken care of."

"Judas," Sticks Mullen muttered, letting himself in without knocking. "Looks like somebody already took care of her."

Annie shot him a glare. "Go call for an ambulance. My radio's out."

She turned back to the victim, even though Mullen made no move to obey her. "Jennifer? How long ago did this happen?"

The woman's gaze drifted around the room until it hit on the wall clock. "In the night. I-I woke up and he-he was just there. On top of me. He-he-hurt me. "

"Did he rape you?"

Her face contorted, squeezing tears from her swollen eyes. "I t-try to be s-so careful. Why-why did this happen?"

Annie skipped the question, not wanting to tell her that carefulness didn't always make a difference. "When did he leave, Jennifer?"

She shook her head a little. Whether she couldn't or didn't want to recall was unclear.

"Was it dawn yet? Or was it still dark?"

"Dark."

Meaning their rapist was long gone.

"Great," Mullen muttered.

Annie took in Jennifer Nolan's appearance once again- the stringy hair, the bathrobe. "Jennifer, did you bathe or take a shower after he left?"

The tears came harder. "He-made me. An-and I had-to," she said in an urgent whisper. "I couldn't stand-the way I felt. I-felt him-all over me!"

Mullen shook his head in disgust at the lost evidence. Annie gently rested a hand on Jennifer Nolan's forearm, careful to avoid touching the ligature marks that encircled the woman's wrist, just in case some fiber remained embedded in the skin.

"Jennifer, did you know the man who did this to you? Can you tell us what he looks like?"

"No. No," she whispered, staring at Mullen's shoes. "He-he was w-wearing a mask."

"Like a ski mask?"

"No. No."

She reached a trembling hand for a pack of Eve 100s and a white Bic lighter on the end table. Annie intercepted the cigarettes without a word and set them aside. It was probably too much to hope that Jennifer Nolan hadn't brushed her teeth or smoked a cigarette after the rapist had left the scene, but oral swabs would have to be taken nonetheless. Any trace left behind by the rapist could provide a key to identifying him.

"Horrible. Like f-from a nightmare," the woman said, as spasms rocked her body. "Feathers. Black feathers."

"You mean an actual mask," Annie said. "From Mardi Gras."

Chaz Stokes arrived on the scene eating a breakfast burrito. He was in one of his usual getups: baggy brown suit pants with a brown and yellow shirt that belonged in a fifties bowling alley. A crumpled black porkpie hat rode low over the rims of wraparound shades that were a testimony to the kind of night he'd had. The sun was nowhere in sight.

"She took a bath," Mullen said, striding down off the rusty metal steps of the trailer. "At least she didn't do the fucking laundry. We got a crime scene."

Annie hustled after him. "The rapist made her take a bath. Big difference, jerk. You of all people should be able to relate to a woman wanting to bathe after sex."

"I don't need your mouth, Broussard," Mullen snapped. "I don't know what you're even doing in a uniform after last night."

"Oh, pardon me for arresting someone who was breaking the law."

"Nicky's a brother," Stokes said, throwing the butt end of his breakfast into a patch of dead marigolds along the side of Jennifer Nolan's trailer. "You turned on one of our own. What's the deal with that, Broussard? He come on to you or something? Everybody knows you think you're too good to do a cop."

"Yeah, well, look what I've got to pick from," Annie sneered. "In case you're interested, there's a rape victim sitting just inside that open door, asshole. She says the guy was wearing a black feather Mardi Gras mask."

Stokes winced. "Jesus H., now we got us some kind of copycat."

"Maybe."

"What's that supposed to mean? Renard didn't do her and he did Pam Bichon. Or you got some other opinion on Bichon?"

Annie chewed back the temptation to point out no one had proven Renard guilty of anything. Stokes punched her buttons. He said black, she said white. Hell, she believed Renard was their killer.

"What are you?" Mullen said, curling his lip. "Hot for Renard's shriveled little dick or something? You're all of a sudden his little cheerleader. Nick and Chaz say he did Bichon, he did Bichon."

"Go start knocking on doors, Broussard," Stokes ordered as the ambulance rolled into the trailer park. "Leave the detecting to a real cop."

"I can help process the scene," Annie said as he popped the trunk of his Camaro.

The department wasn't large enough or busy enough to warrant a separate crime-scene unit. The detective who caught the call always brought the kits and supervised as officers on the scene pitched in to dust for prints and bag evidence.

Stokes's trunk was crammed with junk: a rusted toolbox, a length of nylon towrope, a dirty yellow rain slicker, two bags from McDonald's. Three bright-colored plastic bead necklaces from a past Mardi Gras celebration had become tangled around a jack handle. Stokes pulled out a latent fingerprints kit and a general evidence collection kit from the neater end of the junk pile.

Stokes cut Annie a sideways look. "We don't need your kind of help."

She walked away because she didn't have a choice. Stokes outranked her. The idea of him and Mullen processing the scene made her cringe. Stokes was a slacker, Mullen a moron. If they missed something, if they screwed up, the case could be blown. Of course, if Jennifer Nolan's description of events was accurate-not a guarantee with a badly shaken victim-there would be precious little evidence to collect.

Annie walked around the back side of the trailer, putting off the KOD duty. The attacker had come into Jennifer Nolan's trailer in the middle of the night, gaining entrance through the back door, which was not visible from any other trailer in the park. The chances of a neighbor having seen anything would be slim to none. The phone line had been cut clean. Nolan had made her call to 911 from the home of her nearest neighbor, an elderly woman named Vista Wallace, whom Nolan said was very hard-of-hearing.

Annie took a Polaroid of the torn screen door and the inside door that had been easily jimmied and left ajar. There would be no fingerprints. Nolan said her attacker had worn gloves. He had attacked her in her bed, tying her to the bed frame using strips of white cloth he had brought with him. There was no evidence of seminal fluid on the sheets, indicating that the rapist had either used a condom or hadn't ejaculated during the attack.

From her studies, Annie knew that contrary to popular belief, sexual dysfunction was fairly common among sex offenders. Rape was about power and anger, hurting and controlling a woman. Motivation that came out of rage against a particular woman in the rapist's past or against the entire gender, stemming from some past wrong. The attack on Jennifer Nolan had been premeditated, organized, indicating that it was primarily about power and control. The rapist had come prepared, wearing the mask, bringing with him something to jimmy the door and the white cloth ligatures to tie up his victim.

The Bayou Strangler's signature had been a white silk scarf around the throat of his victim. The bindings in this case would be close enough to generate a lot of gossip if word leaked out. Lack of semen could also be pointed out as a similarity. But in the Bayou Strangler cases the women had been violently brutalized and their bodies left exposed to the elements so that such evidence would most likely have broken down.

The primary difference between the Bayou Strangler cases and Jennifer Nolan's was that Jennifer Nolan was still alive. She had been attacked in her home, rather than taken to another location; raped, but not murdered or mutilated. Those were also the differences between Jennifer Nolan's case and Pam Bichon's, and yet the press was bound to draw correlations. The mask was going to be big as a shock factor.

Annie wondered if either the similarities or the differences in the cases had been intentional. If she wondered it, so would everyone else. The level of fear in Partout Parish was going to be pushed to heights that hadn't been seen in four years. It had been bad enough when Pam Bichon had been killed. But at least a great many people had focused on Renard as the killer. Marcus Renard had been in Our Lady of Mercy when Jennifer Nolan was attacked.

God, what a mess, Annie thought, her gaze on the ground. The sheriff's office had come under enough criticism for the Bichon case. Now they had a masked rapist running around loose, and while Jennifer Nolan was being attacked, the cops had been busy arresting each other. That was how the press would paint it. And right smack in the middle of that painting would be Annie's own face.

The ground around the back side of the trailer was nothing but weedy gravel for several feet, then the "estate" gave way to woods with a floor of soft rotted leaves. Annie worked her way from one end of the trailer to the other, looking for anything-a partial footprint, a cigarette butt, a discarded condom. What she found at the north end of the trailer was a fan-shaped black feather about one inch in length, caught in a tuft of grass and dandelions. She took a snapshot of the feather where it lay, then tore a blank sheet of paper from her pocket notebook, folded it around the feather, and slipped it in between the pages of the notebook for safekeeping.

Where had the rapist parked his vehicle? Why had he chosen this place? Why had he chosen Jennifer Nolan? She claimed to have no men in her life. She lived alone and worked the night shift at the True Light lamp factory in Bayou Breaux. The factory would seem the logical starting point to nose around for suspects.

Of course, Annie wasn't going to get the chance to interview anyone but the neighbors. The case belonged to Stokes now. If he wanted help, he sure as hell wouldn't come to her for it. Then again, maybe the rapist was a neighbor. A neighbor wouldn't have to worry about hiding his vehicle. A neighbor would be aware of Jennifer Nolan's schedule and the fact that she lived alone. Maybe that KOD duty wouldn't be so boring after all.

The ambulance was driving out of the trailer park as she came around the end of the Nolan home. A woman with a toddler on one hip and cigarette in hand stood in the doorway of a trailer two down the row. At another trailer, a heavyset old guy in his underwear had pulled back a curtain to stare out.

Annie bagged the feather and took it inside. She found Stokes in the bathroom picking pubic hairs out of the tub with a tweezers.

"I found this behind the trailer," she said, setting the bag on the vanity. "It looks like the kind of feather they use in masks and costumes. Maybe our bad guy was molting."

Stokes arched a brow. "Our? You got nothing to do with this, Broussard. And what the hell am I supposed to do with a feather?"

"Send it to the lab. Compare it to the mask left on Pam Bichon-"

"Renard did Bichon. That's got nothing to do with this. This is a copycat."

"Fine, then send it to the lab, get Jennifer Nolan to draw a sketch of the mask the rapist was wearing, and see if you can't track down a manufacturer. Maybe-"

"Maybe you don't know what the hell you're talking about, Broussard," he said, straightening from the tub. He folded the pubic hairs in a piece of paper and set it on the back of the toilet. "I told you before, I don't want you around. Get outta here. Go write some tickets. Practice for your new job as a meter maid. That's all you're gonna be, sweetheart. If I'm lyin', I'm dyin'. You don't rat out a brother and stay on the job."

"Is that a threat?"

He reached out with a forefinger and pressed it hard against the bruise on her cheek. His eyes looked as flat and cold as glass. "I don't make threats, sugar."

Annie gritted her teeth against the pain.

"Better get your story straight about what happened with Renard last night," he said.

"I know exactly what happened."

Stokes shook his head. "You chicks just don't know shit about honor, do you?"

She pushed his hand away. "I know it doesn't involve committing a felony. I'll go talk to those neighbors now."