A Thin Dark Line

19

They ate. Stir-fried vegetables and brown rice. No meat. Odd that a man who chain-smoked would be a vegetarian, but Annie knew that she would have to become desensitized to Fourcade's contradictions. To expect the unexpected seemed a wise course, though one not easily settled into.

"You had two years at college. Why'd you quit?" he demanded, stabbing his fork into his dinner. He ate the way he did everything-with vehemence and no wasted movement.

"They wanted me to declare a major." She felt uncomfortable with the idea that he had raided her personnel file. "It seemed… restrictive. I was interested in lots of things."

"Lack of focus."

"Curiosity," she retorted. "I thought you liked my inquisitive nature."

"You need discipline."

"Look who's talking." Annie frowned at him, pushing her rice around with her fork. "What happened to your Taoist principles of nonresistant existence?"

"Often incompatible with police work. With regards to religions, I take what's useful to me and apply it where appropriate. Why did you become a cop?"

"I like helping people. It's different every day. I like solving mysteries. I get to drive a hot car. How about you?"

Words like power and control came to mind, but those were not the words he gave her.

"It's factual, logical, essential. I believe in justice. I believe in the struggle for the greater good. I believe the collective evil metastasizes with malignancies in the souls of individuals."

"So it wasn't just the cool uniforms?"

Fourcade looked bemused.

"You enrolled in the academy in August '93," he said. "Just after the whole Bayou Strangler thing. Connection?"

"You know so much about me-you tell me."

He ignored the suggestion of affront in her voice. He made no apologies for overstepping a boundary. "You went to school with the fifth victim, Annick Delahoussaye-Gerrard. You were friends?"

"Yeah, we were friends," she said.

She took her plate to the sink and stood looking out the window, seeing nothing. Night had wrapped itself around the house. Fourcade had no yard light. Of course he wouldn't. Fourcade would be one with the dark.

"We were best friends when we were little," she said. "The families called us the Two Annies. But, you know, we grew apart, ran with different crowds. Her folks ran a bar- it's the Voodoo Lounge now. They sold out after Annick was killed.

"I ran into her maybe a month before it happened. She was waitressing at the bar. She was getting divorced. I told her she should come up to Lafayette for a weekend, that we'd catch up and have some fun. But you know, that weekend never came. I suppose I didn't really mean for it to. We didn't have much in common anymore. Anyway, then came the news… and then the funeral."

Nick watched her reflection in the window. "Why do you think it hit you so hard if you'd grown so far apart?"

"I don't know."

"Yes, you do."

She was silent for a moment. He waited. The answer lay within her grasp. She didn't want to reach for it.

"We were two sides of the same coin once," she said at last. "A flip of the coin, a twist of fate…"

"It could have been you."

"Sure, why not?" she said. "You know, you read about a crime in the paper and you think how terrible for the victims, and then you turn the page and move on. It's so different when you know the people. The press called her by name for a week, then she became Victim Number Five and they were on to the next big headline. I saw what that crime did to her family, to her friends. I started thinking it would be good to try to make a difference for people like the Delahoussayes."

Nick got up from the table and brought his plate to the sink to nest with hers. "That's a good reason, 'Toinette. Honor, social responsibility."

"Don't forget the hot car."

"That's unnecessary."

"The car?"

"The mask you wear," he said. "The effort you go to hide the truth beneath layers of insignificant mannerisms and humor. It's a waste of energy."

Annie shook her head. "It's called having a personality. You oughta try it sometime. I'm betting it would improve your social life."

The retort was made an instant before she realized what he had really said-that he lived with the protective pretenses stripped away from his soul; his needs, his thoughts, his feelings lay like raw and exposed nerve endings. She would never have thought of him as vulnerable, knew he would never think of himself as such. How strange to see him that way. She wasn't sure it was something she wanted to see.

"A waste of time," he said again, turning away. "We've got a job to do. Let's get to it."

He had turned the grenier, the loft that made up the second half-story of the house, into a study. The bed tucked into the far corner seemed like an afterthought, a grudging concession to the occasional need for sleep. A masculine place, with heavy wood furnishings, and an almost monkish quality in its sense of order. The bookcases were lined with tides, hundreds of books shelved by subject in alphabetical order. Criminology, philosophy, psychology, religion. Everything from aberrant behavior to the mysteries of Zen.

A ten-foot-long table held the reams of paperwork the Bichon homicide had generated. Photocopies of every statement, every lab report. Numbered binders filled with Fourcade's notes. A bulletin board behind the table held maps: one of a three-parish area, one of Partout Parish, one of the immediate Bayou Breaux area including the murder scene and Renard's home. Red pins marked significant sites. Fine red lines drawn between sites were annotated with exact mileage.

A second bulletin board held copies of the crime scene photos-stark, hard reality cast in the harsh light of a camera flash.

"Wow," Annie murmured. "I guess you believe in bringing your work home with you."

"It's a duty, not a hobby." He stood in front of one of the bookcases. "You want a time clock and no worries, get a job at the lamp factory. You want to pass the buck on the tough stuff, stay in uniform." He hit her with the Hard Stare. "Is that what you want, 'Toinette? You wanna stay on the surface where everything is simple and safe, or do you want to go deeper?"

Once again she had the feeling he was the guardian at the gate of some secret world, that if she crossed the threshold, there would be no going back. She resented the idea.

"I want to be a detective," she said. "I want to help clear this case. I'm not pledging my allegiance to the Dark Lord or becoming a Jedi knight. I want to do the job, not be the job."

That was Fourcade, the Zen detective. Disapproval hung on him like mist.

"It's a job, not a religion," Annie said. "You were born out of your time, Fourcade. You'd have made a hell of a Zealot."

Her gaze shifted to the table, to the bulletin board and the pictures of Pam Bichon's grisly death. She wanted Fourcade's resources. She didn't have to embrace his doctrine of obsessive-compulsive behavior.

"I want this solved," she said. "End of story."

She selected Donnie Bichon's file folder and opened it.

"Why did you go to him?" Fourcade asked. "We looked at him and cleared him."

"Because Lindsay Faulkner says he's fixing to sell Pam's half of the realty business."

The news hit Nick like a rock to the chest. He had taunted Donnie with the idea just yesterday, never imagining the man would be fool enough to make such a move so soon after Pam's death. "When did you hear this?"

"This morning. I stopped by the realty office." She hesitated, weighing the pros and cons of telling the whole truth.

"You stopped by and what?" he demanded. "If we're partners, we're partners, chère. No holding back."

She took a deep breath as she set the file aside. "She said Donnie claims he has a possible buyer on the hook… in New Orleans. Donnie told me it was a bluff."

Nick had managed to all but banish the idea of Marcotte's involvement. It seemed too far-fetched. He couldn't imagine he had ever meant enough to Marcotte for him to inflict vengeance after all this time. Besides, Marcotte had gotten what he wanted back when, so what would be the point of dragging out the game?

Unless what he wanted now was Bayou Realty, and Nick's involvement was mere coincidence or karma. The question was: If Marcotte was involved, was the murder a result of that involvement or was his involvement a byproduct of the crime?

"C'est ein affaire a pus finir," Nick whispered.

"I figure it's a bluff," Annie said. "We-you've got Donnie's phone records from the period when Pam was being harassed. If the sale of the business was a motive for him to get rid of her, then he would have been in contact with his buyer during that time. Not from his home, if he had any sense, but no one would think twice about him calling New Orleans from the office. We can check it out.

"But I say if Donnie has this fat cat on the hook, why would he even bother to play games with Lindsay Faulkner?" she went on. "And if he was afraid of having the sale raise a red flag with the cops, then why do anything out in the open? It's not that hard to hide deals. In fact, Donnie's done it before. He had Pam hiding property for him so he wouldn't lose it to the bank. Did you know about that?"

"Yes."

Nick forced himself to move. Forward had become a mantra months ago. Move forward physically, psychologically, spiritually, metaphorically. Movement seemed to pull taut the lines upon which facts and ideas aligned themselves in his mind. Movement maintained order. So he moved forward and tried not to be spooked by the shadow that followed him.

"I'll go over the records," he said. "But I doubt the sale of the business has anything to do with the murder. It's more likely scavengers moving in, taking advantage of an opportunity. A woman killed the way Pam was-that's no money murder. People killed for money reasons-they fall down steps, they drown, they disappear."

He stopped in front of the table, his gaze on the photographs. "This… this was personal. This was hate. Contempt. Control. Rage."

"Or made to look so after the fact."

"No," he whispered. "I can feel it."

"Did you know her?" she asked quietly.

"She sold me this place. Nice lady. Hard to believe someone could have hated her this way."

"Renard claims he loved her-like a friend. He insists he's being railroaded. He wants me to find the truth for him." Her lips twisted. "Gee, I'm a popular girl lately."

He didn't pick up on the irony. He concentrated instead on Renard. "You spoke with him? When? Where?"

"This morning. In his office. He invited me up. He's laboring under the misconception that I'm sympathetic toward him."

"He trusts you?"

"I had the great luck to save his sorry ass-twice in one day. He seems to think just because I won't let individuals murder him, I won't want the state to do it, either."

"You can get close to him, then," Fourcade murmured. "That's something Stokes and I could never do. He regarded us as the enemy from the first. Stokes had been riding him already for the harassment, before the murder. You come to him from a whole other direction."

"I don't like the way your mind is bending," Annie said. She went to one of the bookcases and stared at the titles. "I told him flat out I think he did it."

"But he wants to win you over, yes?"

"I don't know that I'd put it quite like that."

Fourcade turned her around, his hands cupping her shoulders, and looked at her as if he was seeing her for the first time. "Mais oui. Oh, yeah. The hair, the eyes, 'bout the same size. You fit the victim profile."

"So do half the women in South Lou'siana."

"But you came into his life, chère. Like it was meant to be."

"You're creeping me out, Fourcade." She tried to wiggle away from his touch. "You talk like he's a serial killer."

"The potential is there. The psychopathology is there," he said, and began pacing. "Look at him: mid-thirties, white, single, intelligent, domineering mother, absent father, unsuccessful in maintaining relationships with women. It's classic."

"But he doesn't have any criminal history. No pattern of escalating aberrant behavior."

"Maybe, maybe not. Before he moved here, he had a girlfriend back in Baton Rouge. She died an untimely death."

"The papers said she died in a car accident."

"She was burned beyond recognition in a single-car crash on some back road not long after she told her mother she was going to break it off with Renard. She thought he was too possessive. 'Smothering' was the word she used with her mother."

He had obviously gone to the source for his information. The only thing the papers had gotten out of Elaine Ingram's mother was that she found Marcus Renard "very pleasant and a gentleman" and that she wished her daughter had married him. If he'd been a monster then, no one had seen it… except perhaps Elaine.

"The mother doesn't think he killed her," Annie said.

Fourcade looked impatient. "It doesn't matter what she thinks. It matters what he did. It matters that he might have killed her. It matters that he might have had that kind of rage in him before and that he might have killed out of that rage.

"Look at this murder," he said, gesturing to the photos.

"Rage, power, domination, sexual brutality. Not unlike your Bayou Strangler."

"Are you saying you think maybe Renard did those women four years ago?" Annie asked. "He moved back here in '93. You think he was the Bayou Strangler?"

Fourcade shook his head. "No. I've been over those files. I've talked to the people who ended up pinning it on Danjermond: Laurel Chandler and Jack Boudreaux. They live up on the Carolina coast now. Too many bad memories 'round here, I guess, with her losing her sister to the Strangler and all. They tell a pretty convincing tale. The investigation backed them up."

He stopped to stare at the crime scene photos. "Besides, there are differences in the murders. Pam Bichon wasn't strangled to death."

He touched a finger to one of the photos, a close-up of the bruising on the throat. "She was choked manually- these bruises are thumbprints-and her hyoid bone was cracked. He probably choked her unconscious at some point. We can only hope so for her sake. But asphyxiation wasn't the cause of death. Loss of blood from the primary stab wounds was the cause of death." He moved his finger to a shot of the woman's savaged bare chest. "Because of the pattern of the blood splatters, I believe she was stabbed several times in the chest while she was standing, then fell to the floor. The choking happened sometime after she went down but before she was dead. Otherwise you wouldn't have this kind of bruising.

"The Strangler, he used a white silk scarf around the throat to kill his victims-that was his signature. And he tied them down with strips of white silk. See here? No ligature marks on Bichon's wrists or ankles."

"But the sexual mutilation-"

He shook his head. "Similar, but not the same by any means. Danjermond tortured his victims extensively before he killed them. The mutilation of Bichon was largely postmortem, suggesting it was about anger, hatred, disrespect, rather than any kind of erotic sadism-which was the case with the Strangler. That boy got off on it in a big way. Renard was pissed.

"And then there's the victim profile," he said. "The Strangler hunted women who were easily accessible: women who hung out in bars, looking for men, liked to pass a good time. That wasn't Pam Bichon.

"No," he declared. "The cases are unrelated. The way I see it, Renard fixated on Pam when he thought she might become available to him-when she separated from Donnie. He probably built a whole fantasy around her, and when she refused to cooperate in turning the fantasy into reality, he went over the line to the dark side."

He turned and his gaze swept down over Annie. "And now he's lookin' at you, chère."

"Lucky me," Annie muttered.

Fourcade ignored the sarcasm. "Oh yeah," he said, moving closer. "You're being presented with a rare opportunity, 'Toinette. You can get close to him, open him up, see what's in his head. He lets you close enough, he'll give himself away."

"Or kill me, if your theory holds true. I'd rather come across a nice piece of evidence, thanks anyway. The murder weapon. A witness who could put him at the scene. A trophy."

"We found his trophy-the ring. Don't expect to find another. We never even found the gifts Pam gave back to him. We never found the other things he'd taken from her. He's too smart to make the same mistake twice-and that's what we need, sugar: for him to make a mistake. You could be it." He brushed her bangs with his fingertips, caressed her cheek. The pad of his thumb skimmed the corner of her mouth. "He could fall in love with you."

She didn't like the way her pulse was pounding. She didn't like the way she saw Pam Bichon's corpse from every angle-torn, ragged, bloody; the feather mask a grotesque contrast.

"I'm not bait for your bear trap, Fourcade," she said. "If I can get something out of Renard, I will, but I'm not getting close enough for him to lay a finger on me. I don't want to get under his skin. I don't want to get inside his head-or yours, for that matter. I want justice, that's all."

"Then go after it, chère," he said, too seductively. "Go after it… every way you can."