A Thin Dark Line

37

He lay in wait like a panther in the night, anger and anticipation contained by forced patience. The glowing blue numbers on the VCR clicked the minutes. 1:43. 1:44. The low purr of an engine approached, passed one end of the house, and slipped into the garage.

The rattle of keys. The kitchen door swung open. He waited.

Footfalls on tile. Footfalls muffled by carpet. He waited.

The footsteps passed by his hiding place.

"Quite the night owl, aren't you, Tulane?"

Donnie bolted at the sound of the voice, but in a heartbeat, Fourcade materialized from the gloom of the living room and slammed him into the wall.

"You lied to me, Donnie," he growled. "That's not a wise thing to do."

"I don't know what you're talking about!" Donnie blubbered, spittle collecting at the corners of his mouth. His breath reeked of scotch. The smell of sweat and fear penetrated his clothing.

Nick gave him a shake, banging his head back against the wall. "In case you haven't noticed, Donnie, me, I'm not a patient man. And you, you're not too bright. This is bad combination, no?"

Donnie shivered. His voice took on a whine. "What do you want from me, Fourcade?"

"Truth. You tell me you don't know Duval Marcotte. But Marcotte, he called you on the telephone tonight, didn't he?"

"I don't know him. I know of him," he stressed. "What if he called me? I can't control what other people do! Jesus, this is the perfect example-I did you a good turn and look how you treat me!"

"You don't like the way I treat you, Tulane?" Nick said, easing his weight back. "The way you lie to me, I was tempted to beat the shit out of you a long time ago. Put in the proper perspective, my restraint has been commendable. Perspective is the key to balance in life, c'est vrai?"

Donnie edged away from the wall. Fourcade blocked the route to the kitchen and garage. He glanced across the living room. The furniture was an obstacle course of black shadows against a dark background; the only illumination, silver streetlight leaching in through the sheer front curtains.

Nick smiled. "Don't you run away from me, Donnie. You'll only piss me off."

"I've already managed to do that."

"Yeah, but you ain't never seen me mad, mon ami. You don't wanna open that door, let the tiger out."

"You know, this is it, Fourcade," Donnie said. "I'm calling the cops this time. You can't just break into people's homes and harass them."

Nick leaned into the back of a tall recliner and turned the lamp beside it on low. Donnie had traded the Young Businessman look for Uptown Casual: jeans and a polo shirt with a small red crawfish embroidered on the left chest.

"Why are you wearing sunglasses?" Donnie asked. "It's the middle of the damn night."

Nick just smiled slowly.

"You sure you wanna do that, Donnie?" he said. "You wanna call the SO? Because, you know, you do that, then we're all gonna have to have this conversation downtown- about how you lied to me and what all about Marcotte sniffing around the realty, wanting that land what's tied up there.

"Me,"-he shrugged-"I'm just a friend who dropped by to chat. But you…" He shook his head sadly. "Tulane, you just got more and more explaining to do. You see how this looks-you dealing with Marcotte? I'll tell you: It looks like you had one hell of a motive to kill your wife."

"I never talked to Marcotte-"

"And now your wife's partner is attacked, left for dead-"

"I never laid a hand on Lindsay! I told Stokes, that son of a bitch-"

"It's just not looking good for you, Donnie." Nick moved away from the chair, hands resting at the waist of his jeans. "So, you gonna do something about that or what?"

"Do what?" Donnie said in exasperation.

"Did Marcotte contact you or the other way around?"

Donnie's Adam's apple bobbed in his throat. "He called me."

"When?"

"Yesterday."

Nick silently cursed his own stupidity. "That's the truth?" he demanded.

Donnie raised his right hand like a Boy Scout and closed his eyes, flinching. "My hand to God."

Nick grabbed his face with one big hand and squeezed as he backed him into another wall. "Look at me," he ordered. "Look at me! You he to God all you want, Tulane.

God, He's not here gonna kick your ass. You look at me and answer. Did you ever have contact with Duval Marcotte before Pam was killed?"

Donnie met his gaze. "No. Never."

And if that was the truth, then Nick had drawn Marcotte onto the scene himself. The obsession had blinded him to the possibilities. The possibility that Marcotte's interest would be piqued by Nick's ill-fated visit, and that Marcotte would be drawn to the scene like a lion to the smell of blood.

"He's the devil," he whispered, letting Donnie go. Marcotte was the devil, and he had all but invited the devil to play in his own backyard. "Don'tcha do business with the devil, Donnie," he murmured. "You'll end up in hell. One way or another."

He dropped his gaze to the floor, reflecting on his own stupidity. There was no changing what he'd done, nothing to do but deal with it. Slowly Donnie's muddy work boots came into focus.

"Where you been tonight, Tulane?"

"Around," Donnie said, straightening his shirt with one hand and rubbing his cheek with the other. "I went to the cemetery for a while. I go there sometimes to talk to God, you know. And to see Pam. Then I went and checked a site."

"In the dead of night?"

He shrugged. "Hey, you like to go around in sunglasses. I like to get drunk and wander around half-finished construction sites. There's always the chance I'll fall in a hole and kill myself. It's kind of like Russian roulette. I don't have much of a social life since Pam was killed."

"I suppose an unsolved murder in your past puts the ladies off."

"Some."

"Well… you watch your step, cher," Nick said, backing toward the kitchen. "We don't want you to meet an untimely end-unless you deserve it."

He was gone as quickly and quietly as he had appeared. Donnie didn't even hear the door shut. But then, that may have been due to the pounding in his head. The shakes swept over him on a wave of weakness, and he stumbled into the bathroom with a hand pressed to his burning stomach. Bruising his knees on the tile, he dropped to the floor and puked into the toilet, then started to cry.

All he wanted was a simple, cushy life. Money. Success. No worries. The adoration of his daughter. He hadn't realized how close he had come to that ideal until he'd blown it all away. Now all he had was trouble, and every time he turned around he screwed himself deeper into the hole.

Hugging the toilet, he put his head down on his arms and sobbed.

"Pam… Pam… I'm so sorry!"

Annie dreamed she caught a bullet in her teeth. Tied to the bullet was a string. Pulling herself hand over hand along the string, she flew through the night, through the woods, and came to a halt with a rifle barrel pressed into the center of her forehead. At the stock end of the gun stood a shimmering apparition with an elaborate feather mask covering its face. With one hand the apparition removed the mask to reveal the face of Donnie Bichon. Another hand peeled away the face of Donnie Bichon to reveal Marcus Renard. Then Renard's face was peeled away to reveal Pam Bichon's death mask-the eyes partially gone, skin discolored and decomposing, tongue swollen and purple. Nailed to her chest was the dead black cat, its intestines hanging down like a bloody necklace.

"You are me," Pam said, and fired the rifle. Bang! Bang! Bang!

Annie hurled herself upright on the sofa, gasping for breath, feeling as if her heart had leapt out of her chest.

The banging came again. A fist on wood. Bleary-eyed, she grabbed for the Sig on the coffee table.

"'Toinette! It's me!" Fourcade called.

He stood at the French doors, scowling in at her.

Annie went to the doors and let him in. She didn't bother to ask the obvious question. Of course Fourcade wouldn't come to the front door. Her tormentor might have been watching from the woods, returning to the scene of his crimes. She asked the second-most obvious question instead.

"Where the hell were you?"

After slamming the door shut on the atrocity in her bedroom, she had gone back to the living room and sat down, trying to think what she should do. Call the SO? Bring Pitre back here and let him soak up the gory details to spread around the department at the shift change? What good would he do? None. She had called Fourcade instead, cursing him silently as his machine picked up again.

"Taking care of some business," he said.

He stared at her as she paced back and forth along the coffee table with her arms banded around her. He took in everything about her-the disheveled hair, the dirty jeans and T-shirt. Reaching out as she came toward him, he plucked the Sig from her fingers and set it aside.

"Are you all right?"

"No!" she snapped. "Someone tried to kill me. I think we've already established that I don't take that well. Then I find out someone came into my house, wrote on my wall in blood, and nailed a dead cat above my bed. I'm not okay with that either!"

From the corner of her eye she could see Fourcade watching her. He didn't seem to know what to do except fall back on the job, the routine. She was a victim-God, but she hated that label-and he was a detective.

"Tell me what happened from the time you parked the Jeep."

She went through the story point by point, fact by fact, the way she had been trained to testify. The process calmed her somewhat, distanced her from the violation. In her mind, she tried to separate the victim in her from the cop. For the first time she told him about the skinned muskrat that had been left in her locker room, though she didn't put the two incidents on the same plane. It was one thing to play a nasty joke at work; breaking and entering was another matter. And what had been done in her bedroom seemed more threatening, more vile, more personal. Then again, if a deputy had been behind that rifle tonight, why not this too?

Nick listened, then headed toward the bedroom. Annie followed, reluctant to face it again.

"Did you touch anything?" he asked out of habit.

"No. God, I couldn't even bring myself to go in."

He pushed the door open and stood there with his hands on his hips, a grimace twisting his lips. "Mon Dieu."

He left Annie at the door and went into the room, taking in the details with a clinical eye.

The blood had been brushed on the wall. No visible fingerprints. The word cunt had been chosen for what reason? As an opinion? To shock? Out of disrespect? Out of anger?

In his mind's eye he could see Keith Mullen, skinny and ugly, standing in his filthy kitchen just that morning. "She don't know nothing about loyalty, turning on one of us. Cunt's got no business being in a uniform."

Was the animal symbolic? An alley cat-sexually indiscriminate. Its guts spilled down onto the bed where Annie had made love with him just the night before.

And the positioning of its body, the nails through its forepaws, the evisceration-an obvious allusion to Pam Bichon. Meant to frighten or as a warning?

He thought of how close she had come to being shot and he wanted to hit something-someone-hard and repeatedly.

He worked to contain the rage even as he remembered Donnie Bichon's muddy boots. He set the thought aside for the moment.

"This cat-was she yours, Toinette?"

"No."

"You talked to your tante and uncle 'bout did they see anyone around today?"

"We had that conversation when we were talking about who might want to shoot me. They were busy today. Tourists coming in early for Mardi Gras. They had to call in extra tour guides. They didn't have time to notice anyone special."

"How'd anyone get in here? Were your doors locked when you came up?"

"Everything was locked up tight. You might be able to pick a lock to break in, but there's no locking these doors from the outside without a key."

"So how did this creep get in?"

"There's only one other way." She led him into the bathroom, to the door behind the old claw-foot tub. "The stairs go down into the stockroom of the store."

"Was it locked?"

"I don't know. I thought so. I usually keep it locked, but I went down this way Sunday night when the prowler was here. Maybe I forgot to lock it after."

Nick stood in the tub and examined the locking mechanism in the doorknob, frowning disapproval. "Ain't nothing but a button. Anybody could slip it with a credit card. How would anyone but family or employees know about these stairs?"

Annie shook her head. "By luck. By chance. The rest rooms are across the hall at the bottom of the stairs. Someone going to use them might look through the stockroom and notice."

He flicked on the light switch and descended the steep stairs, looking for any sign another person had been there-a footprint, a thread, a stray hair. There was nothing. The stockroom door stood open. Across the hall, he could see part of the door to the men's room.

"I'd say someone went out of their way to notice," he murmured.

He went back up the steps and followed Annie to the living room. She curled herself into one corner of the sofa and rubbed her bare foot slowly back and forth under the jaw of her gator table. She looked small and forlorn.

"What d' you think, 'Toinette? You think the shooter and the cat killer are the same person?"

"I don't know," Annie said. "And don't try to tell me I do. Are the shooter and the cat killer one and the same? Is Renard's shooter my shooter too, or is Renard the shooter? Who hates me more: half the people I work with or half the people I work for? And what do they hate me for more: trying to solve this murder or preventing you from committing one?

"I'm so tired I can't see straight. I'm scared. I'm sick that someone would do that to that poor animal-"

Somehow, that was the last straw. Bad enough to have violence directed at her, but to have an innocent little animal killed and mutilated for the sole purpose of frightening her was too much. She pressed her fingertips against her lips and tried to will the moment to pass. Then Fourcade was beside her and she was in his arms, her face against his chest. The tears she had fought so hard to choke back soaked into his shirt.

Nick held her close, whispering softly to her in French, brushing his lips against her forehead. For a few moments he allowed the feelings free inside him-the need to protect her, to comfort her, the blind rage against whoever had terrorized her. She had been so brave, such a fighter through all of this mess.

He pressed his cheek against the top of her head and held her tighter. It had been too long since he'd had anything of himself worth giving to another person. The idea that he wanted to was terrifying.

Annie held tight to him, knowing tenderness didn't come to him easily. This small gift from him meant more to her than she should have let it. As the tears passed, she wiped them from her cheeks with the back of her hand and studied his face as he met her stare, wondering… and afraid to wonder.

Her gaze shifted to the gift box she had left on her coffee table. Inside the box lay a small, finely detailed antique cameo brooch. The note enclosed read: "To my guardian angel. Love, Marcus."

Revulsion shuddered down her back.

Fourcade picked up the box and card and studied the brooch.

"He gave Pam gifts," he said soberly. "And he slashed her tires and left a dead snake in her pencil drawer at work."

"Jekyll and Hyde," Annie murmured.

If Renard had indeed been Pam's stalker, as Pam had insisted, then he had alternated between secretly terrifying her and giving her presents; showing his concern for her, claiming to be her friend. The contrast in those actions had kept the cops from taking seriously Pam's charge that Renard was the one stalking her.

Across the room the phone rang. Automatically, Annie looked at the clock. Half past three in the morning. Fourcade said nothing as she let the machine pick up.

"Annie? It's Marcus. I wish you were there. Please call me when you can. Someone just threw a rock through one of our windows. Mother is beside herself. And Victor- And I-I wish you could come over, Annie. You're the only one who cares. I need you."