A Thin Dark Line

by Tami Hoag

  "Are you always so straightforward, Detective?" he asked. "Whatever happened to those coy games women learned while under their mothers' white-gloved tutelage?"

  "It's Deputy," Annie corrected. "My mother died when I was nine."

  Donnie winced. "God. I can't manage to do much of anything right these days. I'm sorry," he said with genuine contrition. He stepped back from the door and motioned her in. "I'm not so drunk to have lost all my manners or sense, though some would say I never had much of the latter to begin with. Come in. Have a seat. I just ordered a pizza."

  A gooseneck lamp was the only light on in his office, glowing gold on the polished oak desk and giving the place an intimate feel. A bottle of Glenlivet single malt scotch sat on the blotter beside a coffee mug that declared Donnie to be #1 DAD.

  "Have you seen Josie this week?" Annie asked as she walked slowly around the office, taking in the wildlife art on the walls, the framed aerial photos of the Quail Run subdivision. A photo of Josie smiling like a pixie sat on the desk near the mug.

  Donnie dropped into his chair. "Hell, no. Every night's a school night. On the weekend Belle runs off with her. Let me tell you, the only thing worse than having an ex-wife is having an ex-mother-in-law. She lies when I call—tells me Josie's in the bathtub, she's gone to bed, she's doing homework." He poured two fingers of scotch into the mug and drank half. "I admit, I have dark thoughts about Belle Davidson."

  "Careful who you say that to, Mr. Bichon."

  "That's right. Anything I say can and will be used against me. Well, I'm past caring at the moment. I miss my little girl."

  He sipped at the scotch, stroked his fingertips over the printing on the mug. There was an air of surprise about him, as if he had never expected to face any difficulty in his life and what he was going through now was a rude and unwelcome shock. Things had come too easily for him, Annie suspected. He was handsome. He was popular. He was an athlete. He expected love and adoration, instant forgiveness, no accountability. In many ways, he was as much a child as his daughter.

  "Please have a seat so I can focus my eyes, Deputy. And please call me Donnie. I'm depressed enough without having to think attractive women feel compelled to call me 'sir.' " He flashed the weary smile again.

  Annie took a seat in the burgundy wing chair across the desk from him. He wanted to be friends, to pretend she was here for him instead of as a cop—the way Renard kept trying to do. But she felt less anxious about it with Donnie, which could prove to be a costly mistake, she reminded herself. He had as much reason to kill Pam as Renard. More. But he was handsome, and popular, and charming, and no one wanted to think he was guilty of anything other than cheating on his wife.

  If she was going to play detective, it was her role to draw him out from behind his public facade. Get him to relax, get him to talk, see what he might reveal. She could once again play off the adversarial positions Stokes and Fourcade had taken with him. She could be his friend.

  "Okay, Donnie," she said. "What's depressing you?"

  "What isn't? I'm separated from my child. I'm being stalked by a psychopathic cop who I bailed out of jail. Now I've got Stokes coming in here asking me did I bash in Lindsay Faulkner's head—like I even thought anything could put a dent in it. Business is..." He let the statement trail off on a heavy sigh. "And Pam..."

  Tears filled his eyes and he looked away. "This isn't what I wanted," he whispered.

  "It's not working out for the best for anyone," Annie said. "I saw Lindsay this morning. She's in pretty rough shape."

  "But that's got nothing to do with Pam," he declared. "It was that rapist."

  Annie didn't comment. In the brief silence she watched his expression of certainty slip. "I suppose you heard about someone taking a shot at Renard last night."

  "It's the talk of the town," Donnie said. "I believe if he'd been killed, the Rotarians would have made the shooter grand marshal of the Mardi Gras parade. People are sick of waiting around for justice to be done."

  "Are you one of those people?"

  "Hell, yes. Did I pull the trigger? Hell, no, and for once I've got half a dozen witnesses to back me up. I was here last night, working on the parade float."

  "And the crew is off tonight?"

  "It's finished. I'm celebrating." He lifted the bottle and raised his eyebrows. "Want to help me?"

  "No thanks."

  "That's the second time you've turned me down. If you're not careful, I'll get the feeling you don't like me."

  "And then what?"

  He shrugged and grinned. "I'll have to try harder. I dislike rejection."

  "What about competition? Lindsay told me you were jealous of Detective Stokes spending time with Pam."

  The grin flattened. He poured a little more scotch and took the mug with him as he unfolded his lanky body from the chair. "The guy's a jerk, that's all. He was supposed to be investigating. All he really wanted was to get in her pants."

  "Do you think he ever succeeded?"

  "Pam didn't sleep around."

  "And how would it be any of your business if she had?"

  "She was still my wife," he said, his expression tightening with suppressed anger.

  "On paper."

  "It wasn't over."

  "Pam said it was."

  "She was wrong," he insisted. "I loved her. I screwed up. I know I screwed up, but I loved her. We would have worked things out."

  His determination amazed and unnerved Annie. "Donnie, she had filed the papers."

  "She still had my name. She still wore my ring, for Christ's sake." Tears welled in his eyes again and his hand trembled a little. "And she's out with that—"

  He wasn't drunk enough to finish the sentence. He shook his head at the temptation, turned away from it.

  "What do you mean—out with him?" Annie prodded. "You mean like on dates?"

  "Lunch to discuss this aspect of the case. Dinner to go over that aspect of the case. I saw the way he looked at her. I know what he wanted. He didn't give a shit about the case. He didn't do anything to stop what was happening."

  "How do you know that?"

  He blinked at her. "Because I—I know. I was there."

  "Where?" Annie pressed, rising and stepping toward him, her instincts at attention. "Did you follow him around? Did you talk to the sheriff? How would you know what he did or didn't do, Donnie?"

  Unless you were involved.

  He didn't answer for a moment, didn't look at her. "You ask him," he said at last. "You ask him what he was doing. Ask him what he wanted. I can't believe he hasn't wanted the same thing from you." His gaze moved over her face. "Then again, maybe he has. Maybe you go for his type. What do I know?"

  "His type?"

  Sipping at his scotch, he moved away.

  "Did you ever confront him about his interest in Pam?" Annie asked.

  "He said if I had a problem with him, I should take it to the sheriff, but that I'd look like a jackass 'cause Pam sure as hell wasn't complaining."

  "How did that make you feel toward Pam?"

  He didn't answer. He picked a small framed photograph off a shelf in the bookcase and looked at it as if he hadn't seen it in a very long time. A photograph of himself with Pam and Josie at about five. His family, intact.

  "She was so pretty," he whispered.

  Setting the frame aside, he turned toward Annie again. "Like you, Detective. Pretty brown eyes." He reached up with a hesitant hand to brush her bangs to the side. "Pretty smile." He touched the corner of her mouth. "Better watch out. I'll want to marry you."

  Annie held herself still, wondering how much of this talk was Donnie and how much was the liquor. Then the doorbell buzzed, and whatever had been in Donnie's head vanished.

  "Pizza man," he announced, walking out.

  She wondered just how stable he was. His logic seemed perilously close to the classic pattern of the obsessive stalker everyone had pegged Renard to be. She wondered how angry he might have been seeing Pam with Stokes. She wond
ered how a man who reportedly chased every skirt in town could find any moral outrage at his estranged wife having lunch with another man. Even if Stokes had had designs on Pam, Pam had not reciprocated. "It was nothing," Lindsay had said; she had been reluctant even to raise the subject, it seemed so insignificant.

  And yet she had raised the subject with Stokes the very day she had quarreled with Donnie ... and that same night someone had tried to silence her forever.

  The pieces sifted through her mind: Donnie, desperate, losing a wife and a safety net for his business. Donnie, unable to cope with the idea of rejection. Donnie, in financial straits. Donnie, angry, driven to a dangerous limit by his problems and by the sight of his wife enjoying the company of another man—a man whose race might have added to the outrage in Donnie's mind. Pushed to that thin dark line, might he have crossed it in a moment of madness? Killed her in a fit of rage and covered the crime with atrocities no one would ever attribute to him?

  The sudden ringing of the telephone broke Annie's concentration. She expected an answering machine to pick up, but none did. Who called a business line at this hour? A client? A girlfriend? A legitimate associate? A not-so-legitimate associate?

  She picked up the receiver when the phone stopped ringing. Eyes on the door, she dialed star 69 and waited while the call chased itself back home.

  On the fourth ring a man's voice answered. "Marcotte."

  35

  "When will you paint that, Marcus? I want no reminders," Doll said with drama. "My nerves are still ragged tonight. They're worse, in fact. It's as if it's all coming back to me because of it being evening. My evenings will never be the same. The joy of my evenings has been robbed from me. I will never again be able to sit at this table and enjoy a cup of coffee after dinner. Certainly not with the wall looking that way. When will you paint it?"

  "Tomorrow, Mother."

  Marcus scraped the last of the excess wet patching compound from the wall and into the can he had used to mix the concoction. He was no expert at repairing walls, let alone a bullet hole, but then no expert had been willing to do the job. Every call had been the same: They heard his name and hung up.

  He had boarded up the broken French door himself. When the replacement glass arrived, he would have to learn about glazing, he supposed. Until then, the heavy drapes would be pulled across the door. Doll had closed every shade and drape in the house to block the view of any potential voyeur or sniper.

  "The sheriff's office should have to pay for fixing that hole," Doll said. "It's their fault we have people shooting at us. The way they've railroaded you when you're guilty of nothing but making a fool of yourself over a woman. They're lazy and corrupt, and we'll all end up murdered in our beds because of them."

  "They're not all that way, Mother. Annie said she'd do her best to check into what happened last night."

  "Annie," she said with disapproval. "Don't delude yourself, Marcus. You think she's some kind of angel. She's no better than the rest."

  Tuning out his mother's droning, Marcus knelt to clean up his work area. He imagined what it would be like to move away from here and start fresh without the burden of his family or his reputation. He envisioned a house of his own design, perhaps on the Gulf Coast of Texas or Florida. Something open and bright, with a large deck facing the water.

  He thought of coming home after work to cook dinner for Annie. She wasn't the domestic sort. He would take pleasure in teaching her. They would work side by side in the kitchen, and he would show her the proper way to fillet a fish. His hand would close over hers on the knife and guide her. He could almost feel the delicate bones of her hand beneath his, the smooth handle of the knife filling her palm. It would remind them both of the night before, when he had closed her hand around the shaft of his penis. Warmth flooded his groin.

  "Marcus, are you listening to me?"

  Doll's shrill tone tore through the fabric of his fantasy, ruining it. He briefly imagined surging to his feet with a roar, swinging the can of plaster mix, striking his mother across the face with it, plaster and blood spraying across the wall as she crumpled to the floor. But of course he didn't do that. It was only a moment's madness, there and gone. He wiped his hands on the damp towel and folded it neatly.

  "What was that, Mother?"

  "Will the paint match?" she asked with exasperation. "I have a premonition that the spot will always stand out. That the color won't match no matter what we do, and every time I look at that wall I'll be taken with the fear."

  Marcus rose with the bucket in one hand and toolbox in the other. "I'm sure it will match—so long as we allow the plaster to cure properly before we paint it."

  Doll drummed her fingertips against her sternum, frowning sourly. "I wish you would paint it tonight."

  "If I paint it tonight, the spot will show." He walked away as she clucked her tongue behind him.

  He wanted out of the house, needed air, needed quiet. He wanted to see Annie. He had tried to call her, to thank her again for coming to his rescue, to ask her if she had made any progress on his case, but she wasn't home, which made him wonder what she was doing. As much as he didn't want to, he couldn't help but question if she was with a man tonight.

  The thought aroused his jealousy. Men would want her. He did. And she might take a lover, not fully realizing yet what could be between them. He imagined tearing her from the arms of another man, striking her, punishing her, disciplining her for betraying him, taking her sexually with force and dominance. She would realize her mistake then. She would see the truth of his feelings for her. And in seeing that truth she would recognize her own feelings.

  Strange, he thought as he washed the plaster residue from his hands, after Elaine had died, he hadn't wanted anyone to take her place for a long time. He hadn't expected to think of another woman after Pam's death. He still grieved for her. He still missed her. But the sharpness of that pain had faded and was being replaced by something else—hunger, need. Pam had ultimately rejected him. She had believed the lies of her husband and Stokes, and failed to see the truth of his devotion to her. He thought less and less of Pam, more and more of Annie, his angel.

  He went through his bedroom to his sanctuary and turned on the lights and radio. A Haydn string quartet played softly as he took the portrait from its special place in the small secret storage cupboard hidden behind a panel of wainscoting. The cubbyhole had been there for more than a century. No telling what the original owners of the house had protected in it. Marcus lined the shelves with keepsakes he would share with no one. Treasured mementos of past loves. Things he wanted no one in his family to taint with so much as their mere knowledge of them. He touched several pieces now.

  Closing the panel, he moved to his drawing table and arranged things to his satisfaction. The sketch was taking shape nicely. He stared at it for a long time, thinking, imagining. He concentrated first on her eyes with their slightly exotic shape. Then the slim, pert nose. Then the mouth— her incredibly sexy mouth with its full lower lip and quirking corners. He imagined touching her mouth with his, imagined her mouth moving over his naked body. He imagined her hands touching him. The arousal built until he finally went back to the secret cupboard and returned with a pair of women's black silk underpants. He opened his trousers and masturbated with the panties, his eyes on the portrait. He thought of what it would be like to be inside her, to press her body down beneath his and impale his shaft between her legs again and again and again, until she screamed with the ecstasy of it.

  When it was over, he washed himself at the utility sink in the corner, rinsed out the panties, and put them away with his other treasures. He watched the clock and waited, too restless to work on the drawing. When the house was quiet and he knew his mother and Victor were likely both asleep, he let his restlessness drive him from the house into the night.

  Nick paced his study as Annie recounted the events of the evening to him, culminating with Marcotte's call to Donnie. Things were starting to happen. The screws we
re turning.

  Marcotte was in it now, and Nick couldn't help but wonder if that was his own doing. That Marcotte might never have taken an interest in Bayou Breaux if he hadn't drawn the man's attention to it didn't sit well. The possibility that Marcotte had been involved from the start pleased him even less.

  The focus of the investigation was broadening rather than narrowing, suggesting he hadn't done the job right the first time around, and he didn't want to believe that. He had worked too hard to come back from the debacle of New Orleans and the Parmantel case.

  "I feel like I'm balancing on the head of a pin, juggling bowling balls," Annie muttered, starting to pace as Nick slowed, as if it were essential for one of them to keep in motion.

  "If Marcotte was in contact with Donnie before Pam's murder, then that only adds to Donnie's motive," she said. "He was angry with Pam for leaving him. I think she was probably holding his property hostage in order to get him to drop the custody threat—which Lindsay Faulkner hinted might have been about Pam seeing male clients. I know Donnie was angry over the relationship he imagined between her and Stokes. If it was imagined.

  "What do you know about that?" she asked. "Was he talking about her around the office? Did he say anything to you?"

  Nick shook his head. "Not that I recall, but I don't listen to that crap, anyway. I don't care who's screwing who unless there's a felony involved. I sure as hell didn't listen to Stokes. He's got a new one every week, at least. I know he was friendly with her. He was quieter after her murder. He might have wanted to be the primary on the case, but he was tied up with the DA the morning you found her. I caught it instead, and Noblier left it that way, even though Stokes had worked the stalking angle. It was a matter of experience. I've worked more murders than the rest of them put together."

  "But Stokes never said anything personal about Pam, about the two of them?"

  "Not in a sexual way, no. He admitted he wished he had done more for her during the harassment. He didn't take it seriously enough."