Bad Liar

Chapter 4

4

“How did it start?” the detective asked, glancing over at her from the driver’s seat as they waited for an opening in traffic to pull out of the law enforcement center. “Your son’s addiction. How’d it start?”

B’Lynn took a deep breath and sighed, wondering how many times she’d told this story over the years. Too many.

Once was too many.

“Robbie played football in high school. He blew out his left knee during a practice at the beginning of his senior year. He had to have reconstructive surgery.”

She left out the details of an injury so devastating, they had feared for a time he might lose his lower leg. She left out the part of the story about how talented her son had been, how he had been courted by college scouts. He’d had a bright, exciting future, such big dreams, so much to look forward to, and in a single moment all that opportunity was gone. The college scouts disappeared. Fans and fair-weather friends faded from his life. His classmates kept moving forward at the breakneck pace of senior year and all the activities that entailed, while Robbie’s life stopped hard, then crept forward, defined by grueling hours of physical therapy and time spent with tutors as he struggled to catch up academically. He lost who he had been. Depression had descended on him like a dark cloud and swallowed him whole.

“He got hooked on the painkillers,” the detective prompted as they drove toward downtown. It was a statement, not a question. She clearly knew the gist of the story. The way things were in the world, she had doubtless heard many different versions of the same basic tale.

“His doctor prescribed Oxycontin post-op. I didn’t like the idea, but my husband said not to worry. It wouldn’t be for long. Just to get him past the worst of it. But that’s not how it worked out.”

“What does your husband do?”

B’Lynn felt her lips turn in that too-familiar ironic smile. “He’s a doctor. Was. Was my husband,” she hastened to clarify. “He’s still a doctor.”

The detective cut another glance in her direction, looking at her wedding ring, B’Lynn thought, wondering why she still wore it, no doubt. That was a long story of her own bitterness and stubbornness, and her vindictive and pointless desire to aggravate and embarrass Robert. Detective Broussard didn’t need to hear about that.

“You remarried?” she asked.

“No.”

“Have you spoken to your ex about your son being missing?”

“I texted him. He hasn’t heard from Robbie. They don’t speak. They haven’t had a relationship for a long time. Robert can’t accept having a failure for a son. It reflects badly on him.”

That was unfair, to a certain extent, but B’Lynn didn’t care. Her anger toward her ex was one of the few indulgences she allowed herself these days. Blaming Robert made her feel less bad about herself, briefly distracting her from her own failures as a parent.

They had gone through the nightmare of Robbie’s addiction together at first, a united front. She, the dutiful doctor’s wife, had let her husband take the lead, going along with his ideas on treatment facilities and parenting style. Mr. Tough Love, taking the hard line, eventually cut their son off after one too many relapses, one too many transgressions. She had gone along with it, exhausted and at her wit’s end, ground down by the experience and by Robert’s domineering personality. If she lived to be a thousand, she would never forgive herself for it. And she would certainly never forgive him.

“I’ll need his contact information anyway,” Detective Broussard said, hitting the blinker and taking a left. “Does he live here in town?”

“No. He lives in Lafayette.”

He had established his career at Lafayette General Orthopedic Hospital when Robbie was small, but they had chosen to settle in Bayou Breaux, where B’Lynn had grown up, wanting to raise their kids in the sanity and security of a small town, where life was simpler and bad things didn’t happen—or so they had naively believed. But bad things didn’t require a minimum population or draw a line at a maximum income level.

“What kind of doctor is he?”

“Orthopedics.” Which had made the situation with Robbie’s injury and rehab ironically worse than if his dad had been an internist or a gastroenterologist or any other kind of doctor. Robert had been a specialist first and a father second at a time when his son had needed love and support and understanding more than expertise and judgment.

B’Lynn looked over at the detective. She was young—in her early thirties, maybe—with dark hair and dark eyes. Pretty in a girl-next-door kind of way. I looked like that once , she thought, not quite believing herself. It seemed so long ago in so many ways.

“You said you’re a mother, too,” she said.

Broussard nodded. “He’s five. Just started kindergarten this fall.”

B’Lynn immediately flashed back to Robbie’s first day of school, how cute he’d been in his new clothes, carrying a little dinosaur backpack that seemed almost as big as he was. So sweet, so innocent. She pressed her lips together, afraid to open her mouth for fear of something grim and cynical tumbling out, like Enjoy him while you can.

“Such a cute age,” she said at last.

Looking ahead, she could see the big, rusting corrugated metal warehouse looming off to the left in the distance. Her landmark for Robbie’s downtrodden neighborhood.

“It’s just up here on the left,” she said, pointing.

—

The street was narrow and badly in need of repaving, forgotten by the city long ago. The shabby, narrow shotgun houses squatted beneath the oak trees like toadstools in the weed-choked yards. Four in a row, side by side, with shedding paint and sagging porches and roofs that looked like they wouldn’t make it through the next big hurricane. Yet Annie knew the buildings had somehow managed to stand there since the days of hoopskirts and slave labor, when this land had been part of a long-gone plantation. Funny, the things that lasted to serve as reminders of the past.

“It’s the first one,” B’Lynn said.

Annie pulled into the two sparsely graveled tracks that denoted a driveway and cut the engine.

“I budgeted a certain amount of money toward his rent,” B’Lynn explained. “This is the place he picked. He said he liked the privacy—meaning he didn’t want to live anywhere I could easily spy on him.”

“Would you?” Annie asked as they got out of the car. “Spy on him?”

“That’s tempting after all we’ve been through,” B’Lynn admitted. “I mean, here we are. I looked away for a minute, and he’s gone.”

“Is the lease in your name or his?” she asked, thinking ahead to any procedural no-no’s of a search of the premises.

“Mine. Needless to say, Robbie’s credit score isn’t exactly stellar.”

Annie mounted the steps to the sad little porch. She stood a bit to one side and knocked, trying not to recall the deputy who had gotten shotgunned through the door of a drug house some years before.

“Hello?” she called, knocking a second time, then listening for any sound of movement. She thought she heard a faint scraping sound, then instantly wondered if she had imagined it. “Hello? Sheriff’s office. Anybody home?”

A wave of anxiety rolled through her as she waited for an answer. Silly, she told herself. This was just a welfare check. No big deal.

Don’t go there without me. Nick’s text from the night of her attack flashed through her mind’s eye. She remembered feeling tired and impatient. She had just needed to make a quick stop to deliver some news, then head home. No big deal. What could go wrong?

Everything.

“Are you all right?”

B’Lynn Fontenot’s voice startled her back into the moment.

“I’m fine,” Annie said, but her hand was trembling a little as she put the key in the lock. The last time she had walked into a strange house, she had left it by ambulance.

Holding her breath, she pushed the door open, still standing slightly to the side, her right hand resting on the butt of her sidearm, her heart rate picking up as she braced herself for something that didn’t happen.

The anxiety ebbed. She breathed again as she looked down the dark side hall. True to the name of the architecture, you could have shot a shotgun in the front door and not hit a thing on the way out the back door…which stood wide open.

A person emerged from the last room down the hall. A short body on skinny, wide-set legs, arms wrapped awkwardly around a good-size flat-screen TV as they hurried for the back door.

B’Lynn gasped and shouted, “Thief!”

“Stay here!” Annie ordered. She drew her weapon and hustled after the burglar. “Sheriff’s office! Stop right there! Stop!”

The thief continued out the door, off the back porch, and hung a staggering right, heading toward the house next door, struggling with the grip on the television, shouting, “I didn’t do nothing!”

“You’re stealing a TV!” Annie said, incredulous. “I’m looking right at you!”

The thief glanced back over a hunched shoulder to hurl an angry “Fuck you!”—a crucial mistake that threw momentum and balance out of alignment and sent him/her—Annie still wasn’t sure—into a drunken spiral that ended with a strangled cry and a thud. Like a character in a cartoon, the perpetrator fell backside-down, feet up in the air, dirty flip-flops flying off into the weeds, and lay moaning, trapped beneath the television like an upended turtle.

“Oh, for God’s sake!” Annie grumbled, pulling her phone out of her pocket to call for backup.

“You’re under arrest,” she announced, looking down at the thief as she waited for the call to connect.

A woman, she decided, though it could have gone either way. Limp, shaggy dishwater-blond hair. A wide, flat face with the sunken features and bad skin of an addict. She struggled to get out from under the television, skinny arms and legs flailing. Shoving the TV off her chest, she revealed a bleached-out red Fuck Your Feelings T-shirt. Charming.

“Don’t you even think about getting up!” Annie snapped, pointing a finger in warning. Her call went through, and she identified herself and requested a deputy to come to the address.

“Where’s my son?” B’Lynn Fontenot demanded as she came off the porch and made a beeline for the thief. “Where’s Robbie?”

“How would I know?” Fuck Your Feelings grumbled, struggling to sit up, grimacing as she felt the back of her head.

“Please stand back, Mrs. Fontenot,” Annie said, stepping in her path. “I’ll ask the questions. Why don’t you take a seat on the porch?”

“I don’t want to take a seat,” B’Lynn snapped. “I want to know where my son is!”

“That’s my job to find out,” Annie said. “Please let me do it.”

She turned back toward the thief, who had begun to crab-walk backward toward the next house, as if she thought she might sneak away in broad daylight with a sheriff’s detective standing three feet away.

“What do you think you’re doing?”

“You told me not to get up!”

“Are you high?” Annie leaned down, looking for dilated pupils. “Are you high right now?”

“No, but I wish I was,” the thief said belligerently. “You can’t arrest me for wishing!”

“I’m arresting you for stealing that TV.”

“It’s mine! I loaned it to that guy.”

“That’s a bald-faced lie!” B’Lynn shouted, pacing back and forth maybe ten feet away, arms crossed tight over her chest. “I gave that TV to Robbie. It came out of my guest room. I have the serial number at home.”

The thief made a face. “Who keeps the serial number for a TV?”

“You’re friends with the guy that lives here?” Annie asked. “What’s his name?”

“Uh…Donnie?”

“Wrong.”

“I call him Donnie.”

“Why would you loan a TV to a guy you don’t even know his name?”

“I’m nice that way.”

“Uh-huh.” Annie rolled her eyes. “You’re a regular ray of freaking sunshine, you are. What’s your name?”

“I don’t have to tell you nothing! I know my rights!”

“No doubt by heart. But I’ll refresh your memory, just the same.”

Annie recited the Miranda warning as she pulled her handcuffs off her belt. “Stand up, please.”

“Fuck yourself.”

“You’re not doing yourself any favors here being an ass to me, Sunshine,” Annie said, going around behind her and bending down to cuff one wrist and then the other.

“Not doing you any favors, either.”

“And here I’m probably the nicest person you’re gonna meet today,” Annie said as a car door slammed in the distance.

She glanced down the narrow space between the two houses, expecting to see a sheriff’s office cruiser; instead, a town cop in uniform came walking up, hand resting on the butt of his sidearm.

“Everything all right back here, ma’am?” he asked with a pleasant smile. He was maybe thirty and built like a small bull. His gray uniform shirt was tailored tight over his bulletproof vest. His jaw was square, his face all sharp angles capped with a head of blond-tipped dark hair. Annie recognized him from around town. Danny Perry. People called him Hollywood. It wasn’t a compliment.

She held up the badge she wore on a ball chain around her neck. “Detective Broussard. Sheriff’s office.”

“What you got going on here, Detective? You need help? Oh, hey, Rayanne,” he said to the thief. “What you got yourself into now?”

“You know Little Miss Sunshine here?” Annie asked.

“Oh, yeah. Rayanne Tillis. Me and Rayanne go way back, don’t we, Rayanne? How many times have I arrested you?”

The thief made a face at him. “I’d tell you to stick it up your ass, Danny, but you’d probably like it.”

“She’s a charmer,” Perry said. “What’s she done this time?”

“Caught red-handed stealing a TV from this house.”

The officer raised his eyebrows, pretending to be impressed. “B and E. You’re moving up in the criminal world, Rayanne.”

“What’s her usual?” Annie asked.

“Oh, you know, possession, shoplifting, the odd twenty-dollar blow job.”

“You never complain,” Rayanne remarked.

The officer narrowed his eyes at her and then turned back to Annie. “For the record, I have not partaken.”

Annie just looked at him, unamused and unconvinced.

“What brings you to town, Detective?” he asked. “Something going on I should know about?”

“Yes, you should know about it,” B’Lynn Fontenot snapped, coming in from the side. “You would know if you had any interest in doing your job.”

Perry looked ambushed. “Ma’am?”

“This is Mrs. Fontenot,” Annie said. “Her son lives in this house right here.”

“Except that he’s been missing more than a week, and y’all have not done one damn thing about it!” B’Lynn stepped right up to the officer. She looked ready to punch him. Annie wasn’t entirely sure she wouldn’t.

“You don’t know about Robbie Fontenot being missing?” Annie asked. “Is this your regular patrol area, Officer Perry?”

“Well, yes, but—”

“But what?” B’Lynn demanded. “But you don’t give a rat’s behind?”

“No, well, no, that’s not it at all,” Perry stammered. “I came over here with Detective Rivette on a welfare check a few days ago. We didn’t find any reason to be concerned.”

“He’s MISSING !” B’Lynn shouted directly into his face.

Perry frowned and puffed himself up, trying too late to project an air of authority. “Ma’am, please calm down.”

Annie cringed.

“Calm down? Calm down?! ” B’Lynn raged. “My son could be dead by now because of you people, because of your gross incompetence and abject lack of humanity. And you tell me to calm down ? I am all out of Calm Down!”

She was red in the face, eyes wet with tears she refused to let fall. Annie gently rested a hand on her shoulder. Her small body was vibrating with fury and fear and helplessness.

“Come on, B’Lynn,” she murmured. “Let’s just get on with it. I want you to go in the house and have a look around. Don’t touch anything. Just look and see if anything is missing or out of place. Can you do that for me?”

B’Lynn drew in a sharp breath and stepped back, fighting to compose herself for the umpteenth time that morning. Annie watched her walk back to the house, then turned to the officer. “Let me give you a few words of wisdom, Danny. Never in the history of the world has an upset woman ever calmed down because a man told her to calm down. Don’t ever do that.”

“Well, but I just—”

She held up a hand to cut him off just as a sheriff’s office cruiser came down the alley. “No mansplaining necessary, thank you. She’s a mother who can’t find her son.”

“He’s an addict with a record—”

“She’s well aware of that. He’s still her son.”

Perry huffed a frustrated sigh as he watched the radio car approach. “So, you’re just taking this over?” he said, making a vague gesture toward the house.

“Looks that way, yeah,” Annie said casually, though she had the distinct feeling she was about to kick over a small hornet’s nest.

Cops were territorial animals, and the Bayou Breaux PD, a much smaller agency, was ever in the shadow of the sheriff’s office. Only the governor of Louisiana had more power than a parish sheriff, and Gus Noblier had been sheriff a very long time. He had finally retired, only to be pressed back into service after the death of his successor, no doubt much to the consternation of Chief of Police Johnny Earl. The two men had disliked each other for a decade or more, constantly butting heads. While the agencies coexisted and cooperated with each other by necessity, that rivalry was always just under the surface.

“Rivette’s gonna be pissed,” Perry announced.

“Why?” Annie asked. “I’m just taking something off his plate he didn’t want in the first place. He should send me flowers.”

“You’re making him look bad.”

“How’s that? I didn’t make Mrs. Fontenot show up at the sheriff’s office this morning, begging for help. What was I supposed to do? Throw her out in the street? Y’all don’t even think this is worth investigating, do you?” she asked. “Robbie Fontenot is just another addict who up and left or OD’d somewhere. I’ll probably come to the same conclusion. I’ll just be kinder about it, that’s all.”

The deputy got out of the cruiser and came across the weedy lawn toward them. “Hey, Annie, whatcha got?”

“Young Prejean,” Annie greeted him. If the poor kid had a first name, nobody cared. He was called Young Prejean because he was the younger of the two Prejeans in uniform for the SO. He was twenty-two, wide-eyed and fresh-faced with a pathetic tuft of billy goat whiskers masquerading as a goatee on his chin.

“I need you to take this lady in for me,” Annie said. “Put her in a holding cell. Don’t book her yet.”

Young Prejean looked around the yard, tilting his head like a confused puppy. “What lady?”

“You can suck my ass, Deputy Dog!” Rayanne Tillis shouted as Annie gestured toward her. “And I didn’t steal nothing! I was just borrowing it.”

Annie arched a brow at her. “I thought you were loaning it to him.”

“I did, Miss Stick Up Your Ass. And now I’m loaning it back to me.”

“Oh, Lord help me,” Annie grumbled. To the deputy she said, “This is Miss Rayanne. Don’t let her work her feminine wiles on you.”

“Watch out,” Danny Perry warned. “She’ll bite, too.”

“Oh, hey, Danny,” Young Prejean said. “She a friend of yours?”

“Frequent flier.”

“How come we’re taking her, then?”

“?’Cause I said so,” Annie said, wrinkling her nose as she picked Rayanne’s filthy flip-flops out of the grass. “Don’t strain yourself thinking about it. I’ll be along directly. Miss Rayanne and I need to have a chat.”

“Hell to the no!” Rayanne declared, then made an ugly bulldog face at her. “I got the right to remain silent.”

Annie rolled her eyes. “That hasn’t stopped you so far. Come on now, get up and put your shoes on.”

She helped the woman to her feet and patted her down, blinking hard at the unpleasant smell of sour sweat and stale sex.

“You got anything sharp in your pockets gonna stick me?”

“I hope so.”

“You need to think on being friendlier to me, Rayanne,” Annie advised. “I can make your life easier or harder. Your choice.”

She handed off her thief to Young Prejean and started back toward the house. Dismissing Danny Perry, she said, “I’ll call Rivette when I get back to my desk,” dreading the idea.

Welcome back to work, Annie , she thought as she climbed the back steps. She’d caught a case, caught a burglar, and started an interagency war, and it wasn’t even noon.

Her phone pinged the arrival of a text message.

Have you counted all the paper clips?

Nick.

Not yet , she typed, adding a smiley-face emoji, and left it at that.

What he didn’t know could wait. He wasn’t liable to be happy about this situation. As her boss, he would take the brunt of any blowup over the potential turf war. As her overprotective husband, he would have preferred to wrap her in cotton wool and tuck her away someplace quiet than have her digging into a missing person’s case with potential drug involvement.

Oh, well.