Tami Hoag - A Thin Dark Line

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."

Nick stood in the pirogue, his gaze focused on a watery horizon, his mind concentrating completely on his slow, precise movements. Balance… grace… calm… breathe… harmonize mind, body, spirit… sense the water beneath the boat - fluid, yielding… become as the water…

Despite the cool of the day, sweat beaded on his forehead and soaked through his sleeveless gray sweatshirt. Biceps and triceps flexed and trembled as he moved. The strain came not from the Tai Chi form, but from within, from the battle to remain focused.

Move slowly… without force… without violence…

A scene from the night broke his concentration for a heartbeat. Renard… blood… force… violence… The sense of harmony he had been seeking pulled away from him and was gone. The pirogue jerked beneath his feet. He dropped to the seat of the boat and cradled his head in his hands.

He had built the boat himself from cypress and marine plywood, and painted it green and red like the old swampers had done years ago to identify themselves as serious fishermen and trappers. He had been glad to come back to the swamp. New Orleans was a discordant place. Looking back, he had always felt spiritually fractured there. This was where he had come from: the Atchafalaya-over a million acres of wilderness strung along the edges with a garland of small towns like Bayou Breaux and St. Martinville, and smaller towns like Jeanerette and Breaux Bridge, and places that seemed too small and inconsequential to have names, though they did.

He had passed his boyhood some miles removed from one of those places, on a house barge tethered to the bank of a nameless lake. He remembered his father as a swamper, fishing and trapping, before the oil boom hit and he took a job as a welder and moved the family to Lafayette. They had lived richer there, but not better. Armand Fourcade had confessed more than once he had left a part of his soul in the swamp. Only since coming back had Nick begun to realize what his father had meant. Here he could feel whole and centered. Sometimes.

This was not one of those times.

Reluctantly, he picked up his paddle and started the boat toward home. The sky was hanging low, dulling the color of the swamp, tinting everything a clingy gray: the fragile new lime green leaves of the tupelos that stood like sentinels in the water, the lacy greenery of the willows and hackberry trees that covered the islands, the few yellow-tops that had been tricked into opening by the warmth that had come too early in the season. This day was cool, but if the weather heated up again, the bright flowers would soon crowd the banks, and white-topped daisy fleabane and showy black-eyed Susans would grow down to the water's edge to blend in with the tangles of poison ivy and alligator weed and ratten vine.

The swamp was usually bursting with life in the spring. Today it seemed to be holding its breath. Waiting. Watching.

Just as Nick was waiting. He had set something in motion last night. Every action produces reaction; every challenge, a response. The thing hadn't ended with Gus sending him home. It had hardly begun.

He guided the pirogue through a channel studded with deadhead cypress stumps, and around the narrow point of an island that would double in size when the spring waters receded. His home sat on the bank two hundred yards west, an Acadian relic that had been poorly updated as modern conveniences became available to the people of rural South Louisiana.

He was remodeling the place himself, a room at a time, restoring its charm and replacing cheap fixes with quality. Mindless manual labor afforded an acceptable outlet for the restlessness he once would have tried to douse with liquor.