Tami Hoag - A Thin Dark Line

Faulkner's garage door was closed. The front drapes were drawn. Annie walked up to the house and punched the doorbell as she leaned close to peer in the sidelight.

Lindsay Faulkner lay on the entry floor, her nightgown bunched up beneath her chin, her right arm reaching toward the portable handset of a phone that lay on the floor with an assortment of debris. Blood caked her golden hair at the roots. Her face was covered with it. Her ginger cat lay curled beside her, sleeping.

Swearing, Annie ran back to the Jeep and grabbed the radio mike.

"Partout Parish 911. Partout Parish 911. Requesting officers and an ambulance at 17 Cheval Court. Please hurry. And notify the detectives. This is a probable 261. Over."

She confirmed the information as requested, giving her name and rank. Then, grabbing her gun out of her duffel in case the assailant was still on the premises, she ran back to the house to see if Lindsay Faulkner was alive.

The front door was locked, but the assailant had obligingly left the patio door standing wide open. Annie covered Lindsay's body with a blanket hastily dragged from the guest bedroom and knelt beside her, monitoring her weak pulse.

"Hang in there, Lindsay. The ambulance is on its way," she said loudly. "We'll have you to the hospital in no time. You've gotta hang tough. We'll need you to tell us who did this to you so we can catch the guy and make him pay. You've gotta hang on so you can help us with that."

There was no response. Not a movement of eyelids or lips. Faulkner seemed to be clinging to the finest thread of life. The only good sign was that she had not gone into a fetal posture indicative of severe brain damage, but that didn't mean she couldn't die.

Annie stared at the face some animal had battered into unrecognizability. If this was the work of their serial rapist, why had he singled out Lindsay Faulkner? For the obvious reasons? That she was single, attractive, lived alone? She was also connected to a murder investigation. Just yesterday she'd found something relevant to say in regard to that murder. Had someone shut her up before she could tell it? The possibilities made Annie's nerves twitch.

The wail of approaching sirens penetrated the silence of the house. The EMTs stormed the place first, followed closely by Sticks Mullen. He scowled at Annie. She scowled at him.

"What the hell are you doing here, Broussard?"

"I could ask you the same thing," Annie said, glancing at her watch. "You're usually stuffing your face with doughnuts about this time. Lucky me, you picked today to be diligent instead of delinquent."

She stepped back into the living room, out of the way of the EMTs, one eye on the paramedics as they worked.

"It looks to me like the attacker cracked her head with the base unit of the phone." She pointed to where it lay bloody on the floor among scattered broken picture frames. "She put up a fight."

"For all the good it did her," Mullen muttered.

"Hey, some jerk comes after me, I go down swinging," Annie said. "I'll make the guy wish he'd never set eyes on me."

"There's plenty of that going around anyway."

"Don't start with me," Annie snapped.

She dared him with a glare, then started for the dining area. "He came in here through the patio door. She must have heard him, came out of her bedroom, and confronted him."

"Should have stayed put and called 911."

"Wouldn't have done her any good. The phone's dead. You'll find the line cut, I imagine. Just like the others."

The EMTs hefted up their stretcher and rolled it out the front door with Lindsay Faulkner motionless beneath the blanket. As they left, Stokes walked in, a gray fedora sitting back on the crown of his head, a slip of toilet paper glued to his left cheek with a dot of blood. His light eyes were shot through with red.

"Man, I hate these early calls," he grumbled.

"Yeah, how inconsiderate of people to be attacked during your off-hours," Annie said. "At least she waited until morning to be found raped, beaten, and unconscious."

Stokes scowled at her. "What're you doing here, Broussard? Somebody call for McGruff?"

"I found her."

He took a moment to digest that, his gaze sharpening. "And I say again, what are you doing here? How'd you know her? You two playing 'Bump the Doughnut' or something?"

Mullen snickered. Annie rolled her eyes.

"You know, Chaz, I hate to break it to you, but just because a woman won't have sex with you doesn't mean she's a lesbian. It just means she has standards."

"Stop. You're spoiling my fantasies." He nodded to Mullen. "Go see if the phone line's cut. And see if there's any good footprints in the yard. Ground's soft. Maybe we can get a cast."

Mullen went out the front. Stokes hiked up his baggy brown trousers and squatted down amid the junk that had toppled from the hall table.

"You gonna answer my question, Broussard?" he asked as he pulled on a pair of rubber gloves and picked up the bloody phone unit.

"She's my real estate agent," Annie said automatically. "I'm thinking of buying a house."

"Is that right?" he said flatly. "So why come all the way out here to see her when her office is-what?-all of four blocks from the department?"

"She wanted to show me something out this way."

"This neighborhood's a little out of your price range, isn't it, Deputy?"

"A girl can dream."

"Uh-huh. And when did y'all set this up?"

"Lindsay called me last night and left a message on my machine." Her eyes went to Faulkner's answering machine. Her own voice would be on the tape. Thank God she'd left nothing more than her name and number.

"I tried to call her back about ten-thirty, but the machine answered. Why all the questions?" she asked, turning it back around on him. "You think I raped her and beat her head in?"

"Just doing my job, McGruff." He narrowed his eyes as if he were visualizing Lindsay Faulkner's body on the floor. He rubbed his goatee and hummed a note. The puddle of blood that had leaked from her skull had dried dark on the honey-tone oak. Spatters and smears had soaked into the off-white Berber runner. "He did her right here, huh?"

"Looked that way. Her nightgown was pulled up around her shoulders. There was a lot of bruising on her body."

"So is this the work of our friendly neighborhood serial rapist?" Stokes said more to himself than to Annie. "He did the other two in bed, tied them up."

"It looks to me like she heard him coming," Annie said; "He didn't get the chance to surprise her in bed. And he didn't have to tie her up because he knocked her out with the phone."

She squatted down beside the rug, her gaze zooming in on a patch of dark fibers embedded in the carpet runner where Faulkner's body had lain. She scratched at the spot gingerly with a fingernail and plucked at the loose end that came up, bringing it up close before her eyes.

"Looks to me like a piece of black feather," she said, looking at Stokes as she held it out toward him. "That answer your question for you?"

"Don't you bend them papers shoving them in that way," the records clerk snapped, his voice at a pitch that rivaled screeching chalk on a blackboard.

Annie twitched. "Sorry, Myron."

"That's Mr. Myron. You on the other side of my counter, you call me Myron. You on my side of my counter, you call me Mr. Myron. You are in my domain. You are my assistant."

Myron jammed his hands at his belt and nodded sharply. A slight, prim black man, he wore a clip-on polyester tie every day and had his gray hair trimmed like a shrub every other Friday. He had worked records and evidence for twenty years and saw the presence of a uniform behind his counter as a direct threat to his kingdom.

"Don't let it go to your head," Annie muttered. To Myron she gave her earnest face and said, "I'll do my best."