Tami Hoag - A Thin Dark Line

"I didn't come here to discuss your mother, Mr. Renard."

"Please call me Marcus." He turned toward her. The light that filtered out from the house softened and shadowed his bruises and stitches. With the swelling gone he was no longer grotesque, merely homely. He didn't look dangerous, he looked pathetic. "Please, Annie. I need to at least pretend I have a friend in all this."

"Your lawyer is your friend. I'm a cop."

"But you're here and you don't have to be. You came for me."

She wanted to tell him differently, had tried to set him straight, but either he didn't listen or he twisted the truth to suit himself.

It was the kind of thinking that applied to stalkers and other obsessive personalities. The unwillingness or inability to accept the truth. There was nothing overt in Renard's attitude. Nothing that could have been deemed crazy, and yet this subtle insistence to bend reality to his wishes was disturbing.

She wanted to distance herself from him. But the truth was the closer she got to him, the more likely she was to see something the detectives had missed. He might let down his guard, make a mistake. "He could fall in love with you…" and she'd be there to nail him.

"All right… Marcus," she said, his name sticking in her mouth like a gob of peanut butter.

He let out a breath, as if in relief, and slid his hands into his pants pockets. "Fourcade," he said. "You asked if anyone had come by recently. Fourcade was here on Saturday. On the bayou."

"Do you have any reason to believe Detective Fourcade is the one who took that shot tonight?"

He made a choking laugh, pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket, and dabbed at the corners of his mouth. "He tried to kill me last week, why not this week?"

"He wasn't himself that night. He'd lost a tough decision in court. He'd been drinking. He-"

"You're not going to make excuses for him at the hearing next week, are you?" he asked, looking at her with shock. "You were there. You saw what he was doing to me. You said it yourself: He was trying to kill me."

"We're not talking about last week. We're talking about tonight. Did you see him tonight? Have you seen him since Saturday? Has he called you? Has he threatened you?"

"No."

"And of course you didn't see the shooter because you happened to be in the bathroom at the precise moment-"

"You don't believe me," he said flatly.

"I believe if Detective Fourcade wanted you dead, you'd be meeting your maker right now," Annie said. "Nick Fourcade isn't going to mistake your brother for you or put a shot in the wall a foot above your head. He'd blow your skull apart like a rotten melon, and I don't doubt but that he could do it in the dark at a hundred yards."

"He came here in a boat Saturday. He could have been on the bayou-"

"Everybody in this parish owns a boat, and about ninety percent of them think you should be drawn and quartered in public. Fourcade is hardly the only possibility here," Annie argued. "To be perfectly frank with you, Marcus, I do think you're a more likely candidate than Fourcade."

He turned away from her then, staring out at the darkness. "I didn't do this. Why would I?"

"To get attention. To get me over here. To sic the press on Fourcade."

"You can test my hands for gunpowder residue, search the premises for the gun. I didn't do it." He shook his head in disgust. "That seems to be my motto these last months: I didn't do it. And while y'all are busy trying to prove me a liar, killers and would-be killers are running around loose."

He blotted at his mouth again. Annie watched him, tried to read him, wondered how much of what he was letting her see was an act and how much of it he bought into himself.

"You know the worst part of all this?" he asked, his voice so soft Annie had to step closer to hear him. "I never got to mourn Pam. I've not been allowed to express my grief, my outrage, my hurt, my loss. She was such a lovely person. So pretty."

He looked down at Annie as lightning flashed and his expression was gilded in silver-a strange, glassy, dreamy look, as if he were looking at a memory that wasn't quite true.

"I miss her," he whispered. "I wish…"

What? That he hadn't killed her? That she had returned his affection instead of his gifts? Annie held her breath, waiting.

"I wish you believed me," he murmured.

"It's not my job to believe you, Marcus," she said. "It's my job to find the truth."

"I want you to know the truth," he whispered.

The intimacy in his tone unnerved her, and she stepped back from him as the wind came in a great exhalation from the heavens, rattling the trees like giant pompons.

"I'll keep on top of this," she said. "See if the deputies come up with anything. But mat's all I can do. I'm in enough hot water as it is. I'd appreciate it if you didn't tell anyone I'd been here."

He drew his thumb and forefinger across his lips. "Our secret. That makes two." The idea seemed to please him.

Annie frowned. "I'm checking on that truck-your Good Samaritan the night Pam died. I'm not making promises anything will come of it, but I want you to know I'm looking."

He tried to smile. "I knew you would. You wouldn't want to think you saved my life for no good reason."

"I don't want it said the investigation wasn't thorough on all counts," she corrected. "For the record, Detective Fourcade looked into it, he just didn't find anything. Probably because there's nothing to find."

"You'll find the truth, Annie," he murmured, reaching out to touch her shoulder. His hand lingered a heartbeat too long. "I promise you will."

Annie's skin crawled. She shrugged off his touch. "I'm gonna go get my flashlight. I want to have a look around the yard before the rain starts."

The yard gave up no secrets. She searched for twenty minutes. Renard watched her from the terrace for a while, then disappeared into the house, returning some time later with his own flashlight, to help her look.

Annie didn't know what she had hoped to find. A shell casing, maybe. But she found none. The shooter could have disposed of it. It may well have been in the bayou if that was where the shooter had been-if the shooter had been anyone other than Renard himself.

She mulled the possibilities over in her mind as she drove out of the Renard driveway and headed for the main road. It wouldn't hurt to know where Hunter Davidson had been at the time of the shooting, though he was an old sportsman and she couldn't imagine him missing a target.

Maybe he had drawn a bead on the back of Victor Renard's head, having mistaken him for Marcus, and while staring through the crosshairs of the rifle's scope had been hit with the enormity of taking a human life, then popped the shot into the wall instead.

It seemed more likely that he would have looked at Renard in his sights and pulled the trigger on a tide of emotion. Remorse, if it came at all, would come after the revenge.

Nor did it make any sense to consider Fourcade as a suspect, for the very reasons she had given Marcus. Renard himself, on the other hand, had everything to gain by staging the incident. It gave him an excuse to call her. It cast suspicion on Fourcade, could be used to draw the media. The story could have rolled on the ten o'clock news, creating a full-fledged furor by morning. That's certainly what Renard's lawyer would have wanted.

Then where were the reporters? Renard hadn't called them; he had called her.

"You're here and you don't have to be. You came for me."

The bayou road was empty and dark, a lonely trench between the dense walls of woods that ran on either side of it. The rain had finally begun to fall, an angry spitting that would, any second, become a deluge. Annie hit the switch for the wipers and glanced in the rearview mirror as lightning flashed-illuminating the silhouette of a car behind her. Big car. Too close. No lights.