Tami Hoag - A Thin Dark Line

"Donnie," Faulkner whispered.

"What about Donnie?"

"Jealous."

"Jealous of who?" Annie asked, bending close.

"Stupid… It wasn't anything."

She was slipping away. Annie touched Faulkner's arm in an attempt to maintain her connection to the waking world.

"Who was Donnie jealous of, Lindsay?"

The silence hung again, like a cold breath in the air.

"Detective Stokes."

Donnie was jealous of Stokes. Annie let her brain chew on that while she sorted through the faxes in the tray, pulling the one she'd requested from the DMV-a listing of trucks with Louisiana plates containing the partial sequence EJ.

It wasn't difficult to envision Stokes flirting with Pam. In fact, it would have been impossible not to. That was what Stokes did: spent his every spare moment honing his seduction skills. He considered it his duty to flirt with women. And, according to what Lindsay Faulkner had said Sunday, Pam brought out those qualities in men without even trying. Men were attracted to Pam, found her charming and sweet. Chaz Stokes would never be the exception to that rule.

With the stalking an ongoing thing, he would have had ample cause to see Pam on a fairly regular basis. Had Donnie gotten the wrong idea about the two of them? And what would he have done about it if he had? Confront Stokes? Confront Pam?

If Stokes knew Donnie was jealous, then he would certainly have examined that angle when Pam was murdered. She could check the statements tonight, ask Nick about it. Renard had alleged Pam was afraid of Donnie, was afraid to see another man socially because of what Donnie might do. Donnie had threatened a custody fight, as though he had grounds for challenging Pam's rights. But it wasn't as if Pam had been seeing Stokes in a social way.

Was it?

"Stupid," Lindsay Faulkner had said. "It wasn't anything."

But Donnie had thought otherwise. Had he heard what he wanted to hear, interpreted the situation to suit-or to rouse-his temper? Annie had seen a hundred examples in domestic abuse cases-the imagined slights, the phantom lovers, the contrived grounds for anger. Excuses to lash out, to hurt, to belittle, to punish.

No one had ever accused Donnie of abuse, but that didn't mean his mind didn't bend the same way. Pam had bruised his ego openly, publicly, kicking him out of their house, filing for divorce, trying to separate the companies. An imagined affair with Stokes might have pushed him over the edge.

He had said something derogatory about Stokes when she'd spoken with him Saturday, hadn't he? Something about Stokes being lazy. The remark had seemed almost racist, an attitude that would have yanked Stokes's chain, and rightly so. He would have been on Donnie like a pit bull. But Marcus Renard was the suspect Stokes had in his crosshairs.

She was giving herself an unnecessary headache. Nick was probably right. If she didn't keep the individual strands separate, she would end up with a knot-around her own neck. She had Renard on the hook, just the way Fourcade had predicted. If she kept her focus, she could reel him in. She decided she would swing by the hospital again at lunch and see if Lindsay could identify the scarf Renard had sent Pam.

"There is no time for dawdling, Deputy Broussard!" Myron pronounced, marching to his post with all the starch of a palace guard. "We have our orders for the morning. Detective Stokes needs the arrest records for every man accused of a violent sexual crime in this parish dating back ten years. I will call up the list on the computer, you will then pull the files. I will log them out, you will deliver them to the task force in the detectives' building."

"Yes, sir, Mr. Myron," Annie said with a plastic smile, sliding the fax from the DMV under her blotter.

They worked quickly, but interruptions of usual records division business dragged the task out-calls from the courthouse, calls from insurance companies, filling out the intake form on a newly arrested burglar, checking in evidence against the same burglar, checking out evidence for the trial of a suspected drug dealer.

All of it was tedious and Annie resented it mightily. She wanted to be the one receiving the files instead of the one digging for them through decades of filed-away crap. She wanted to be on the task force instead of in the paper trenches. Even working with Stokes would have been preferable to working with Myron the Monstrous.

Lunch was ten minutes with a Snickers bar and a telephone pressed to her ear, checking the local garages for any big sedans with passenger-side damage. She found none. Her adversary either had stashed the car or had taken it out of the parish for repairs. She checked the log sheet for recently stolen vehicles and found nothing to match. Expanding the parameters of her search, she started in on the list of garages in St. Martin Parish.

"Hey, Broussard," Mullen barked, leaning over the counter. "Knock off the hen party and do your job, why don't you."

Annie glared at him as she thanked another mechanic for nothing and hung up the phone.

"This task force is priority one," Mullen said, puffing his bony chest out.

"Yeah? Well, how'd you get on it? You got pictures of the sheriff naked with a goat?"

He smirked, much too pleased with himself. "I guess on account of my work on the Nolan rape."

"Your work," Annie said with disdain. "I caught that call."

"Yeah, well, you win some, you lose some."

"You know, Mullen," she muttered, "I'd tell you to eat shit and die, but by the smell of your breath I guess it's already a staple of your diet."

She expected him to snap at the bait, but he leaned back from her instead. "Look, can I get the rest of those files now? As for our little feud, let's just let that go. No hard feelings."

"No hard feelings?" Annie repeated. She leaned toward him, holding her voice low and taut. "You terrorize me, threaten me, cost me a small fortune in damages, cost me my patrol. I'm standing back here playing a glorified goddamn secretary while you're making hay on a case that should have been mine, and you say no hard feelings?

"You son of a bitch. Hard feelings are the only kind I've got right now. You'd better believe I find so much as a paint chip connecting you to that Cadillac or whatever the hell it was you tried to kill me with last night, I'll have your badge and your bony ass."

"Cadillac?" Mullen looked confused. "I don't know what you're talking about, Broussard. I don't know nothing about no Cadillac!"

"Yeah, right."

"I didn't do nothing to you!"

"Oh, save the act," Annie sneered. "Take your files and get out of here."

She gave the folders a shove and sent them over the edge of the counter, raining arrest reports all over the floor.

"Goddammit!" Mullen yelled, drawing Hooker out of his office.

"Jesus H., Mullen!" he shouted. "You got a nerve condition or something? You got something wrong with your motor skills?"

"No, sir," he said tightly, glaring at Annie. "It was an accident."

"South Lou'siana is traditionally a place of folk justice," Smith Pritchett preached, strolling along the credenza in his office, his hands planted at his thick waist. "The Cajuns had their own code here before organized law enforcement and judicial agencies provided a mitigating influence. The common mind here still makes a distinction between the law and justice. I am well aware that a great many people in this parish feel that Detective Fourcade's attack on Marcus Renard was an acceptable way to cure a particular social problem. However, they would be mistaken."

Annie watched him with barely disguised impatience. This was likely the rough draft of his opening statement for Fourcade's trial, which would be weeks or months away if he was bound over. She sat in Pritchett's visitor's chair. A.J. stood across the room, arms crossed, back against the bookcase, ignoring the empty chair four feet away from her. His expression was closed tight. He hadn't spoken a word in the ten minutes she'd been here.