A Thin Dark Line

The key to staying sane in homicide was keeping a distance. Don't let it get personal. Don't get involved. Don't take it home with you. Don't cross the line.

He had never been good at taking any of that advice. He lived the job. The line was always behind him.

Had the shadows drawn Pam Bichon? Had she seen Death's phantom coming, felt its cold breath on her shoulders? He knew the answer.

She had complained to friends about Renard's persistent, if subtle advances. Despite her rebuffs, he had begun sending her gifts. Then came the harassment. Small acts of vandalism against her car, her property. Items stolen from her office-photographs, a hairbrush, work papers, her keys.

Yes, Pam had seen the phantom coming, and no one had listened when she tried to tell them. No one had heard her fear any more than they had heard her tortured screams that night out on Pony Bayou.

'I still think about what he did to her,' Stokes said. 'Don't you?'

All the time. The details had saturated his brain like blood.

With his back against the tree trunk, Nick lowered himself to sit on his heels and stared across the empty street at the building that housed Bowen amp; Briggs. A light burned on the second floor. A desk lamp. Renard worked at the third drafting table back and on the south side of the big room there. Bowen amp; Briggs designed both small commercial and residential buildings, with their commercial work coming out of New Iberia and St. Martinville as well as Bayou Breaux.

Renard was a partner in the firm, though his name was not on the logo. He preferred designing residential buildings, especially single-family homes, and had a liking for historical styles. His social life was quiet. He had no long-term romantic involvement. He lived with his mother, who collected Mardi Gras masks and created costumes for Carnival revelers, and his autistic brother, Victor, the elder by four years. Their home was a modest, restored plantation house-less than five miles by car from the scene of Pam Bichon's murder. Nearer by boat.

According to the descriptions of the people who worked with and knew Marcus Renard, he was quiet, polite, ordinary, or a touch odd-depending on whom you asked. But other words came to Nick's mind. Meticulous, compulsive, obsessive, repressed, controlling, passive-aggressive.

Behind the mask of ordinariness, Marcus Renard was a very different man from the one his co-workers saw every day sitting at his drafting table. They couldn't see the core component Nick had sensed in him from their first meeting -rage. Deep, deep inside, beneath layers and layers of manners and mores and the guise of mild apathy. Rage, simmering, contained, hidden, buried.

It was rage that had driven those spikes through Pam Bichon's hands.

Rage was no stranger.

The light went out in the second-story window. Out of old habit, Nick checked his watch-9:47 P.M.-and scanned the street in both directions-all clear. Renard's five-year-old maroon Volvo sat in the narrow parking area between the Bowen amp; Briggs building and the antiques shop next door, an area poorly lit by a seventy-five-watt yellow bug light over the side door.

Renard would emerge from that door, climb in his car, and go home to his mother and his brother and his hobby of designing and building elaborate dollhouses. He would sleep in his bed a free man tonight and dream the sinister, euphoric dreams of someone who had gotten away with murder.

He wasn't the first.

'Protect and serve, pard. …'

The rage built…

'Case dismissed.'

… and burned hotter…

'I still think about what he did to her…'

'I saw what he did to her… I still see it…'

'Don't you?'

Blood and moonlight, the flash of the knife, the smell of fear, the cries of agony, the ominous silence of death. The cold darkness as the phantom passed over.

The chill collided violently with the fire. The explosion pushed him to his feet.

'He's gonna walk, Nicky. He's gonna get away with murder. …'

Nick crossed the street, hugged the wall of the Bowen amp; Briggs building, out of sight from the elevated first-floor windows. Pulling a handkerchief from his pocket, he hopped silently onto the side stoop, doused the bug light with a twist of his wrist, and dropped down on the far side of the steps.

He heard the door open, heard Renard mutter something under his breath, heard the click, click, click of the light switch being tried. Footsteps on the concrete stoop.' A heavy sigh. The door closed.

He waited, still, invisible, until Renard's loafers hit the blacktop and he had stepped past Nick on his way to the Volvo.

'It's not over, Renard,' he said.

The architect shied sideways. His face was waxy white, his eyes bulged like a pair of boiled eggs.

'You can't harass me this way, Fourcade,' he said, the tremor in his voice mocking his attempt at bravado. 'I have rights.'

'Is that a fact?' Nick stepped forward, his gloved hands hanging loose at his sides. 'What about Pam? She didn't have rights? You take her rights away, tcheue poule, and still you think you got rights?'

'I didn't do anything,' Renard said, glancing nervously toward the street, looking for salvation that was nowhere in sight. 'You don't have anything on me.'

Nick advanced another step. 'I got all I need on you, pou. I got the stink of you up my nose, you piece of shit.'

Renard lifted a fist in front of him, shaking so badly his car keys rattled. 'Leave me alone, Fourcade.'

'Or what?'

'You're drunk.'

'Yeah.' A grin cut across his face like a scimitar. 'I'm mean too. What you gonna do, call a cop?'

'Touch me and your career is over, Fourcade,' Renard threatened, backing toward the Volvo. 'Everybody knows about you. You got no business carrying a badge. You ought to be in jail.'

'And you oughta be in hell.'

'Based on what? Evidence you planted? That's nothing you haven't done before. You'll be the one in prison over this, not me. '

'That's what you think?' Nick murmured, advancing. 'You think you can stalk a woman, torture her, kill her, and just walk away?'

The nightmare images of murder. The false memories of screams.

'You got nothing on me, Fourcade, and you never will have.'

'Case dismissed.'

'You're nothing but a drunk and a bully, and if you touch me, Fourcade, I swear, I'll ruin you.'

'He's gonna walk, Nicky. He's gonna get away with murder. …'

A face from his past loomed up, an apparition floating beside Marcus Renard. A mocking face, a superior sneer.

'You'll never pin this on me, Detective. That's not the way the world works. She was just another whore…'

'You killed her, you son of a bitch,' he muttered, not sure which demon he was talking to, the real or the imagined.

'You'll never prove it.'

'You can't touch me. '

'He's gonna get away with murder…'

'The hell you say.'

The rage burned through the fine thread of control. Emotion and action became one, and restraint was nowhere to be found as his fist smashed into Marcus Renard's face.

Annie walked out of Quik Pik with a pint of chocolate chip ice cream in a bag and a little mouse chewing at her