A Thin Dark Line

'Her sorry excuse for a husband. And Stokes. They both wanted her and they turned her against me. What's your excuse, Annie?' he asked, bitterly. 'You want that lawyer? He's using you to do his dirty work for him. Can't you see that?'

'He's got nothing to do with this, Marcus. I want to solve Pam's murder. I told you that from the first.'

'You'll be sorry,' he said quietly. 'In the end, you'll be sorry.'

He started to pull his hand from his pocket. Heart pounding, Annie pulled the Sig and pointed it at his chest.

'Slowly, Marcus,' she ordered.

Slowly he drew his hand free, balled into a fist, and held it out to the side.

'Whatever it is, drop it.'

He opened his fingers, letting fall something small that hit the sidewalk with a soft rattle. With her left hand, Annie pulled her flashlight from her belt and took a step closer, the Sig still raised. Renard moved back toward the alley.

'Stand right there.'

She swept the beam of the flashlight down on the concrete and it reflected back off a strand of gold chain, a necklace lying like a length of discarded string with a heart-shaped locket attached.

'I thought you were special,' he said again.

Annie holstered the Sig and picked the necklace up.

'Is this the necklace you tried to give Pam?'

He stared at her through the empty eyes of the smiling mask and took another step back from her. 'I don't have to answer your questions, Deputy Broussard,' he said coldly. 'And I believe I'm free to go.'

With that, he turned and went back down the alley.

'Great,' Annie said under her breath, closing her fist on the locket.

Her edge with him had been her similarity to Pam, the woman he had fallen in love with. She had gained his trust, his respect, his attraction. In a heartbeat that was gone. Now she was more like Pam, the woman he may have butchered.

The two-way crackled against her hip and she jumped half a foot. 'Broussard? Where the fuck are you? Are you back on or what?'

Annie plucked at her wet shirt and bit back a groan. 'On my way, Sarge. Out.'

Sucking on the fingertip the thorn had lacerated, she wove her way through the crowd across France to the old Canal gas station. The place had been closed since the oil bust, and the old pumps had been taken out long ago, leaving weeds to sprout where they had once stood. The BUSINESS OPPORTUNITY FOR SALE sign had been propped in the front window so long it had turned yellow. A herd of teenage boys in baggy clothes and backward baseball caps milled around on the cracked concrete, drinking Mountain Dew and smoking cigarettes. Eyeing Annie with suspicion, they scattered like a pack of scruffy young dogs as she passed through their midst.

She went to the side of the building, where a pay phone was still in service. She dialed Fourcade and flapped her wet shirtfront as the phone on the other end rang. His machine clicked on with a curt 'Leave a message.'

'It's Annie. I just had a run-in with Renard. It's a long story, but the bottom line is I might have pushed him over the edge. He said some things that make me nervous. Um- I'm stuck working the dance, then I'm going home. I'm off tomorrow. I'll see you when I see you.'

She hung up feeling vaguely sick. She may have pushed a killer over the line from love to hate. Now what?

She watched the party from the corner of the vacant station, as removed from it as if she were standing behind a wall of glass. Inside her mind, she didn't hear the music of the band or the sounds from the crowd.

'I would never have hurt her.'

Not that he hadn't hurt Pam. He had made that verbal distinction before.

'She couldn't see how much I really cared. I tried to show her.'

How had he tried to show her? With his gifts or with the concern he had shown after he had scared her half to death? The same creepy, voyeuristic concern he had shown Annie when she'd told him about someone taking a shot at her.

'Were you alone? You must have been frightened… Having a stranger reach into your life and commit an act of violence -it's a violation. It's rape. You feel so vulnerable, so powerless … so alone… Don't you?'

Words of comfort that weren't comforting at all. He had made her feel vulnerable, made her feel violated, and he had done the same to Pam. She knew he had.

'I thought you were special'

'Like you thought Pam was special?'

'You're just like her, after all… You'll be sorry… In the end, you'll be sorry.'

In the same way Pam must have been sorry? Sorry no one else could have seen the monster in him. Sorry no one had listened to her pleas for help. Sorry no one had heard her screams that night out on Pony Bayou.

Annie dug the necklace out of her pocket and held it up, watching the small gold locket sway back and forth. Renard had tried to give Pam a necklace for her birthday two weeks before she was killed.

'Officer Broussard?'

The soft voice broke Annie's concentration. She caught the locket in her fist and turned. Doll Renard stood beside her in a prison gray June Cleaver shirtwaist that had been intended for a woman with breasts and hips. In her hands she played nervously with the stem of a delicate butterfly-shaped mask covered in iridescent sequins. The elegant beauty of the mask seemed at odds with the woman holding it-plain, unadorned, her mouth a bitter knot.

'Mrs. Renard. Can I help you?'

Doll glanced away, anxious. 'I don't know if you can. I swear, I don't know what I'm doing here. It's a nightmare, that's what. A terrible nightmare.'

'What is?'

Tears glazed across the woman's eyes. One hand left the stem of her mask to pat at her heart. 'I don't know. I don't know what to do. All this time I thought we'd been wronged. All this time. My boys are all I have, you know. Their father betrayed us, and now they're all I have in the world.'

Annie waited. In her previous meetings with Doll she had found the woman melodramatic and shrill, but the stress stretched taut in Doll Renard's voice now had the ring of genuineness. Her small, sharp nose was red at the tip, her eyes rimmed in crimson from crying.

'I knew motherhood would be a joy and a trial,' she said, rubbing a hankie under her nose. 'But all the joy of it has been robbed from me. And now I fear it's become a nightmare.' Tears skimmed down her thin, pale cheeks. 'I'm so afraid.'

'Afraid of what, Mrs. Renard?'

'Of Marcus,' she confessed. 'I'm afraid my son has done something terribly wrong.'

45

'Could we go somewhere and talk?' Doll asked, glancing anxiously around at the masked revelers that moved up and down the street. She raised her own mask to partially hide her face. 'Marcus is here somewhere. I don't want him to see me speaking to you. We had a terrible quarrel last night. It was horrible. I never left my bed today, I was so distraught. I don't know what to do. You've been so kind, so fair to us, I thought…'

She paused, fighting the need to cry. Annie put a hand on her shoulder, torn between a woman's sympathy and a cop's excitement.

'I'm afraid I'm on duty-' she began.

'I wouldn't ask- I didn't want to- Oh, dear…' Doll raised a hand to her mouth and closed her eyes for a moment, working to compose herself. 'He's my son,' she said in a tortured whisper. 'I can't bear the thought that he might have-' Breaking off again, she shook her head. 'I shouldn't have come here. I'm sorry.'

She turned to go, shoulders hunched.