A Thin Dark Line

'No. I thought for once maybe someone in the system would use some common sense. Mais sa c'est fou!'

'It's not crazy,' Gus insisted, translating the Cajun French automatically. 'We're talking about the rules, Nick. The rules are there for a reason. Sometimes we gotta bend 'em. Sometimes we gotta sneak around 'em. But we can't just pretend they're not there.'

'So what the hell were we supposed to do?' Fourcade asked with stinging sarcasm and an exaggerated shrug. 'Leave the ring at Renard's house, come back, and try to get another warrant? Can't use the 'plain view' argument to get the warrant. Hell, the ring wasn't in plain sight. So then what? Track down some of Pam Bichon's family and play Twenty Questions?'

He squeezed his eyes shut and pressed his fingertips against his forehead. 'I'm thinking of something of Pam's that might be missing. Can y'all guess what that something might be? Mais non, I can't just come right out and tell you. That would be against the fucking rules!'

'Goddammit, Nick!'

Frustration pushed Gus to his feet and flooded his face with unhealthy color. Even his scalp glowed pink through the steel gray of his crew cut. He jammed his hands against his thick waist and glared at Fourcade leaning across his desk. At six-three he had a couple inches on the detective, but Fourcade was built like a light heavyweight boxer-all power and muscle and 3 percent body fat.

'And while we were all chasing our tails, trying to follow the rules,' Fourcade went on, 'you don't think Renard would be pitching that ring in the bayou?'

'You could have left Stokes there and come back. And why hadn't Renard pitched the ring already? We'd been to his house twice-'

'Third time's a charm.'

'He's smarter than that.'

Of all the things Nick had expected Gus Noblier to say to him, to insinuate, he hadn't anticipated this. He felt blind-sided, then foolish, then told himself it didn't matter. But it did.

'You think I planted that ring?' he asked in a voice gone dangerously soft.

Gus blew a sigh between his lips. His narrow eyes glanced a look off Nick's chin and ricocheted elsewhere. 'I didn't say that.'

'You didn't have to. Hell, you don't think I'm smarter than that? You don't think if I knew what I was gonna find before I went there, I woulda had sense enough to list the ring on the goddamn warrant?'

The sheriff scowled, accentuating the sagging lines of his big face. 'I'm not the one who thinks you're a rogue cop, Nick. That's Kudrow's game, and he's got the press playing with him.'

'And I'm supposed to give a shit?'

'You, of all people. This case has folks spooked. They're seeing killers in every shadow and they want someone put away.'

'Renard-'

Gus held a hand up. 'Save your breath. We all want a conviction on this. I'm just telling you how it can look. I'm just telling you how this thing can be twisted. Kudrow plants enough doubt, we'll never get this creep. I'm telling you to mind your manners.'

Nick let out the breath he'd been holding and turned away from the cluttered desk, resuming his pacing with less energy. 'I'm a detective, not a damn community relations officer. I've got a job to do.'

'You can't just do it all over Marcus Renard. Not now.'

'So I'm supposed to do what? Have a gypsy conjure me up some more suspects? Cast suspicion on someone else, just to be fair? Buy into that bullshit theory this murder is the work of a serial killer everybody knows got his ticket punched for him four years ago?'

'You can't keep leaning on Renard, Nick. Not without some solid evidence or a witness or something. That's harassment, and he'll sue our asses eight ways from Sunday.'

'Oh, well, God forbid he should sue us,' Nick sneered. 'A murderer!'

'A citizen!' Gus yelled, thumping the desktop between stacks of paperwork. 'A citizen with rights and a damn good lawyer to make sure we respect them. This ain't some lowlife dirtbag you're dealing with here. He's an architect, for Christ's sake.'

'He's a killer.'

'Then you nail him and you nail him by the book. I've got enough trouble in this parish with half the people thinking the Bayou Strangler's been raised from the dead and half of them spoiling for a lynching-Renard's, yours, mine. This fire's burning hot enough, I don't need you throwing gasoline on it. You don't want to defy me on this, Nick. I'm telling you right now.'

'Telling me what?' Nick challenged. 'To back off? Or you want me off the case altogether, Gus?'

He waited impatiently for Noblier's reply. It frightened him a little, how much it mattered. The first murder he'd handled since leaving New Orleans and it had sucked him in, consumed his life, consumed him. The Bichon murder had taken precedence over everything else on his desk and in his head. Some would have called it an obsession. He didn't think he had crossed that line, but then again maybe he was in the middle of the deep woods seeing nothing but trees. It wouldn't have been the first time.

His hands had curled into fists at his sides. Holding on to the case. He couldn't make himself let go.

'Keep a low profile, for crying out loud,' Gus said with resignation as he lowered himself into his chair. 'Let Stokes take a bigger part of the case. Don't get in Renard's face.'

'He killed her, Gus. He wanted her and she didn't want him. So he stalked her. He terrorized her. He kidnapped her. He tortured her. He killed her.'

Gus cupped his hands together and held them up. 'This is our evidence, Nick. Everybody in the state of Lou'siana can know Marcus Renard did it, but if we don't get more than what we've got now, he's a free man.'

'Merde,' Nick muttered. 'Maybe I shoulda let Hunter Davidson shoot him.'

'Then it'd be Hunter Davidson going on trial for murder.'

'Pritchett's filing charges?'

'He doesn't have a choice.' Gus picked up an arrest report from his desk, glanced at it, and set it aside. 'Davidson tried to kill Renard in front of fifty witnesses. Let that be a lesson to you if you're fixing to kill someone.'

'Can I go?'

Gus gave him a long look. 'You're not fixing to kill someone, are you, Nick?'

'I got work to do.'

Fourcade's expression was inscrutable, his dark eyes unreadable. He slipped on his sunglasses. Gus's stomach called loudly for Mylanta. He jabbed a finger at his detective. 'You keep that coonass temper in check, Fourcade. It's already landed your butt in water hot enough to boil crawfish. Blaming the cops is in vogue these days. And your name is on the tip of everyone's tongue.'

Annie loitered in the open doorway to the briefing room, a leaking Baggie of melting ice cubes pressed to the knot on the back of her head. She had changed out of her torn, dirty uniform into the jeans and T-shirt she kept in her locker. She strained to make out the argument going on in the sheriff's office down the hall, but only the tone was conveyed. Impatient, angry.

The press had been speculating even before the evidentiary hearing that Fourcade would lose his job over the screwup on the warrant, but then the press liked to make noise and understood little of the intricacies of police work. They had written much about the public's frustration with the SO's failure to make an arrest, but they brushed off the frustration of the cops working the case. They all but called for a public hanging of the suspect based on nothing more than hearsay evidence, then spun around 180 degrees and pointed their fingers at the detective in charge of the case when he finally came up with something tangible.

No one had any evidence Fourcade had planted that ring in Renard's desk drawer. It didn't make sense that he would have planted evidence but not listed that evidence on the warrant. There was every possibility Renard had put the ring in that drawer himself, never imagining his house would be searched a third time. Perpetrators of