alone? She was also connected to a murder investigation. Just yesterday she'd found something relevant to say in regard to that murder. Had someone shut her up before she could tell it? The possibilities made Annie's nerves twitch.
The wail of approaching sirens penetrated the silence of the house. The EMTs stormed the place first, followed closely by Sticks Mullen. He scowled at Annie. She scowled at him.
'What the hell are you doing here, Broussard?'
'I could ask you the same thing,' Annie said, glancing at her watch. 'You're usually stuffing your face with doughnuts about this time. Lucky me, you picked today to be diligent instead of delinquent.'
She stepped back into the living room, out of the way of the EMTs, one eye on the paramedics as they worked.
'It looks to me like the attacker cracked her head with the base unit of the phone.' She pointed to where it lay bloody on the floor among scattered broken picture frames. 'She put up a fight.'
'For all the good it did her,' Mullen muttered.
'Hey, some jerk comes after me, I go down swinging,' Annie said. 'I'll make the guy wish he'd never set eyes on me.'
'There's plenty of that going around anyway.'
'Don't start with me,' Annie snapped.
She dared him with a glare, then started for the dining area. 'He came in here through the patio door. She must have heard him, came out of her bedroom, and confronted him.'
'Should have stayed put and called 911.'
'Wouldn't have done her any good. The phone's dead. You'll find the line cut, I imagine. Just like the others.'
The EMTs hefted up their stretcher and rolled it out the front door with Lindsay Faulkner motionless beneath the blanket. As they left, Stokes walked in, a gray fedora sitting back on the crown of his head, a slip of toilet paper glued to his left cheek with a dot of blood. His light eyes were shot through with red.
'Man, I hate these early calls,' he grumbled.
'Yeah, how inconsiderate of people to be attacked during your off-hours,' Annie said. 'At least she waited until morning to be found raped, beaten, and unconscious.'
Stokes scowled at her. 'What're you doing here, Broussard? Somebody call for McGruff?'
'I found her.'
He took a moment to digest that, his gaze sharpening. 'And I say again, what are you doing here? How'd you know her? You two playing 'Bump the Doughnut' or something?'
Mullen snickered. Annie rolled her eyes.
'You know, Chaz, I hate to break it to you, but just because a woman won't have sex with you doesn't mean she's a lesbian. It just means she has standards.'
'Stop. You're spoiling my fantasies.' He nodded to Mullen. 'Go see if the phone line's cut. And see if there's any good footprints in the yard. Ground's soft. Maybe we can get a cast.'
Mullen went out the front. Stokes hiked up his baggy brown trousers and squatted down amid the junk that had toppled from the hall table.
'You gonna answer my question, Broussard?' he asked as he pulled on a pair of rubber gloves and picked up the bloody phone unit.
'She's my real estate agent,' Annie said automatically. 'I'm thinking of buying a house.'
'Is that right?' he said flatly. 'So why come all the way out here to see her when her office is-what?-all of four blocks from the department?'
'She wanted to show me something out this way.'
'This neighborhood's a little out of your price range, isn't it, Deputy?'
'A girl can dream.'
'Uh-huh. And when did y'all set this up?'
'Lindsay called me last night and left a message on my machine.' Her eyes went to Faulkner's answering machine. Her own voice would be on the tape. Thank God she'd left nothing more than her name and number.
'I tried to call her back about ten-thirty, but the machine answered. Why all the questions?' she asked, turning it back around on him. 'You think I raped her and beat her head in?'
'Just doing my job, McGruff.' He narrowed his eyes as if he were visualizing Lindsay Faulkner's body on the floor. He rubbed his goatee and hummed a note. The puddle of blood that had leaked from her skull had dried dark on the honey-tone oak. Spatters and smears had soaked into the off-white Berber runner. 'He did her right here, huh?'
'Looked that way. Her nightgown was pulled up around her shoulders. There was a lot of bruising on her body.'
'So is this the work of our friendly neighborhood serial rapist?' Stokes said more to himself than to Annie. 'He did the other two in bed, tied them up.'
'It looks to me like she heard him coming,' Annie said; 'He didn't get the chance to surprise her in bed. And he didn't have to tie her up because he knocked her out with the phone.'
She squatted down beside the rug, her gaze zooming in on a patch of dark fibers embedded in the carpet runner where Faulkner's body had lain. She scratched at the spot gingerly with a fingernail and plucked at the loose end that came up, bringing it up close before her eyes.
'Looks to me like a piece of black feather,' she said, looking at Stokes as she held it out toward him. 'That answer your question for you?'
'Don't you bend them papers shoving them in that way,' the records clerk snapped, his voice at a pitch that rivaled screeching chalk on a blackboard.
Annie twitched. 'Sorry, Myron.'
'That's Mr. Myron. You on the other side of my counter, you call me Myron. You on my side of my counter, you call me Mr. Myron. You are in my domain. You are my assistant.'
Myron jammed his hands at his belt and nodded sharply. A slight, prim black man, he wore a clip-on polyester tie every day and had his gray hair trimmed like a shrub every other Friday. He had worked records and evidence for twenty years and saw the presence of a uniform behind his counter as a direct threat to his kingdom.
'Don't let it go to your head,' Annie muttered. To Myron she gave her earnest face and said, 'I'll do my best.'
Myron gave her the skunk eye and went back to his desk.
Annie let his presence fade from mind as she concentrated on the facts of Lindsay Faulkner's attack. She was tempted to think this attacker was a copycat of their rapist, who was a copycat of sorts of Pam Bichon's killer, someone who had taken advantage of the first two rapes to silence Faulkner for his own reasons. Perhaps it had been his intent to murder her. He may well have believed she was dead when he left her.
But if that was the case, then who was this copycat? Renard would seem to be free from suspicion. Debilitated by the pounding Fourcade had given him, he couldn't have had the strength or the mobility to attack a strong, healthy woman like Lindsay. If not Renard, then who? Donnie? It was no secret he disliked Lindsay. If she was standing in the way of a deal for the real estate company…
Could he kill her? Make it look like rape? If it was Donnie, then did that mean he was involved in Pam's murder? If he had murdered Pam, killing Lindsay would have been easy by comparison.
The fragment of black feather was the sticking point for the copycat theory. That feather had been no plant left to implicate someone else. It appeared to be just the opposite, in fact. Something left behind by accident, hidden by his victim's unconscious body. Their boy had certainly left nothing else behind to incriminate himself.
Then again, the feather may not have come from a mask. It could have been part of a cat toy. It could have been tracked in by a visitor. They wouldn't know whether or not they had a match to the feather in the Nolan case until they heard back from the lab in New Iberia.
'Hey, Myron, what'd you do to deserve this, man?' Stokes asked, snickering as he set the rape kit on the counter. 'Who sicced the crime dog after you?'
