'I feel like I'm balancing on the head of a pin, juggling bowling balls,' Annie muttered, starting to pace as Nick slowed, as if it were essential for one of them to keep in motion.
'If Marcotte was in contact with Donnie before Pam's murder, then that only adds to Donnie's motive,' she said. 'He was angry with Pam for leaving him. I think she was probably holding his property hostage in order to get him to drop the custody threat-which Lindsay Faulkner hinted might have been about Pam seeing male clients. I know Donnie was angry over the relationship he imagined between her and Stokes. If it was imagined.
'What do you know about that?' she asked. 'Was he talking about her around the office? Did he say anything to you?'
Nick shook his head. 'Not that I recall, but I don't listen to that crap, anyway. I don't care who's screwing who unless there's a felony involved. I sure as hell didn't listen to Stokes. He's got a new one every week, at least. I know he was friendly with her. He was quieter after her murder. He might have wanted to be the primary on the case, but he was tied up with the DA the morning you found her. I caught it instead, and Noblier left it that way, even though Stokes had worked the stalking angle. It was a matter of experience. I've worked more murders than the rest of them put together.'
'But Stokes never said anything personal about Pam, about the two of them?'
'Not in a sexual way, no. He admitted he wished he had done more for her during the harassment. He didn't take it seriously enough.'
'No kidding,' Annie said sarcastically. 'I've gone over those reports. He gave her pamphlets on domestic violence and told her to call the phone company to see if she couldn't get them to put a tap on her line. Lazy son of a bitch.'
She marched back toward him, her eyes bright with anger and adrenaline. She looked ready to wrestle tigers. Her anger pleased him.
'And what if Stokes is something worse than lazy?' Annie asked quietly, giving voice to the thought for the first time. She felt as if she had just let a poisonous snake loose in the room.
Fourcade looked at her with suspicion. 'What exactly are you saying, 'Toinette?'
'I had a little run-in with Stokes today over some of the evidence in those rapes. He claims he sent it in to the lab in Shreveport for analysis, but he threatened me not to check up on it. He says he'll go to Noblier and make a formal complaint about me digging around in his cases. But what's the big deal if I call-if the stuff is really there?'
'You think he didn't send it?' Nick said. 'Why wouldn't he?'
'This rapist knows everything we'll look for-hairs, fibers, fingerprints, body fluids. He goes so far as to make the victims clean under their fingernails after he's through with them. Who would know to be that careful? A pro… or a cop.'
'You think Stokes is the rapist?
'Why is that crazy?' she demanded. 'Because he's got all the women he wants? You know as well as I do it doesn't always work that way.'
'Come on, 'Toinette. Stokes is suddenly a rapist? Overnight he's a rapist? No way.'
'You think he's not capable of violence against a woman?' Annie said. 'Good ol' Chaz. Everybody's buddy. I can tell you from experience he doesn't like the word
The import of her words struck Nick hard, awakening feelings of jealousy and protectiveness he would have said he didn't possess. 'He laid a hand on you?'
'He never got the chance,' Annie said. 'But that doesn't mean he didn't want to or that he hasn't thought about it a hundred times since. He's got an ugly temper with a touchy trigger.'
True enough, Nick thought. He'd seen Stokes's temper in action just yesterday.
'You thought he turned on you,' Annie reminded him.
And he wasn't entirely sure it wasn't true. But Nick couldn't decide if he suspected Stokes because Stokes was deserving of it or because Nick didn't want to accept 100 percent of the culpability for beating up Renard.
'There's a big jump from selling me out to being a rapist,' he said.
'But look at the connections to Stokes in all of this,' Annie said. 'Every time I turn around, there he is. He's got control of the rape task force, has access to all the evidence. Now he's checked out the feathers from the mask in two of the rapes and the mask from Pam Bichon's homicide, and he doesn't want me calling the lab to check on the stuff.'
Nick lifted his hands. 'Oh, hold on, 'Toinette. You're not gonna try to tie him to Bichon.'
'Why not?' Annie said. 'Stokes investigated Pam's stalking complaints. Donnie was jealous of the time Pam spent with him-so said Lindsay Faulkner, who met Stokes over lunch on Monday and had her head bashed in that same night.'
'You're way off the beam here,' Nick said, shaking his head. 'I was there, remember. Bichon was my case. You think I wouldn't have seen that?'
'Were you looking?' Annie challenged. 'Where did Stokes steer you? To Renard.'
'Nobody steers me. I went to Renard because the logic took me there. Stokes turns up in all of this because he's a cop, for God's sake. If you follow your line of thinking, you could tie me to the murder, I could tie you to the rapes.'
'I'm not the one trying to hide evidence,' Annie shot back.
'You don't know that he is, either. Maybe he just wants you out of his hair.'
'And maybe I'm right and you don't wanna hear it because it would make you look like a fool.'
'I don't wanna hear it because it's a waste of time,' he said stubbornly.
'Because it's my theory and not yours,' Annie argued. 'I told you at the start of this I wouldn't be your puppet, Nick. Don't blow me off now because I'm not stuck in the same tunnel with you. I think Stokes is a legitimate suspect.'
'He's a cop.'
'So are you!' she snapped. 'It didn't stop you from breaking the law.'
Her words slapped everything to a halt. She felt a sting of guilt that aggravated her. She wasn't the one who had something to feel guilty about. And yet, she couldn't let go of the feeling that she'd hurt him. Fourcade, the granite cop, the pillar of cold logic. No one else would have thought him capable of feeling hurt.
'I'm sorry,' she murmured. 'That was bitchy.'
'No. It's true enough.
He went to a dormer window and stared out at nothing.
'I just think it's another possibility,' Annie said. 'It's an angle no one's considered.'
An angle he didn't want to consider, Nick admitted. For exactly the reason she had said. Bichon had been his case. If he'd worked side by side with her killer and never seen it, what kind of cop did that make him?
He ran the possibility through his mind, trying to see it as if he'd never had anything to do with the case or with Stokes.
'I don't buy it,' he said. 'Stokes has been here four or five years, suddenly he butchers a woman and becomes a serial rapist? Uh-uh. That's not the way it works.'
He turned around and walked slowly back toward Annie. 'What other evidence was there in the rapes?'
'No blood, no semen, no skin. Nothing from the rape kits.' Then a memory surfaced. 'At the Nolan rape, I saw Stokes picking pubic hairs out of Jennifer Nolan's bathtub with a tweezers.'
'Check it out. Meanwhile, get me the case numbers on the rapes. I'll call Shreveport and tell them I'm Quinlan. See what they have to say.'
Annie nodded. 'Thanks,' she said, looking up at him. 'I'm sorry-'
'Don't be sorry, 'Toinette,' he ordered. 'It's a waste of energy. You had something on your mind, you laid it out. We'll see where it takes us, but I don't want you getting sidetracked. These rapes aren't your focus. The murder is your focus and Renard is your number one suspect. Pam Bichon herself, she told us that. You don't wanna listen to me, you listen to her.'
He was right. Pam had seen Renard for a monster and no one had listened to her. In turning away from Renard to look at other possibilities, was she also ignoring Pam's cries for help-or was she simply doing the job?
'Why couldn't I have been a cocktail waitress?' she asked on a weary sigh.
