Noblier stared at her in silence for a moment. "How did Kudrow know you tried to arrest Fourcade? Has he already talked to you?"
"He left a message on my answering machine this morning while I was out running."
"But you didn't talk to him?"
"No."
"Did you tell Renard you arrested Fourcade?"
"No."
"Did you Mirandize Fourcade in front of him?"
"Renard was unconscious."
"Then Kudrow was bluffing, that ugly son of a bitch," Gus muttered to himself. "I hate that man. I don't care that he's dying. I wish he'd hurry up and get it over with. Have you filed an arrest report?"
"Not yet."
"Nor will you. If you've started that paperwork, I want it shredded. Not thrown away. Shredded."
"But Renard is going to press charges-"
"That doesn't mean we have to make it easy for him. Go ahead and write up his complaint, write up your preliminary report, but you did not arrest Fourcade. Get your sergeant's initials on the paperwork, then bring the file straight to me.
"I'm personally taking charge of the case," he said, as if he were trying out the phrase for a future official statement. "It's an unusual situation-allegations being made against one of my men. Requires my undivided attention to see to it justice is served.
"And don't look at me like that, Deputy," he said, pointing an accusatory finger. "We're not doing anything Richard Kudrow hasn't done time and again for the scum he represents."
"Then we're no better than they are," Annie murmured.
"The hell we're not," Noblier growled, reaching for the telephone. "We're the good guys, Annie. We work for Lady Justice. It's just that she can't always see what's what with that damned blindfold on. You're dismissed, Deputy."
The women's locker room in the Partout Parish Sheriff's Department had originally been a janitor's closet. There had been no women on the job when the building was designed in the late sixties, and the blissful chauvinists on the planning committee hadn't foreseen the possibility. Their shortsightedness meant male officers had a locker room with showers and their own rest room, while female personnel got a broom closet that had been converted during the 1993 remodeling.
The only light was a bare bulb in the ceiling. Four battered metal lockers had been salvaged out of the old junior high school and transplanted along one wall. A cheap frame-less mirror hung on the opposite wall above a tiny porcelain sink. When Annie had first come on the job, someone had drilled a peephole half a foot to the left of the mirror from the men's room on the other side. She now checked the wall periodically for new breaches of privacy, filling the holes with spackling compound she kept in her locker alongside her stash of candy bars.
She was the only female deputy who used the room with any regularity, and currently the only female patrol officer. There were two women who worked in the jail, and one female plainclothes juvenile officer, all of whom had come on before the broom closet had been converted and had adjusted to life without it. Annie thought of the room as her own and had tried to spruce it up a little by bringing in a plastic potted palm and a carpet remnant for the concrete floor. A poster from the International Association of Women Police brightened one wall.
Annie sat on her folding chair and faced the door. She couldn't bring herself to face the women in the poster. She was late for patrol, had missed the morning briefing. There was no doubt in her mind that every uniform in the place knew Noblier had called her into his office, and why. Sergeant Hooker had announced the first the minute she stepped into the building. The looks she had drawn from the rest of the men had hinted strongly at the second.
She looked at the file folder on her lap. She had gone so far as to type out the arrest report on Fourcade last night. It had given her a small sense of control to sit at her typewriter at home and put down in black and white what she had seen, what she had done. She had felt a sense of validation for just a little while there in the dead of night. Sheriff Noblier had smashed it flat beneath the weight of his authority this morning.
He wanted her to file a false report. She was supposed to lie, justify brutality, violate God knew how many laws.
"And no one sees anything wrong with that picture but me," she muttered.
Anxiety simmered like acid in her stomach as she left the locker room and headed down the hall.
Hooker rolled an eye at her as she passed the sergeant's desk. "See if you can't contain yourself to arresting criminals today, Broussard."
Annie reserved comment as she signed herself out. "I have to be in court at three o'clock."
"Oh really? You testifying for us or against us?"
"Hypolite Grangnon-burglary," she said flatly.
Hooker narrowed his little pig eyes at her. "Sheriff wants those reports on his desk by noon."
"Yes, sir."
She should have gone straight to the report room and gotten it over with, but she needed air and space, some time on the road to clear her head, and a cup of coffee that didn't taste like boiled sweat socks. She let herself out of the building and sucked in air that smelled of damp earth and green grass.
The rain had subsided around five A.M. Annie had lain awake all night listening to it assault the roof over her head. Finally giving up on the idea of rest, she had forced herself to get out of bed and work out with the free weights and pull-up bar that gave her second bedroom such a decorative flair.
As she worked her aching muscles, she watched for dawn to break over the Atchafalaya basin. There were mornings when the sunrise boiled up over the swamp like a ball of flame and the sky turned shades of orange and pink so intense they seemed liquid. This morning had come in with rolling, angry slate-colored clouds that carried the threat of a storm with a bully's arrogance.
A storm would have suited her, she thought, except that a spring rainstorm would blow over and be forgotten, while the metaphorical storm in which she had landed herself would do neither.
"Deputy Broussard, might I have a moment of your time?"
Annie jerked around toward the source of the low, smooth voice. Richard Kudrow stood propped against the side of the building, holding the front of his old trench coat together like a flasher.
"I'm sorry. No. I don't have time," she said quickly, stepping off the sidewalk and heading across the parking lot toward her cruiser. She cast a nervous glance over her shoulder at the building.
"You'll have to talk to me sooner or later," the lawyer said, falling in step beside her.
"Then it'll have to be later, Mr. Kudrow. I'm on duty."
"Taxpayer time. Need I point out to you, Miss Broussard, that I myself pay mightily into August Noblier's fat coffers and am, therefore, technically, one of your employers?"
"I'm not interested in your technicalities." She unlocked the car door with one hand while balancing her clipboard, files, and ticket books in the other arm. "It's my sergeant who's gonna kick my butt if I don't get to work."
"Your sergeant? Or Gus Noblier-for talking to me?"
"I don't know what you mean," she lied. She added the car keys to the pile on her arm and started to pull the cruiser's door open.
"Can I hold something for you?" Kudrow offered gallantly, reaching toward her.
"No," Annie snapped, twisting away.
The sudden movement sent the pile sliding off the clipboard. The keys, the ticket books, the files tumbled to the ground, the Renard file spilling its contents. Panicking, Annie dropped the clipboard and fell to the blacktop on her hands and knees, chanting expletives, scrambling to scrape the papers back into the folder before the wind could take them. Kudrow crouched down, reaching for the notebook that had blown open, its pages of details and observations and interview notes fluttering, as tantalizing to a lawyer as a glimpse of lacy underwear. Annie snatched it out of his hand, then saw his liver-spotted hand reach next for the arrest form she hadn't filed and hadn't shredded.