Annie swallowed hard. "Press conference?"
"Come on," he ordered as he strode down the hall.
Pritchett opened the show with a statement about Marcus Renard's alleged attack. He announced Detective Nick Fourcade had been taken into custody by the Bayou Breaux PD. He promised to get to the bottom of the allegations and expressed outrage at the idea of anyone attempting to circumvent the justice system.
Kudrow, looking wan and tragic, quietly reminded everyone of Fourcade's checkered past, and asked that justice be served. "I will state again my client's innocence. He has been proven guilty of nothing. In fact, while he lay in the hospital last night, put there by Detective Fourcade, the real criminal was at large and may well have committed a brutal rape."
And then began the feeding frenzy.
The questions and comments of the reporters were pointed and barbed. They had been chasing the story of Renard in one form or another for better than three months with no solid conclusion as to his innocence or guilt. While they couldn't find sympathy for the officers who had endured the same frustration, they didn't hesitate to vent their own. They went after everybody, sided with no one, and homed in on the chance for fresh blood.
"Sheriff, is that true-that another woman was attacked last night?"
"No comment."
"Deputy Broussard, is it true you formally arrested Detective Fourcade last night?"
Annie squinted into the blinding light of a portable sun gun as Gus nudged her forward. "Ah-I can't comment."
"But you are the officer who called in the ambulance. You did return to the sheriff's department with Detective Fourcade."
"No comment."
"Sheriff, if Renard was in the hospital while this other woman was being attacked, doesn't that prove his innocence?"
"No."
"Then you're confirming the attack occurred?"
"Deputy Broussard, can you confirm taking a statement from Mr. Renard at the hospital last night? And if so, why was Detective Fourcade not in custody this morning?"
"Ah-I-"
Gus leaned in front of her at the microphone. "Detective Fourcade was responding to a report of a prowler in the area. Deputy Broussard was off duty and did not hear the call. She came across a situation she found questionable, contained it, and accompanied Detective Fourcade back to the sheriff's department. It's as simple as that.
"I immediately suspended Detective Fourcade with pay, pending further investigation. And that's where this case stands as far as I'm concerned. My department has nothing to hide, nothing to be ashamed of. If the district attorney wants to have the police investigate the matter, I welcome the scrutiny. I stand behind my people one hundred percent, and that's all I have to say on the matter."
Pritchett stepped back up to the microphone, determined to have the last word, while Gus herded Annie away from the podium toward the door. Annie kept at Noblier's heels like a faithful dog and wondered if that made her some kind of hypocrite. She expected the sheriff to protect her but not Fourcade. I didn't try to kill anyone. All I did was lie and file a false report.
Disgusted with herself, with her boss, with the vultures trying to pick at her on the fly as she made her escape from the courthouse and went to her cruiser, she kept her mouth shut and her eyes forward. The mob split into factions then, some of them running back up the courthouse steps as Kudrow emerged, some trailing after Noblier as he drove away in his Suburban. Half a dozen tailed Annie to the law enforcement center and chased her across the parking lot to the officers' entrance to the building.
Hooker stood in the foyer, staring out at the show, arms crossed over his round belly. "Where's the follow-up report on that cemetery vandalism?"
"I turned it in two days ago."
"The hell you did."
"I did!"
"Well, I don't have it, Broussard," he stated. "Do it again. Today."
"Yes, sir," Annie said, biting down on the urge to call him a liar. Hooker was an asshole, but fair in that he usually treated everyone with equal disrespect.
"Like it's not bad enough to have to do paperwork once," she grumbled as she came up on the briefing room. "I get to do mine twice."
"Who you want to do twice, Broussard?" Mullen sneered. He and Prejean stood in the hall, drinking coffee. "Your little pervert friend, Renard? I hear when he nails a woman, she stays nailed-to the floor." He snickered, flashing his bad teeth.
"Very funny, Mullen," Annie said. "And in such good taste. Maybe you could get a job doing stand-up comedy down at the funeral home."
"I'm not the one gonna be looking for a job, Broussard," he returned. "We heard about you going over to the townies to suck Johnny Earl's dick."
"I hate to spoil your sordid daydreams, but I didn't go over there because I wanted to, and the chief wasn't exactly happy when I left."
Mullen smirked. "Can't even get a blow job right?"
"You'll sure as hell never find out."
Annie looked to Prejean, who was usually quick with a smile and a smart remark when she bested Mullen. He looked at her now as if he didn't know her. The snub hurt.
"That's okay, Prejean," she said. "It's not like I ever covered for you when your wife was working nights and you wanted a little extra time at lunch to, shall we say, satisfy your appetite."
Prejean looked at his shoes. Annie shook her head and walked away. She needed ten minutes alone, just to sit down and regroup. Ten minutes to marshal her disappointment and corral the fear that was beginning to skitter around inside her. She had fallen into a deep hole and no one was reaching in to help her out. Instead, the men she had thought were her comrades stood around the rim, ready to kick dirt on her.
She headed for her locker room. But she knew before she even set foot inside that her sanctuary had been breached.
The smell hit her as she turned the doorknob-sickening, rotten. She flipped the light switch and barely managed to clamp her hand over her mouth before the scream could escape.
Hanging from a length of brown twine tied to the single bulb in the ceiling, the cord knotted together with its long, skinny tail, was a dead muskrat.
The muskrat had been skinned from the base of its tail to the base of its skull, the pelt left dangling down past its head. Annie stared at it, nausea rising up her esophagus. Air currents and the weight of its body twisted the rodent to and fro like a grotesque mobile. One hind leg was missing, suggesting the muskrat had met its untimely end in the steel jaws of a trap, as thousands did every year in South Louisiana.
Aware that her tormentor could have been watching through a fresh hole in the wall, Annie moved toward the muskrat, then stepped around it. She took in every detail- the knotted tail, the naked muscle, the piece of paper that had been stabbed to the corpse with a nail.
The note read: Turncoat bitch.
10
"Broussard ratted you out," Stokes said, curling his fingers through the wire mesh of the holding cell. "Man, I can't believe she did this to you. I mean, it's one thing that she won't sleep with me. Some women are just masochists that way. But ratting out another cop… man, that's low."
Stokes shouldn't have been allowed into the city jail holding cells. At least not as a visitor. Prisoners in holding had the right to see their attorneys, and that was all. But, as always, Stokes had known somebody and talked his way in.
"Goddamn, you think maybe she's a lesbian?" he asked, as the idea struck him.
An image of Annie Broussard came to Nick as he prowled his cell-her eyes widening, a hint of a blush spreading across her cheeks as he reached out and passed his hand too close to her.
"I don't care," he said.
"Maybe you don't, but she's just taken on a whole new role in my fantasy life," Stokes admitted. "Damn, but I've always had a thing for lesbians. Pretty ones," he qualified. "Not the butch dykes. Don't you ever picture beautiful women naked together? Man, that gets my dick twitching."