"Where you been tonight, Tulane?"
"Around," Donnie said, straightening his shirt with one hand and rubbing his cheek with the other. "I went to the cemetery for a while. I go there sometimes to talk to God, you know. And to see Pam. Then I went and checked a site."
"In the dead of night?"
He shrugged. "Hey, you like to go around in sunglasses. I like to get drunk and wander around half-finished construction sites. There's always the chance I'll fall in a hole and kill myself. It's kind of like Russian roulette. I don't have much of a social life since Pam was killed."
"I suppose an unsolved murder in your past puts the ladies off."
"Some."
"Well… you watch your step, cher," Nick said, backing toward the kitchen. "We don't want you to meet an untimely end-unless you deserve it."
He was gone as quickly and quietly as he had appeared. Donnie didn't even hear the door shut. But then, that may have been due to the pounding in his head. The shakes swept over him on a wave of weakness, and he stumbled into the bathroom with a hand pressed to his burning stomach. Bruising his knees on the tile, he dropped to the floor and puked into the toilet, then started to cry.
All he wanted was a simple, cushy life. Money. Success. No worries. The adoration of his daughter. He hadn't realized how close he had come to that ideal until he'd blown it all away. Now all he had was trouble, and every time he turned around he screwed himself deeper into the hole.
Hugging the toilet, he put his head down on his arms and sobbed.
"Pam… Pam… I'm so sorry!"
Annie dreamed she caught a bullet in her teeth. Tied to the bullet was a string. Pulling herself hand over hand along the string, she flew through the night, through the woods, and came to a halt with a rifle barrel pressed into the center of her forehead. At the stock end of the gun stood a shimmering apparition with an elaborate feather mask covering its face. With one hand the apparition removed the mask to reveal the face of Donnie Bichon. Another hand peeled away the face of Donnie Bichon to reveal Marcus Renard. Then Renard's face was peeled away to reveal Pam Bichon's death mask-the eyes partially gone, skin discolored and decomposing, tongue swollen and purple. Nailed to her chest was the dead black cat, its intestines hanging down like a bloody necklace.
"You are me," Pam said, and fired the rifle. Bang! Bang! Bang!
Annie hurled herself upright on the sofa, gasping for breath, feeling as if her heart had leapt out of her chest.
The banging came again. A fist on wood. Bleary-eyed, she grabbed for the Sig on the coffee table.
"'Toinette! It's me!" Fourcade called.
He stood at the French doors, scowling in at her.
Annie went to the doors and let him in. She didn't bother to ask the obvious question. Of course Fourcade wouldn't come to the front door. Her tormentor might have been watching from the woods, returning to the scene of his crimes. She asked the second-most obvious question instead.
"Where the hell were you?"
After slamming the door shut on the atrocity in her bedroom, she had gone back to the living room and sat down, trying to think what she should do. Call the SO? Bring Pitre back here and let him soak up the gory details to spread around the department at the shift change? What good would he do? None. She had called Fourcade instead, cursing him silently as his machine picked up again.
"Taking care of some business," he said.
He stared at her as she paced back and forth along the coffee table with her arms banded around her. He took in everything about her-the disheveled hair, the dirty jeans and T-shirt. Reaching out as she came toward him, he plucked the Sig from her fingers and set it aside.
"Are you all right?"
"No!" she snapped. "Someone tried to kill me. I think we've already established that I don't take that well. Then I find out someone came into my house, wrote on my wall in blood, and nailed a dead cat above my bed. I'm not okay with that either!"
From the corner of her eye she could see Fourcade watching her. He didn't seem to know what to do except fall back on the job, the routine. She was a victim-God, but she hated that label-and he was a detective.
"Tell me what happened from the time you parked the Jeep."
She went through the story point by point, fact by fact, the way she had been trained to testify. The process calmed her somewhat, distanced her from the violation. In her mind, she tried to separate the victim in her from the cop. For the first time she told him about the skinned muskrat that had been left in her locker room, though she didn't put the two incidents on the same plane. It was one thing to play a nasty joke at work; breaking and entering was another matter. And what had been done in her bedroom seemed more threatening, more vile, more personal. Then again, if a deputy had been behind that rifle tonight, why not this too?
Nick listened, then headed toward the bedroom. Annie followed, reluctant to face it again.
"Did you touch anything?" he asked out of habit.
"No. God, I couldn't even bring myself to go in."
He pushed the door open and stood there with his hands on his hips, a grimace twisting his lips. "Mon Dieu."
He left Annie at the door and went into the room, taking in the details with a clinical eye.
The blood had been brushed on the wall. No visible fingerprints. The word cunt had been chosen for what reason? As an opinion? To shock? Out of disrespect? Out of anger?
In his mind's eye he could see Keith Mullen, skinny and ugly, standing in his filthy kitchen just that morning. "She don't know nothing about loyalty, turning on one of us. Cunt's got no business being in a uniform."
Was the animal symbolic? An alley cat-sexually indiscriminate. Its guts spilled down onto the bed where Annie had made love with him just the night before.
And the positioning of its body, the nails through its forepaws, the evisceration-an obvious allusion to Pam Bichon. Meant to frighten or as a warning?
He thought of how close she had come to being shot and he wanted to hit something-someone-hard and repeatedly.
He worked to contain the rage even as he remembered Donnie Bichon's muddy boots. He set the thought aside for the moment.
"This cat-was she yours, Toinette?"
"No."
"You talked to your tante and uncle 'bout did they see anyone around today?"
"We had that conversation when we were talking about who might want to shoot me. They were busy today. Tourists coming in early for Mardi Gras. They had to call in extra tour guides. They didn't have time to notice anyone special."
"How'd anyone get in here? Were your doors locked when you came up?"
"Everything was locked up tight. You might be able to pick a lock to break in, but there's no locking these doors from the outside without a key."
"So how did this creep get in?"
"There's only one other way." She led him into the bathroom, to the door behind the old claw-foot tub. "The stairs go down into the stockroom of the store."
"Was it locked?"
"I don't know. I thought so. I usually keep it locked, but I went down this way Sunday night when the prowler was here. Maybe I forgot to lock it after."
Nick stood in the tub and examined the locking mechanism in the doorknob, frowning disapproval. "Ain't nothing but a button. Anybody could slip it with a credit card. How would anyone but family or employees know about these stairs?"
Annie shook her head. "By luck. By chance. The rest rooms are across the hall at the bottom of the stairs. Someone going to use them might look through the stockroom and notice."
He flicked on the light switch and descended the steep stairs, looking for any sign another person had been there-a footprint, a thread, a stray hair. There was nothing. The stockroom door stood open. Across the hall, he could see part of the door to the men's room.