A Thin Dark Line by Tami Hoag Read Free Book Online Page A

hard on the case, and it was crumbling around him. He felt the chill pass over him, through him. The shadow of the dead. He felt the need pull at him. And a part of him wanted very badly to go where it would lead him.
    He wondered if Annie Broussard felt that same pull or if she would even recognize it. Probably not. She was too young. Younger than he had been at twenty-eight. Fresh, optimistic, untainted. He had seen the doubt in her eyes when he had spoken of the shadows. He had also seen the naked truth when she spoke of the obligation she felt to Pam Bichon.
    The key to staying sane in homicide was keeping a distance. Don’t let it get personal. Don’t get involved. Don’t take it home with you. Don’t cross the line.
    He had never been good at taking any of that advice. He lived the job. The line was always behind him.
    Had the shadows drawn Pam Bichon? Had she seen Death’s phantom coming, felt its cold breath on her shoulders? He knew the answer.
    She had complained to friends about Renard’s persistent, if subtle advances. Despite her rebuffs, he had begun sending her gifts. Then came the harassment. Small acts of vandalism against her car, her property. Items stolen from her office—photographs, a hairbrush, work papers, her keys.
    Yes, Pam had seen the phantom coming, and no one had listened when she tried to tell them. No one had heard her fear any more than they had heard her tortured screams that night out on Pony Bayou.
    “I still think about what he did to her,” Stokes said. “Don’t you?”
    All the time. The details had saturated his brain like blood.
    With his back against the tree trunk, Nick lowered himself to sit on his heels and stared across the empty street at the building that housed Bowen & Briggs. A light burned on the second floor. A desk lamp. Renard worked at the third drafting table back and on the south side of the big room there. Bowen & Briggs designed both small commercial and residential buildings, with their commercial work coming out of New Iberia and St. Martinville as well as Bayou Breaux.
    Renard was a partner in the firm, though his name was not on the logo. He preferred designing residential buildings, especially single-family homes, and had a liking for historical styles. His social life was quiet. He had no long-term romantic involvement. He lived with his mother, who collected Mardi Gras masks and created costumes for Carnival revelers, and his autistic brother, Victor, the elder by four years. Their home was a modest, restored plantation house—less than five miles by car from the scene of Pam Bichon’s murder. Nearer by boat.
    According to the descriptions of the people who worked with and knew Marcus Renard, he was quiet, polite, ordinary, or a touch odd—depending on whom you asked. But other words came to Nick’s mind. Meticulous, compulsive, obsessive, repressed, controlling, passive-aggressive.
    Behind the mask of ordinariness, Marcus Renard was a very different man from the one his co-workers saw every day sitting at his drafting table. They couldn’t see the core component Nick had sensed in him from their first meeting—rage. Deep, deep inside, beneath layers and layers of manners and mores and the guise of mild apathy. Rage, simmering, contained, hidden, buried.
    It was rage that had driven those spikes through Pam Bichon’s hands.
    Rage was no stranger.
    The light went out in the second-story window. Out of old habit, Nick checked his watch—9:47 P . M .—and scanned the street in both directions—all clear. Renard’s five-year-old maroon Volvo sat in the narrow parking area between the Bowen & Briggs building and the antiques shop next door, an area poorly lit by a seventy-five-watt yellow bug light over the side door.
    Renard would emerge from that door, climb in his car, and go home to his mother and his brother and his hobby of designing and building elaborate dollhouses. He would sleep in his bed a free man tonight and dream the sinister,