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nervous gesture. “I—ah—was on the courthouse steps. We took down Hunter Davidson. I was the one at the bottom of the pile.”
    The gaze slid down from her face past the open front of her denim jacket and the thin white T-shirt beneath it to the flower-sprigged skirt that hit her mid-calf to the Keds she wore on her feet . . . and eased back up like a long caress.
    “You out of uniform, Deputy.”
    “I’m off duty.”
    “Are you?”
    Annie blinked at his response and at the smoke, not quite sure what to make of the first. “I was the first officer on the scene at the Bichon homicide. I—”
    “I know who you are. What you think,
chère
, that this little bit o’ whiskey pickled my brain or something?” He arched a brow and chuckled, tapping his cigarette into a plastic ashtray bristling with butts. “You grew up here, enrolled in the academy August 1993, got hired into the Lafayette PD, came to the SO here in ’95. You were the second woman deputy on patrol in this parish—the first having lasted all of ten months. You got a good record, but you tend to be nosy. Me, I think that’s maybe not such a bad thing if you gonna
do
the job, if you looking to move up, which you are.”
    Astonished, Annie gaped at him. In the months Fourcade had been in the department she had never heard him volunteer a sentence of more than ten words. She had certainly never dreamed that he knew enough about her to do so. That he seemed to know quite a lot about her was unnerving—a reaction he read without effort.
    “You were the first deputy on the scene. I needed to know if you were any good, or if you mighta screwed up, or if maybe you knew Pam Bichon. Maybe you had the same boyfriend. Maybe she sold you a house with snakes under the floors. Maybe she beat you out for head cheerleader back in high school.”
    “You considered me a suspect?”
    “Me, I consider ever’body a suspect ’til I can find out different.”
    He took a long pull on his smoke and watched her as he exhaled. “Does this bother you?” he asked, making a small gesture with the cigarette.
    She tried without success not to blink. “No.”
    “Yes, it does,” he declared as he stubbed it out in the overflowing ashtray. “Say so. Ain’t nobody in this world gonna speak up for you,
chère
.”
    “I’m not afraid to speak up.”
    “No? You afraid of me?”
    “If I were afraid of you, I wouldn’t be standing here.”
    His lips twisted in a faint smirk and he gave a very French shrug that said,
Maybe, maybe no
. Annie felt her temper spike a notch.
    “Why should I be afraid of you?”
    His expression darkened as he turned a shot glass on the bar. “You don’t listen to gossip?”
    “I take it for what it’s worth. Half-truths, if that.”
    “And how you decide which half is true?” he asked. “There is no justice in this world,” he said softly, staring into his whiskey. “How’s that for a truth, Deputy Broussard?”
    “It’s all in your perception, I suppose.”
    “‘One man’s justice is another man’s injustice . . . one man’s wisdom another’s folly.’ ” He sipped at the whiskey. “Emerson. No reporter will sum up today’s events as well . . . or with such truth.”
    “What they say doesn’t change the facts,” Annie said. “You found Pam’s ring in Renard’s house.”
    “You don’t think I put it there?”
    “If you had put it there, it would have been listed on the warrant.”
    “
C’est vrai
. True enough, Annie.” He gave her a pensive look. “Annie—that’s short for something?”
    “Antoinette.”
    He sipped his whiskey. “That’s a beautiful name, why you don’t use it?”
    She shrugged. “I—well—everyone calls me Annie.”
    “Me, I’m not ever’body, ’Toinette,” he said quietly.
    He seemed to have gotten closer or loomed larger. Annie thought she could feel the heat of him, smell the old leather of his jacket. She knew she could feel his gaze holding hers, and she told herself to