Page 33 of Dominion's Guard
"And the Blanchard files you had open on your screen?"
The question lands cleanly, aimed with the precision of a man who spent years in interrogation rooms before he moved behind the desk. He's not guessing. He saw what he saw.
"Landry and Blanchard were connected. They ran in the same social circles and had the same financial profile. If I'm building the victimology for Landry, I need to understand who else fits the pattern."
"Blanchard is a missing person, not a homicide. And he's not your missing person. He's nobody's missing person at this point, because interestingly nobody has filed a follow-up and nobody's pushing the case." Hebert sets his cup down and crosses his arms again, framing a boundary with his body language before he puts it into words. "You were pulled off that investigation for a reason. The reason hasn't changed."
"The reason was no evidence. Landry changes the evidentiary picture."
"Landry is your case. Blanchard is not. The connection you're drawing is speculation until I see something that makes it more than that, and you don't bring me speculation. You bring me something I can take upstairs." He holds my gaze with the steady patience of a man who has ended more promising careers than mine over less obvious insubordination. "I'm going to ask you a direct question, and I want a direct answer. Are you working cases that aren't assigned to you?"
The answer that serves my career is no. The answer that serves the case is yes. The answer I give splits the difference in the only way a good detective can when his captain is standing between him and the work that needs doing.
"I'm working the Landry homicide. If Blanchard's name comes up in the course of that investigation, I'm going to follow it."
Hebert watches me for a long beat. The reading glasses catch the fluorescent light. His expression carries the combination of respect and warning that tells me he knows exactly what I'm doing and is choosing, for the moment, not to stop me.
"Follow it if it comes up. Don't go looking for it." He picks up his coffee and walks past me toward the door. "And Broussard? The next time I find you in a database you shouldn't be in, we're having a different conversation."
He leaves. The break room smells like burnt coffee and the specific tension of a line I've been warned not to cross by a man who knows I'm going to cross it anyway.
I go back to my desk. The Ridgewater lead is the first solid thing this case has produced since Susan Landry's body gave me an official file number, and it sits in my notebook alongside the partial facial recognition match and the employment history and the name that connects a man with technical expertise and a grudge to a club at the center of a murder investigation my captain doesn't know exists.
I spend the rest of my time on my assigned caseload, because Hebert is watching now and the fastest way to lose room to operate is to give him a reason to pull the leash tighter. Fontenot and I close out the witness statements on the Mid-City double and file the arrest paperwork on the suspect we identified. The work is clean and efficient and occupies enough of my attention to look like compliance while the rest runs Ridgewater through scenarios.
I worked the Simone LaCroix investigation. I know Julien LaSalle planted those cameras and Armand Deveraux funded the operation. Ridgewater wasn't part of their conspiracy. He was a separate problem, a contractor who stumbled onto the feeds Julien's cameras were producing and saw an opportunity instead of a crime to report. If he copied weeks of footage from those rooms before Margot caught him accessing recordings and fired him, the archive he carried out of Dominion would contain material on every member who scened in rooms three, five, and eight during that window. Dozens of people, all of it leverage, and Margot's code changes and credential scrub did nothing to erase what he'd already taken.
Lawrence was blackmailed. Lawrence stopped paying. Lawrence is dead. Susan appeared in the same photographs. Susan is dead. The pattern suggests a blackmailer who escalatesto murder when the money stops flowing, and the two remaining names are people who may be receiving their own demands right now without knowing that the person making them has already killed twice.
The precinct empties around me in shifts as the afternoon turns over. I pack up when the clock gives me cover, take the notebook, and drive home through late-afternoon light that turns New Orleans gold and soft while the heat sits heavy on the streets.
Renata's shoes are by the front door when I walk in. Her jacket hangs on the hook beside mine. A mug that isn't one of mine sits in the dish rack. The faint trace of citrus from the hand soap she brought from her apartment cuts through the cedar that my house has smelled like for years, and each piece registers with the same trained eye I can't turn off at my own front door.
She's at the kitchen table with her laptop open, wearing a tank top that shows the line of her collarbone and fitted leggings that I am not going to let myself look at for longer than it takes to confirm she's dressed. Her hair is down, loose around her shoulders in a way I've only seen at the club and in my hallway at three in the morning, and the casual intimacy of it, here, in my kitchen, on an ordinary afternoon, hits low in my gut where it has no business being while I'm carrying a case file.
When I come through the doorway she looks up, and the mask assembles itself a fraction slower than it used to. The gap keeps narrowing. She either doesn't notice or doesn't care, and I'm not sure which possibility is more dangerous.
"You're home early," she says. "Did they finally fire you, or are you just getting a head start on the inevitable?"
"Neither. I brought you a present."
"If it's another NOPD t-shirt, I've already liberated enough from your closet to sleep in for a week."
I set my bag on the counter and pull out my notebook. "Jerry Ridgewater."
The name lands like a slap. Her posture changes, the easy slouch straightening into alert tension, and the shift is real, not performed. Recognition comes first, sharp and immediate, followed by a colder awareness that settles in her expression and stays.
"Ridgewater." She says it like she's tasting something rotten. "He worked the security side at Dominion. Cameras, access systems, the whole technical infrastructure. Margot got rid of him fast." Her arms cross loosely over her chest. "He gave me the creeps. He was always watching the staff, always positioning himself where he could see the private hallways. Most of the security contractors kept to their assigned areas and moved on. Ridgewater lingered. He watched us the way a man watches something he thinks belongs to him."
The description hits a nerve I didn't expect. The idea of someone watching Renata with that kind of proprietary attention, filing her away without the restraint, without the patience, without giving a damn about her consent, tightens the muscles across the back of my neck in a way that feels less like professional concern and more like territory.
"Margot fired him for accessing private room footage without authorization," I say.
"I remember. She changed every security code in the building within days. She issued new key cards, rewrote the access protocols, and had the whole system rebuilt from scratch. Margot doesn't do that for a minor infraction. Whatever he accessed was bad enough that she wanted every trace of his credentials scrubbed." She pauses, her fingers stilling on the laptop edge. "She thought he'd hacked into the legitimate monitoring system. She didn't know about the hidden camerasyet. None of us did, not until the whole thing came out during the LaCroix situation."
"Which means he could have found Julien's cameras through his contractor access and copied the footage before anyone knew those cameras existed."
"And walked away with an archive Margot didn't even know was there to protect." Renata's jaw tightens. "She fired him for the access violation, scrubbed his credentials, and thought the problem was solved. The actual cameras stayed hidden in those rooms until Luc swept them months later."
