Page 49 of Dominion's Guard
"The FBI field office called me this morning, Broussard. They wanted to thank me for NOPD's cooperation on the Ridgewater arrest." He lets the silence sit long enough for the implication to settle. "An arrest I didn't authorize, on a case I didn't know you were running, using resources I never approved, in coordination with a private security firm that has no business inside an NOPD investigation."
"Captain, the Landry warrant gave me the thread. I followed it."
"You followed it off a cliff. You're running a shadow investigation with a private firm, leveraging federal resourceswithout departmental clearance, and housing a material witness in your personal residence. That's not following a thread. That's building a parallel operation, and if Internal Affairs gets wind of it, I can't protect you."
"Susan Landry is still my case."
"Susan Landry is your case. Lawrence Blanchard is not. Thomas Arceneaux is not. Whatever pattern you think you're chasing, you do it through channels or you don't do it at all." The pause is final. "Your badge is on the line. I'm telling you that as a courtesy, because the next person who tells you will be holding paperwork."
The call ends. I pour coffee and drink it standing at the counter while the taste of it barely registers. The badge has been the architecture of my life for over a decade, the structure that holds every choice I make in place, and Hebert just told me the structure is cracking and the cracks are my fault.
He's right. The shadow investigation, the unauthorized coordination with Rapier Strategic, the woman sleeping in my guest room who should be in witness housing under departmental oversight: every one of those choices was mine, and every one of them was the right call for the case and the wrong call for my career.
I'd make every one of them again. That certainty sits in my gut beside the coffee and doesn't taste like conflict. It tastes like a line I already crossed.
Down the hall, the guest room door opens. Renata's feet on the hardwood, the sound I've memorized the way I memorize evidence, filed alongside her drink orders and her deflections and the exact pitch of her voice when the bravado drops and the real woman speaks.
She appears in the kitchen doorway wearing my shirt and sleep shorts and the half-awake expression of someone who slept badly and is reaching for caffeine before she reaches forcomposure. The shirt has slipped off one shoulder, and the bare skin there catches the morning light, and my hands tighten around the coffee mug because the alternative is crossing the kitchen and finding out if her skin is as warm as it looks.
"You're brooding," she says, pulling a mug from the cabinet she reorganized. "I can hear you brooding through the wall. The brooding has a frequency."
"Ridgewater didn't kill anyone. Airtight alibis for every murder."
She stops mid-pour. The coffee hovers over the rim of the mug, and I watch her process the information the way she processes everything, fast and thorough, the implications landing in sequence behind her eyes.
"So the lead we burned your career for just went up in smoke."
"That's the short version."
"And the long version?"
"Armand had a partner. Someone who copied the footage before Luc destroyed the cameras and built a pipeline that's still operational. The FBI is tracing the server architecture. The identity is unresolved." I take a drink. "Hebert called. The FBI thanked him for my cooperation on an arrest he didn't authorize. My badge is on the table."
She finishes the pour, takes a sip, and leans against the counter across from me. The distance between us is the width of the kitchen, and the morning light fills it with the warm amber that belongs to this house and this woman and the domestic proximity that will end my career if I'm lucky and get her killed if I'm not.
"So you're standing in your kitchen with a dead investigation and a captain who wants your badge, and you look like you're about to put on your holster and go do it anyway."
"I am about to put on my holster and go do it anyway."
"Good." She raises the mug. "Your coffee ratio is still wrong, by the way. I fixed it again yesterday."
The morning is three hours old when Remy calls, and the anger that has been coiling at the base of my spine since Locke's call finds a new target.
"Sophie Marchand," he says, and the flatness in his voice tells me everything before the details arrive. "Found an hour ago. Parking garage near the Arts District."
The name catches. Sophie Marchand. I cross-reference it against the contact list from Susan Landry's social circle, the one Renata helped me build during the midnight session at this table with her shoulder close enough to mine that I could smell citrus in her hair while I wrote. Genevieve Marchand was on Susan's list, a Dominion regular who Renata identified by drink order and scene history. Sophie and Genevieve share a surname that could be coincidence but probably isn't.
"Same method?" I ask.
"Single gunshot, close range. The scene was clean, but he didn't have time to finish the job. A security patrol interrupted the cleanup." Remy's voice tightens. "He left a note. Written on card stock, tucked into her jacket pocket."
"What does it say?"
"Two words.Dominion's whores."
My hand tightens around the phone hard enough that the case creaks. Four people are dead. Four members of a club I walk through every week, people I've sat beside and shared a bar with, and the man who killed them has decided they deserved it and is now advertising that conviction to anyone who finds the body.
The words rewrite everything I thought I understood about this case. The financial angle, the blackmail connection, the assumption that the murders were tied to the footage distribution: all of it was the wrong frame. The killer isn't covering tracks or eliminating witnesses. The killer is makinga statement. A puritan with a gun and access to Dominion's membership information, killing people he's decided are sinners, and the note doesn't distinguish between Doms and submissives. It condemns the entire club. Anyone on the membership list is a potential target, and the escalation from silent executions to written manifestos means the quiet wasn't enough anymore.
