Page 15 of Dominion's Guard
I press my palms against the steering wheel until my knuckles go white. The shaking doesn't stop. The heat in my chest doesn't fade.
The worst part, the part that will follow me out of this car and into whatever comes next, is that the high felt better than anything since Margot shook my hand. Better than the first clean shift at Dominion. Better than Margot's quiet approval after I nailed the cocktail menu. Better than the moment I paid off the last of my mother's debt and stood in my apartment with nothing owed to anyone.
The lock turned and the door opened and I was home.
I can't tell Margot that. I can't tell Andy either, the man who watches my hands across a bar like he's memorizing their choreography, who would look at these same fingers and understand what they're capable of and what that means about the woman they belong to. Andy said'that's going to be a problem, I think,'and he has no idea how right he is about to be.
The engine starts. The headlights come on. I pull away from the curb and drive back toward the Irish Channel with evidence of a conspiracy burning in my memory and the taste of my own betrayal coating the back of my throat like copper.
By the time I reach my building, the Rapier Strategic SUV is still in position. I park in my usual spot, take the basement hatch, climb the service corridor, and let myself into my apartment. The bourbon on the counter waits where I left it. This time I drink it.
The burn goes down smooth and the glass hits the counter harder than it should.
Someone still has the footage stolen from inside Dominion, and that someone is planning to use it. The only person who knows it right now is a woman standing in her kitchen with bourbon on her tongue and a dead man's secrets in her head, who can't decide which scares her more: that she broke everypromise she ever made to get them, or that her hands have already stopped shaking.
4
ANDY
Hebert doesn't bother closing his door. He delivers it from behind his desk with his reading glasses on and his eyes on his monitor, which tells me the decision was made before I walked in and the conversation is a formality.
"Blanchard stays missing persons. No forensic evidence, no body, no physical proof of a crime. You've had your window, Broussard. It's closed."
"The camera wipe alone justifies continued investigation. Destruction of evidence presumes evidence existed."
"And I told you that's a reach." He looks up for the first time. The reading glasses come off and he sets them on the desk with a deliberation that makes the gesture feel final. "You've spent valuable time on a case that doesn't exist on paper. I've got Fontenot pulling double duty covering your share of active cases because you're chasing a ghost. That stops today."
"Captain, if I could just..."
"Today, Broussard." The tone is pure warning, delivered by a man who has protected careers and ended them with equal efficiency. "You're a good detective. Don't let a pretty witnessand a hunch turn you into a crusade case. Those don't end well for anyone's career, including mine."
The mention of career is the kill shot, and he knows it. He's not threatening me. He's telling me what happens to detectives who can't let go of a case that command has decided doesn't warrant resources. They get reassigned. They get sidelined. They become the cautionary tale that partners tell over beers at the bar after shift.
"Understood, sir."
"Good. Fontenot's got a fresh one in Mid-City. Double homicide, witnesses, physical evidence. That's real police work. Go help him."
I walk back to my desk and sit down. The Blanchard file is still open on my screen. I close it, pull up Fontenot's case, and spend the next hour reading witness statements from a shooting that happened in front of a corner store at two in the afternoon with the victim's blood still visible on the sidewalk. Bodies beat theories. Hebert's world is clean that way: if you can't put your hands on the evidence, the evidence doesn't exist.
Lawrence Blanchard's body is somewhere in this city. I know it with the same certainty I know my own name, and I can't prove it. That doesn't make him less dead. It makes whoever killed him better at their job than I've been at mine.
Fontenot and I work the Mid-City double through the morning. Two men, both in their twenties, had been shot outside a convenience store in an apparent dispute over a gambling debt. The witnesses are cooperative, the forensics are textbook, and by noon we have a suspect identified and a warrant in progress.
Fontenot handles it with the comfortable efficiency of a detective who likes cases that solve themselves, and I match his pace because the work needs doing and because the appearance of compliance buys me room to operate.
After lunch, I tell Fontenot I'm running down a lead on a prior case and take my laptop to a coffee shop a few blocks from the precinct. The lead I'm running down is Lawrence Blanchard, and the case I'm working is the one my captain just told me to drop.
Lawrence had no enemies. I've spent days running his name through every database available to NOPD and the picture is the same from every angle: a man who lived carefully, spent moderately, and kept his life in precise order, not a life that generates conflict.
That means whatever got him killed didn't come from the usual places. Lawrence Blanchard's life was a locked room, and the answer is inside a room I can't officially enter.
The answer is Dominion.
I know Lawrence was a member. I've seen him at the club, watched him order his Blanton's and settle into his corner of the bar with the quiet discipline of a man who treated the place like a second home. He scened occasionally, always in the private rooms, always with the same discretion that governed every other aspect of his life.
If something in Lawrence's world was dangerous enough to get him killed, Dominion is the most likely place where that danger lived.
I can't investigate the club officially. Warrants, subpoenas, formal records requests: all of that becomes public record, drags Dominion into the legal system, and exposes members who stayed because Margot promised them the protocols she rebuilt after the breach would hold. Everything she spent time and money earning back goes up in smoke the moment NOPD shows up with paperwork.
