Page 20 of Dominion's Guard
The thought lodges in my throat and stays. If I had gone straight to Andy with what I found instead of slipping back to my apartment like the thief I swore I'd stopped being, would it have mattered? Would he have connected the photographs to Susan fast enough to save her? Would the investigation have shifted in time to put someone between her and the gun?
That uncertainty is a special kind of hell, because it means I'll never stop wondering.
Margot finds me in the corridor ten minutes later, leaning against the wall with my arms crossed and my face arranged into the neutral expression I've spent years perfecting for moments when the inside doesn't match the outside.
"I heard," she says. Her voice carries the weight of a woman who built something she's proud of and keeps watching people try to tear it apart. "Andy called Remy. Two Dominion members dead, same method."
"She was at my bar last Saturday, Margot."
"I know who she was." Margot's hand grips my shoulder, firm and grounding, the same touch she gave me the night I called her from the parking garage. "Go home. Take the rest of the shift off. I'll have Terrence cover."
I want to argue, want to stay where the work is physical and the rhythm doesn't ask questions. Margot's grip tightens by a fraction, though, and the look in her eyes says this isn't a suggestion.
"Okay," I say. "Okay."
My bag from the staff locker carries its ordinary weight. Keys and wallet and phone are all that's inside, nothing incriminating, nothing that would give me away. What I need to hand overexists only in my head, and the walk to the service elevator feels like a confession I haven't made yet.
The drive to the Irish Channel takes no time. I park in my usual spot on the second level, and the garage is quiet and ordinary and nothing like the last time I walked through a parking structure at night, which is a thought I shut down before it can take root. One of the Rapier Strategic operatives is positioned near the garage entrance with a sight line to the stairwell, and he tracks me from the car to the building door without pretending he isn't. I give him a nod I don't feel. He gives me one back.
My apartment is warm when I let myself in. I lock the door, drop my bag on the kitchen counter, and stand in the silence with my hands flat on the surface while the photographs reassemble behind my eyes.
They're as clear as if I were still standing in Lawrence's study. The folder sat near the back of the credenza, labeled with a date rather than a subject. Photographs on glossy paper filled it, Lawrence in several, other members in the rest. The camera angles were identical across multiple rooms, the same elevated perspective that matched the fixed positions from the security breach that nearly destroyed Dominion.
Susan Landry appeared in one photograph, kneeling in a private room with her eyes closed and her hands behind her back and an expression of absolute trust on a face that will never make another expression again.
The other two photographs surface next in my memory. They showed two more members whose names I know from drink orders and seating habits and the quiet assumption of safety that Susan carried too. Two more people sit on a list someone is working through with methodical patience, and I am the only person outside of a dead man's study who knows what I saw.
The decision crystallizes while I'm standing at the counter with my eyes closed. I am done sitting on this, done rationalizing the delay, done telling myself I need more information, done hiding behind the excuse that going to Andy means confessing to a felony. Susan is dead. Two more names are waiting, and each hour I spend protecting my own secrets is an hour the killer spends getting closer to them.
I am going to tell Andy everything. The break-in, what I found, the blackmail emails, the connection to Dominion's previous security breach.
I am going to give him all of it, but on my terms. I won't do this in an interrogation room, and I won't do it with his partner watching through a mirror. I am going to walk into his space the way I walked into Lawrence Blanchard's, lay out what I know, and stand there while he decides what to do with it. If he wants to arrest me for the B&E, he can do it to my face.
I know where Andy lives. I've known for months, because knowing things about people is a reflex I developed long before Margot taught me to channel it into drink orders and customer preferences. His address is public record, the same way Lawrence's was. I pulled it one night after a shift when he'd spent an hour at my bar watching me work with that patient, stripping focus that makes me feel like he's reading a language I didn't know I was written in.
I told myself I was just being careful. Knowing where a cop lives is basic self-preservation for a woman with my history. It had nothing to do with the way my blood moves differently when he's in the room.
I told myself a lot of things. Most of them were lies.
I evade the detail the same way as before. Andy’s house is a Craftsman in Mid-City, the kind of neighborhood where the architecture can't decide if it's gentrifying or holding the line. Imake one pass first, scanning the street and the driveway and the windows. His car is gone. The house is dark.
The alarm system is newer than Lawrence's and better maintained, a mid-range residential setup with door and window sensors and a keypad inside the back entrance. It takes me longer than the Blanchard deadbolt, but not by much. The keypad gives me a few attempts before lockout, which means I need to be strategic. I try his badge number first, because cops are creatures of habit with their personal security, and because Andy's confidence extends to believing nobody would have the nerve to break into a detective's house. My backup is the last four of his precinct desk line, which I memorized from the card he left at Dominion the night he took my statement.
The badge number works. I file the information away for a conversation about operational security he doesn't know we're going to have.
His house smells like coffee and cedar and clean detergent, the scent of a man who keeps his space ordered because disorder is something he doesn't tolerate in any corner of his life. The living room is spare and deliberate: a leather couch, a bookshelf heavy with nonfiction and legal texts, a sound system that tells me he listens to music with intention. The walls hold no photographs. The surfaces hold no clutter. The whole space is controlled and curated. He lets people see what he chooses and keeps the rest locked down.
The scent is what stays with me. Coffee and cedar are woven into the leather of the couch, the fabric of the cushions, the air itself. I'm breathing him in, and the intimacy of it is disorienting. This is what his mornings smell like, what his sleep smells like. I'm sitting in the dark in the place where he takes off the badge and the composure and becomes whoever he is when no one is watching, and the knowledge that I will know the shape ofthat man before he chooses to show me feels like a theft more intimate than anything I've taken with my hands.
I sit on his couch in the dark. I wait.
The waiting is hard because it gives me time to think, and thinking means replaying every moment since Lawrence's murder, cataloging all the places where a different choice might have changed the outcome. I keep circling the same alternatives: telling Andy about the photographs the night he showed up at my door, calling Remy and handing the information to Rapier Strategic, walking into the precinct and making a statement and accepting whatever consequences came with the confession. Each path ends with the same question, and the question has no answer: would Susan still be alive?
The lock turns close to eleven. The door opens and his rhythm fills the space, keys placed with a deliberation that tells me he has a spot for them, jacket hung rather than tossed. He exhales, shedding the day, and then his footsteps stop.
I don't move. I don't speak. I sit on his couch in the dark and let him feel the wrongness of another body in a space he left empty, because the way he responds in the next breath will tell me everything I need to know about who Andy Broussard is when the badge and the calm come off.
The response is fast and silent, without shouting, without demands for identification. I hear the soft, precise sound of a weapon clearing a holster and a shift of weight that puts his back to the wall and his sight line on the room.
