Page 24 of Dominion's Guard
He disappears down the hallway and comes back with a faded NOPD academy t-shirt that should hit me at mid-thigh. He sets it on the arm of the couch without ceremony, without lingering, without letting his fingers brush mine when I reach for it.
"Bathroom's across from the guest room. Towels are in the cabinet."
He turns toward the kitchen without looking back. His shoulders carry the weight of Susan Landry and the warrant he needs to write and the complicated reality of a witness whojust proved she's both indispensable and dangerous in the same breath.
The professional distance he's erected between us holds without a crack. I handed him the truth and it didn't bring us closer. It built a new wall, higher and colder than the one I put up withDetective.
The guest room at the end of the hallway is small, clean, and impersonal, a room belonging to a man who doesn't have guests often enough to bother decorating for them. The sheets smell like detergent and cedar, his presence threaded through fabric that's been absorbing this house, this air. I sit on the edge of the bed in the dark and close my eyes.
Susan Landry's face is behind my eyelids, as clear as the photograph I memorized in Lawrence Blanchard's study. I spoke two more names aloud for the first time tonight, and two more people don't know they're on a list.
The guilt will be there tomorrow and the day after, and no amount of confessions will answer the question of whether Susan would still be alive if I'd been faster, braver, less afraid of losing what I'd built.
I am in Andy Broussard's house, wearing the scent of his sheets and the weight of his anger, and he is more furious with me than he has ever been. We are bound by what I saw and what he needs to prove and the hard truth that neither of us can solve this alone. He doesn't trust me. I'm not sure he should. The case is all that matters, and whatever I thought I saw between us at the bar and in the hallway and through the gap in my door will have to wait until the killing stops.
If any of it is still there after everything I've just told him, I'll find out when the bodies stop falling and he finally looks at me again without the badge between us.
6
ANDY
The coffee maker finishes its third cycle while I'm drafting language for the warrant affidavit at the kitchen table. The first pot went cold before I remembered to pour from it. The second lasted longer. This one I've been drinking on autopilot, and somewhere past the third cup I stopped tasting it.
Renata is still asleep in the guest room. I know this because the house is quiet in the particular way it gets when someone else is breathing in it, a subtle displacement of air and silence that my space hasn't held in years. The door at the end of the hall hasn't opened since she closed it last night, and the only sound from that direction has been the creak of the mattress when she shifted in the early hours before dawn.
The affidavit is coming together. Susan Landry's homicide gives me probable cause to search the Blanchard residence for connections between the two victims. They were both Dominion members, both killed by a single gunshot in a parking garage, professionally executed, with no witnesses. The Blanchard home is a logical investigative step in establishing a pattern. If there happens to be a folder in the credenza behind his desk,labeled with a date, containing photographs and blackmail correspondence, the discovery will read as diligence.
The legal fiction is clean. The reality behind it is a felony confession from a former burglar who broke into the house, memorized the evidence, and told me exactly where to find it while sitting on my couch in the dark.
Susan Landry is my case. The connection to Blanchard is what I'm building below the official one, the angle Hebert shut down when there was no body and no proof. Now there's a body. It might not be Blanchard's, but with Landry's body I can start tracking down their killer. The warrant threads the needle between the case I'm authorized to work and the one I'm not, and if my captain looks closely enough to see how the Blanchard search grew out of the Landry investigation, I'll need answers I don't currently have.
I save the draft and close the laptop. The kitchen window catches the early light, and a mockingbird has been running through its repertoire on the live oak in my yard for the past hour, cycling through borrowed songs like it can't decide which voice is actually its own.
The floorboard in the hallway groans. I hear her bare feet on the hardwood before she reaches the kitchen doorway, and when she appears she's wearing my NOPD academy shirt and nothing else visible below the hem. Her hair is loose around her shoulders, creased from sleep, and her eyes carry the smudged look of someone who got less of it than she needed.
She finds the coffee maker without asking, pulls a mug from the cabinet like she's already mapped the kitchen. The ease of the movement reminds me what she is, someone who catalogs rooms on instinct, who could navigate my house blind because she already took inventory in the dark.
"Morning," I say.
"Is it?" She pours, drinks, and leans against the counter with one ankle crossed over the other. The academy shirt rides up on one thigh when she shifts her weight. She catches me noticing and doesn't adjust the fabric.
"We need to go through the Blanchard walk-through. Entry point, sequence, everything you touched."
"Before breakfast? You really know how to treat a girl, Detective."
"I can make eggs."
Her nose wrinkles. "Toast will work."
"Bread's on the counter. Butter's in the fridge." I slide the laptop aside and pull out my notebook. "Start with how you got to the house."
The walk-through takes the better part of an hour. Renata recounts the Blanchard break-in with a specificity that would make a crime scene tech jealous. She walks me through the back gate, the yard, the door she picked, the alarm she didn't need to bypass because the wife had disarmed it when she left. She describes the ground floor she swept for occupancy, then the second-floor study where the desk sat squared and organized with pens in a leather cup and a brass letter opener placed parallel to the blotter edge.
She lays out the credenza, the folder position, the photographs, the blackmail emails with their escalating demands and disposable sender addresses, and Lawrence's margin note in his careful handwriting. She describes putting everything back, matching positions, wiping her touch pattern clean.
Every detail lands with photographic clarity, and I recognize the recall for what it is: a burglar's discipline, the kind of spatial memory that comes from years of entering spaces where mistakes cost freedom.
When she finishes, she sets her coffee down and meets my eyes with a directness that has nothing casual in it.
