Page 32 of Dominion's Guard
I spent yesterday afternoon on the phone with Susan Landry's employer, her sister in Baton Rouge, and a college friend who broke down halfway through the conversation. The picture they paint is consistent and thorough: a woman who managed other people's money with meticulous precision andmanaged her own life the same way. She had no outstanding debts, no volatile relationships, and no enemies that anyone could name, and when pressed, each person said the same thing in different words: Susan was private. Susan was careful. Susan didn't make mistakes.
Lawrence Blanchard's profile is a mirror in different clothes. He was retired, comfortable, and methodical about his routine. His wife described a man who kept his calendar updated and his obligations met, who golfed on Tuesdays, went to his club on Thursdays, and dined at the same restaurant on Fridays and hadn't deviated from the pattern in years. No one had a reason to want him dead. No one could point me to a conflict or a grudge or even a raised voice, and the absence of motive is its own kind of evidence, because people who live carefully don't get executed in parking garages for no reason.
The thing that connects them is Dominion. The thing I can't write in any official report is that both of them appeared in photographs taken by hidden cameras inside a private club, and those photographs were being used for blackmail. The connection sits in my head alongside Renata's voice describing the folder in Lawrence's credenza, the escalating payment demands, the third invoice with no receipt attached.
I pull up the security footage request I filed with Susan Landry's building management yesterday. Her office sat in a mid-rise on one of the commercial corridors near the business district, with a lobby camera and exterior coverage stored on a cloud server by the management company. The footage arrived in my inbox overnight, and I've been working through it since I sat down.
The first pass is noise: pedestrians, delivery drivers, an office worker who smokes on the same corner at the same time each morning. Susan's building sees steady foot traffic during business hours and thins out after six. Her routine matches whather employer told me: she arrived early, left late, parked in the attached garage, and walked the same route from the elevator to her car.
The second pass is where the picture sharpens. I'm watching the exterior camera that covers the building's main entrance and the sidewalk approach, running the footage at double speed and looking for anything that breaks the pattern.
A few days before Susan's death, a man appears on the sidewalk across from the building entrance. He stays for close to an hour, standing near a bus bench with his phone out, and the angle of his body says he's watching the building, not the screen. He's back the next day, holding the same position in different clothes with the same patient attention to the entrance and the garage ramp.
On the day Susan died, he doesn't show up at all. The routine surveillance stops, and the murder happens that evening.
I isolate the best frame I can pull from the footage. The resolution is commercial-grade, adequate for a general description and insufficient for a definitive ID, but the angle catches his face in partial profile as he turns toward the street. I crop the image, run it through the facial recognition database NOPD maintains, and wait while the system chews through its comparison algorithms.
The result comes back as a partial match. The confidence score lands in the range where a good detective treats it as a lead and a lazy one files it away. The name attached to the match is Jerry Ridgewater.
I know that name.
The recognition hits before I finish reading the database entry, a physical jolt that travels from my eyes to the base of my skull where I store things I've observed but haven't had a reason to retrieve until now. Jerry Ridgewater worked the security side at Dominion on a contract basis, brought in during a periodwhen Margot was expanding the club's technical infrastructure. He handled camera systems, access control, and the digital architecture that keeps a place like Dominion running without exposing its members to the wrong kind of scrutiny.
Margot fired him. I remember the night it happened, the atmosphere at the club shifting in the days after, the quiet efficiency with which she changed every access code and rotated every security protocol. She didn't announce it. Margot doesn't announce things. The staff moved differently for weeks afterward, carrying the tension of a breach that had been sealed but not forgotten, and when I asked a bartender what happened, the answer was careful and vague in the way that told me the real answer was much worse.
I heard the rest through the channel that operates between Dominion's long-term members, the informal circulation of information that moves through quiet conversations and knowing glances. Ridgewater had been caught accessing private room recordings he had no authorization to view. Margot believed he'd found a way to exploit the legitimate monitoring system, and she responded the way Margot responds to any threat against her members: she cut him out fast, scrubbed his credentials, and rebuilt every protocol he'd touched.
What she didn't know at the time, what none of us knew until the Simone LaCroix investigation blew the whole thing open, was that Julien LaSalle had planted hidden cameras in those same private rooms during a maintenance window. They recorded for weeks before Luc swept the rooms and removed them. If Ridgewater discovered those unauthorized feeds through his legitimate contractor work and copied the footage instead of reporting it, he could have walked away from Dominion with an archive that Margot never knew existed. She fired him for the access violation. She had no reason to suspecthe'd found a second surveillance system operating inside her walls, one that wouldn't be discovered until months later.
A man with that skill set and that history makes sense as more than a lead. He makes sense as the answer I've been looking for.
Ridgewater knew Dominion's camera systems because he installed parts of them. He knew the blind spots in the private rooms because he worked with the monitoring layout that Luc Pascal designed, giving him access to every specification, every gap, every angle the legitimate cameras couldn't reach. And he had the skill set to manipulate commercial surveillance platforms remotely, the same capability that would let someone wipe parking garage footage from across the city.
Ridgewater has a grudge, technical capability, and insider knowledge of Dominion's layout and membership that would let him identify targets, track routines, and exploit the archive he carried out of the club.
The pieces don't snap together into a prosecutable case, not yet, but they fit well enough to accelerate my pulse in the way it does when a case that's been running cold suddenly develops heat.
I run Ridgewater through every database I can access from my terminal. His last known address is in Metairie, a rental property that he may or may not still occupy. His employment history after Dominion is sparse, just a few short-term contracts with commercial security firms, none longer than a few months. His criminal record is clean, which makes him either careful or lucky, and Margot firing him rather than pressing charges suggests she chose containment over prosecution, keeping the breach quiet to protect her members rather than pursuing justice that would have dragged their privacy into a courtroom.
I have Ridgewater's employment history open alongside the Blanchard missing persons file, cross-referencing the timelineof Ridgewater's access to Dominion against the dates on the blackmail correspondence Renata described. The two windows sit side by side on my screen, and I'm absorbed enough in the comparison that I don't hear Hebert's office door open.
"Broussard."
His voice reaches me a half-second before the awareness of his presence, and the delay tells me exactly how deep I was. I close the database window and look up, but the transition isn't fast enough to pass for casual, and Hebert isn't the kind of man who misses a flinch.
He's standing in his doorway with his reading glasses pushed up on his forehead and his arms crossed, and the posture says he's been watching me long enough to form an opinion about what he's seeing.
"Captain."
"Walk with me."
He doesn't wait for me to stand. He turns and walks toward the break room, and the invitation isn't an invitation. I close my notebook, leave the Landry file visible on my desk, and follow.
The break room is empty, either luck or engineering on Hebert's part. He pours himself a cup of the burnt coffee without flinching and leans against the counter.
"Talk to me about your workload."
"Landry's progressing. I'm building the victimology, running down leads from the scene."
