Page 34 of Dominion's Guard
"He showed up on security footage outside Susan Landry's office building in the days before her death. He held the same position with the same surveillance posture each time. On the day she was killed, he wasn't there."
Renata processes that with the quiet attention of someone who understands surveillance patterns from the other side of them. Her fingers tap the edge of her laptop, an unconscious rhythm, and I track the movement because I track everything her hands do, a habit I stopped pretending was professional weeks ago.
"He would know the camera systems inside Dominion," she says. "He installed some of them. He'd know how to access commercial surveillance platforms remotely, and if he's sitting on weeks of footage from those private rooms, he has blackmail material on anyone who used them."
"That's what I'm thinking."
"And if he knew those systems well enough to remotely access Dominion's feeds after Margot fired him, wiping the parking garage cameras and manipulating the footage from Susan's building wouldn't have been much of a stretch."
"That's the same conclusion I reached."
She stands and moves to the counter, pulling a second mug from the cabinet and reaching for the coffee maker with theease of someone who has memorized where things live in a kitchen that isn't hers. She fills both and brings one to the table, her fingers brushing the space beside my hand when she sets it down. She doesn't touch me, but the warmth from her skin crosses the gap on its own.
"You've rearranged my mugs," I say.
"I organized them. You had them shoved in the cabinet like you were punishing them for something."
"They're mugs."
"They're your only mugs, and half of them were behind the protein powder. If I have to live here, the kitchen has to function like a kitchen."
"If you have to live here." I take the coffee. It's exactly how I drink it, and she's been watching me make it long enough to know. "You sound like a hostage."
"You sound like a man who's never had someone rearrange his cabinets." She sits back down across from me, tucking one foot under her thigh, and the posture is too comfortable, too settled, too much like a woman who has stopped thinking of this table as borrowed. "How strong is the facial recognition match?"
"It's partial. It's enough for a lead but not enough for a warrant."
"So you have a creepy ex-security contractor lurking outside a dead woman's building, and the system says maybe. That's thin."
"It's a starting point. I need more to tie him to the murders specifically."
"What about his financials? If Lawrence was paying blackmail through wire transfers, the money went somewhere. Ridgewater's accounts might show incoming deposits that match the amounts and timing."
"I'd need a warrant for his financial records. Probable cause requires more than a partial match and a former employer in common."
She wraps both hands around her coffee and watches me over the rim, and the look on her face is the one that costs me sleep. The armor thins just enough for me to see the sharp, calculating mind she buries behind every deflection she throws at me, and she's letting me see it, here, in my kitchen, with her hair down and her guard halfway to the floor. That lands harder than any of the sarcasm ever has.
"The blackmail emails in Lawrence's credenza," she says. "The sender addresses were disposable, random strings. The wire transfer confirmations were clipped to the emails, though. If those transfers went to accounts Ridgewater controls, even through layers, that's your connection."
"The warrant for Blanchard's house will get me the physical evidence. Once I have the folder and the transfer records, I can start tracing the money. If Ridgewater is on the other end, the probable cause builds itself."
"When does the warrant come through?"
"The judge's office has it. It should be soon."
"It should be soon. The legal system's definition of 'soon' and mine have never been in the same time zone."
"You're criticizing the legal system from inside a cop's house while drinking his coffee."
"I'm criticizing the pace, not the system. And you made terrible coffee until I fixed your ratio."
"You changed the ratio?"
"I changed it days ago. You haven't noticed because you've been too busy playing detective to taste anything." She takes a sip. "You're welcome."
I have, in fact, noticed the coffee is better. I attributed it to a new bag of beans. The realization that she's been adjusting mykitchen without announcement, just quietly improving things the way she improves the efficiency of everything she touches, pulls a knot tight between my shoulder blades. The woman who reorganized my cabinet and recalibrated my coffee is the same woman who memorized a dead man's blackmail files in the dark and can pick a lock faster than I can find my keys.
I want my hands in her hair. The thought arrives vivid and uninvited: my fingers wound through the auburn she's wearing loose, tilting her head back, finding out what sound she makes when someone controls the angle instead of letting her choose it. She is the bartender who pours my bourbon without making eye contact, the sub who tested Arnold Voss until he broke and gave me the smallest, most genuine sound I've ever heard from a woman before burying it, the burglar who sits at my table speaking my language while the scent of her soap marks my house one surface at a time.
