Page 40 of Dominion's Guard
I have seen Renata scene. I have watched her on the main floor with Arnold Voss, watched her test and push and bury the one genuine sound she made before it could cost her anything. What I saw, she chose to show. These photographs represent the opposite. They represent what someone took.
The third demand has no payment attached. Lawrence stopped paying, and Lawrence is dead.
Guidry photographs everything in place before we bag it. She seals the evidence, labels it, and logs each item with the case number while I note the contents in my notebook. The process takes the better part of an hour, and when we leave the house, the chain of custody is clean enough to survive anything a defense attorney throws at it.
The heat in my gut hasn't cooled. It won't. It's going to sit there and burn until I find every frame of footage Ridgewater took from those rooms and put him in a cell where the only thing he watches is a concrete wall.
The days that follow are grinding, methodical work, the kind that separates cases that get solved from cases that collect dust. I build the financial picture one record at a time, pulling threads and filing requests and waiting for institutions to respond on schedules that have nothing to do with how many people are dead.
The wire transfers from Lawrence's folder open the first door. His first two payments went to an account registered to a shell company in Texas, a limited liability entity with a registered agent service handling the paperwork and no physical office address, carrying a generic, forgettable name designed to receive money and redirect it. I submit the subpoena request for the account records and settle in to wait, because financial institutions move on their own clock and a homicide detective's urgency rarely adjusts it.
Waiting is the part that eats at me, not the work itself, which I can lose hours inside when a case has enough architecture to hold my attention, but the stillness between the work. Mornings, Renata pads into the kitchen in bare feet and one of my t-shirts with the collar stretched wide enough to show the hollow of her throat, and I track the movement of her hands on the coffee mug the way I tracked her hands behind the bar the first night I sat at Dominion and understood that this woman was going to be a problem I'd never solve.
When she’s not working, she sits at my kitchen table with her laptop and her hair down and the light catching the auburn until the color burns, and I keep my eyes on the case file because the alternative is watching her mouth while she reads and losing the thread of whatever financial record I'm supposed to be analyzing.
She has claimed my kitchen quietly, reorganizing the cabinets and adjusting the coffee ratio and hanging her jacket on the hook beside mine as though proximity is a fact rather than a conversation we haven't had. Each small territorial act registers in the possessive part of my brain that wants to put my hands on the counter on either side of her and tell her that if she's going to rearrange my house, she should understand what that means to a man who reads every inch she takes as an inch she's willing to give.
I don't. The case file stays open, and the distance holds, but barely. For the subpoena, I run Ridgewater's known information through the law enforcement databases I can access. His credit history tells a story that doesn't match a man living on short-term security contracts. His Metairie rental is modest, but his credit card balances are higher than his reported income should support, and one of his accounts shows a pattern of large monthly charges that suggest recurring commercial services rather than personal spending. An asset discrepancy surfaces too: a bank account listed in a financial background check that doesn't track with what short-term security work pays. The details are suggestive rather than conclusive, a pattern that points a detective toward money coming from somewhere that isn't showing up on a tax return, but not granular enough to tell me where.
When the subpoena results come back, the picture sharpens. The shell company that received Lawrence's payments has a transaction history showing a pattern I've seen before in cases involving the commercial distribution of compromised material. Money comes in from multiple sources, routed through the shell entity, and flows out to a series of smaller accounts. The outgoing transfers don't match the incoming amounts, which means the shell company isn't just collecting blackmail payments. It's receiving money from somewhere else.
I pull the outgoing transaction details and cross-reference the receiving accounts against public records. One belongs to a media licensing firm in Florida. The firm's name doesn't tell me much on its own, but when I run it through the federal law enforcement databases accessible through our joint task force agreements, it appears in two prior federal complaints involving the non-consensual distribution of intimate material. Neither complaint resulted in prosecution, but the firm's presence in those files is enough to confirm what I'm looking at: a companythat operates in the space between what's legal and what's defensible, brokering content that someone else obtained and someone else is paying to access.
Ridgewater isn't just blackmailing Dominion members. He's selling the footage.
The realization rearranges everything behind it. I sit at my desk with the transaction records spread across both monitors and the precinct humming around me and the understanding settling into my chest alongside the worst parts of the worst cases I've carried.
He's selling it. The footage of Dominion members in their most private moments, footage that may include the woman sleeping in my guest room and slowly taking my house apart one reorganized drawer at a time, is being distributed through a commercial broker to buyers whose names I don't know and whose appetites I can't control.
I stop myself. I'm building a theory, not a case. The shell company received Lawrence's payments and sent money to the brokerage firm. Ridgewater has unexplained income and the access and skill set to have obtained the footage. The circumstantial line between those two facts is strong enough for me to see the shape of what's happening, but I haven't yet put Ridgewater's name on the shell company's registration or its bank account. That connection is the gap, and the gap is what separates a theory from an arrest warrant.
This is bigger than three murders and a blackmail scheme. This is a distribution operation, and distribution operations attract federal attention.
I pick up my desk phone and call a number I haven't dialed since the Armand Deveraux case closed. Adrian Locke answers on the third ring, his voice carrying the same measured cadence I remember from the press conferences and the evidencereviews and the long hours of coordination between NOPD and the Bureau's Cyber Crimes Division.
"Locke."
"It's Broussard. NOPD Homicide."
A beat of silence follows, the kind that tells me he's placing the name and recalibrating his afternoon. "Andy. It's been a while. What do you have?"
"Two threads that I think connect, and federal resources to close the gap. First thread: a former security contractor at Dominion with the access and technical skill to have copied footage from the cameras Julien LaSalle planted. He's got a partial facial recognition match placing him outside one of my victim's buildings before her death, and his financials don't track with his reported income. Second thread: a shell company receiving blackmail payments from Dominion members, with outgoing transfers to a media licensing firm in Florida that's appeared in prior federal complaints for non-consensual distribution of intimate material. Three homicide victims who were being blackmailed from the same archive."
"You're telling me you've got the footage pipeline and the likely source, but you haven't connected them yet."
"That's what I'm telling you. The contractor's name is Jerry Ridgewater. Former commercial security, hired by Dominion during their technical infrastructure expansion. Margot Pascal fired him for unauthorized access to private room recordings. She didn't press charges. If your databases can connect Ridgewater to the shell company or the brokerage firm, I've got a case that spans three homicides and a federal distribution operation."
The silence that follows carries a different texture. Locke knows Dominion. He knows what those cameras recorded.
"The cameras Julien LaSalle planted were recording for weeks before Luc Pascal swept the rooms," I continue."Ridgewater had access to the monitoring systems during that period. If he copied the footage before he was fired, the archive he carried out of Dominion would contain material on every member who scened in those rooms during that window."
Locke's pen scratches across paper on his end. "Send me what you have. I'll run Ridgewater through our databases and see if the brokerage firm has active federal interest beyond those prior complaints. If they're distributing material from those cameras, this falls under our jurisdiction."
"That's why I'm calling."
"I'll have Rivera pull the Deveraux case files and cross-reference. If Ridgewater's archive connects to the footage Armand's operation used, the overlap gives us grounds to reopen the investigation on the distribution side." He pauses. "You're working this through the Landry case?"
"Landry is the authorized investigation. The pattern connects the rest."
