Page 7 of Dominion's Guard
He says it like he has all the time in the world. Like my defenses are a lock he fully intends to pick, and he is content to sit with the tumblers until every last one gives.
I want to hit him. I also want him to keep talking in that low, certain voice, and the collision of those two impulses leaves me furious and flushed and gripping the table edge.
"Margot," Andy says, without breaking eye contact with me. "I'm going to need everything you've got on Lawrence Blanchard. Membership records, attendance logs, who he scened with regularly."
"I'll have it for you by morning," Margot says.
Andy looks at me one last time. The cop falls away, just barely, and what's underneath is warmer than the badge, closer than the notebook, and entirely more dangerous. Cop mode, not club mode, except the line just blurred and we both felt it.
"Get some rest, Renata."
My name again. Softer this time. And my name in his mouth, in that voice, lands like a hand on the back of my neck.
"I don't take orders from cops," I say. But my voice comes out quieter than I want.
"No," he says. "You don't take orders from anyone. That's going to be a problem, I think."
He turns and walks out, and his footsteps are quiet for a man that size. His cologne still hangs in the air across the table, and it fills the space where fear sat minutes ago with something just as unsettling. Remy watches me from across the room. The look on his face says he caught every bit of what just passed between me and Andy, and he is wisely keeping his mouth shut about it.
I press my palms against my eyes and try to replace the afterimage of blue-grey with darkness.
The darkness doesn't hold. Blue-grey keeps bleeding through, and underneath it, that voice.That's going to be a problem, I think.
He's right. I just don't know yet how much of one.
2
ANDY
The case file on my desk is the thinnest I've handled in years.
I left Rapier Strategic before dawn. Drove home, showered, put on a fresh shirt, and made the precinct by the time the day shift was pouring its first round of coffee. That was hours ago.
It contains one witness statement and my notes from the Rapier Strategic debrief. No body, no forensic evidence, no surveillance footage, no weapon recovered. A member of one of the leading families of New Orleans, a missing member of a private club, reported by a bartender who called 911 from her car and then led the responding officers back to a parking garage where they found exactly nothing.
On paper, this case shouldn't exist.
I lean back in my chair and reread Renata's statement for the third time. The precinct hums around me, the sound of phones and keyboards blending into the low noise of a homicide division that never fully shuts down. My coffee went cold a while ago. The overhead fluorescents cast the same washed-out light they always do. My partner Fontenot is two desks over, working a domestic that went sideways in Algiers last night. He has a realcase, a body on the ground, witnesses who saw it happen, a suspect in custody by dawn. A clean solve with good clearance numbers.
Mine has none of that. What mine has is Renata's voice in my ear from the small hours of this morning, sharp and controlled, holding back enough to fill a second statement.
She told me what happened. She did not tell me everything. The distinction sat with me the whole drive back from Rapier Strategic, and it's sitting with me now.
Renata described the murder cleanly. She gave me the location, the positioning, the suppressed gunshot, the victim's face caught in the fluorescent light. Her recall was detailed, organized, the sort of precision that comes from either training or a mind wired to process spatial information under pressure. Bartenders are observant, but this went beyond that. Whatever taught her to catalog a room that fast and that thoroughly, it predates Dominion. I don't know what it is yet. But I know it's there.
I also know she was scared, and not just of the murder, though that fear was real. She was scared of me, scared of the badge, and more than either of those, scared of the man behind it. I've spent enough nights at Dominion to recognize what her bravado costs her, and last night, sitting across a conference table in the dead hours before dawn with adrenaline still running hot in her blood, the cost showed.
My desk phone rings. I pick up.
"Broussard, Homicide."
"Detective, this is dispatch. We've got a missing persons report filed about an hour ago. Lawrence Blanchard, resident of the Garden District. Family says he didn't come home last night, missed a morning appointment, phone going straight to voicemail. Flagged to your desk because of the name match on the 911 call from early this morning."
There it is. When I asked Renata whether the patrol officers had checked if Blanchard had been reported missing, it was too early for anyone to have filed. I asked the question because I knew it was coming, and I wanted her to see that the cops who dismissed her hadn't bothered to think that far ahead. Now the report is here, and Renata's account just got its first piece of corroboration.
My pulse doesn't change. I don't let it. "Send me the report."
"Coming through now."
