Page 64 of Dominion's Guard
Agent Rivera sits across from me. She's compact, sharp-featured, and has the kind of focused patience that suggests she can sit in this chair longer than I can. Her recorder is running. Her pen is poised. She has asked me to walk her through the events of the evening from the beginning, and the beginning, for her purposes, starts with the wire.
"The text came in at ten-forty," I say. "Blocked number. Four sentences. They knew I was wired, they knew Andy was upstairs, and they wanted me in private room seven. Alone."
"Walk me through your decision to go."
"It wasn't a decision. It was a calculation." I shift in the hard plastic chair and try to find a position that doesn't pull the stitches. "The wire was still transmitting. Locke's team was recording. Andy and the operatives were already moving when I opened the door, because Andy heard everything I heard and he's faster than I am at converting information into action. Going to room seven with backup already in motion gave us a chance to draw the killer into a contained space with federal witnesses and a live audio feed. Not going meant they’d disappear again, and the next person on the list would end up like the others."
Rivera writes without looking up. "You entered the room alone."
"The door was closed. I opened it. Patricia Moreau was inside."
Saying the name still catches strangely. I've replayed the moment a dozen times since the cuffs closed, and the face that turned toward me when I opened that door belongs to a version of reality I hadn't built. I'd been looking for a man. The parking garage, the strength required to move Lawrence's body before police arrived, the clinical precision of Susan's murderand Thomas's and Sophie's: I'd been constructing a profile in my head from the start, and the profile was male, physically dominant, someone comfortable with violence as a tool.
The woman who lunged at me with a gun and then a knife was none of those things and all of them, and the disjunction between expectation and reality is the kind of miscalculation that gets people killed. It almost got me killed. The slash on my arm is the margin.
"Tell me about the confrontation," Rivera says.
I tell her about the gun, about the first shot that went into the ceiling because Patricia's hands were shaking with the tremor of conviction rather than fear. I describe the knife she pulled from her coat when the gun skidded across the floor, the way she moved, powered by fury and a righteous certainty that made her stronger than her frame should have allowed. I walk Rivera through the fight, my blood and Patricia’s mixing on the floor, my forearm grinding her wrist against the floor until the knife came free and Andy was on us with the cuffs and the Miranda rights and the procedural language that turns violence into evidence.
Rivera's pen moves in even strokes. She doesn't interrupt. She doesn't react. The recorder captures everything, and the silence between my sentences is a professional courtesy that allows me to choose my words with the precision they require.
"After the arrest," Rivera says, "Ms. Moreau made statements. Unprompted."
"She couldn't stop talking." The memory of Patricia's voice carries its own texture, the pressured cycling of a woman delivering a sermon she'd been rehearsing in private for months.'Lawrence begged. He begged me to stop.'The words had come out of her in a torrent that tangled and repeated and restarted, each confession layered over the last, and the compulsive qualityof it told me this was a woman who had been carrying the justification for murder so long it had calcified into scripture.
"She named all four victims: Lawrence, Susan, Thomas, Sophie. She described how each of them reacted."
"Did she state a motive?"
"She said Armand showed her the surveillance footage from the cameras Julien LaSalle planted at Dominion. She said he showed her what the members were doing in the private rooms, and she used the word 'filth' repeatedly." I pause, because the next piece is the one that rearranges everything behind it. "She called them complicit. She said they performed their filth and nobody held them accountable."
Rivera sets her pen down. "Do you know the defendant's connection to Dominion?"
"Only what she said during the arrest. Armand showed her the footage and how to bypass Dominion’s security, and she decided the members deserved punishment."
Rivera is silent for a moment, consulting her notes. When she speaks again, her voice carries the careful neutrality of an agent choosing how much to share with a witness. "During her interrogation, Ms. Moreau disclosed additional details about her motivation. Her husband was a Dominion member. He left the marriage for a woman he met at the club, and the subsequent divorce resulted in significant personal and social losses for Ms. Moreau. That's the context for her focus on Dominion's membership."
The information settles into the spaces the night left open. Patricia's husband had been inside those rooms, doing the things Patricia saw on the footage and called filth, and the woman he'd left Patricia for had been in there with him. The divorce had stripped Patricia of the social architecture she'd spent decades constructing: the Garden District invitations, thestanding that depends on whose name you carry and how cleanly you carry it.
Armand hadn't created her rage. He'd found it and handed her a weapon.
"Ms. Moreau also described her operational partnership with Armand Deveraux," Rivera continues. "She confirmed that Deveraux provided her with the original surveillance footage and the encrypted communication infrastructure she used to maintain the operation. After Deveraux's arrest, Ms. Moreau continued independently."
"She updated her information," I say, because the piece I can contribute is the one I've lived with since Andy identified the gap. "The original footage from Armand was historical. The cameras were destroyed months ago. She needed current membership data to keep targeting active members, their schedules, their routines, and which nights they attended. She got that from Ridgewater."
Rivera's pen moves. "Can you elaborate?"
"Jerry Ridgewater had compiled current membership information from Dominion's systems before Margot fired him. He was selling it through the same distribution network the Bureau seized. If Patricia purchased that data, she'd have had an updated target list even after Armand went to prison. The footage told her who the members were. Ridgewater's material told her where to find them."
Rivera pauses before continuing. "During her interrogation, Ms. Moreau disclosed the location of Lawrence Blanchard's remains. A recovery team has been dispatched."
The words hit a place I didn't know was still open. Lawrence Blanchard died on a parking garage floor while I watched from a stairwell, and the body that should have been there when patrol arrived was gone, scrubbed from existence with chemicals and precision, and the absence of it became the reason no onebelieved me. It was the reason the patrol officer wrote me off and the reason Hebert nearly buried the case. It was the reason I spent weeks carrying the knowledge of a dead man's face in my memory with no evidence to prove he'd ever existed anywhere outside of it.
I flex my fingers against the stitches and let the ache hold me in place.
Patricia told them where she put him. The man I watched die is going to be brought home to the wife who filed the missing persons report the morning after and never got an answer.
"The connection to the Deveraux federal case," Rivera says, moving forward with the focused efficiency of an agent building a record. "The encrypted communication channels Ms. Moreau used to contact Ridgewater were built on infrastructure created by Deveraux's operation. The shell companies, the payment routing, the digital architecture: it connects to the network the Bureau seized when Deveraux was arrested. The U.S. Attorney's Office will be handling prosecution. The charges include four counts of first-degree murder and one count of attempted murder." She pauses. "The attempted murder charge involves you, Ms. St. Clair."
