Page 63 of Dominion's Guard
"You moved into her," I say, because if I don't redirect my focus to the case I'm going to do something that ends up in Locke's after-action report. "When she had the knife. You closed the distance."
"Seemed like the right call at the time."
"It was the right call. It was also the move of someone who's spent time in rooms where the exit is behind the threat."
"Are we adding that to the list? Because the list is getting long enough to need its own filing system, and you already have a notebook problem."
My hand moves from her wrist to the back of her neck. The grip is firm, my thumb against the tendon that runs along the side of her throat, and the shiver that runs through her is visible and immediate and has nothing to do with blood loss.
"The medics are on their way up," Locke says from the doorway. "Ms. St. Clair, we'll need your statement after you're treated."
"She'll give it when she's ready," I say without turning around. The possessive edge in my voice is not appropriate for an NOPD detective speaking to a federal agent, and I don't moderate it.
Renata's mouth curves. The smile is small and private and meant only for me, and the warmth in it slides under my ribs and stays there, lodged in the place where this woman has been setting up residence since she sat in my living room in the dark and told me the truth about who she is.
Remy appears in the doorway seconds later. He reads the room with the efficiency his training requires and moves to Renata's other side without being asked.
"I've got her," Remy says. The look he gives me over her head is direct and unambiguous: the room needs processing, the evidence needs securing, and the arresting officer standing here with his hand on a civilian's neck instead of holding a notebook is a problem the defense will exploit.
He's right. The gun on the floor needs to be tagged. The knife needs to be collected. The blood needs to be mapped and the ceiling examined where the bullet lodged in the plaster. The chain of custody starts now, and if I'm not the one documenting the scene, Moreau's lawyer will ask why the detective who built this case walked away from the evidence to hold a woman's hand.
My hand tightens on her wrist, one last press of my thumb against her pulse. The beat is fast and strong under my touch, and my fingers don't want to open. The reluctance is physical, lodged in the tendons of my hand, a refusal that takes more effort to override than any instinct the badge has ever trained into me.
"Stay with her," I tell Remy.
Renata watches me pull back. The mask hasn't fully reassembled yet, and what shows through the cracks is a versionof her I've only seen twice: once last night, when she stopped performing and let me hold what she was carrying, and once now, in a room that's about to become a crime scene, with my shirt wrapped around her arm and my handprint still warm on her throat.
"Go, Andy." Her voice is rough and stripped to the bones of it, all banter spent, all deflection gone, just the sound of my name in her mouth the way it sounded last night. "I'll be right here giving Remy a hard time until you're done. He's much easier to irritate than you are."
"That's because he doesn't enjoy it," I say, and what passes between us in the silence after is a conversation we'll finish later, when the room is empty and the badge is off and the only audience is the dark.
I pull the notebook from my pocket. I click the pen. I turn toward the evidence with the disciplined focus the badge demands and the full knowledge that the woman behind me just said my name without the wordDetectivein front of it, and the absence of the title tells me more than anything she's said tonight in a room full of people.
The room gives up its story in pieces. The gun on the floor is a compact semi-automatic I'll run through the firearms database before morning. The folding knife lies near the chair leg. Blood covers the floor, two women's worth, and the pattern tells me where they fought and how they fell. Plaster dust coats the carpet beneath the spot where the round lodged in the ceiling. Drag marks cross the floor where Renata took Moreau down with body weight and leverage and the scrappy, vicious resourcefulness that Margot saw in a young burglar and decided to save.
I photograph and note and measure. The notebook fills with the precise, unhurried attention I've brought to scenes for the past decade.
Across the room, the medic is cleaning Renata's wound and she's giving him the same hard time she gives everyone, her voice carrying just enough of the brat to tell me the shock is wearing off and the real Renata is coming back online. Remy stands beside her with his arms crossed, and the flicker at the corner of his mouth tells me she's already found whatever button of his is easiest to push.
She catches my eye over the evidence markers. The glance is fast and targeted, the same one she's been giving me over the bar for over a year, the one that tracks me with the precision of a woman who memorizes sight lines for a living and has decided that I'm the most interesting thing in any room she enters.
What it tells me is simple:I'm here. I'm fine. Finish your work and come get me.
I hold it for a beat longer than the scene requires, then go back to the notebook. The evidence needs my attention. The case needs closing. Patricia Moreau's confession is on a federal recording, and each detail I document tonight is a brick in the wall between her and the defense attorney who will try to take it apart.
Renata sits a dozen feet away with a medic's bandage on her arm and my overshirt by her side. She is alive and sharp-tongued and already making Remy regret volunteering for bedside duty. When this room is processed and the evidence is logged and the jurisdictional paperwork begins its slow federal grind, I am going to take her home and put my hands on her and find out what she does when there's no audience and no badge and no distance left between us.
My phone buzzes in my pocket. The screen shows Hebert's number, and the timing tells me everything the conversation will confirm: the captain just learned that his homicide detective ran a bait operation inside a private club using federal resources he never authorized, in coordination with a security firm that hasno business inside an NOPD investigation, and made an arrest that's going to generate the kind of attention that ends careers or makes them.
The notebook can wait. Hebert can't. And the woman sitting across the room with my shirt around her arm and my name in her mouth is about to find out what happens when the man who just risked his badge to keep her alive has to decide whether the badge is still worth keeping.
16
RENATA
The federal building smells like floor wax and recycled air and the staleness of a place that has never once considered opening a window. I sit in a conference room on an upper floor with my forearm bandaged properly now, the medic's field dressing replaced by an ER nurse who cleaned and sutured the wound at University Medical Center while an FBI agent stood in the hallway and made phone calls about chain of custody. The stitches pull when I flex my fingers. I keep flexing them anyway, because the small bite of pain is the clearest thing I've felt in hours, and clarity is in short supply at three in the morning in a building where every hallway looks like the last one and the coffee tastes like it was brewed during a previous administration.
Andy is somewhere else on this floor, giving his own statement to a pair of agents I haven't met. I know this because the agent who escorted me to this room told me Detective Broussard would be interviewed separately, in the tone of someone communicating a policy rather than offering a choice. Separate statements, separate rooms, separate recordings, all standard procedure. The procedure makes sense. The absence of him doesn't sit the way I expected it to, which is aproblem I'll examine later when examining things won't cost me concentration I need for the woman across the table.
