Chapter 2
Chapter two
Thiago
I woke at once. I’d been in New Orleans for a week, and the air hung still and damp.
After the third ring, I picked up. He didn’t call someone on leave for trivial matters. It was against policy.
“Still in the city,” he said.
“Through next Sunday.”
“New client. Dominic St. Clair. Conductor. St. Charles Avenue.”
“Tell me more,” I said.
He did. There had been gunfire inside the residence the night before. Single shot, high placement, not aiming for assassination. Sheet music left behind and an anniversary date circled in red.
“Patron named Celeste Boudreaux Hargrove made the contact,” Eamon said. “We handled a family situation for her two years ago. She’s authorizing a substantial bonus for immediate deployment.”
I knew I’d accept the job before he told me the number. I had old debts from my dead-end job days and family that needed help. As he delivered the details, I watched the ceiling fan complete a slow circuit.
“The client’s parameters?”
“He refuses to be caged.”
A hint of skepticism gnawed at the back of my brain. I’d watched clients demand protection and then resist every measure that actually provided it.
“Concert series,” Eamon continued. “Culminates at the Orpheum in eleven days. He won’t cancel.”
“Of course not.”
“Seventy-two years old. Fifty years in this city. Whoever is behind this knows his world from the inside. This isn’t random hostility.”
“It’s a relationship,” I said.
A pause. “Yes. Exactly that.”
“I’m on it.”
In minutes, I was in the shower, only slightly more humid than the surrounding air. I’d lived through Manhattan in August, when the subway platforms at rush hour were a collective act of suffering.
New Orleans was next-level. The air settled on your skin, and a ceiling fan didn’t help.
My apartment for a two-week leave was a short-term rental two blocks from the edge of the French Quarter, with tired furniture and laminate floors beginning to peel upward. I’d put my go-bag in the closet and told myself to rest.
I dressed and left in eleven minutes. The street was still mostly dark, gas lamps glowing in the pre-dawn murk.
As I reached St. Charles Avenue, I slowed the SUV, examining the broad pavement and distinguished mansions.
The streetcar tracks ran alongside me for several blocks, rails laid into the asphalt.
The live oaks lining the median were old enough that their canopies had closed overhead into something close to a ceiling.
A man walked on the opposite sidewalk with a dog.
I watched him until he turned the corner.
As I slowed to a stop, I counted four live oaks between the house and the curb. Clean sightlines to the street would be impossible. It was beautiful, but tactically, it was a disaster.
Cream-painted wood siding covered Dominic St. Clair’s mansion. A second-floor balcony ran the width of the facade, and gas lanterns still burned on either side of the entrance. One of the tall windows had been patched overnight, with plastic sheeting taped over an upper pane from the inside.
The house had a composure to it, a settled confidence. The broken pane looked wrong.
I knocked twice and stepped back. The man who opened the door was not Dominic St. Clair.
He was early thirties, lean but fit, a body built for movement. He wore a white linen shirt with sleeves pushed up to the elbows. His dark hair was slightly out of place, still rumpled from sleep.
“Thiago Reyes,” I said.
“Luca Moreau. I run Dominic’s household. Come in.”
I followed him inside. The house smelled of coffee, old paper, and a hint of gunpowder. The parlor’s marble floor was worn to a low matte finish. A console table held a neatly stacked pile of correspondence.
I caught up with Luca at the entrance to the salon. “He’s already awake. He was near this piano when the shot came, reviewing the ‘Saints’ score. Somehow, in the confusion, the note arrived.”
It was the most precise situational briefing I’d ever received from a civilian.
“Thank you.”
Luca stepped to the side. “He’s in there.”
Tall, silver-haired, in dark trousers and a cream-colored linen shirt, Dominic stood sipping coffee. He turned toward me and held out a hand.
I shook it. His grip was steady, and I looked into his wide-awake blue eyes.
He said, “I’ve spent fifty years teaching orchestras that safe performances rarely honor the music. I need you to understand that.”
He laid down his terms without compromise.
“Understood,” I said.
My initial sweep took forty minutes.
Ground floor first, then the courtyard, and then the upper levels. A window in the back hallway was unlatched, looking out onto a narrow passage between the house and the property wall. Nothing dramatic about it. The latch was old and required upward pressure before it seated.
I closed it without comment.
The rear courtyard presented problems. Its walls were eight feet of old brick, with mortar worn and crumbled enough in places to provide grips for someone patient and purposeful.
The largest lemon tree, one rooted in the ground unlike the others in pots, stretched to within arm’s reach of the second-floor balcony.
From that balcony, you had clean sightlines down into the kitchen.
The courtyard also did something strange with sound.
Manhattan buildings funnel noise upward, creating a kind of vertical acoustic awareness. This space gathered sound and held it. Standing beside the fountain, I heard the house without seeing it: Luca’s footsteps in the kitchen and a shutter on the third floor shifting in the breeze.
I photographed the wall, the tree, and the balcony. When I re-entered the house, I passed the kitchen doorway. A pot was going on the stove already, hints of garlic and bay drifting into the air. Luca was standing at the counter with his back to the hallway, working through something on his phone.
Returning to the salon, I examined everything more closely.
The shot had entered through the upper pane of the window at a slightly upward angle.
I stood at the entry point and sighted along its path with my arm extended until the geometry snapped into place.
The bullet had traveled through the room and buried itself in the plaster above the Steinway.
High. Well above any standing person.
I crouched and sighted again, measuring the precise angle.
Someone was standing outside at ground level, or even further away, crouching or lying down.
I considered the options.
You don’t fire a warning shot into a house without knowing precisely where your target is standing, and you don’t know that without watching him. I stood and looked at the piano bench.
A podium stood nearby. I imagined Dominic in the room, alone with his music. He would have a score open in front of him, and somewhere out there in the dark, someone was doing the math.
The bullet was the most visible component, designed to be found and traced back to an outside position. It pulled my attention outward, toward the perimeter of the property and traditional external threat management.
The sheet music was the more insidious move. Placed inside and waiting.
My phone vibrated. It was a text from Michael McCabe at The Guardians office in Seattle.
Michael: Police scanner says patrol units responded to a tip about gunfire heard in the neighborhood. They didn’t file a report.
That meant one of two things. Either someone had convinced them not to, or someone made sure they didn’t arrive.
Luca was at the stove when I returned to the kitchen, stirring a pot simmering on low. “Red beans,” he said. “It’s Monday.”
I leaned against the doorframe as I looked around the room. The marble countertops were worn at the edges. Copper pots hanging above the island swayed slightly in a gentle breeze, occasionally clanking together.
Luca poured coffee and slid a mug toward me. It was darker than anything I’d grown up with, nothing like the sweet, quick bodega coffee of Washington Heights.
“Tell me about access to the house,” I said.
Luca laid the spoon across the pot rim and turned around. He crossed his arms over his chest.
“That depends on what access means.”
“Who could move through the salon at night, place something on the bench, and leave with no one knowing?”
He was quiet for a moment.
“Many people come and go here. It’s Dominic’s circle.
On any given day, colleagues, musicians, and patrons all stop by.
Some of them will remember which windows he leaves open because he mentioned it once in passing seven years ago and they filed it.
” He held my gaze. “The guest list is not a short one.”
“The note,” I said. “Envelope?”
“Folded. No envelope.”
“Where exactly on the bench?”
“Squared. Aligned perfectly in the center. Dominic is never that precise.”
Luca turned to look at me. That was the moment I understood what I was working with.
He didn’t read threats the way I did: sightlines and the geometry of approach.
He read it the way you read a room where someone moved the furniture two inches; how it disrupts normal behavior.
Seven years of managing Dominic’s world had given him a granular map of it. He would find things I would miss.
Luca was likely to resist every clean line I tried to draw. He didn’t live in a world of angles and lines. He inhabited an interconnected web of histories and the weight of years.
He turned back to the stove to check the beans, and for approximately two seconds I stared at the back of his neck and the way his shirt had come untucked on one side. I was not thinking about access points. I filed the thought in a different category under things to manage.
“I need the full list,” I said. “Who has keys? “ Which of them has standing invitations. Anyone Dominic lets in without notice.” I considered the next piece. It was vital. “And anyone who’s felt slightly different recently. Let me know about any conversations where the texture was off. You don’t need a reason, only that you noticed. ”
“I can have it this afternoon.”
“This morning.”
Our gazes locked on each other for a few seconds.
“This morning,” he said. “One more thing.”
I listened.
“The sheet music wasn’t on the piano when Dominic started working.”
“When did it appear?”
Luca looked toward the salon.
“I don’t know specifically.”
Luca reached for his laptop at the end of the counter. He opened it and rotated the screen toward me.
“You should understand what the piece means here.”
A phone video filled the screen.
The camera moved through Jackson Square. I recognized it from the three spires. Brass instruments sounded first, trumpets and trombones cutting through the crowd noise. A drummer picked up the rhythm.
People on the sidewalk clapped along.
“A year after Katrina,” Luca said quietly. “The street musicians started it, and then it spread.”
The melody emerged, “When the Saints Go Marching In.”
The camera pushed deeper into the crowd. More players stepped forward from the sidewalks as though they’d been waiting for their cue. A clarinet joined the brass. Someone began singing.
I watched as voices layered over the instruments until the entire square echoed the tune. Then the camera tilted upward. Dominic stepped into the middle of the crowd, climbing onto a crate.
He looked younger in the video, his hair darker, but the posture was unmistakable. He raised one hand, not theatrically, just enough to gather the sound.
The musicians saw him, and everyone leaned forward to watch.
Dominic executed a small downward motion with his wrist, and the music surged, with brighter brass and snappier drums.
The camera shook as the crowd pushed closer.
“He didn’t organize it,” Luca said. “He just walked into it.”
On the screen, Dominic guided the music for another thirty seconds, shaping it with small gestures until the tune reached its final refrain. When the last note faded, the crowd erupted in cheers and applause.
The video cut off.
I let the video resonate. I’d read about the 2006 video in the file Eamon sent while the SUV idled at the curb. Watching it was different. The crowd hadn’t been organized. It accumulated, and Dominic walked into the middle of it and did the one thing he knew how to do.
Before the silence in the kitchen could settle, piano notes sounded from the salon.
The melody was unmistakable, but the harmony beneath it had changed.
Dominic was playing the same tune from the video, only slower now, with the bright chords turned inward. The familiar march had become something darker, as the melody bent into minor tones.
Luca closed the laptop. “He’s done that multiple times this morning,” he said.
A streetcar bell chimed in the distance. The fountain gurgled, and a wet brick smell drifted through the open doors with the morning air.
I set my mug on the counter and thought about what I knew.
Someone had walked into this house as though they had a right to be in it, had placed a piece of music on the correct bench in the correct room at the correct hour, and had walked back out without the house knowing they’d been there.
Eleven days.
And the threat was already inside.