Chapter 4
ANDY
Hebert doesn't bother closing his door. He delivers it from behind his desk with his reading glasses on and his eyes on his monitor, which tells me the decision was made before I walked in and the conversation is a formality.
"Blanchard stays missing persons. No forensic evidence, no body, no physical proof of a crime. You've had your window, Broussard. It's closed."
"The camera wipe alone justifies continued investigation. Destruction of evidence presumes evidence existed."
"And I told you that's a reach." He looks up for the first time.
The reading glasses come off and he sets them on the desk with a deliberation that makes the gesture feel final.
"You've spent valuable time on a case that doesn't exist on paper.
I've got Fontenot pulling double duty covering your share of active cases because you're chasing a ghost. That stops today. "
"Captain, if I could just..."
"Today, Broussard." The tone is pure warning, delivered by a man who has protected careers and ended them with equal efficiency. "You're a good detective. Don't let a pretty witness and a hunch turn you into a crusade case. Those don't end well for anyone's career, including mine."
The mention of career is the kill shot, and he knows it.
He's not threatening me. He's telling me what happens to detectives who can't let go of a case that command has decided doesn't warrant resources.
They get reassigned. They get sidelined.
They become the cautionary tale that partners tell over beers at the bar after shift.
"Understood, sir."
"Good. Fontenot's got a fresh one in Mid-City. Double homicide, witnesses, physical evidence. That's real police work. Go help him."
I walk back to my desk and sit down. The Blanchard file is still open on my screen.
I close it, pull up Fontenot's case, and spend the next hour reading witness statements from a shooting that happened in front of a corner store at two in the afternoon with the victim's blood still visible on the sidewalk.
Bodies beat theories. Hebert's world is clean that way: if you can't put your hands on the evidence, the evidence doesn't exist.
Lawrence Blanchard's body is somewhere in this city. I know it with the same certainty I know my own name, and I can't prove it. That doesn't make him less dead. It makes whoever killed him better at their job than I've been at mine.
Fontenot and I work the Mid-City double through the morning.
Two men, both in their twenties, had been shot outside a convenience store in an apparent dispute over a gambling debt.
The witnesses are cooperative, the forensics are textbook, and by noon we have a suspect identified and a warrant in progress.
Fontenot handles it with the comfortable efficiency of a detective who likes cases that solve themselves, and I match his pace because the work needs doing and because the appearance of compliance buys me room to operate.
After lunch, I tell Fontenot I'm running down a lead on a prior case and take my laptop to a coffee shop a few blocks from the precinct. The lead I'm running down is Lawrence Blanchard, and the case I'm working is the one my captain just told me to drop.
Lawrence had no enemies. I've spent days running his name through every database available to NOPD and the picture is the same from every angle: a man who lived carefully, spent moderately, and kept his life in precise order, not a life that generates conflict.
That means whatever got him killed didn't come from the usual places. Lawrence Blanchard's life was a locked room, and the answer is inside a room I can't officially enter.
The answer is Dominion.
I know Lawrence was a member. I've seen him at the club, watched him order his Blanton's and settle into his corner of the bar with the quiet discipline of a man who treated the place like a second home.
He scened occasionally, always in the private rooms, always with the same discretion that governed every other aspect of his life.
If something in Lawrence's world was dangerous enough to get him killed, Dominion is the most likely place where that danger lived.
I can't investigate the club officially.
Warrants, subpoenas, formal records requests: all of that becomes public record, drags Dominion into the legal system, and exposes members who stayed because Margot promised them the protocols she rebuilt after the breach would hold.
Everything she spent time and money earning back goes up in smoke the moment NOPD shows up with paperwork.
Margot would give me what I need if I asked through the right channels.
She's already cooperating with Rapier Strategic's investigation, and she trusts me enough to extend that cooperation.
But anything I get from her informally is inadmissible, and every step I take down that road pushes me further off the books on a case my captain just told me to bury.
The coffee goes cold while I think. Then I do what I should have done yesterday.
I spend the rest of the afternoon on the phone, working every business within a couple of blocks of the parking garage.
My badge and a vague reference to a "neighborhood security audit" give me enough cover to ask questions without tying the calls to a case I've been ordered to drop: restaurants, a dry cleaner, a cell phone repair shop, a small law office that keeps odd hours.
Most of them run basic systems that record to local hard drives and overwrite weekly.
Those are useless. But three of them use cloud-based platforms with remote access, and every one of those three tells me the same story.
The dry cleaner lost footage overnight and his tech guy can't explain it.
The law office had their cloud provider flag an unauthorized remote login during the early morning hours, and their recordings from midnight to six are gone.
The cell phone repair shop owner is the one who cracks it open: his provider already sent him a diagnostic showing someone accessed his system remotely, purged the stored footage, and reset it to default. The whole thing took minutes.
Three businesses with three different providers all point to the same window, the same method, the same ghost.
Whoever killed Lawrence didn't just wipe the parking garage.
They blinded a multi-block radius, every cloud-based system that might have caught a vehicle entering or leaving during the killing.
The local hard drives they left alone, either because they couldn't reach them remotely or because the weekly overwrite would bury the footage on its own.
This goes beyond covering tracks. Someone mapped every camera in the area before the first shot and had the technical reach to shut them down from a distance.
The operation was planned, resourced, and executed with a discipline that makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up.
I close my laptop and call Remy.
He picks up on the second ring. "Broussard."
"I need to coordinate with your team on the Renata situation. If I’m going to be able to get my captain to let the investigation go forward, I’m going to have to assure him that NOPD and Rapier Strategic aren't stepping on each other."
The lie is clean enough for Remy to be able to overlook it as he’s pragmatic enough to take the opening I'm offering.
He knows I've been working this case. He knows my captain is the kind of man who buries what he can't solve.
The coordination angle gives us both a reason to talk that doesn't require admitting I've been ordered to stop.
Rapier Strategic took this on because Margot asked her brothers, and Remy doesn't answer to NOPD, which means any information he shares is a gift I can't compel and shouldn't take for granted.
"What do you need?" Remy asks.
"The parking garage camera wipe extended beyond the garage itself. Multiple businesses in the area had their systems hit in the same window. Same method, same timing. Whoever did this has serious technical resources and knew exactly which systems to target."
Remy is quiet for a beat. "That's a level of preparation that suggests prior surveillance of the area."
"That's what I'm thinking. Someone mapped the camera coverage around that garage before the killing, which means this wasn't opportunistic. They chose that location because they knew how to blind it."
"Renata parks there every night," Remy says. The implication sits between us. "Same level, same spot."
"I'm aware."
The silence that follows carries the weight of what neither of us says out loud.
If the killer chose that garage because they'd already mapped its surveillance coverage, they'd been in the area long enough to know who else uses it.
Long enough to know Renata's routine. Long enough to know she'd be walking through the ground level at three in the morning after her shift.
"I'd like to talk to her," I say. "In person."
"She's at her apartment. The detail's been on her since Saturday."
"Has she cooperated with the detail?"
Another pause. Remy chooses his words with the care of a man who protects information the way other people protect assets. "There's been a complication. I'd rather you hear the details from the detail on scene."
The phrasing tells me two things: something went wrong, and Remy wants me to see it firsthand rather than filter it through a phone call. I file it and move on. "I'd like to come by after shift. Text me a time that works for your team."
"I'll let the detail know."
The call ends. I finish the cold coffee, toss the cup, and drive back to the precinct to close out the afternoon on Fontenot's case.
The warrant comes through before the end of shift.
Fontenot's pleased. Hebert nods his approval from his office doorway as I pass.
The machinery of police work grinds forward on cases with bodies and evidence and clean sight lines from crime to arrest.