Chapter 5
RENATA
The call comes while I'm restocking the well bottles behind the bar, my hands full of Aperol and my mind still tangled in the look on Andy's face when I closed my door on him last night. His name on my phone screen sends a jolt through my stomach that I refuse to examine.
I set the bottles down and step into the service corridor where the music can't reach.
"Detective."
"Susan Landry." His voice is stripped to its components, the professional calm worn like body armor with a rawer frequency pressing through the seams. "Do you know her?"
I know Susan Landry. I know her order, her seat, her tip, the way she folds her cocktail napkin into a precise square before she sets her glass on it.
Bombay Sapphire martini, dry, two olives, her usual stool on Saturdays.
She works in finance, portfolios and risk assessment, and she has the kind of laugh that catches you off guard because everything else about her is so buttoned up.
She asks how my week has been and she actually listens to the answer.
Most members treat the bar staff like furniture. Susan treats us like people.
"She's a regular," I say. "Saturdays. Why?"
The pause on the other end lasts long enough for me to hear my own pulse in my ears.
"She's dead, Renata. Found this morning in her car in a parking garage near her office. Single gunshot, nobody heard a thing." He lets the silence sit. "Another Dominion member. Another parking garage. Tell me you see where this is going."
The Aperol I just shelved is suddenly the only thing keeping me upright. My shoulder finds the corridor wall and it takes my weight because my knees have decided they're done supporting the rest of me.
"Renata."
"I'm here."
"There's a difference this time. Whoever cleaned up after Lawrence didn't get the chance with Susan.
A security guard found her before the scene could be sanitized.
There's a body, there's forensics, and my captain can't call this one a ghost story.
" He pauses again, and I can hear him choosing his next words with a precision that tells me they matter more than the ones before them.
"This is a homicide investigation now. Official. My case."
Susan Landry is dead. She sat at my bar last Saturday and told me about a hiking trip she was planning for the fall. She once noticed I was having a rough shift and left an extra twenty tucked under her napkin with a note that said hang in there in handwriting so neat it looked printed.
I served her drinks for years, watched her walk through the main floor with the composed confidence of a woman who had spent her professional life in rooms full of men who underestimated her.
Her face is in one of the photographs I found in Lawrence Blanchard's study, captured by a camera that had no business being in a room where she was at her most vulnerable.
Susan's photograph was the one that made my hands shake. Not because of what it showed, though that was explicit enough. Her expression was what gutted me. She looked peaceful. She looked safe. She looked like a woman who believed the walls around her would hold.
The walls didn't hold. She's dead, and the information I've been sitting on is burning a hole through my conscience that no amount of rationalizing is going to patch.
"I need to see you," Andy says. "Tonight."
The word tonight drops low in my body, somewhere that has nothing to do with the investigation and everything to do with the weight his voice takes on when professional distance thins out and a more direct frequency pushes through.
Even now, with Susan's name still between us, I feel the pull, the gravity of a man who makes commands sound like inevitabilities.
"I know." The words come out quieter than I intend, the armor I usually wear when I talk to him gone before I can catch it. "I know you do."
The call ends. My phone presses against my thigh and the corridor hums with muffled bass from the main floor.
What I left in Lawrence Blanchard's credenza plays on a loop in my memory. Photographs and blackmail emails, all of it cataloged in a brain I trained to retain floor plans and safe combinations and the exact sequence of turns in a lock.
I'd put the evidence back where I found it, because that's what training dictates. You don't take what you can memorize. Taking leaves a gap. A gap gets noticed. The information has been sitting in my head like contraband since the night I broke every promise that matters.
I told myself I was gathering intelligence.
I told myself Andy's investigation was moving too slowly, that sitting behind Rapier Strategic's wall while a killer operated freely was a luxury I couldn't afford.
The break-in was necessary, justified, the only way to get answers before someone else died.
Susan Landry died anyway, and my silence might have contributed to that.
The thought lodges in my throat and stays.
If I had gone straight to Andy with what I found instead of slipping back to my apartment like the thief I swore I'd stopped being, would it have mattered?
Would he have connected the photographs to Susan fast enough to save her?
Would the investigation have shifted in time to put someone between her and the gun?
That uncertainty is a special kind of hell, because it means I'll never stop wondering.
Margot finds me in the corridor ten minutes later, leaning against the wall with my arms crossed and my face arranged into the neutral expression I've spent years perfecting for moments when the inside doesn't match the outside.
"I heard," she says. Her voice carries the weight of a woman who built something she's proud of and keeps watching people try to tear it apart. "Andy called Remy. Two Dominion members dead, same method."
"She was at my bar last Saturday, Margot."
"I know who she was." Margot's hand grips my shoulder, firm and grounding, the same touch she gave me the night I called her from the parking garage. "Go home. Take the rest of the shift off. I'll have Terrence cover."
I want to argue, want to stay where the work is physical and the rhythm doesn't ask questions. Margot's grip tightens by a fraction, though, and the look in her eyes says this isn't a suggestion.
"Okay," I say. "Okay."
My bag from the staff locker carries its ordinary weight. Keys and wallet and phone are all that's inside, nothing incriminating, nothing that would give me away. What I need to hand over exists only in my head, and the walk to the service elevator feels like a confession I haven't made yet.
The drive to the Irish Channel takes no time.
I park in my usual spot on the second level, and the garage is quiet and ordinary and nothing like the last time I walked through a parking structure at night, which is a thought I shut down before it can take root.
One of the Rapier Strategic operatives is positioned near the garage entrance with a sight line to the stairwell, and he tracks me from the car to the building door without pretending he isn't. I give him a nod I don't feel. He gives me one back.
My apartment is warm when I let myself in. I lock the door, drop my bag on the kitchen counter, and stand in the silence with my hands flat on the surface while the photographs reassemble behind my eyes.
They're as clear as if I were still standing in Lawrence's study.
The folder sat near the back of the credenza, labeled with a date rather than a subject.
Photographs on glossy paper filled it, Lawrence in several, other members in the rest. The camera angles were identical across multiple rooms, the same elevated perspective that matched the fixed positions from the security breach that nearly destroyed Dominion.
Susan Landry appeared in one photograph, kneeling in a private room with her eyes closed and her hands behind her back and an expression of absolute trust on a face that will never make another expression again.
The other two photographs surface next in my memory.
They showed two more members whose names I know from drink orders and seating habits and the quiet assumption of safety that Susan carried too.
Two more people sit on a list someone is working through with methodical patience, and I am the only person outside of a dead man's study who knows what I saw.
The decision crystallizes while I'm standing at the counter with my eyes closed.
I am done sitting on this, done rationalizing the delay, done telling myself I need more information, done hiding behind the excuse that going to Andy means confessing to a felony.
Susan is dead. Two more names are waiting, and each hour I spend protecting my own secrets is an hour the killer spends getting closer to them.
I am going to tell Andy everything. The break-in, what I found, the blackmail emails, the connection to Dominion's previous security breach.
I am going to give him all of it, but on my terms. I won't do this in an interrogation room, and I won't do it with his partner watching through a mirror.
I am going to walk into his space the way I walked into Lawrence Blanchard's, lay out what I know, and stand there while he decides what to do with it.
If he wants to arrest me for the B&E, he can do it to my face.
I know where Andy lives. I've known for months, because knowing things about people is a reflex I developed long before Margot taught me to channel it into drink orders and customer preferences.
His address is public record, the same way Lawrence's was.
I pulled it one night after a shift when he'd spent an hour at my bar watching me work with that patient, stripping focus that makes me feel like he's reading a language I didn't know I was written in.