Chapter 8 #3
"And if he knew those systems well enough to remotely access Dominion's feeds after Margot fired him, wiping the parking garage cameras and manipulating the footage from Susan's building wouldn't have been much of a stretch."
"That's the same conclusion I reached."
She stands and moves to the counter, pulling a second mug from the cabinet and reaching for the coffee maker with the ease of someone who has memorized where things live in a kitchen that isn't hers.
She fills both and brings one to the table, her fingers brushing the space beside my hand when she sets it down.
She doesn't touch me, but the warmth from her skin crosses the gap on its own.
"You've rearranged my mugs," I say.
"I organized them. You had them shoved in the cabinet like you were punishing them for something."
"They're mugs."
"They're your only mugs, and half of them were behind the protein powder. If I have to live here, the kitchen has to function like a kitchen."
"If you have to live here." I take the coffee. It's exactly how I drink it, and she's been watching me make it long enough to know. "You sound like a hostage."
"You sound like a man who's never had someone rearrange his cabinets.
" She sits back down across from me, tucking one foot under her thigh, and the posture is too comfortable, too settled, too much like a woman who has stopped thinking of this table as borrowed.
"How strong is the facial recognition match? "
"It's partial. It's enough for a lead but not enough for a warrant."
"So you have a creepy ex-security contractor lurking outside a dead woman's building, and the system says maybe. That's thin."
"It's a starting point. I need more to tie him to the murders specifically."
"What about his financials? If Lawrence was paying blackmail through wire transfers, the money went somewhere. Ridgewater's accounts might show incoming deposits that match the amounts and timing."
"I'd need a warrant for his financial records. Probable cause requires more than a partial match and a former employer in common."
She wraps both hands around her coffee and watches me over the rim, and the look on her face is the one that costs me sleep.
The armor thins just enough for me to see the sharp, calculating mind she buries behind every deflection she throws at me, and she's letting me see it, here, in my kitchen, with her hair down and her guard halfway to the floor.
That lands harder than any of the sarcasm ever has.
"The blackmail emails in Lawrence's credenza," she says. "The sender addresses were disposable, random strings. The wire transfer confirmations were clipped to the emails, though. If those transfers went to accounts Ridgewater controls, even through layers, that's your connection."
"The warrant for Blanchard's house will get me the physical evidence. Once I have the folder and the transfer records, I can start tracing the money. If Ridgewater is on the other end, the probable cause builds itself."
"When does the warrant come through?"
"The judge's office has it. It should be soon."
"It should be soon. The legal system's definition of 'soon' and mine have never been in the same time zone."
"You're criticizing the legal system from inside a cop's house while drinking his coffee."
"I'm criticizing the pace, not the system. And you made terrible coffee until I fixed your ratio."
"You changed the ratio?"
"I changed it days ago. You haven't noticed because you've been too busy playing detective to taste anything." She takes a sip. "You're welcome."
I have, in fact, noticed the coffee is better.
I attributed it to a new bag of beans. The realization that she's been adjusting my kitchen without announcement, just quietly improving things the way she improves the efficiency of everything she touches, pulls a knot tight between my shoulder blades.
The woman who reorganized my cabinet and recalibrated my coffee is the same woman who memorized a dead man's blackmail files in the dark and can pick a lock faster than I can find my keys.
I want my hands in her hair. The thought arrives vivid and uninvited: my fingers wound through the auburn she's wearing loose, tilting her head back, finding out what sound she makes when someone controls the angle instead of letting her choose it.
She is the bartender who pours my bourbon without making eye contact, the sub who tested Arnold Voss until he broke and gave me the smallest, most genuine sound I've ever heard from a woman before burying it, the burglar who sits at my table speaking my language while the scent of her soap marks my house one surface at a time.
I keep my hands on the notebook and my voice level.
"Ridgewater knows Dominion from the inside," she says, and the way she steers the conversation back to the case tells me she felt the weight of whatever just passed between us and chose to step around it.
"He knows the membership, the routines, the social dynamics.
He knows which members have the most to lose from exposure, and he can gauge who will pay and how much they can afford.
Lawrence was wealthy and discreet. Susan was comfortable and private.
The other two fit the same profile." She pauses, and something sharp and self-aware moves through her expression.
"He's selecting victims the way a burglar selects targets.
You choose the ones with the most to protect and the most to give. "
The comparison lands with a specificity that comes from experience, and she knows it as soon as the words leave her mouth. She holds my gaze, steady, unapologetic, a woman who spent years taking things from people now using that knowledge to help me find a killer.
"You're good at this," I say.
"I'm good at thinking like someone who takes things from people. That's not a compliment."
"It is from me, and it is tonight. Take it."
The command sits between us, low and quiet and shaped like something that has nothing to do with the case.
Her chin lifts by a fraction, the reflex she has when I push into dominant register, the one that says she felt it land and is deciding whether to fight or fold.
The air in the kitchen shifts, or maybe that's just blood moving differently under my skin.
"Fine," she says. "I'll take the compliment, but I'm charging interest."
"You would."
I flip to a clean page and start writing out the timeline.
She leans forward to read my handwriting, and her shoulder comes within an inch of mine before she settles into the position and stays.
The citrus from her soap reaches me first, followed by warmth from her body, present and unmistakable without contact.
My hand stops moving on the page for a beat before I force it to continue.
"Your handwriting is terrible," she says. "How does anyone read your reports?"
"They're typed."
"Thank God for that." She tilts her head to decipher a word. Her hair falls forward, brushing the table surface near my wrist, and the accidental contact sends a jolt up my arm that I refuse to acknowledge with anything more than a shift in my grip on the pen. "Is that a six or a zero?"
"It's a six."
"Write like a grown man, Broussard."
The use of my last name is a deflection, a door she closes when the proximity gets too warm, and I recognize the retreat because I've been mapping her escape routes since the first night she called me Detective to keep me at arm's length.
She's sitting near enough for me to count the freckles on her shoulder where the tank top doesn't cover, and she went to Broussard because the alternative was staying in the space where my name is Andy and the distance between us carries a different weight.
"If you can read safe specifications in the dark, you can read my handwriting," I say.
"That's a generous comparison. Safes follow logic."
We work through the timeline together, her memory pulling up specifics about Ridgewater's work schedule and his habits and how he positioned himself in the club.
Her recall is exact. Her analysis is sharp.
She anticipates where my questions are going and meets them with answers that save me the trip, and the rhythm of it, the back-and-forth of two minds working the same problem from different angles, builds a cadence that feels less like collaboration and more like something I don't have a safe word for.
"We need to find out where Ridgewater is living now," she says. "If Margot scrubbed his access, he's been operating from outside the club's systems for some time. He needs a base with equipment for remote access and storage for the footage archive."
"I'm working on his last known address. It's a Metairie rental."
"When you pull those transfer records from Blanchard's house, the financial trail should lead you to him. If he's smart, there will be layers, shell accounts and intermediaries." She picks up her mug and drains it. "Even smart people leave patterns in how they move money, though."
"A former burglar is giving me lessons in financial forensics."
"This former burglar knows that the hardest part of stealing isn't getting in.
It's getting the take out without leaving a trail.
" She sets the empty mug down near mine, ceramic edges almost touching.
"Speaking of leaving trails, you should eat something.
You've been running on bad precinct coffee and adrenaline since this morning, and your fridge has the contents of a man who thinks protein bars count as dinner. "
"I eat."
"You eat like a cop, which is to say you eat like someone who considers nutrition an obstacle between meals." She stands, and the motion puts her hip level with my shoulder, heat from her body reaching me through the thin cotton of my shirt. "I made food earlier. There are leftovers."
"You cooked in my kitchen."
"I heated things in your kitchen. Cooking implies your pantry has ingredients, which it doesn't. We're going to have a conversation about that."
She moves to the fridge, and I watch her navigate my kitchen with the territorial ease of someone who has already claimed it, and the possessive awareness that moves through me in response is heavy and warm and entirely inappropriate for a man who is supposed to be focused on a murder investigation.
She pulls containers out and assembles a plate with the efficiency she uses behind the bar, and when she sets it in front of me she stands where I can see the small scar on her wrist and the pulse beating at the base of her throat.
"Eat," she says. "Then you can tell me the rest of the Ridgewater theory."
"That's bossy."
"That's observant. There's a difference." She drops back into her chair and pulls her laptop closer, and the smile she gives me is the real one, quick and sharp and gone before she can be held accountable for it. "You're welcome, again."
I eat because she's right and because arguing with her about it will take longer than the food, and because being fed by a woman who reorganized my cabinets and fixed my coffee and is currently running Ridgewater's likely operational requirements on her laptop while I eat the meal she made is pressing against the walls I built between the detective and the man.
The walls are holding, but just barely. And the woman on the other side of them knows it, because she told me the hardest part of stealing isn't getting in, and the look she gives me over her laptop says she's already past the first tumbler and working on the second.