Chapter 10
ANDY
The warrant for Blanchard's house lands on my desk mid-morning, signed and sealed and filed under the Landry case number, because Susan Landry's victimology connects to Blanchard's blackmail materials and the Landry investigation is what Hebert authorized.
I call the crime scene unit and request an evidence tech to meet me on-site, because a search warrant executed without proper chain of custody is a gift to the defense, and whatever is inside Lawrence Blanchard's credenza is going to end up in front of a jury.
The house looks the same as Renata described it: green door, live oaks, the heavy respectability of Garden District money sitting quiet behind its hedges.
The morning paper still isn't being collected, and the mailbox holds several days' worth of envelopes, confirming that Margaret Blanchard hasn't been back since she left to stay with her sister across the lake.
I serve the warrant to an empty house, which means I document the service, note the time, photograph the exterior, and let myself in through the front door with the key the property manager provided after a phone call that required more patience than I had and less authority than I used.
The evidence tech, a woman named Guidry who I've worked with on enough cases to trust her documentation, meets me at the door with her kit and her camera and the quiet efficiency that comes from processing enough crime scenes to stop needing instructions.
The study is on the second floor. I take the stairs cataloging the layout as I go, noting the exits and the windows and the quality of the locks.
Renata would have done the same thing, except faster and in the dark and with no legal document in her pocket to mark the difference between a search and a crime.
The credenza sits behind the desk, exactly where she told me it would be.
The third folder from the back is labeled with a date rather than a subject.
I pull it and set it on the desk, and the photographs inside hit with a specificity that Renata's verbal description prepared me for but didn't fully convey.
There are six photographs, all from Dominion's private rooms, captured from fixed elevated angles that match the camera positions Luc Pascal identified and removed during the Simone LaCroix investigation.
Lawrence Blanchard appears in three of them, and other members fill the rest. The blackmail correspondence sits behind the photographs: three printed emails from disposable addresses, escalating demands, two wire transfer confirmations paper-clipped to the first two.
Guidry is right beside me, documenting. I keep my hands steady and my face neutral while the photographs register in the back of my skull where the worst evidence lives.
These are Dominion members caught in their most private moments, their faces visible, their bodies exposed, the trust they placed in the club's walls captured from an angle that was never supposed to exist. The photographs show the same rooms, the same elevated camera positions, the same window of time when Julien LaSalle's hardware was recording everything it could reach.
Renata scened in rooms three and five during that window.
The thought sits in my gut like a coal, slow and specific and getting hotter.
Somewhere in Ridgewater's archive, if the archive is as comprehensive as the evidence suggests, there are images of her that look like these, images of the private negotiations between a woman learning what she wanted and the men she trusted enough to learn with, all of it captured by a camera she didn't know existed while a man she remembers as the contractor who watched her with predatory patience helped himself to the feed.
I have seen Renata scene. I have watched her on the main floor with Arnold Voss, watched her test and push and bury the one genuine sound she made before it could cost her anything. What I saw, she chose to show. These photographs represent the opposite. They represent what someone took.
The third demand has no payment attached. Lawrence stopped paying, and Lawrence is dead.
Guidry photographs everything in place before we bag it.
She seals the evidence, labels it, and logs each item with the case number while I note the contents in my notebook.
The process takes the better part of an hour, and when we leave the house, the chain of custody is clean enough to survive anything a defense attorney throws at it.
The heat in my gut hasn't cooled. It won't. It's going to sit there and burn until I find every frame of footage Ridgewater took from those rooms and put him in a cell where the only thing he watches is a concrete wall.
The days that follow are grinding, methodical work, the kind that separates cases that get solved from cases that collect dust. I build the financial picture one record at a time, pulling threads and filing requests and waiting for institutions to respond on schedules that have nothing to do with how many people are dead.
The wire transfers from Lawrence's folder open the first door.
His first two payments went to an account registered to a shell company in Texas, a limited liability entity with a registered agent service handling the paperwork and no physical office address, carrying a generic, forgettable name designed to receive money and redirect it.
I submit the subpoena request for the account records and settle in to wait, because financial institutions move on their own clock and a homicide detective's urgency rarely adjusts it.
Waiting is the part that eats at me, not the work itself, which I can lose hours inside when a case has enough architecture to hold my attention, but the stillness between the work.
Mornings, Renata pads into the kitchen in bare feet and one of my t-shirts with the collar stretched wide enough to show the hollow of her throat, and I track the movement of her hands on the coffee mug the way I tracked her hands behind the bar the first night I sat at Dominion and understood that this woman was going to be a problem I'd never solve.
When she’s not working, she sits at my kitchen table with her laptop and her hair down and the light catching the auburn until the color burns, and I keep my eyes on the case file because the alternative is watching her mouth while she reads and losing the thread of whatever financial record I'm supposed to be analyzing.
She has claimed my kitchen quietly, reorganizing the cabinets and adjusting the coffee ratio and hanging her jacket on the hook beside mine as though proximity is a fact rather than a conversation we haven't had.
Each small territorial act registers in the possessive part of my brain that wants to put my hands on the counter on either side of her and tell her that if she's going to rearrange my house, she should understand what that means to a man who reads every inch she takes as an inch she's willing to give.
I don't. The case file stays open, and the distance holds, but barely.
For the subpoena, I run Ridgewater's known information through the law enforcement databases I can access.
His credit history tells a story that doesn't match a man living on short-term security contracts.
His Metairie rental is modest, but his credit card balances are higher than his reported income should support, and one of his accounts shows a pattern of large monthly charges that suggest recurring commercial services rather than personal spending.
An asset discrepancy surfaces too: a bank account listed in a financial background check that doesn't track with what short-term security work pays.
The details are suggestive rather than conclusive, a pattern that points a detective toward money coming from somewhere that isn't showing up on a tax return, but not granular enough to tell me where.
When the subpoena results come back, the picture sharpens.
The shell company that received Lawrence's payments has a transaction history showing a pattern I've seen before in cases involving the commercial distribution of compromised material.
Money comes in from multiple sources, routed through the shell entity, and flows out to a series of smaller accounts.
The outgoing transfers don't match the incoming amounts, which means the shell company isn't just collecting blackmail payments.
It's receiving money from somewhere else.
I pull the outgoing transaction details and cross-reference the receiving accounts against public records.
One belongs to a media licensing firm in Florida.
The firm's name doesn't tell me much on its own, but when I run it through the federal law enforcement databases accessible through our joint task force agreements, it appears in two prior federal complaints involving the non-consensual distribution of intimate material.
Neither complaint resulted in prosecution, but the firm's presence in those files is enough to confirm what I'm looking at: a company that operates in the space between what's legal and what's defensible, brokering content that someone else obtained and someone else is paying to access.
Ridgewater isn't just blackmailing Dominion members. He's selling the footage.
The realization rearranges everything behind it. I sit at my desk with the transaction records spread across both monitors and the precinct humming around me and the understanding settling into my chest alongside the worst parts of the worst cases I've carried.
He's selling it. The footage of Dominion members in their most private moments, footage that may include the woman sleeping in my guest room and slowly taking my house apart one reorganized drawer at a time, is being distributed through a commercial broker to buyers whose names I don't know and whose appetites I can't control.