Chapter 10 #4
I hold the observation alongside my own assessment.
Renata's instincts are calibrated by years of reading people across a bar, sorting the nervous from the curious from the predatory, and her radar for incongruity is one of the sharpest tools this investigation has access to.
The woman may be a genuine prospect. She may be something else entirely.
The overlap between the two is where the danger lives.
"I'll run the names she dropped."
"They won't match." Renata is quiet for a beat, her eyes on the far wall of the garage where a security camera I know she clocked the moment we stepped off the elevator sits mounted above the stairwell door.
"People who use real referrals don't need to drop them.
The referral does the work before they ever walk in. "
She's right. And her being right, again, doing the analytical work that most witnesses can't touch and most informants won't bother with, pulls the thread tighter between the detective who needs her brain and the man who wants to put his hands on the hip she just cocked against the car door while she dissects his case for him.
"Follow me back," I tell her.
"You say that every night."
"And you argue about it every night, and then you follow me back, and we do this whole thing again tomorrow."
"It's called maintaining the illusion of autonomy."
"It's called being stubborn."
"Tomato, tomahto." She drops into the driver's seat and pulls the door shut, and the smile she gives me through the window is the real one, the one that cracks through the armor and disappears before she can be accountable for it.
The engine catches, the headlights flare, and she pulls out of the spot and heads for the exit ramp with the ease of a woman who knows every turn by muscle memory, the steady mastery that comes from doing one thing long enough to stop thinking about it.
I take the stairs back to the member level, unlock my sedan, and then follow her into the New Orleans night.
The city is soft at this hour, the heat releasing its hold on the pavement and the streetlights pooling amber on wet streets where the humidity has condensed into a thin gloss.
Her taillights stay steady close ahead, and the drive back to Mid-City carries the rhythm of two people who have stopped pretending that following each other home is about the route.
The house is dark when we pull in. She parks beside me in the driveway, a habit that started as logistics and has become territorial, her car claiming the space beside mine the way she's claimed the kitchen counter and the guest bathroom shelf and the hook by the front door where her jacket hangs next to mine.
Inside, the kitchen light goes on and the routine engages.
She drops her bag on the counter. I lock the door and check the windows.
She fills the kettle because she has decided, at some point that I wasn't consulted about, that we drink tea after late shifts instead of bourbon, and the presumption would irritate me from anyone else.
"The brokerage firm," she says, her back to me while she pulls mugs from the cabinet she reorganized. "If they're distributing the footage, there are copies on their servers. Even if the FBI shuts them down, the material has already been distributed. You can't un-sell something."
"I know."
"So the arrest solves the murder case and stops the blackmail, but the footage is already out there. The members who were filmed don't get that back."
"No. They don't."
She turns around with two mugs in her hands and the expression of a woman who has been running this calculation since I told her about the brokerage and has arrived at the number she feared.
My mug goes on the counter within reach.
Hers stays in both hands, the ceramic between her palms like an anchor.
"And if there's footage of me?"
The question fills the kitchen and stays there.
She asks it with her eyes steady on mine, and the vulnerability underneath is the kind she guards with every sarcastic deflection and every bratty comment and every careful inch of space she keeps between who she shows the world and who is standing in my kitchen right now asking me what happens to the most private moments of her life.
"I'll find it." The words come out before the detective can leash them, before the careful procedural language I'm supposed to be using can shape them into something defensible. "Every copy. Every server. Every file with your face on it."
"Andy." Her voice drops the bravado and hits something quieter, something that reaches across the counter and presses against my chest. "You can't promise that."
"I know what I can promise."
"Tell me what's real, then. Not what you want to be true. What's actually real."
She holds my gaze while she says it, and the challenge in her expression is the same one she gives every Dom who tries to offer her something easier than the truth.
She won't take the grand gesture. She won't let me wrap the answer in false certainty because the alternative is admitting there are things I can't control.
She is standing in my kitchen demanding I be honest with her, and her trust in me to deliver that honesty is worth more than anything I could offer wrapped in a promise I can't keep.
"Locke's team can seize the brokerage's servers under a federal warrant.
Every file, every transaction record, every download log.
If your footage is in that system, it gets pulled as evidence and locked down.
The FBI's digital forensics unit traces distribution chains, tracks where files went, who accessed them, and they issue takedown orders.
" I hold her eyes because she deserves to see that the man giving her the procedural answer is the same man who wanted to give her the other one.
"It's not instant. It's not perfect. It is thorough, and I will be in their ear every day until it's done. "
"That last part isn't procedure."
"No. It isn't."
The kitchen holds that admission. She reads through the professional language to the personal commitment underneath, and what she finds there changes the angle of her chin and loosens her grip on the mug by a fraction. She looks like a woman deciding whether the ground she's standing on will hold.
"Thank you," she says, and the simplicity of it lands harder than any of her barbed comebacks. "For calling Locke. For going to the club tonight. For the parking garage."
"You don't have to thank me for the parking garage."
"I'm not thanking you for the protection.
I'm thanking you for not making it obvious.
" She sets the mug down on the counter, and her fingertips brush the edge of the surface near mine.
The contact is incidental. Neither of us moves away from it.
Her eyes hold mine for a beat longer than the conversation requires, and the warmth in them is unguarded, the look I've only seen when she's too tired or too honest to remember to hide it. "Goodnight, Andy."
"Goodnight."
She walks toward the guest room, and I watch her go the way I've watched her go every night she's slept in this house, tracking the line of her shoulders and her bare feet on my hardwood floors.
At the doorway she pushes her hair behind her ear, a gesture that looks habitual and unperformed, aimed at no one, and it pulls harder than anything she's aimed at me on purpose.
I rinse the mugs. I check the locks. I sit at the kitchen table with my notebook open and the financial records spread out and the taste of the words I wanted to say still sitting in my mouth like bourbon I didn't swallow.
The case keeps getting bigger. The house keeps getting smaller.
She is in my guest room trusting me with her safety and her secrets and the fear she carries with the same fierce competence she brings to everything else, and I am sitting at this table because the line between the detective and the man is the only wall still standing and she is on both sides of it.
The notes blur. The distance between the kitchen table and the guest room door is twelve steps, and I know the number because I counted them the first night she slept here and have been counting them every night since. Twelve steps, and every one of them belongs to her.