Chapter 11
RENATA
The house is too quiet without him in it, and too full of him at the same time.
I've been awake since Andy left before dawn, moving through the kitchen in the dark with his holster already on and his phone pressed to his ear, speaking in the low, clipped shorthand that usually means Remy is on the other end.
He paused in the doorway long enough to tell me he'd be gone most of the day, that the Rapier Strategic detail was positioned outside, and that I should stay in the house.
The last part landed like a door closing, and the look he gave me when he said it told me he expected an argument.
I gave him a small one, since at five in the morning even my defiance needs coffee before it hits full stride, and the gravity in his voice held the weight of something that had been building for days.
He heard me out, said "noted" in the tone that means he heard and is proceeding anyway, and pulled the front door shut behind him.
That was hours ago.
The coffee I made with the ratio I fixed weeks ago has gone cold and been replaced twice.
The live oak outside the kitchen window throws its shadows across the yard in a pattern I've memorized, because memorizing the geometry of enclosed spaces is a reflex I can't turn off, and this house has become the most luxurious cage I've ever occupied.
The morning light has shifted from pale grey through gold into the flat white of a Louisiana afternoon, and everything in this kitchen holds the specific residue of a man I am not supposed to be thinking about the way I am thinking about him.
His coffee mug sits in the dish rack, the one I rinsed after he left while the ceramic was still warm from his hands and picking it up felt like holding something that belonged to him.
His reading glasses are on the counter by the toaster where he set them down before dawn, and the impulse to pick those up too, to fold them and tuck them into his case, is domestic in a way that should alarm me more than it does.
The NOPD shirt I slept in smells like his detergent and my skin, and the combination has been doing something to my concentration since I pulled it on last night and felt the worn cotton settle against my collarbones like a hand I didn't ask for.
Andy is running an operation on Jerry Ridgewater, and I am sitting at his table with a laptop and nothing to do but wait.
Last night he sat across from me with his sleeves rolled and the lamplight finding the tendons in his wrists, writing in his notebook while I pretended to work on inventory, and I watched his pen move across the page for the better part of an hour before I trusted myself to speak.
That man is executing a federal warrant right now, and I am here.
The operational details came together over the past few days, and I watched them take shape from the civilian side of the glass.
Andy told me he called Locke at the FBI and laid out the federal angle, and from the conversations I've overheard since then, the Bureau found enough overlap with the Deveraux case to justify pulling resources.
Remy filled the gaps that NOPD couldn't.
I don't know the specifics of what Andy asked for, but I know the calls happened because I've been sitting at this table while he made them, close enough to hear his voice shift between Locke and Remy, the careful measured version for the Bureau, the direct one for the Pascals.
Whatever arrangement they built runs outside NOPD's official channels, because from what I've gathered, Andy is working a case he was never fully authorized to pursue and the resources backing him up answer to Margot rather than the City of New Orleans.
None of that knowledge helps me now. The bartender reads people and the burglar reads rooms, and both skills are useless when the operation goes live and the civilian who provided the intelligence gets left behind with a laptop and an overactive imagination.
My phone sits on the table. It hasn't buzzed in over an hour. The last text from Andy was two words: Moving forward. The one before that was from Remy, a check-in disguised as a logistics question, which was his way of confirming the detail was in place without making me feel surveilled.
I don't need anything from outside. I need to be inside whatever building Andy is standing in right now, watching the arrest, seeing Ridgewater's face when the warrant lands.
I need to be there when they seize the archive, when they pull the servers and hard drives and the footage that includes my face and my body and the private negotiations I had with men I trusted in rooms I believed were safe.
Instead I'm in a Craftsman in Mid-City, pacing his kitchen and trying to work on the seasonal drink menus that Terrence has been covering in my absence, and the concentration required to care about shrub ratios while someone is executing a federal warrant on the man who sold my privacy to strangers is so far beyond what I can manage today that the laptop screen might as well be blank.
I close the computer. I stand at the kitchen window.
I sit back down. I pick up my phone, check for messages, find none, set it down.
The waiting is a physical thing, a crawling restlessness that lives in my hands and the back of my neck and the space between my shoulder blades where the tension has been settling for weeks.
The house holds still around me, and the stillness is the worst part, because in the stillness I can hear every creak of a floor I've memorized by accident and every shift of the air conditioning that I learned to distinguish from footsteps during the early, sleepless nights when the guest room walls felt too thin and the steps between his door and mine felt too short.
My phone buzzes in the late afternoon. Andy's name on the screen sends a kick through my ribs that I don't bother pretending is anything other than relief.
On my way back. We got him.
It’s one of the shortest messages he's ever sent me, but the weight it lifts is physical, a pressure releasing from across my shoulders and down through my spine that I didn't realize I'd been holding because I'd been holding it so long it started to feel like posture.
I read the text twice. I set the phone down. I pick it up and read it again.
We got him.
The front door opens less than an hour later, and the man who walks through it looks like he's been running on adrenaline and bad coffee for most of the day.
Andy's sleeves are rolled to the elbow, his tie is gone, and the leather of his holster sits visible against his rumpled shirt in a way that tells me he stopped caring about concealment long before he got in the car to come home.
He drops his keys on the counter and stands in the kitchen doorway, and the exhaustion in his face is real, but underneath it, running through the fatigue like a current through deep water, is the controlled energy of someone who spent the day hunting and caught what he was after.
His gaze finds me at the table, and it stays a beat longer than the doorway requires.
The look doesn't move across my face. It moves down, tracking the borrowed shirt and my bare legs and the bare feet I've been padding through his house in all day, and the inventory is slow and thorough and entirely deliberate.
The detective walked through that door. The man is looking at me now.
"You're staring, Broussard."
"You're wearing my shirt."
"Your shirt is the only clean option in this house, because your laundry system is as incompetent as your pantry." I push the chair across from me out with my foot. "Sit down before you fall down. You look like you fought the federal government and the federal government won."
"The federal government and I came to an arrangement.
" He takes the chair, forearms on the table, hands loose.
The proximity is immediate. The table is small, and it gets smaller every day, and he's close enough that I can see the shadow of stubble along his jaw and smell cedar and gun leather and the particular scent of a man who has been working hard in the Louisiana heat.
"Ridgewater is in federal custody. Locke's team executed the warrant on his Metairie rental and seized his equipment, servers and hard drives and external storage. The Bureau's forensics unit has it now."
"What about the footage?"
"The initial assessment found a large archive. The files are organized by date and location, and it's going to take time to catalogue the full scope, but what they've seen so far is consistent with footage from Dominion's private rooms."
The nausea that rises is sharp and specific. I swallow it down because vomiting on Andy's table won't change what Ridgewater built, and the information matters more than the feeling. "What about the blackmail operation?"
"Financial records link him to the shell company that received Lawrence's payments.
The brokerage firm in Florida was receiving content from the same accounts.
Locke thinks the distribution side will net additional charges once they trace the buyer network.
" He rubs a hand across the back of his neck.
"There's enough to hold him on the footage theft and distribution.
The connection to the murders is circumstantial right now.
The forensics team is pulling location data from his devices.
If his phone puts him at any of the parking garages on the nights of the killings, the circumstantial becomes prosecutable. "
"So it's not over."