Chapter 12
ANDY
The call from Locke comes at six in the morning, and the news it carries lands in two pieces that don't fit together the way I need them to.
Ridgewater is talking. The footage theft, the shell company, the brokerage firm in Florida, the financial pipeline that turned Dominion's private rooms into a distribution network: he's given it all up in exchange for whatever deal his lawyer negotiated overnight.
He sold the footage, he built the archive, he ran the operation from his rental in Metairie with equipment he'd been accumulating since Margot fired him.
The confession is detailed and verifiable and it closes the federal case with the kind of clean resolution that makes prosecutors smile.
He didn't kill anyone.
Locke lays out the alibis with the dispassionate efficiency of a man delivering bad news he's already processed.
Ridgewater was in Biloxi the night Lawrence disappeared, attending a tech conference with timestamped check-ins, hotel records, and security footage from the convention center.
For Susan Landry's murder, his cell tower data puts him in Houston.
For Thomas, he was in a holding cell in Kenner on a DUI that his lawyer got dismissed the following morning.
The alibis are airtight, cross-verified, and each one drives another nail into the theory I've been building for weeks.
"There's another piece," Locke says, and the pause before he continues tells me this one will cost more than the rest. "Ridgewater may not have planted the cameras, but he acquired the footage from a source he communicated with through encrypted channels.
He says he never met the source in person.
The account traces back to a server that Armand Deveraux's operation used during the Simone LaCroix case. "
I sit with that. Armand is in federal custody, awaiting trial on the conspiracy charges.
The cameras were Julien LaSalle's work. Luc Pascal found and destroyed them during a security sweep.
The footage survived because someone copied it before the hardware was pulled, and that someone funneled it to Ridgewater for distribution.
"Armand had a partner," I say.
"That's what the digital trail suggests.
Someone with access to the original footage, someone who maintained a copy after the cameras were destroyed.
Ridgewater dealt with a middleman. The middleman dealt with someone who had direct access to the source material.
" Locke's voice carries the measured care of a man building a case he can't yet close.
"We're tracing the server architecture, but whoever set it up knew what they were doing.
The identity behind the original account is still unresolved. "
I hang up and stand at the kitchen window while the coffee maker runs its cycle. My hands press flat against the counter, and the pressure is the only thing keeping them from doing something less productive, like putting a fist through the cabinet.
I've spent weeks building toward Ridgewater, threading the investigation through legal loopholes and unauthorized channels at a professional cost that ends careers, and the man who was supposed to be at the center of it all is a middleman with airtight alibis and a lawyer who got him a deal.
Renata's door is still closed. She went to bed after the kiss, after the conversation about birth control and testing that she tried to deflect with humor and I refused to let her, and the hallway between my door and hers held the particular quiet of two people who chose distance over the alternative.
I can still feel the shape of her mouth against mine and the grip of her fist in my shirt and the sound she made when I took the kiss from her and made it mine.
The memory sits alongside the wreckage of my case with the particular cruelty of a man whose best night and worst morning arrived in the same twelve-hour window.
The killer is someone else entirely, someone using the same membership information through a channel that Ridgewater didn't control and can't identify.
The body count is three—if you include Lawrence Blanchard—and the suspect list is empty.
My phone rings before the coffee finishes. Hebert. The captain's voice carries the measured calm of a man who has reached the end of his patience and is delivering the consequences without raising his voice.
"The FBI field office called me this morning, Broussard.
They wanted to thank me for NOPD's cooperation on the Ridgewater arrest." He lets the silence sit long enough for the implication to settle.
"An arrest I didn't authorize, on a case I didn't know you were running, using resources I never approved, in coordination with a private security firm that has no business inside an NOPD investigation. "
"Captain, the Landry warrant gave me the thread. I followed it."
"You followed it off a cliff. You're running a shadow investigation with a private firm, leveraging federal resources without departmental clearance, and housing a material witness in your personal residence.
That's not following a thread. That's building a parallel operation, and if Internal Affairs gets wind of it, I can't protect you. "
"Susan Landry is still my case."
"Susan Landry is your case. Lawrence Blanchard is not.
Thomas Arceneaux is not. Whatever pattern you think you're chasing, you do it through channels or you don't do it at all.
" The pause is final. "Your badge is on the line.
I'm telling you that as a courtesy, because the next person who tells you will be holding paperwork. "
The call ends. I pour coffee and drink it standing at the counter while the taste of it barely registers.
The badge has been the architecture of my life for over a decade, the structure that holds every choice I make in place, and Hebert just told me the structure is cracking and the cracks are my fault.
He's right. The shadow investigation, the unauthorized coordination with Rapier Strategic, the woman sleeping in my guest room who should be in witness housing under departmental oversight: every one of those choices was mine, and every one of them was the right call for the case and the wrong call for my career.
I'd make every one of them again. That certainty sits in my gut beside the coffee and doesn't taste like conflict. It tastes like a line I already crossed.
Down the hall, the guest room door opens. Renata's feet on the hardwood, the sound I've memorized the way I memorize evidence, filed alongside her drink orders and her deflections and the exact pitch of her voice when the bravado drops and the real woman speaks.
She appears in the kitchen doorway wearing my shirt and sleep shorts and the half-awake expression of someone who slept badly and is reaching for caffeine before she reaches for composure.
The shirt has slipped off one shoulder, and the bare skin there catches the morning light, and my hands tighten around the coffee mug because the alternative is crossing the kitchen and finding out if her skin is as warm as it looks.
"You're brooding," she says, pulling a mug from the cabinet she reorganized. "I can hear you brooding through the wall. The brooding has a frequency."
"Ridgewater didn't kill anyone. Airtight alibis for every murder."
She stops mid-pour. The coffee hovers over the rim of the mug, and I watch her process the information the way she processes everything, fast and thorough, the implications landing in sequence behind her eyes.
"So the lead we burned your career for just went up in smoke."
"That's the short version."
"And the long version?"
"Armand had a partner. Someone who copied the footage before Luc destroyed the cameras and built a pipeline that's still operational.
The FBI is tracing the server architecture.
The identity is unresolved." I take a drink.
"Hebert called. The FBI thanked him for my cooperation on an arrest he didn't authorize. My badge is on the table."
She finishes the pour, takes a sip, and leans against the counter across from me.
The distance between us is the width of the kitchen, and the morning light fills it with the warm amber that belongs to this house and this woman and the domestic proximity that will end my career if I'm lucky and get her killed if I'm not.
"So you're standing in your kitchen with a dead investigation and a captain who wants your badge, and you look like you're about to put on your holster and go do it anyway."
"I am about to put on my holster and go do it anyway."
"Good." She raises the mug. "Your coffee ratio is still wrong, by the way. I fixed it again yesterday."
The morning is three hours old when Remy calls, and the anger that has been coiling at the base of my spine since Locke's call finds a new target.
"Sophie Marchand," he says, and the flatness in his voice tells me everything before the details arrive. "Found an hour ago. Parking garage near the Arts District."
The name catches. Sophie Marchand. I cross-reference it against the contact list from Susan Landry's social circle, the one Renata helped me build during the midnight session at this table with her shoulder close enough to mine that I could smell citrus in her hair while I wrote.
Genevieve Marchand was on Susan's list, a Dominion regular who Renata identified by drink order and scene history.
Sophie and Genevieve share a surname that could be coincidence but probably isn't.
"Same method?" I ask.
"Single gunshot, close range. The scene was clean, but he didn't have time to finish the job. A security patrol interrupted the cleanup." Remy's voice tightens. "He left a note. Written on card stock, tucked into her jacket pocket."
"What does it say?"
"Two words. Dominion's whores."