Chapter 12 #2
My hand tightens around the phone hard enough that the case creaks.
Four people are dead. Four members of a club I walk through every week, people I've sat beside and shared a bar with, and the man who killed them has decided they deserved it and is now advertising that conviction to anyone who finds the body.
The words rewrite everything I thought I understood about this case.
The financial angle, the blackmail connection, the assumption that the murders were tied to the footage distribution: all of it was the wrong frame.
The killer isn't covering tracks or eliminating witnesses.
The killer is making a statement. A puritan with a gun and access to Dominion's membership information, killing people he's decided are sinners, and the note doesn't distinguish between Doms and submissives.
It condemns the entire club. Anyone on the membership list is a potential target, and the escalation from silent executions to written manifestos means the quiet wasn't enough anymore.
He wants them to know why.
"Has the scene been processed?"
"NOPD crime scene unit is on site. I've got an operative observing from the perimeter, and Margot's already been notified." Remy pauses. "Andy, this changes the threat profile for everyone on the membership list. Including Renata."
The words hit the part of me that stopped being professional weeks ago, the part that tracks her footsteps in my hallway and counts the twelve steps between our doors and kissed her last night with the focused intention of a man who has decided what he wants and isn't interested in pretending otherwise.
"I know."
I get dressed and strap on the holster and stand in the hallway for a beat that lasts longer than it should.
Hebert's warning is barely hours old. Sophie Marchand is connected to the Landry case by method, location type, and Dominion membership, which gives me enough of a thread to justify responding.
The justification is thin, and Hebert will see through it, and the conversation that follows will involve Internal Affairs and paperwork and the end of a career I've spent years building.
I drive to the scene anyway, because four people are dead and the woman in my kitchen is on the same list and my badge isn't worth more than her life.
The parking garage is a commercial structure near Magazine Street. Sophie Marchand's car sits on the second level with the driver's door open and the interior light still on, and the crime scene tape marks a perimeter that I cross with my badge out and my notebook ready.
Sophie was an art gallery owner. Submissive.
Dominion member. Her body tells the same story as Susan's: professional execution, close range, a killer who understood sight lines and camera coverage and the specific window when a parking garage empties between the dinner crowd and the overnight security rotation.
The note is in an evidence bag when I see it.
White card stock, clean block letters, no fingerprints visible to the naked eye.
DOMINION'S WHORES. The handwriting is controlled, deliberate, the letters sized and spaced with a precision that speaks to someone who took time with the message rather than scrawling it in haste.
I stare at it long enough for the crime scene tech to ask if I need a copy, and the anger that passes through me is cold and specific and aimed at a man I haven't identified yet whose hands I intend to put in cuffs if he's lucky and in the ground if he isn't.
I leave the garage with Sophie's crime scene photographs and the card-stock note imprinted behind my eyes, and by afternoon I'm sitting across from Margot in her office above Dominion's main floor, the door closed and the ambient noise of the empty club filtering up through the floorboards.
"Even with Ridgewater arrested, someone is still accessing membership records," Margot says.
She sits behind her desk with the controlled composure that I've learned covers a mind working several steps ahead of the conversation.
"The channels Ridgewater used are shut down.
His access to Dominion's systems ended when I fired him.
Whatever he built afterward was his own infrastructure, and the FBI has it now. This is different."
"Different how?"
"The information the killer is using, the members he's targeting, their schedules, their parking habits, which nights they attend: none of that was in Ridgewater's archive.
The footage captured what happened inside the private rooms. It didn't capture attendance patterns or personal routines.
" Margot folds her hands on the desk. "Someone is accessing current membership information through channels that existed before Ridgewater and still function without him. "
The implication connects to what Locke told me this morning.
Armand's unidentified partner, the person who copied the footage before Luc destroyed the cameras, the ghost in the server architecture: that person had access to Dominion from the inside.
Deep enough access to know the layout, the protocols, the membership database.
"I need your membership records," I say. "Complete. Every member who's attended in the past year, their attendance patterns, their scene histories, their emergency contacts."
"You'll have them within the hour." Margot doesn't hesitate. "What else?"
"A conversation with your staff. Specifically anyone who had access to the booking system and the private room schedules during the period when the cameras were active."
"I'll arrange it."
I drive back to the house with Sophie Marchand's crime scene photographs in a folder on the passenger seat and the note replaying in my head with the frequency of a threat aimed at someone I'm not willing to lose.
Renata is at the kitchen table when I come through the door. She reads my face the way she reads a room, fast and thorough, the assessment complete before I've set down my keys.
Her laptop is open and her coffee sits untouched, no steam rising from the mug.
The borrowed shirt has slipped off the same shoulder it slipped off this morning, and my hands want to touch the skin there and my mouth wants to follow.
I set the car keys on the counter instead and deliver the next name on a list that keeps getting longer.
"Who?" she asks.
"Sophie Marchand. Art gallery owner. Dominion member."
The color leaves her face in a slow drain. Her hands go flat on the table, the same gesture I use when I need the surface to hold what my body can't, and for a second the bartender and the detective mirror each other across the kitchen.
"Sophie orders a C?tes du Rh?ne, the same vineyard every time, and she gets annoyed if we run out because she says the backup tastes like 'ambition without follow-through.
'" Renata's voice is even but her knuckles are white on the table's edge.
"She brought bottles of champagne for the bar staff at the end of last year and tipped Terrence so well he talked about it for a month.
She's one of the ones who makes the place feel like it actually matters, not just a club but a community. "
The grief is there, buried under the precision of the details, the bartender's inventory of a woman who won't walk through the door again. She processes loss the way she processes everything else, by cataloging what she knew and holding it up to the light.
"He left a note this time," I tell her. "At the scene, in her pocket. Two words."
I don't make her ask. "Dominion's whores."
Her jaw tightens. The white-knuckled grip on the table's edge shifts into something different, something harder, and the woman who looks up at me is the one who broke into Lawrence Blanchard's study and memorized a dead man's secrets in the dark.
The grief is still there, but the calculating intelligence that lives alongside it has moved to the front.
"He's not covering tracks," she says. "He believes he's cleaning house."
"A crusader. Someone who sees Dominion as corruption and the members as complicit."
"And he's escalating. Four kills and now a manifesto.
" She pushes back from the table and stands, and the motion carries the coiled energy of a woman who has been sitting in this kitchen for weeks watching other people die.
She crosses to the counter, pours coffee she won't drink, and turns to face me with her arms folded and her chin set at the angle that precedes the arguments I've learned to brace for.
"Put me on the floor, Andy. Club night. Let him see me. "
"No."
"I'm already on his list. Every day I spend in this kitchen is a day he picks the terms instead of us.
" She holds my gaze with the steady, unflinching directness that makes her impossible to dismiss and dangerous to underestimate.
"You've got four bodies and a manifesto and a killer who's getting comfortable.
I can give you a target he can't resist walking toward. "
"I said no." My voice drops into a register that would end the conversation with anyone else. The refusal is professional on the surface and personal underneath, and the personal part is louder than I want it to be, hearing her offer herself as a lure for a killer who operates in parking garages.
"It's not your choice."
"The hell it isn't."
"My body. My risk. My decision." She tips her chin up, and the defiance in it is beautiful and infuriating and aimed directly at the part of me that wants to lock her in this house and stand between her and every threat that exists outside it.
"I'm tired of sitting at this table waiting for you to come home with another name.
Sophie's was one too many. Put me to work or I'll put myself to work, and we both know which version is safer. "