Chapter 15
ANDY
The staircase is narrow, and I take it two treads at a time with my weapon drawn and Locke's voice in my earpiece telling me the FBI team is thirty seconds behind me.
Thirty seconds is too long.
Renata said my name into the wire moments ago, the two syllables coming through the feed with the forced calm of a woman who has trained herself to perform under pressure and is now performing for an audience that includes the man she slept with last night and a roomful of federal agents she's never met.
I heard her tell Terrence she needed a minute, heard the shift in the ambient noise as she left the main floor, heard her footsteps on the carpet in the upper hallway, and I was out of the chair and moving before Locke finished telling me to hold position.
I didn't hold. The instruction registered and my legs kept moving, because the distance between the monitoring station and the second floor is a gap that procedures can't close fast enough when the woman on the other end of the wire just walked into something that made her reach out for me first.
The upper hallway seems too long and room seven, the last door on the left, is closed.
Renata's voice through the wire is controlled and level, carrying the rhythm she uses behind the bar when a patron crosses a line and she's managing the situation before it requires intervention.
The other voice, muffled through the door, is female, and I can't make out the words, but the cadence is wrong, too fast, too pressured, the pattern of someone whose composure is unraveling at the seams.
Locke's voice crackles in my ear. "Broussard, hold at the door. Team's on the stairs."
I hold. My back stays against the wall beside the doorframe, my weapon up, my breathing controlled, while Renata is on the other side of a door with someone who has killed four people and left a note calling them whores.
The discipline required to wait is the worst kind, the kind that demands I trust the woman inside to stay alive for the handful of seconds it takes for backup to clear the stairwell.
The female voice rises. The words sharpen into fragments I can catch through the door: sin and punishment and filth, and the conviction in the delivery carries a zealotry that rewrites the profile. This isn’t someone with a financial grudge. The killer is a woman on a crusade.
The gunshot splits the air.
The sound punches through the door and the wall and every protocol I've ever followed. I don't wait for Locke. I don't wait for the team on the stairs. My hand drops to the handle. It turns. The door swings inward and I clear the threshold with my weapon up and my sight line sweeping the room.
The gun is on the floor. Renata is on her feet with her hands up, palms open, and the dark-haired woman facing her is reaching into the pocket of her coat. The bullet went into the ceiling. The plaster dust is still settling.
What comes out of the pocket is a folding knife.
The blade locks open with a click that carries across the room, and she lunges before I can close the distance.
The blade catches Renata's left forearm in a slash that opens the skin from elbow to wrist, and Renata's reaction is sharp and involuntary, bitten off before it can become a scream.
The clipped control of it hits me in a place the gunshot didn't reach.
I bring my weapon up and the sight finds the woman's center mass, and then Renata is moving into her instead of away, closing the distance the way someone does when they understand that proximity is the only defense against a blade, and my sight line disappears.
They're too close. The knife arm is trapped between their bodies and Renata has her attacker by the wrist with her injured hand, blood running down her forearm and onto both of them, and the angle gives me nothing clean.
. Each fraction of movement shifts the geometry, and the training that tells me to fire when the target is clear is fighting the reality that clear won't exist while Renata is tangled with her.
The woman twists. She's strong, stronger than her frame suggests, and the knife rotates in her grip as she tries to free the blade. Renata's hold on the woman’s wrist slips in the blood, and for a beat that lasts longer than physics should allow, the point of the knife turns toward Renata's ribs.
Renata doesn't execute a technique. She fights the way someone fights who learned early that losing means worse than bruises: ugly, close, using her weight and her hips and the momentum of the lunge to drive the woman off-balance.
She hooks a leg behind the knee and shoves, and they go down together, Renata landing on top with one forearm jammed against the collarbone and the other hand still gripping the knife wrist, grinding it against the floor until the fingers open and the blade skitters free.
The hold is raw and graceless and it works because Renata is younger and more desperate and has spent her life reading the geometry of enclosed spaces with the instinct of a woman who knows what it means to be trapped.
The woman bucks underneath Renata, her nails clawing at the bleeding arm and leaving white tracks across the red, and what comes out of her is half scream and half sob.
I'm on them in two strides. My weapon goes into the holster and the cuffs come out, and the transition between armed response and arrest is muscle memory that doesn't require thought.
I take the wrists from Renata's grip, one at a time, pulling the arms behind her back while Renata holds the pin until the cuffs click and I tell her she can let go.
Renata releases. She rolls off and sits on the floor with her back against the leather chair, her injured arm cradled against her stomach. The blood has soaked through her sleeve and is dripping from her fingertips. She doesn't make a sound. The restraint in that silence is louder than the gunshot.
The face that turns toward me as the woman writhes against the cuffs is one I recognize. It belongs to Patricia Moreau.
I first heard her name on the comm channel the night the Bureau traced Julien LaSalle's signal to that decoy warehouse.
Simone named her as a rival, someone who wanted her job and had the operational expertise to hire contractors.
Luc told me to pull her information and financials.
I did, and what I found went to the Bureau alongside the other threads I was running.
The financials flagged unusual patterns.
The Bureau was still working the analysis when we shifted to the bait operation.
She's the gap, the partner with direct access to the original footage, the middleman Ridgewater communicated with through encrypted channels.
"You don't understand.” Patricia’s voice is raw and cracked and threaded with a conviction that hasn't broken under the cuffs or the blood or the federal agents now filling the doorway behind me.
"They're all complicit. All of them. They come here and they perform their filth, and no one, no one holds them accountable. "
"Patricia Moreau, you're under arrest." The Miranda rights come out of my mouth in the order I learned them and have delivered hundreds of times, and the procedural language feels inadequate against the scope of what she's done, but the law doesn't care about scope.
The law cares about rights and evidence and the chain of custody that starts the moment the cuffs close.
She isn't listening. Her words tumble over each other, cycling and repeating, the pressured speech of a woman who has been building this sermon for months and can't stop delivering it now that she has an audience.
"Armand showed me. He showed me the footage and I saw what this place really is.
What they do to each other." She pulls against the cuffs, her face contorting.
"Lawrence begged. He begged me to stop. As if money could wash it away.
As if, as if he could just pay and keep doing what he was doing in these rooms." Her breathing hitches and the words fragment further.
"Susan ran. Coward. She thought she could leave and I wouldn't find her.
Thomas didn't even see me coming. Sophie fought.
Sophie fought and I respected that, but she was still, they were all still—"
The confession is live. Renata's wire is still transmitting from beneath her bloody shirt, and Locke's team is recording it all. I don't interrupt. I don't ask questions. I let her talk, because each unprompted word is a word the defense can't suppress.
Two FBI agents move past me to take custody.
One of them kneels beside Patricia and begins the transfer, and I step back to give them room because the scene belongs to the Bureau now and my badge belongs to NOPD and the jurisdictional lines that got blurred during this operation are about to get very clear under the fluorescent lights of a federal booking facility.
Patricia's voice carries as they lift her to her feet, still looping, still cycling through justifications that repeat and tangle and restart.
Her voice fades with distance down the hallway, and the room settles into the particular quiet that follows violence: the ringing aftermath, the displaced air, the smell of gunpowder and copper and the chemical sweetness of fresh blood on the floor.
I cross the room to Renata, and the badge stops mattering before I cover half the distance.
"Let me see."
She pulls her arm tighter against her stomach instead of extending it. The blood has soaked through her sleeve from elbow to wrist, and the stubborn set of her jaw tells me she'd rather bleed on Margot's carpet than admit to pain in front of the FBI.