Chapter 17
ANDY
The week after Patricia Moreau's arrest passes in the slow grind of paperwork, federal coordination, and the particular quiet of a precinct that knows one of its detectives is waiting for the axe to fall.
I spend the days catching up on the caseload Fontenot carried while I was running a shadow investigation, writing supplementals, returning calls.
The nights are worse. My house smells like cedar and nothing else, the second coffee mug is back in the cabinet, and the guest room door stays open on a room that holds the faint impression of a woman who folded the sheets before she left.
Renata went home to her apartment a few days after the debrief.
She didn't ask me to drive her. She called a cab while I was in the shower, left my spare key on the kitchen counter beside a note that read your dish towels are terrible, buy new ones, and was gone by the time I walked into the kitchen with wet hair and the wrong number of coffee mugs in my hands.
That was days ago. The IA review has been grinding through channels since the morning after the arrest, and Hebert's assistant called at eight to tell me the captain wants to see me at ten.
Hebert's office door is closed, which means the conversation has already been decided and the meeting is a formality.
I sit in the chair across from his desk and wait while he finishes reading from a file I recognize by the tab color as Internal Affairs.
The reading glasses are on his nose instead of pushed up on his forehead, so he's been reviewing the material for a while and hasn't bothered to perform the casual removal that usually accompanies my visits.
He's past staging body language for my benefit. He's delivering a verdict.
The office smells like the same burnt coffee that permeates the entire floor, stale and over brewed, the air of a room where a man has spent his morning reading about the professional failures of another man he respects enough to call in rather than send paperwork.
"Close the door behind you." He says it without looking up from the file.
"It's closed."
"Good." He turns a page. He reads another paragraph, then sets the file down and removes the glasses, folding them with the slow care that means each second of silence is calibrated.
"The Bureau's formal letter of commendation arrived yesterday.
Apparently NOPD's cooperation on the Moreau arrest was exemplary.
Agent Locke used that word specifically. Exemplary."
"I'll send him a thank-you card."
"You'll sit there and listen." Hebert opens a second file.
"Internal Affairs completed their review this morning.
I'm going to read you the summary, and then I'm going to tell you what happens next, and then you're going to walk out of this office and go back to work.
Those are the three things that are going to happen in this room. Are we clear?"
"Yes, sir."
"Detective Andrew Broussard conducted an unauthorized parallel investigation into multiple homicides connected to Dominion, a private club in the Warehouse District, over a period of several weeks.
This investigation was conducted without departmental authorization.
It involved coordination with a private security firm, Rapier Strategic, that had no official standing in an NOPD case.
It also included the use of federal resources obtained through channels that bypassed standard interdepartmental protocols.
" He glances up over the file. "I'm paraphrasing. "
"I gathered."
"Detective Broussard also housed a material witness in his personal residence for an extended period rather than placing her in departmental witness housing.
This witness, a bartender employed at the club in question, served as an informal confidential informant without formal CI registration.
Detective Broussard's personal membership at the club creates an additional conflict of interest that was not disclosed during the investigation.
" He closes the file. "That's the summary. Here's what happens next."
I wait. The coffee on his desk has stopped steaming. He poured it and forgot about it or poured it and chose not to drink it. Either way, the cold mug sits between us like a timer that already ran out.
"The Bureau's solve gives you cover. Four homicides closed, a confession on a federal wire, and a letter from the field office that makes you look like a hero instead of a cowboy.
Internal Affairs reviewed the file and concluded that your methods, while irregular, produced results that justified the deviation from protocol.
" He pauses long enough for the next word to carry its full freight. "Barely."
"Understood."
"A formal reprimand goes in your jacket.
It stays there. If you apply for promotion, it comes up.
If you transfer, it follows. If you do anything in the next two years that gives IA a reason to reopen this review, the reprimand becomes the foundation of a case that ends your career.
" He leans back. The chair creaks in the register I've been hearing since I first sat in this office as a junior detective.
"That's your one free pass, Andy. I've been doing this long enough to know what a good detective looks like when he's running hot.
You ran hot. It worked. It will not work twice. "
The use of my first name is the tell. Hebert calls me Broussard when I'm a detective under his command. He calls me Andy when he's talking to me as a man who has watched my career from the beginning and intends to watch it continue.
"I understand, Captain."
"Do you." He picks up the cold coffee, looks at it, and sets it back down. "The Dominion membership. You know that's going to sit in your file alongside the reprimand, and you know what it looks like."
"It looks like a conflict of interest."
"It looks like a detective who belongs to the same club where four of his victims were members.
It looks like a man who was already inside the community he was investigating, who had personal relationships with potential witnesses, and who chose not to disclose any of that when the case landed on his desk.
" He holds my gaze. "I'm not asking about your personal life.
I'm telling you what the file says, and what anyone who reads that file is going to think. "
"What they should think is that my membership is the reason we caught a serial killer.
Without my access to that community, without the trust I'd built inside those walls, NOPD doesn't get a witness, doesn't get a CI, and doesn't get a joint operation with the Bureau.
Renata St. Clair talked to me because she knew me.
Margot Pascal cooperated because she knew me.
The membership isn't a liability in that file, Captain. It's the reason the file exists."
Hebert lets the argument land. He doesn't dismiss it and he doesn't concede it. He lets it sit in the room with the weight it deserves, and then he sets it aside with the practiced efficiency of a man who has spent decades separating what's true from what's useful.
"You're right. And when someone reads that file, they won't see the solve. They'll see the conflict." He puts his glasses back on. "That's not fair. It's not wrong either. Welcome to the part of the job they don't teach at the academy."
The file says what it says. The truth is more complicated, the way truth always is when a case crosses into territory where the badge and the man wearing it stop occupying separate space.
I joined Dominion before Lawrence Blanchard's name existed in any case file.
I walked on the main floor as a member long before I walked it as a detective, and the knowledge I carried from one role into the other is the reason the case got solved and the reason my jacket now holds a reprimand that will shadow every professional step I take.
I would make every one of those choices again. Hebert knows it. The fact that he's telling me this instead of handing me to IA tells me he'd have made most of them too.
"Anything else, sir?"
"Yeah." He stands, and the formal portion is over.
"Go do your job. You've got active cases that need attention, and Fontenot's been carrying your share of the caseload for long enough that he's starting to complain, which for Fontenot means he mentioned it once in passing.
That's the equivalent of anyone else filing a grievance. "
I leave Hebert's office and close the door behind me.
The bullpen is half-empty in the late-morning lull, desks occupied by detectives doing the steady, unglamorous work of cases that proceed through channels and follow protocol and produce results that don't require letters of commendation from federal agencies.
Fontenot is at his desk. He watches me cross the room and sit down, his expression carrying the studied blankness of a partner who has been covering my cases without complaint and is now assessing whether the covering is over.
"Still employed?" he asks.
"For now."
"Good. I've got a witness who won't return my calls and the DA wants a supplemental by the end of the day. Welcome back to the real world."
He slides a case file across the desk. The gesture is as close to solidarity as Fontenot gets, the professional equivalent of the coffee he left on my desk weeks ago when the investigation was running me ragged and he chose not to ask why.
He doesn't need to know the details. He needs his partner back at his desk doing the work, and the file he's handing me is both a task and a peace offering.
I take it and spend the next two hours doing the job I nearly lost. The witness answers on the third try.
The DA gets her supplemental. The work is clean and procedural and occupies enough of my attention to keep the rest of it from circling back to a woman in the Irish Channel who sent me one text,