Cordelia made coffee at four in the morning and sat at the kitchen table with Philippe's folder spread open beside Renée's file and a fresh legal pad, and she worked. It was the only thing that reliably quieted the part of her brain that refused to stay professional about what had happened against her wall. Work had gotten her through worse. Work would get her through this.
The holding account Broussard's shell companies routed through turned up a name she didn't recognize: Veillard Holdings. Registered in Delaware, as shell companies always were when someone wanted the question of who owned what to go unanswered. The registered agent was a law firm. The law firm's listed clients were not public record.
She wrote Veillard at the top of a fresh page and drew a line down from it.
At six she called in a favour from a records clerk she'd helped out of a parking situation three months ago and asked him to pull anything he could find on Veillard Holdings without running it through official channels. He said he'd have something by noon. She thanked him and hung up and made more coffee.
She needed to go back to the archive.
Renée received her with the neutral efficiency that was becoming familiar. "He's resting," Renée said, before Cordelia could ask.
"I wasn't going to ask."
Renée looked at her. "No," she said, after a moment. "I suppose you weren't."
The archive was as she'd left it. Cool, dry, the reading lamp waiting with its adjustable arm. She put on the cotton gloves and went to the ledgers from the 1910s, where she'd found a reference the day before to properties in the Garden District changing hands under circumstances she wanted to trace forward. What she found instead, forty minutes in, was a photograph.
It was tucked inside a ledger from 1923, which was not where photographs were supposed to live, which meant either it had been misfiled or it had been placed there deliberately. She'd stopped assuming coincidence around day three of knowing Louis Saint-Clair.
A garden party. The rear grounds of 14 Rue Dauphine, recognizable by the iron fountain, overgrown then as now. A group of people in the clothes of the era, soft-focus and formal in the way of photographs from that decade. Most of the faces were turned away or indistinct.
One wasn't.
A woman near the fountain. Dark hair. The angle of her head as she looked toward something outside the frame — slightly tilted, the quality of someone listening. Cordelia held the photograph under the lamp and looked at it for a long time.
She put it back exactly where she'd found it. Sat still for a moment. Then she pulled the ledger she'd originally come for and kept working, because that was what you did when the evidence became personal. You kept working.
She cross-referenced the properties against the victim files from the original four murders. What emerged was a pattern she hadn't had the full picture for before — each of the victims connected to a woman who had quietly disappeared from the record in the preceding year. Dark-haired women, all of them. Young. Attached, however loosely, to Louis's properties or his social orbit.
She found four of them. And then a fifth, from the 1920s, attached to a name.
Marguerite.
No surname recorded. Just the first name in a journal entry from 1924, in the same controlled hand she knew.
M. asked me again about the portrait. I told her it was a great-aunt. She accepted this. She has a quality of acceptance that I find — I find it more difficult each time. I am going to leave before I cannot. I have been saying this for three months.
The next entry was dated six weeks later. Two words.
She left.
No — she looked again. The handwriting was different at the end. Thicker. Pressed harder into the page.
I left.
He had corrected himself. She left, then struck it, then wrote the truth.
Cordelia set the journal down.
Cordelia could see it now. A pattern of proximity and retreat — women who looked like Élise, who made it close enough to matter, and then an exit. Sometimes his. Sometimes hers. Sometimes something that had gone wrong in the space between.
The four dead men had been connected to women. Those women had disappeared. She didn't know yet whether they'd been harmed or simply removed from his proximity by some less permanent means, but she knew the thread existed and she was going to pull it. Cordelia was also, and this was the part she filed without examining, somewhere in this pattern herself.
She left the archive at dusk.
Later than she'd meant to — the research had a gravity to it, kept pulling her back to cross-reference one more thing. The streets were thinning in the way they thinned at the threshold between the city's two lives, the tourists retreating and the dark settling into the alleys with the comfortable ease of something that had always been there.
She was two blocks from her apartment when she smelled it. Cordelia has been at crime scenes in summer heat, had stood in rooms where things had been dead for days and learned to breathe through her mouth and keep her face neutral and do her job. She knew what death smelled like.
This was that, and wrong underneath it — organic and persisting, the smell of a thing that was past the point of dying and had kept going anyway. Her hand went to her holster the reflex was clean and automatic. Eyes and mind at high alert.
The alley to her left was dark. She looked at it without turning her head, the peripheral scan meant to make look like nothing. She saw nothing but the smell was stronger.
Cordelia he kept walking. Measured pace. Don't run ,she told herself.
It came out of the alley behind her. Cordelia quickly turned and fired in the same motion, two rounds, centre mass. It staggered but it did not stop. Up close it was worse than the smell had prepared her for — the shape of a person but wrong in every proportion that mattered, the eyes without anything behind them that she could recognise as intent, the hunger in it so far past what she'd seen in Louis's face that they barely shared a name.
Cordelia ran.
It was faster.
She made it half a block. She had her phone in her hand, no idea who she was calling, when something moved at the far end of the street — a figure stepping out of the dark with purposefulness that was different from the creature behind her, different and familiar.
It was Louis. And what Cordelia experienced after would haunt her for the rest of her days. Louis had none of his elegance to him nor his centuries of management and discipline Cordelia had come to associate with him. Louis destroyed the creature in the alley like he had been doing this for a very long time and felt nothing about the necessity of it, and it was over before she'd fully processed that it had begun.
He suddenly turned, red eyes blazing. Cordelia was bleeding. Her forearm — a graze from the alley wall when she'd rounded the corner. It wasn't deep but Louis's eyes found it immediately.
Cordelia watched him hold himself still his discipline clamping back down from the outside in. His jaw was tight. His eyes moved from her arm to her face. "Don't," she said taking a step back. For the first time, Cordelia felt the fear she should have possessed when she met Louis.
"I know," he said. His voice was controlled again. Almost.
They looked at each other in the alley with the creature he'd destroyed behind him and her blood doing something she was now acutely aware of in the warm air between them.
"Can you walk?" he asked.
"I can walk."
He fell into step beside her. He didn't touch her but Cordelia kept her gun close by afraid of what he might do if he did.
Louis sat in her armchair while she cleaned the wound at the kitchen sink. "The creature," she began. " What was it?"
Louis eyes found hers, "A pathetic imitation. Locals call it a ghoul. " he scoffed, "I call them blights to proper beings like myself."
As if, Cordelia thought. "Why did it targeted me specifically?"
A pause. "I don't know, mon cheri "
Cordelia bit back a grimace, "Don't call me that.". She ignored the heat on her cheeks caused by his comment. "I think whatever is creating them knows I'm connected to you." She pressed a clean cloth to the graze and held it. "Which means someone has been watching closely enough to know that."
"Yes," he said again. He was looking at her with the focused, unhurried attention of his. "I should have anticipated this."
"Should you have."
"You are — " he paused. Something moved through his expression that she didn't try to name. "You are not invisible to them. Not anymore."
She looked at him across the kitchen. The archive key on the table was between them, the chess piece beside it, the legal pad with Veillard at the top and the line going down.
"I found a photograph today," Cordelia said. "In the archive. A garden party. 1923."
Louis said nothing. face neutral but he twisted his ring.
"There was a woman by the fountain. I'd like to know her name."
The silence stretched.
"Marguerite," he said after some time with difficulty.
"What happened to her?"
"I left." He looked at his hands. The ring he was twisting. "Before I couldn't anymore."
"Is that what you do. When it gets close enough to matter."
"It was," he said. "What I did."
"And now?"
Louis stared down at the woman he had opened himself to while somewhere outside, the river was doing what it always did, indifferent and wide. "I find I am less certain," he said, "of my ability to leave."
Cordelia held the cloth to her arm and said nothing.
After a while he stood — one fluid motion. He crossed to the door then paused with his hand not quite touching the frame.
"The Veillard Holdings account," he said.
Cordelia went still. "How do you know about that."
"Because it's mine," he said. "Or it was. It was seized from me — a hostile acquisition, the legal paperwork appearing faster than should have been possible, two years ago. Someone knew enough about my finances to move against them through channels I couldn't easily contest." He paused. "I didn't know it was being used to route the shell company funds until now."
Cordelia's mind started going through its motions. Someone had taken Louis's own holding company and turned it into the financial infrastructure of the conspiracy against him. That required either extraordinary access or extraordinary patience.
Or both.
"Philippe gave me the document trail that led to Veillard," Cordelia said carefully.
Louis was very still. The room dropped several degrees. "He told me he found it in the city archives," she continued. "That he was helping with the investigation."
The room felt like ice now. "Did he," Louis drawled.
It wasn't a question.
Cordelia looked at the legal pad on her table to the name at the top and at the line she'd drawn going down with nothing yet written beneath it.
She picked up the pen. Wrote Philippe Moreau below Veillard Holdings then drew a line connecting them. Cordelia proceeded to stare at it.
"I need more evidence," she said.
"Yes," Louis said. "You do."
He left. She sat at the table with the legal pad, the graze on her forearm that had stopped bleeding, and as she looked at the two names connected by a line, Cordelia thought about warm courtyards and string lights and a man who knew exactly which documents to put in front of her.
She crossed nothing out. She wrote it again, this time with a circle around it.
Outside, somewhere in the Quarter, the night went on doing what it did. Patient and dark and full of things that were waiting to be seen.