Cordelia had been in Captain Tureaud's office twice before — once when she transferred in, once when she filed a complaint about a case being reassigned without notice. Both times she'd left feeling assessed and found technically acceptable.
This time was different.
"Sit down, Vireaux."
She sat.
Tureaud was a broad man in his late fifties who had the look of someone who had once been physically imposing and had redistributed the mass over the years to be more administrative. He had a file open on his desk. She recognised her own case notes in it, which were thinner than they should have been for a three-month investigation.
"Four dead men," he said. "Twelve weeks. Where are we."
"I have active leads I'm developing."
"Marcus tells me you've been unreachable. Three days last week, two the week before."
"I was working the leads."
"Where."
Cordelia held his gaze. "I can't tell you that yet."
The silence that followed had consequences attached to it. Tureaud closed the file and folded his hands on top of it with the patience of a man who had been dealing with difficult detectives for thirty years.
"You're a good detective," he said finally. "Your record before transfer is solid. Which is the only reason this is a conversation and not a formal review." He leaned forward. "You have one week to produce something substantive. Case notes, leads, a person of interest I can put in front of the DA's office. One week. If I don't have something on my desk by Friday I'm pulling you from the case and opening a conduct inquiry."
"Understood."
"Dismissed."
She got to the door.
"Vireaux," he said.
She turned.
"Whatever you're into." His voice had dropped the administrative register. "Be careful. Four dead men in twelve weeks is not a normal case. I've been doing this long enough to know when something is above the waterline and when it isn't." He looked at her steadily. "This isn't."
She nodded once and left.
Marcus was in the corridor.
Leaning against the wall outside the bullpen with his arms crossed. He'd aged in three months, or she'd stopped noticing and was noticing again now. Lines around his eyes that hadn't been there in September.
Cordelia tried to walk past. He stepped into her path."Four minutes," he said, palms open. "Give me four minutes."
She stopped. "Fine."
He steered her into the empty break room and closed the door. His arms stayed crossed. The expression on his face was one she hadn't seen from him before. It wasn’t the exhausted skepticism nor the reflexive dismissal. It looked like— although Cordelia would never believe it— it like genuine concern.
"I pulled Saint-Clair's records," he began."His property holdings go back to 1887 under the same name. His financials have structured gaps — like he has been managing his paper trail for a very long time. And three of the four victims had financial connections to his properties that aren't in our case file." He looked at her. "Someone pulled those connections before we got the file."
Cordelia kept her face even. "How far back do the gaps go."
"Further than they should." He held her gaze. "What is he, Cordelia?"
Her first name. Three months and he'd never used it without at least derision but now he said it properly so she studied the worry in his face and the tiredness seeing the person underneath the professional skepticism she'd been bumping against since day one. As she did, she thought about Veillard Holdings and how close his name sat to Philippe's on the legal pad. Complicit or used. Cordelia still didn't know. Although her mind whispered hypocrite to Cordelia.
"I can't tell you yet," she replied.
"You don't have yet. Tureaud just gave you a week."
"Then I have a week." she sassed.
He looked at her for a long moment. "I've been carrying this case alone for two months. Whatever you've found, whatever you're doing off the books — I'm your partner. That used to mean something."
"It still does."
"Does it."
Cordelia had no answer that was both true and safe so she said nothing, which was its own kind of answer. His jaw tightened. He stepped back and uncrossed his arms and his face closed down.
"Don't get killed," he said, and left.
Cordelia stood in the break room with the smell of burnt coffee and with a conversation that had cost more than she'd budgeted for.
A journalist was on the steps outside.
Mid-thirties, sharp-featured, recorder in her bag that she hadn't reached for yet. She had the look of a person who'd worked the crime beat long enough to know the off the record moments were usually the most useful ones.
"Detective Vireaux. Delphine Arceneaux, Times-Picayune. Do you have a moment?"
"No." Cordelia rejected outright.
She fell into step beside Cordelia anyway. Confidence or a calculated gamble. "I've been covering the jazz murders since January. Four victims, twelve weeks, no arrest." A pause. "I'm also asking questions about your connection to Louis Saint-Clair. Sources have placed you at his Garden District property multiple times in the past month. Off duty."
Cordelia stopped walking.
"I'm not running anything yet," Arceneaux said. "I'm asking."
"No comment."
"Is he a suspect?"
"No comment."
"A source?"
Cordelia turned and looked at her directly. Arceneaux held it without flinching, which meant she'd done her homework and decided Cordelia wasn't the dangerous one in this story. She wasn't wrong. She also wasn't right in the way she thought she was.
"Off the record," Cordelia said.
Arceneaux nodded.
"Stop following me. There is an active investigation and anything you print about my movements will compromise it and potentially get someone killed." She held the journalist's gaze. "On the record — no comment."
She got in her car.
In the rearview mirror she watched Arceneaux write something in her notebook, look up, write something else. A woman doing her job. Cordelia understood the instinct completely and wished she didn't.
She drove to the Garden District.
Louis received her in the study without surprise. Émile had called ahead. Cordelia did not appreciate the fact that Louis probably had someone always watching her.
Neither of them addressed what happened previously.
"I have a week," she said, taking the chair that faced the door. "The department is closing in. There's a journalist who has connected me to your property. My partner is asking questions he shouldn't be able to ask yet." She looked at him. "The Veillard Holdings account connects to Philippe Moreau. I have the financial thread but I don't have the full picture. I need what you know."
"That's a complicated request."
"Make it uncomplicated."
He turned his ring once. Twice. "If I give you what I have, some of it will raise questions about my own operation. Things that are not criminal but are not easily explained to people who ask straightforward questions about what a man does with his evenings."
"I'll manage it."
He looked at her with that quality of focusof his, unhurried and total. "You'll manage it," he said, turning the phrase over.
"Louis." Cordelia leaned forward. "I have seven days and a circled name and a financial thread that any competent lawyer will cut through in an afternoon. Give me what I need to build something that holds."
He held her gaze.
"I want something in return," he said.
"Name it."
"When this is over, I want you to answer a question."
"What question."
"Whether you're still here because of the case," he said, "or in spite of it."
Outside a streetcar passed, its bell distant and ordinary.
"Ask me when it's over," Cordelia replied.
He nodded once. "Sit down. This will take a while."
Two hours.
What he gave her wasn't a file. It was a map — names in the municipal structure compromised by Philippe's network. The legal mechanism by which Veillard Holdings had been seized — fraudulent transfers executed through a law firm whose senior partner had died conveniently six months later. Dates, transactions, a chain of custody connecting Philippe's rotating identities across a century of property records.
Philippe Moreau was not a grieving local who ran a bed and breakfast. He had been in New Orleans since before the First World War, surfacing and disappearing under different names, each identity clean and warm and impossible to suspect. He was old. Older than Louis. And he had been building toward this — toward dismantling Louis's territory, toward using Cordelia as the instrument of it.
Cordelia’s mind drifted to warm courtyards and string lights and a man who asked questions and waited for the answers. She shook her head quickly and picked up her pen and kept writing.
"He knows what you are to me," Louis said, near the end. "The ghouls weren't meant to kill you. They were meant to make me reckless. Push me into protecting you in ways that would expose me to the hierarchy." He paused. "He is using you as a lever."
"I know."
"You know."
"I've known since the alley." Cordelia looked at him steadily. "I'm going to let him think it's working."
Louis hummed, impressed, but furrowed his brows, "You're using yourself as bait," he said.
"I'm using myself as a detective.” Cordelia winked.
"If he gets to you before—"
"Then you'll arrive and do what you did in the alley," she said. "Only this time I'll have a recording device and enough evidence to close the case before anyone asks too many questions about how the primary suspect met his end."
He was quiet for a moment. "You have thought about this carefully."
"I think about everything carefully. It's my job." Cordelia said proudly. “ I’m no damsel for you to save Louis.” Cordelia gathered her notes and stood but at the door she stopped.
"The seven women," she said, without turning. "Marguerite and the others. Did any of them know what you are."
Silence.
"Élise did," he said. "At the end. The others — some suspected. None knew fully."
"I know fully," she said.
"Yes," he said. "You do."
She left.
She took the long way home. Through the Quarter, through streets she'd learned over three months from the surface down but as she turned onto the corner where the preacher kept his milk crate.
The crate was there. He wasn't.
She stopped and looked at the empty corner noting the absence where the frayed collar and dark coat should have been. The man she had always kept at the corner of her eye, despite having spoken to him only three times.
A passing couple gave her a look but Cordelia kept walking.
At home she spread everything across the kitchen table. Louis's intelligence alongside her own notes alongside Philippe's folder alongside the Veillard thread. Seven days and for the first time since the captain's office that morning she had enough to work with.
She wrote at the top of a fresh page: what changed. why is the preacher gone.
Stared at it.
Added underneath: Philippe knows I'm getting close.
Cordelia hesistated but wrote,
He and Louis are the same kind of monster.
She looked at her legal pad for a long time.
Then she started building the case.