In the interview room on the second floor of the Royal Street building, Theriot laid three photographs on the table in front of me, one by one, like a casino dealer.
The first one was Lila Toussaint at nineteen, undergrad ID badge clipped to a white sundress. The second was the body. The third was a still from the security camera on the gallery balcony across St. Philip, dated to that humid June night, shot at eight-something p.m. — a girl in white, and behind her, a thin-shouldered figure half in shadow.
Theriot tapped the thin-shouldered figure with two fingers. "That's you."
I didn't bother to deny it. "That's me."
"When was the last time you saw Lila Toussaint?"
"Seven years ago. June seventeenth. Eight-forty p.m."
He smiled. "You remember it down to the minute."
"My father went off the Crescent City Connection that night."
The smile went off his face.
He slid another sheet over. "Trace report. Restorative wax was recovered from under her fingernails. The chemistry's a match for the product you carry in your prep room."
I read the line he was pointing at twice.
Restorative wax.
We did carry it. We had a small stockpile in the bottom drawer of the cosmetic cabinet, gone yellow at the corners. But that formulation was a low-melt paraffin blend that the Delacroix Institute of Mortuary Science had milled in its own basement workshop, and the Institute had been shuttered since 2021. The last batch was older than Sunny's apprenticeship. Nobody else taught with it. You couldn't buy a tin on the open market now if you tried.
"There's suture material left in her left shoulder. Technique's a match for yours."
I looked up. "Who did her intake at Earhart?"
Theriot's eyebrows knit. "You don't ask questions in here."
"Her time of death is less than seventy-two hours. She's been missing seven years, and she dies three days before she gets to me. You're not asking where she was for those seven years. You're asking about a wax tin in my cabinet."
Theriot slapped the table flat-palmed. "Because the dying woman named you."
I looked at the mirror that took up most of the long wall.
I knew Marigny was behind it.
"Bring him in."
Theriot leaned back. "You think the séance is going to save you?"
The door opened.
Marigny walked in. The bruise under his eyes was the bruise of a man who hadn't slept and was no longer pretending he might.
Theriot started, "Detective, the protocol —"
"I'll question her."
Theriot looked at him a long moment. Then he picked up his folder and walked out.
The room had just us in it.
Marigny reached over and clicked the recorder off.
I laughed once. It came out wrong. "That's a violation, Detective."
He looked at me. His voice came low, almost under the air. "She didn't say your name."
The skin under the cuff on my wrist was already starting to burn raw. "Then why did you cuff me in front of my staff."
"What she said was —"
He hesitated for one second.
"Don't let her fix me."
I thought I had misheard him.
Marigny slid a folded sheet across the table.
It was a page from the small notebook he carried in his inside breast pocket. Every time he laid a hand on a body, he wrote down the words inside the first thirty seconds, before they degraded. He had let me see those pages exactly twice in three years.
The line under Toussaint, L. read:
Cold. Lamp. White room. She is here. Don't let her fix me. The killer is you.
I read the last four words a second time.
"That you," I said. "It isn't me."
His knuckle came down on the table.
Three times.
Quiet, like he was knocking on the door of an apartment he wasn't sure he should walk into. It was the same rap he used in my prep room.
I felt something pass under my sternum that I did not want to name.
"When she said it," he said, "her line of sight was straight into a mirror."
I closed my eyes.
"She was looking at her own face."
He nodded once.
"In the mirror," he said, "her face was your face."
The air in the room felt evacuated.
I understood, then, why he had snapped the cuff on my wrist in front of my staff.
If he had explained any of this on the loading bay, in front of Theriot and the uniforms and the gathering sidewalk, whoever had built the trap would have known the exact piece of information Lila Toussaint had managed to leave behind. He had let me look like the suspect on the local six o'clock news so that the killer would keep moving toward me.
He had baited me.
I should have been furious.
I was, in fact, angry enough that for a count of three I considered picking up the water cup on the table and putting it through his face.
"Marigny," I said. "Has it occurred to you that Theriot is going to charge me?"
"I'll block it."
"You can't block what people already believe."
He didn't answer.
His phone went off against the tabletop. He read it. His color shifted, which from him was the equivalent of a shout.
"They searched your prep room."
I made a flat sound that wasn't quite a laugh. "Standard procedure, isn't it."
"They recovered Lila Toussaint's state ID."
The room got quiet inside my own ears.
He turned the phone toward me. The photograph was of my cosmetic cabinet, bottom drawer pulled out. Inside the false bottom — the cavity I'd cut into the underside of the drawer myself the year my father died — was a Louisiana driver's license, the lamination going amber at the corners.
Toussaint, Lila Margaux. Issued seven years ago. Expired four years ago.
I knew the false bottom of that drawer.
Three people in the world knew about the false bottom.
Me. Sunny. And Dr. Étienne Delacroix, who had taught me how to cut it.
Dr. Étienne Delacroix had been, for a quarter of a century, the youngest department chair in the history of the Delacroix Institute of Mortuary Science in St. Bernard Parish. The Institute had been founded by his grandfather; he ran it the way you run a Carmelite convent.
His hands had been the gift the trade tells stories about. Steady, accurate, patient. He liked to say the dead could still feel pain. Therefore every suture should be gentle.
When I was sixteen, my father drove me out to the Institute one afternoon and got down on his knees on the gravel outside the academic building and asked Dr. Delacroix to take me on as an apprentice. My father told him I had the hands and could not be allowed to lose them to a debt that wasn't mine.
Dr. Delacroix looked at me for a long time.
Then he handed me a curved needle. "Suturing isn't covering damage, Delphine. It's restoring truth."
I learned, later, that the truth he was talking about was not the truth a coroner wanted.
Marigny heard the story out and put his thumb against the bridge of his nose.
"You suspect Delacroix."
"The wax under her fingernails," I said, "is his formulation. Nobody else mills it."
"Where is he now."
"He's dead."
Marigny looked up.
"Five years ago," I said. "Cardiac arrest. The death certificate is mine. I signed it."
He went quiet for a long beat.
"The body," he said.
I lowered my eyes to the table.
"I rolled him into the retort at Bultman myself."
He was watching me.
"You sure it was him?"
The question went into my skull like a needle through bone.
The day they brought Delacroix into the prep room at Bultman Funeral Home, five years ago, his face had been distorted by the intubation tube and the failed resuscitation. There had been blood around his nose and at one corner of his mouth. I had done the restoration myself. I had matched the face, the fingerprints, the toe tag against the chart.
I had not opened his chest.
I had also not, at the time, entertained the thought that the only category of human being on earth who knew the full paperwork chain of a faked death — the cremation forms, the chain of custody, the cross-county notification — was a senior member of my own profession.
Outside the interview room, there was shouting in the hallway.
Theriot came back through the door with Sunny in front of him.
Sunny's eyes were swollen. She was holding a clear evidence pouch in both hands like a child holding a hymnal.
Inside the pouch was a scalpel from my second tray. A Bard-Parker number twenty-two. The blood on the blade was dark and going crusted.
"That blade is positive for Toussaint's blood," Theriot said.
Sunny was looking at me, tears coming down her cheeks like she'd given up on stopping them.
"Del, I'm sorry, I didn't want to. They said if I didn't they'd stop my mama's dialysis."
I held her eyes. "Who is they."
Sunny's lips were shaking.
Theriot snapped, "Aucoin. You don't get to coach the witness."
The next second Sunny went down hard on her knees on the linoleum and started clawing at her throat.
A small metal capsule dropped out of the cuff of her scrub top and rolled.
Marigny was already moving. "Don't touch it —"
They rolled Sunny down the hallway to the ground-floor clinic on a gurney from the building's own infirmary, then transferred her to Tulane Medical.
Theriot wanted me back in a holding cell.
Marigny drew his service weapon. He kept the muzzle pointed at the floor, but he drew it, and that was enough for every uniform in the hallway to take one step back.
"She's a protected witness now."
"Marigny," Theriot said. "Have you lost your mind."
Marigny did not move his eyes off him. "Sunny Boudreaux just got dosed inside our building, under our cameras, and you want to put her supervisor back in interrogation."
The hallway got quiet.
I stood against the wall with the cuff still on one wrist. The fluorescent strip overhead had the high steady whine they all have.
Twenty minutes later, a doctor came down the corridor wiping her hands on a paper towel.
"She'll live. What she swallowed was a benzodiazepine analog cut with something we haven't identified yet. We can't tell you when she'll wake."
Theriot's face finally moved.
I said, quietly, "She didn't take it herself."
Marigny looked at me. "How do you know."
"Sunny is afraid of needles. She closes her eyes when I draw blood for a typing kit. She wouldn't carry a capsule in her sleeve, and she wouldn't swallow it standing in front of me."
I was thinking about the way she'd dropped, and the way her hand had gone to her neck, not to her mouth.
She had not been choking. She had been reaching for the wrong thing.
I pushed past the nurse at the door of the clinic. Marigny put his badge in the doorway behind me.
"Police evidence."
Sunny was on the gurney with an oxygen cannula in her nostrils. On the right side of her neck, just under the angle of the mandible, was a pinprick mark with a faint bluish bloom around it.
"She was injected before they brought her into the building," I said.
Marigny pulled the corridor security camera feed on his department tablet.
The footage showed Sunny coming in through the side entrance off Royal. As she crossed the lobby, a janitor pushing a wheeled bucket bumped her shoulder. The janitor's head was down. The visor of his ball cap rode low.
But his hands on the push bar were the hands of a man who had spent fifty years doing precision work.
The way he held the cart was the way Delacroix had held a pair of mortuary forceps.
The cold started under my fingernails.
"He's alive."
Marigny zoomed in.
The janitor lifted his face for half a second to glance at the lobby clock. The camera caught the lower half of his jaw, the corner of his mouth, the rim of a wristwatch.
It wasn't Delacroix.
It was my father.