The address attached to the photograph was the basement of a derelict vaudeville theater on Iberville that Delacroix had used as a private workshop in the nineties.
Marigny called for SWAT.
I went out to the car.
He caught me at the driver's door.
"You walk in there alone, you don't walk out."
I looked at him.
"She wants me. Not a tactical team."
"Delacroix is there too."
"Which is why we don't have time to wait."
His jaw moved sideways.
"Delphine. You do this every time. You decide you're the only person on God's earth who can fix the situation."
I let his hand off my wrist.
"And you, Detective? Every time you put your hand on a body — you don't decide you're the only person on God's earth who can hear the truth?"
He took it like a small punch to the gut. He didn't have an answer for me.
A second went by.
He pulled his service piece out of the holster and pressed it into my hand.
"You know how to use this."
"No."
"Safety's here. Two hands. Center of mass. Don't try to be a hero."
I gave the gun back.
"I'm steadier with a blade."
He laughed once, dry. "Delphine. You really should sit down with a psych eval one of these days."
"Let me live through tonight, I'll book one for next week."
The theater basement had been gutted. The rows of seats had been taken out. Where the orchestra pit had been, somebody had set up a single large stainless prep table under one work lamp.
My mother was on the side of the table, hands and ankles strapped.
Behind her stood my sister.
We looked too much alike.
Same brow line. Same shape to the lip. Same hairline against the temple.
The smile she had on, though, was a smile I had never seen in a mirror.
"Big sister. You came."
I held the scalpel along my forearm.
"Let our mother go."
She tilted her head.
"You mean your mother. She doesn't want me. She only wants you."
My mother was crying into the strap across her mouth. "Camille — honey — I didn't have a choice —"
"You didn't have a choice when you sold me?"
Camille's voice slammed up into a register that wasn't a register so much as a wound.
A second later, the smile came back as if she had set it down and picked it up again.
"It's okay. Teacher said as long as we get our two faces to match, Mama won't be able to tell us apart."
Delacroix walked out of the wing that had been the orchestra entrance.
He had changed into a clean black suit. The collar was buttoned. He looked dressed for a funeral.
"Delphine. Camille. My two students."
"She isn't your student," I said. "She's the knife you sharpened."
Delacroix considered the framing for a moment.
"Knives need to be honed."
Camille looked at him with the pinched, near-pathological gratitude of a person who has been kept on a thin diet of approval since she was very young.
I had been thinking of her, all the way over in the car, as someone Delacroix had imprisoned.
She had also stood on a bridge across the Atchafalaya seven years ago and put both hands on Margaux Theriot's shoulder blades.
You don't get to cancel one with the other.
In my left ear I heard the muffled sound of Marigny's SWAT element moving down a service corridor.
I needed to stretch the time.
"Why did Lila have to die?"
Delacroix turned his eyes on me.
"She tried to take Camille and run."
Camille's face moved.
"She lied to me."
I held my sister's eyes.
"She didn't lie. The last thing she said before she died was not her. She was trying to clear me."
Camille's grip on the scalpel started to tremble.
Delacroix said, mildly, "Camille. She's destabilizing you."
"Teacher. Did Lila really want to take me away?"
His face cooled. "It doesn't matter."
"It does matter."
Camille's eyes had gone bright.
"You told me everyone who tried to take me away was going to send me back to the laboratory."
Delacroix took a step.
"Put the blade down."
Camille turned the blade and laid the edge against her own cheek.
"Did you also lie when you told me Mama didn't want me? And big sister hated me? And the only person on earth I could live around was you?"
Delacroix's patience, finally, gave way.
"You can only live around me. That is a fact."
The thing in Camille's eyes that had been doing the work of belief came apart.
In that same second, Delacroix's right hand came out of the slit pocket of his suit jacket with a small syringe in it. He drove the needle at the side of her neck.
I went forward.
The needle went into the meat of my left shoulder.
The plunger went down.
The world tilted black at the edges and came in.
I went down to one knee, then onto my side on the boards.
Marigny's team came through the loading entrance with weapons up.
Camille screamed.
Delacroix had her against him by the back of the neck. The scalpel he had taken back from her hand was now under her jaw, edge into the carotid.
"Stay where you are," he said.
Marigny brought his service weapon up to a perfect line, two-handed, the way someone steadies a hand on a violin bow.
"Let her go, Étienne."
Delacroix smiled.
"You won't shoot, Detective. You're afraid that when she goes, you'll hear one more voice you couldn't save."
Marigny's color shifted.
I was on my side on the floor. Half my body had gone away into something cottony. My fingers, though, still answered. The number twenty-two scalpel was on the boards within reach.
Camille's eyes had found me.
For the first time since I'd walked in, she was not smiling.
"Big sister. Did Lila really say it wasn't you?"
I made a noise. I think it was a yes.
Tears came down both her cheeks.
"Then I killed the wrong person."
Delacroix's mouth went thin. "Camille. Don't listen to her."
Camille reached up and took Delacroix's wrist in both her hands and pressed her own throat into the blade.
He let go on instinct.
Marigny fired.
The round opened Delacroix's right shoulder. The scalpel came out of his hand and went across the floor. Two of the tactical guys were on top of him before he hit the boards.
Camille slid down onto her knees with her hand at her throat. Blood came through her fingers.
I crawled to her on my elbows. My left arm wasn't working. I got my right hand pressed flat over hers.
"Stay still."
She looked at me.
Her voice, when it came, sounded like a thread of itself.
"Big sister. Can you fix it."
My throat closed.
"Yes."
She tried to smile. "You're lying. Teacher said broken people don't fix."
I pressed harder. My hand was starting to shake.
Marigny was on his knees next to me. He took the wad of gauze out of a tactical first-aid kit and slid his palm over the top of mine on the wound and took the pressure.
His voice came out absolutely steady.
"Camille Aucoin. Listen to me. You're still alive. That means what you say now is a witness statement. It isn't a deathbed."
Camille's tears ran along her hairline into her ear.
"I'll testify."
Delacroix was arraigned in federal court within the week.
The cold-case unit reopened every file with his name in the periphery.
Wes Theriot confessed to evidence suppression in the Margaux case and pled out to a long stretch of time at Angola.
The medical examiner at Earhart did the autopsy on my father with no involvement from me. I asked to attend the identification anyway. They wheeled him out in a body bag and I unzipped it down to the collarbones and looked at his face for the first time in seven years.
I looked. I closed the bag. I signed the form.
For the first time since I was twenty-one years old, I did not owe him anything.
Camille pulled through. She got transferred from Tulane Medical to a secure forensic psychiatric unit. Her competency evaluation was expected to take a long time.
Down the corridor in the academic building's basement, the investigators found thirty-seven bound notebooks in Delacroix's hand.
Every notebook went under the same heading.
Protocols for guiding the testimony of the dead.
I read the first one and put it down and went into the hallway and threw up into a trash can.
Marigny took the rest of them away and would not let me look at them again.
I was put on professional suspension pending a review.
It wasn't a suspect's review. It was a chain-of-evidence review of the twenty-seven cold cases.
Some of the verdicts held.
Some of the verdicts came apart.
A man named Cordell Jones, who had been on death row at Angola for a 2018 case I had worked on, walked out into the parking lot four months after his release with his sister and cried into her shoulder until he was hoarse. A woman in Houma whose conviction held went into her cell and laughed until she choked, because at least someone, this late, had finally heard her say she did it.
The local paper called me "the gifted embalmer manipulated by a monstrous professor."
I hated the headline.
I am not gifted.
I also refuse to be defined as anybody's victim.
What I am, finally, is somebody who understands that restoring a body isn't making the body perfect.
It's admitting the body was broken.
Two weeks later I went back to the prep room.
The red paint on the front door had been pressure-washed off.
Sunny was waiting for me, walking with a cane. She insisted on coming in and helping me set out the trays. She polished the overhead surgical lamp three times in a row and then said, without looking up:
"Del. Am I still hired."
I looked at her.
"Half pay through the end of the year."
Her face lit up. "Yes ma'am."
"Sunny. You ever sell me out again, I'll suture you into a teaching specimen."
She laughed and cried at the same time.
"I won't."
Three raps came on the loading-bay frame.
Marigny was there, holding an evidence box.
"Borrow your hands, Ms. Aucoin?"
I looked at the box.
"Who."
He said, low, "Lila Toussaint."