Page 13 of Pregnant By A Rich Demon 4

Priest watched Teal remove her name from the secondary list.

“This is the part that worried me,” he said.

“I know.”

“We can’t turn proximity into guilt.”

“I never said we would.”

He looked at me.

“Everybody connected to Rahsaan gets looked at,” I said. “Not everybody connected to Rahsaan dies.”

That seemed to settle something in him.

For now.

Rahsaan’s legitimate front turned out to be bigger than any of us had accounted for, and the discovery came through Teal, who’d been quietly working the funeral home angle since morning.

He called around six.

“Fontaine Funeral Services isn’t just laundering through burials. She’s got a whole side operation—prepaid funeral plans sold to families who don’t exist, insurance payouts routed through accounts that trace back to shell companies with Rahsaan’s fingerprints all over the ownership structure. This isn’t a side hustle. This might be half his operating capital.”

I went myself.

A business that important deserved my direct attention.

Marguerite Fontaine met me in the viewing room of her own funeral home, standing very straight in a black dress that looked like it had been chosen for exactly this kind of confrontation, like she’d known someday it would come to this.

She was sixty, maybe older, with the kind of composure that came from decades of standing in rooms with dead people and learning not to flinch.

“Mr. Landry.” She didn’t offer her hand. “I assume you’re here about the business, not a burial.”

“I’m here about both, depending on how the next ten minutes go.”

“This is a legitimate operation.”

“Part of it.”

Her chin lifted.

“I bury people. I’ve buried people from every family in this city, including yours if you go back far enough. Rahsaan donated to my building fund fifteen years ago. I never turned down a donation in my life.”

“You’ve done four burials for his people who never got proper death certificates filed. You’ve moved insurance payouts through accounts registered to shell companies that only exist on paper.” I looked around the viewing room. “That ain’t a donation, Marguerite.”

Her composure cracked slightly at the corners.

“I have employees. I have a reputation in this community that took thirty years to build.”

“I know.”

“I’m not a soldier. I never carried a gun for that man.”

“I believe you.”

A flicker of hope crossed her face.

Curtis had shown me the same thing.