Page 51 of Pregnant By A Rich Demon 4

“She’s got separate books,” he said. “This one doesn’t match what’s logged in the system. Same dates, different transaction amounts, different vendors.”

“Take pictures. Leave it where you found it.”

He was already doing it.

We had been inside eighteen minutes when we heard the side door open—not the back, the side, which meant someone had come in through the chapel entrance and cut through. I put myself flat against the wall inside the prep room doorway. Kaisen stepped behind the records room door.

Footsteps. One set. Unhurried.

A woman walked past the doorway without looking in. Sixty, maybe sixty-five. Short. Natural hair gone silver. Wearing a house dress under an open cardigan, reading glasses pushed up on her forehead. She carried a mug of something and was headed for a small office at the far end of the corridor.

She made it three steps past us before she felt it—the change in air pressure, maybe, or some instinct developed by thirty years of preparing the dead in the middle of the night—and she turned.

She saw me first.

The mug hit the floor.

“Ms. Fontaine.” I stepped out of the doorway and kept my voice even. “I’m not here to hurt you.”

She pressed her back against the wall. Her eyes cut to the exit—quick, involuntary—and then back to me. I saw her make the decision not to run. Smart woman.

“Why are you back here?” Her voice was steady. Steadier than most people managed.

“You know why.”

The recognition moved through her face fast, and whatever she’d been holding onto—some hope that this was a robbery, something ordinary and survivable—released.

“I need you to listen to me carefully,” I said. “I’m only going to say this once.”

Kaisen had come out from behind the door and positioned himself by the back entrance, arms crossed, watching her with that flat stillness that seemed to bring a bit of life back in him.

I stepped closer to Marguerite, not enough to touch her, but enough so she understood there was nowhere to go that I wasn’t already an obstacle to.

“Three generations,” I said. “Sixty years. Your grandmother started this business when half this city wouldn’t extend her credit. Your mother took it through the storm. You kept the lights on through two recessions and a pandemic. People in the Seventh Ward bring you their people because they trust you to treat them right.”

She didn’t answer.

“I know all of that,” I said. “I also know what’s been moving through that cold storage unit behind me. I know the refrigerant purchases. I know the separate ledger. And I know which four funerals you rushed through in the past eight months, and exactly when each one of them fell on Rahsaan Boudreaux’s calendar.”

The color in her face went uneven.

“Here is what I don’t know,” I said. “And this is the only thing that matters right now, so I need you to hear me. I don’t know if you made this choice, or if somebody made it for you.”

I let that sit.

“If somebody leaned on you,” I said, “if somebody showed up here and told you what was going to happen to this building, to your family, to you, if you didn’t cooperate—that’s one situation. I can work with that. People do what they have to do to survive. I understand survival.”

She was breathing through her nose, controlled, trying not to show me how hard her hands were shaking.

“But if you’ve been doing this because you were paid,” I said, “if you have been knowingly running logistics for a man who has put bodies in my family’s ground, then we have a different conversation. And that conversation doesn’t end with you standing in this hallway.”

“I have grandchildren,” she said, barely above a whisper.

“I know.”

“I have—this is all I have. This business is all⁠—”

“I know what this is to you.” I didn’t raise my voice. “That’s why I’m telling you instead of just handling it. Because if you are in this because you had no choice, you can come out of it. You stop taking his calls. You stop processing anything that comes through that cold storage unless you personally know the deceased. You call me if anyone from his network contacts you, and you do it the same day.”