Page 8 of Pregnant By A Rich Demon 4

“No.”

The word landed flat in the room, and Priest’s face did something complicated—confusion first, then the beginning of understanding, then something that looked like it didn’t want to finish understanding.

“Then what’s the list for?”

I capped the marker and set it on the tray beneath the board. “We’re not looking for information. We already know how this man operates—he doesn’t tell any one person the whole plan, doesn’t sleep in the same place twice in a row if he can help it, doesn’t trust his own soldiers with details that could get back to us. Pulling in one man at a time, asking him nice or asking him ugly, that’s slow. That’s weeks. Maybe months. And I don’t have that kind of time to give him.”

“So, what do you have time for?”

“Taking away every place he could ever come home to.”

Nobody said anything for a second. Brandon looked at Teal. Teal looked at the spreadsheet like it might explain itself. DeShawn, who’d been quiet since he walked in, opened the banker’s boxes on the table and started pulling files without waiting to be told.

Priest sat back in his chair, arms crossing over his chest in the particular way he did when he was buying himself time to think instead of react. “You’re talking about a purge.”

“I’m talking about making the whole city too small for him to hide in.”

“Amai.” He said my name carefully, the way you’d say it to somebody standing near a ledge. “That’s not a plan. That’s a body count.”

“It’s both.”

I turned back to the board and started writing names as DeShawn called them out from the files—people Corinne had flagged in the Baptiste Logistics paperwork, names that came up more than once in shipping manifests that shouldn’t have had anything to do with a man selling drugs and running girls out of the Ninth Ward.

“Curtis Odom, tire shop on Tulane, message drop for going on three years. Corinne already confirmed that one independently before I shut her operation down. Write it.”

DeShawn wrote it.

“Marguerite Fontaine, funeral home on Elysian Fields, handled at least four burials for Rahsaan’s people that never got proper death certificates filed. Write it.”

“You want us pulling receipts on a funeral home?” Brandon asked, not quite believing it.

“I want us pulling receipts on everything that’s ever touched him.”

We went like that for the better part of an hour—names surfacing from the files, from Teal’s network contacts from things Priest remembered from years of watching Rahsaan build his little kingdom back up after I’d first taken it apart.

A barber on Claiborne who let him use the back room for meetings.

A woman in Gentilly running cash through a daycare center.

Two mechanics who kept his fleet of unremarkable cars running and untraceable.

A lawyer downtown who filed the paperwork that made three of his properties look like they belonged to somebody else entirely.

By the time the sun would’ve been coming up outside, if there’d been windows to see it through, the board had eleven names on it, each connected by lines to two or three others, a small ugly constellation of a man’s entire support system laid out in marker and string.

“That’s everybody we’ve confirmed,” Priest said, studying it. “Give me a week, and I’ll have double this.”

“You’ve got until tonight.”

“Amai—”

“Tonight.” I set the marker down and looked at him. “Every hour we spend confirming is an hour Rahsaan spends deciding his next move. He’s already heard about Victor. He knows I got what I wanted out of that. He’s smart enough to be scared right now, which means he’s smart enough to start covering ground before we get to him. I want every name on that board dealt with inside forty-eight hours.”

Priest didn’t answer right away.

“Some of these people, man. Curtis fixes tires. Marguerite buries the dead. You’re talking about people who did him small favors, not soldiers.”

“I know exactly what they did.”