He looked at the kitchen. Someone was serious about salad. There were roughly twenty bowls of perfectly done salads ready to be delivered. Who the hell thought they would need that many salads?

His cell phone trilled. He pulled it out and sighed. It wasn’t someone he could put off or drag by the tail back to the swamp. “I have to take this. Momma, put that cigarette out and go find Chef. Zep, stir the gumbo. You know how pissy he’ll be if the bottom scorches.”

Zep grumbled, but he was stirring when Remy stepped into his office.

Here he could see Lisa’s handiwork. She’d already left an indelible impression on Guidry’s. Everything in the office was neat and in its place. Jean-Claude hadn’t been very organized, so making file folders and cleaning up in here had been Lisa’s first task. She’d brought in nice curtains to frame the window and found him a much more comfortable chair. She’d even found some old framed pictures of his mom-mom and pop-pop, and photos of what Guidry’s looked like decade by decade, and had made something she called a memorial wall.

His heart did a little flip-flop every time he looked at those pictures of his family over the years. He wanted a new picture up there on that wall. One of him and Lisa. Later, some of their kiddos.

He slid his finger across the screen. “Hello, Maia. Thanks for getting back to me.”

“Hello, hot stuff,” she replied, her voice low. “Heard from Big Tag you’re back in the bayou.”

“I am back home. Did you find anything out for me?”

He could practically hear her pouting over the line. “What, no flirting? You know you should buy me a drink before we get down and dirty, Guidry.”

“I have a whole bar waiting for you if you ever decide to come down this way, but if this is good enough, you could be drinking at Sanctum tonight and making Big Tag crazy. So why don’t you spill?”

“Fine,” she said, satisfaction clear in her voice. “I’m sending you a couple of files that I’ll forward to McKay-Taggart, too. I have some contacts on DPD who did some digging. Did you know the officer wasn’t reprimanded for breaking the chain of custody?”

That was surprising. He knew it wasn’t exactly her fault, but there should still be some kind of remark on her record. “She wasn’t punished at all?”