Submission. Tori Carrington

by one last night.

      But I knew the only thing I was cursed with was a wicked hangover.

      I stepped toward my twelve-year-old navy blue Chevy Caprice, a solid car, if unsightly. A bit like me, I supposed.

      Only this morning it bore a hood ornament I wasn’t used to seeing. Well, at least not without a price tag attached. And I was pretty sure that the attractive woman leaning against the front of my car wasn’t a streetwalker, if only because her clothes revealed she was from a place where autumn required a change in wardrobe. A wool suit in New Orleans in October would immediately peg anyone as an outsider. And this girl, no matter how hot, was definitely an outsider.

      She spotted me when I took my keys out of my pocket and unlocked the driver’s-side door.

      “Detective Chevalier?”

      She knew me. Which usually meant bad news. A looker like this one, and I didn’t recognize her? Could mean one of two things: I’d met her when I’d had too much to drink or she was associated with someone else I’d met when I’d had too much to drink.

      I squinted up into her face and my stomach pitched. Because I wasn’t only looking at an outsider; I was looking at a dead woman. Claire Laraway. My unsolved-murder victim from two weeks ago.

      “Are you all right, Detective?” She blinked as if a thought had just occurred to her. “I’m sorry. Sometimes I forget how much my sister and I looked alike. I’m Molly Laraway, Claire’s twin sister. We’re fraternal, not identical, but we still always looked enough alike to…I didn’t mean to startle you.”

      Startle me? Christ, she had me wondering if there was something to the upcoming Halloween celebration, one of the longest nights of the year in the city of the dead when it was believed that ghosts walked the earth.

      “I was hoping I could talk to you,” she said.

      The only thing that could be worse than confronting the ghost of a victim whose murder you hadn’t solved was dealing with the sibling of one.

      I inserted the key into the car door and opened it. “Call the office.”

      I climbed inside, but a cleverly positioned bag with sequins on it prevented me from closing the door. “I have called the office. Countless times. And I always get the same response—I’ll hear something when there’s something to hear.”

      I grimaced, recognizing the words as my own.

      It wasn’t that I was a cold person. It was just that in my job nearly every victim came with well-meaning relatives attached. Wives, husbands, children, friends. And they all thought the killing of their loved ones elevated them to detective status; at best, making themselves pests; at worst, hindering my investigation.

      I stared at her bag and where it was still stuck in my door. I hadn’t meant to go farther than that, but I found my gaze taking in the fullness of her breasts beneath the brown wool of her jacket, the flare of her hips, the length of her legs—which looked great in heels not too high to be impractical but not too short to be sexy.

      “Detective Chevalier, I need to know what’s going on in the investigation of my sister’s death. I want to help find her killer.”

      I moved her bag out of the way. “Go home, Miss Laraway, and let me do my job.”

      She replaced the bag with fingers I couldn’t exactly slam in the door. “From what I can see, you’re not doing that job very well.”

      Now that would get her far. Pretty much as far as she’d gotten.

      “Remove your hands from my vehicle, Miss Laraway, before I remove them for you.”

      She stared at me as if gauging my willingness to do just that. She removed her fingers.

      I closed the door and started the engine.

      A knock at the window.

      I pushed the button to open it a crack.

      “Here,” she said, holding a card through the slit. “This is my contact information. I’m staying at the Ritz.”

      I didn’t take the card.

      She didn’t retract it.

      “Detective Chevalier, I think it only fair to warn you that I’m not going anywhere. I’m here for the duration. However long it takes to find my sister’s killer.”

      “Alan,” I said automatically.

      I took the card.

      She smiled at me.

      I wished I hadn’t taken the card.

      “I’d like to treat you to lunch today if you can spare the time,” she said.

      “I’m busy.”

      “Dinner, then.”

      I thought of the two nickels I had in my pocket and grimaced.

      “Coffee?”

      “Look, Miss Laraway, I don’t know what you hope to accomplish by coming down here from…”

      “Toledo.”

      Was that even a real place? I thought it was something made up on TV. “The best way you can help is by letting me do my job.”

      “How does coffee prevent you from doing your job?”

      My hangover-dulled mind couldn’t produce a response to that.

      She said, “Eleven o’clock, then. At Tujague’s in the French Quarter.”

      Tujague’s happened to serve the best beef rémoulade in New Orleans, if not the whole of Louisiana. And it had been a while since I’d had it.

      I knew I should refuse the invite. But damn if I could come up with a real good reason why.

      “I’ll be there if I have the time.”

      I put the car into gear and pulled away, looking into the rearview mirror at the woman with legs that went all the way up to her beautiful neck. I told myself she was nothing but trouble with a capital T.

      But it had been a long time since I’d gotten myself into that kind of trouble. And so long as she wasn’t married to my superior, well, maybe this kind of trouble was just what I needed….

      MOLLY LARAWAY STOOD staring after the departing Chevy, feeling frustrated and defeated and intrigued all at once. Detective Alan Chevalier was everything and nothing she’d imagined him to be. Oh, the cavalier attitude she’d expected, since she’d received as much from him on the phone. But there was something more about the rumpled man, something that niggled under her too-warm jacket and her damp skin. Something that made her itch more than the worsted wool did.

      She glanced at her watch. She’d been in town since yesterday morning and, aside from coaxing the detective’s home address out of a desk sergeant at the Eighth Precinct with a few crisp bills and collecting her sister’s things from FBI agent Akela Brooks, she hadn’t accomplished a lot. Of course, what had she expected? To come down here and have Chevalier lay the case out on a table in front of her? To see a pattern in the evidence and immediately pinpoint the killer’s identity?

      “I don’t know why you’re wasting your time, girl,” her mother had said last night when Molly had called her from the hotel to tell her where she was. “You always were a little too ambitious for your own good.”

      She’d heard the sentence more times than she could count over her twenty-seven years, but she’d always taken it as a compliment. At least someone in their family was determined to do something with her life.

      But last night she’d taken the comment as an insult.

      Probably because she’d been in a strange room in a strange city, alone and without anything to occupy her but the box of Claire’s meager belongings.

      She realized she was still standing on