Submission

“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 the street staring after a car that had long since left. She’d found herself in similar positions in the past two and a half weeks—being somewhere and forgetting why she was there and where she needed to go next. But right now, part of the reason was that she didn’t have anywhere to go next.

Her head jerked up, a chill running up the backs of her arms. She had the odd sensation that she was being watched. She scanned the windows of the houses and apartments squashed together on the narrow street. Not a face or a moving curtain among them.

She regained her bearings and turned around, going back the way she’d come, toward the spot where the taxi had let her off near the French Quarter.

Where should she go next?

It was said that twins shared a special connection, but she’d never really believed it. Claire had. She’d spent many a conversation trying to convince Molly that she knew how she felt, what she was thinking. But while Claire may have had some sort of insight into her thoughts and feelings, Molly had never understood the same of her sister. When they were younger, Claire had spent the majority of her time outdoors—usually with boys—while Molly had stayed indoors, taking care of the house while their mother worked or reading in the room she shared with her twin. When they were in high school, Claire had dated the football captain and had gone to all the “in” parties, while Molly had studied hard, graduating at the top of their class. She’d been offered scholarships at three different universities and had picked the one closest to home for practical reasons.

No, she’d never felt any sort of paranormal connection to her twin sister…until two and a half weeks ago.

Molly caught herself rubbing her neck. She’d known the instant Claire had died. Had felt the knife that had taken her twin’s life as surely as if the cold blade had been pressed against her own throat. Had experienced her sister’s horror, dread, then felt the life slipping from her body just as the blood had flowed from her wound.

Every minute of every day Molly felt her twin’s ghost haunting her, demanding that she find her killer.

And Molly intended to do exactly that. Either with or without Detective Chevalier’s help.

2

I PULLED THE OLD CHEVY to the curb outside Hotel Josephine in the old section of the French Quarter. The place had become familiar to me lately. Not because I’d ever stayed there but because just over two weeks ago another body had shown up in one of the rooms. A body that had looked remarkably like the woman I’d just left standing in the street outside my apartment.

I got out of the car, grabbed my hat from the front seat, then stood staring at the four-story structure not unlike countless others in the Quarter. It was probably at least two centuries old—and looked it.

A uniformed NOPD officer who’d arrived on the scene before me hiked up his pants as I approached the door.

“What do we got?” I asked.

“Thirty-C. Room 2B.”

Damn. The thirty indicated homicide. The C indicated homicide by cutting, which meant this victim might very well be connected to the one before.

The pretty hotel owner, Josie Villefranche, was standing near the front desk, her honey-colored skin looking pale. Not that I could blame her. I’d heard business had taken a nosedive after the first unsolved murder. Now that there was a second, Lord only knew how she’d manage to keep afloat.

“Miss Villefranche,” I said.

“Detective Chevalier.”

I knew she kept an illegal sawed-off shotgun behind the front desk, which probably explained why she was partial to standing near it at all times.

Since I couldn’t ask questions until I actually had them to ask, I climbed the stairs to the second floor. Another uniformed officer stood outside the door to 2B, guarding it.

“John,” I said, recognizing him.

“Alan.”

I stepped into the doorway and stared inside the room. And for the second time that day I saw a ghost. Because the victim stretched across the bed, her head hanging over the foot, was in the same position and had the same throat wound as Claire Laraway.

I’d never been one to buy into coincidence. If it looked like a crawfish, smelled like a crawfish and tasted like a crawfish…well, it was a goddamn crawfish.

I rubbed my closed eyelids and took a deep breath, then stepped farther into the room, pushing aside the similarities between the last victim and this one and instead focusing on the differences. Number one, I knew this victim. Her name was Frederique Arkart and she was a streetwalker, not a new resident to the city. Number two, she was African-American. I slowly crouched down, taking in the way her eyes seemed to stare at a point I couldn’t see. For all intents and purposes, she couldn’t see it, either, but it was apparent that she’d been looking at something—or rather someone—while her life was being taken away from her. I blindly reached for a rubber glove in the pocket of my trench coat and put it on my right hand. Number three, the wounds were different, I found as I lightly probed the victim’s neck. Laraway’s had been made with a sharp instrument, while the blade used here had been duller, making a sloppy job of it.

I took off the glove and sat crouched for long minutes, staring at the floor in front of me.

New Orleans ranked pretty high in the nation when it came to murder statistics. I knew this not because I read the papers but because I was kept busier than most other detectives in bigger cities. I’d seen more than my share of murders and had no fewer than a dozen actively open cases sitting on my desk at any one time, with a countless number of others that had been marked cold cases and filed away.

“Looks familiar.”