Private Investigations

The body had a pair of arms that caught and steadied her in a comforting embrace. The guy had blatant sex appeal in a lean body that scraped six feet and moved with a sexual, confident gait. Now, like half the female population in New Orleans, Christy found herself susceptible to this man, experiencing all these treacherous sensations. This dizzy breathlessness as the pair of brash green eyes continued to hold her gaze. This sudden heat in her insides as she stared up at the bold face under its thatch of dark hair. And this weakness in her limbs as the powerful arms continued to pin her against his chest.

“If you go around getting into trouble just to get my attention,” Dallas said in a deliberately seductive voice, “things are bound to happen. Really dangerous things.”

Dear Harlequin Intrigue Reader,

Cupid’s bow is loaded at Harlequin Intrigue with four fabulous stories of breathtaking romantic suspense—starting with the continuation of Cassie Miles’s COLORADO SEARCH AND RESCUE miniseries. In Wedding Captives, lovers reunite on a mountaintop…unfortunately they’re also snowbound with a madman!

And there’s no better month to launch our new modern gothic continuity series MORIAH’S LANDING. Amanda Stevens emerges from the New England fog with Secret Sanctuary, the first of four titles coming out over the next several months. You can expect all of the classic themes you love in these stories, plus more of the contemporary edge you’ve come to expect from our brand of romantic suspense.

You know what can happen In the Blink of an Eye…? Julie Miller does! And you can find out, too, in the next installment of her TAYLOR CLAN series.

Finally, Jean Barrett takes you to New Orleans for some Private Investigations with battling P.I.’s. It’s a regular showdown in the French Quarter—where absolutely anything goes.

So celebrate Valentine’s Day with the most confounding mystery of all…that of the heart.

Deep, rich chocolate wishes,

Denise O’Sullivan

Associate Senior Editor

Harlequin Intrigue

Private Investigations

Jean Barrett

www.millsandboon.co.uk

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

If setting has anything to do with it, Jean Barrett claims she has no reason not to be inspired. She and her husband live on Wisconsin’s scenic Door Peninsula in an antique-filled country cottage overlooking Lake Michigan. A teacher for many years, she left the classroom to write full-time. She is the author of a number of romance novels.

Write to Jean at P.O. Box 623, Sister Bay, WI 54234.

Books by Jean Barrett

HARLEQUIN INTRIGUE

308—THE SHELTER OF HER ARMS

351—WHITE WEDDING

384—MAN OF THE MIDNIGHT SUN

475—FUGITIVE FATHER

528—MY LOVER’S SECRET

605—THE HUNT FOR HAWKE’S DAUGHTER

652—PRIVATE INVESTIGATIONS

CAST OF CHARACTERS

Christy Hawke—Both her heart and her P.I. agency are at risk.

Dallas McFarland—The sexy P.I. has more on his agenda than he is willing to admit.

Denise—Christy’s assistant gives her a hard time, but she is a loyal friend.

Laura Hollister—Her death is shadowed by a web of lies and deceit.

Glenn Hollister—Christy’s ex-boyfriend is desperate for her help.

Monica Claiborne—She trusts no one but Dallas to solve her sister’s murder.

Daisy—The little girl is threatened by the loss of her father.

Camille Leveau—Does the voodoo queen have something to hide?

Marty Bornowski—The asphalt king is protecting more than his daughter.

Dutch Vesey—He’s an undesirable character, but is he also a killer?

Buzz Purreau—The young jeweler has no secrets, or does he?

Alistair St. Leger—Christy’s congenial neighbor is all too willing to help.

Edgar Evers—The lawyer startles Christy with a surprising revelation.

To new and used bookstores everywhere.

Your support is wonderful.

Bless you for caring.

Contents

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Epilogue

The Altar

It was no more than a narrow shelf behind a hidden door in a darkened room, but it held all that he required to serve his demonic deity. A pair of black candles burned, their flickering light revealing on the shelf a tiny black coffin, the skull of a goat and several finger bones. There was also a flat dish containing oil. In it he placed the strands of auburn hair he had snipped from the head of his victim. He was ready.

Seizing one of the candles, he passed it back and forth over the dish before applying its flame to the oil. The hair slowly curled and burned in the ignited oil, filling his nostrils with a sickly sweet odor. As he watched the strands being consumed, he chanted a soft, rhythmic incantation.

When the hair was no more than a powdery ash on the surface of the hot oil, he began to pray. “You instruct us, Master, that those who transgress must pay for their transgressions. Hear me, Master, and know that she will trouble us no more…”

Above the shelf hung a small mirror. In the weaving light of the candles his face was reflected in the shadowy, distorted glass. A face that was lurid, glowing with triumph, for he knew now what it felt like to have taken the life of a human being. And, if necessary, he could kill again.

Prologue

New Orleans

Dallas McFarland was history. They had lost all swaggering, hot-eyed six feet of him at a fender bender over on Canal. McFarland had been trapped in the mob of gawkers that had gathered when a minivan had run a light and smacked into a panel truck. So much for his celebrated reputation as a private investigator.

Chortled wasn’t a word that Christy Hawke ordinarily associated with herself, but on this occasion it seemed appropriate. She did feel like chortling. McFarland had been a thorn in her side from the day she had opened her own agency, robbing her of one client after another.

Not this time, thank you. She intended to demonstrate her worth, win this contest of skills, and secure the job she badly needed. Make that desperately needed.

But not by being overconfident, Christy sharply reminded herself. She and her subject might have accidentally shaken McFarland, but there was always the chance that Christy could also be given the slip. Not that her young target had manifested any sign yet of being followed. With all the negligent ease that only a teenager is capable of, she continued to wind her way through the tourists sauntering along Decatur Street, never once turning her head.

“Hey, my daughter is tricky,” Marty Bornowski had gruffly cautioned them. “You wouldn’t be the first tail this kid has managed to ditch. That’s why I need the best and can afford to pay for it. So, providing one of you can show me whether she’s still meeting this little punk on the sly, you get all the work I can throw your way.”

Christy wasn’t forgetting the warning as she kept her objective in sight. However, it did seem to her that if his daughter was determined to evade her father’s surveillance, she was going about it all wrong. Because there was no way, absolutely no way, that Brenda Bornowski could blend with any crowd, not even here in the French Quarter where the eccentric were hardly remarkable.

From her chunky shoes to her black leather miniskirt, and cropped hair, with spiky tufts shaded from orange to silver-blond, Brenda proclaimed her presence. Then went on to confirm it with a lavender-blue mouth and a particularly vivid shade of green fingernail polish. And that didn’t take into account her triple-pierced ears, pierced nose, pierced lower lip and conceivably other pierced areas not yet evident to Christy.

Interesting, she thought. It was just possible that Brenda was carrying more metal on her body than the heavy equipment her father used in his asphalt business, which had Christy wondering if she ought to start paving roads herself. Had to be a lot more profitable than private investigating, at which she was barely surviving. And that was on the good days. She had yet to determine if this would be one of them. That depended on Brenda.

Ah, the Jax Brewery! That was where they were going. She watched Brenda cross the street and head toward the blocky, multi-storied structure that had been converted from an old brewery into a trendy shopping mall. Following at a safe distance, Christy quickly checked the street behind her before swinging onto the center after her subject. Wonderful! McFarland was still missing in action. Brenda Bornowski was hers!

Brenda started up on the top level and worked her way down from shop to shop, Christy drifting after her. The girl seemed in no hurry. She tried on an awesome jacket in an explosion of colors, which she didn’t buy. She chatted on her cell phone, presumably to a girlfriend and examined a selection of lingerie so blatantly erotic in nature it would have made a Bourbon Street stripper blush. And as she continued to aimlessly wander the mall, chewed her way through a bag of licorice sticks acquired from a candy stand near the elevator.

What Brenda didn’t do was meet anyone, male or female. Nor at any point did she indicate the slightest concern over the possibility that she was being shadowed. Which, even as careful as Christy was to remain unobserved, should have been her first clue that trouble was on its way.

The problem wasn’t Christy’s lack of alertness, however, but the mounting tension that accompanied it. This was always a threat to concentration. She couldn’t help it. She had so much riding on this contest that she risked taking the brim off her baseball cap from tugging on it, a habit whenever her nerves were under siege.

Come on, Brenda. Make my day.

Things got a bit more interesting when they returned to the ground floor and her subject took them into a bookstore. A bookstore? It didn’t strike Christy as Brenda’s kind of scene. Had to be the young clerk and his eager smile. Sure. The two of them lost no time engaging themselves in a leisurely conversation, Brenda leaning against the counter as she flirted with him.

Christy went into action behind the paperbacks. From the shoulder bag that was far too large for her petite frame, but contained all her essentials, including her Glock semiautomatic, she removed a pocket-size tape recorder and dutifully reported the encounter in a low murmur.

“Don’t think this can be the, uh, little punk she’s meeting. No tattoos. At least none currently visible. I’d say he’s harmless…”

By the time Christy replaced the recorder in her bag, her subject had left the counter and was strolling up one aisle and down the next. Christy followed, pretending to examine the titles. When they reached the end of the last aisle, Brenda abruptly swung around and faced her. Except she wasn’t Brenda. Same chunky shoes, same black leather miniskirt, even the same hair, but definitely not Brenda Bornowski.

Christy must have clearly registered her shock since a gleeful grin appeared on the girl’s face. And that’s when she understood two things. The conversation on the cell phone upstairs had been a lot more than just gossip. A cunning Brenda, spotting Daddy’s tail, had summoned Best Friend to the mall.

The second thing Christy understood was that she should never have taken her eyes off her subject. Not even for those forty-five seconds with the recorder, because that’s all Brenda had needed to pull this switch on her.

Gone!

But maybe not. From the corner of her eye, Christy caught a flash of orange and silver blond through the expanse of glass at the side of the store. Brenda was outside and on her way to the top of the levee!

And I’ll be damned if I lose her.

The little stinker was far too important to Christy, which was why she streaked out of the store, out of the building, toward the river.

Above the blare of a Dixieland band playing on the Brewery’s restaurant terrace came the hoot of a steamboat whistle. It announced the imminent departure of one of the replicas of the old paddle wheelers that offered hourly excursions along the river. And Christy knew, just knew, that Brenda was making for that vessel.

Determined not to let her quarry escape, she struggled, squirmed and squeezed her way through the tourists that jammed the area. Progress, she was making progress. She caught a glimpse of Brenda racing up the stairs ahead of her. And then it all went wrong again.

A bevy of elderly ladies wearing badges that identified them as conventioneers swarmed around her, cutting her off, trapping her. One of them, who had an overbite and a raspy voice, demanded of Christy, “Okay, tell us how we get to the Streetcar Named Desire.”

New Orleans always treated its out of town visitors with warmth and courtesy. Or tried to. But, myth or reality, Christy was in no mood for Southern hospitality. “Uh, I don’t think it exists anymore, or else these days it’s a bus; either way I don’t know. Now if you’ll just let me by—”

“Oh, not that one. I’m talking about the Streetcar Named Desire that’s a club. You know, the one featuring exotic male dancers?”

Christy blinked at her. “No, I don’t know, so if you’ll excuse me—”

The raspy voice sounded injured this time. “But he said you’d be certain to know.”

“Who?”

“That sweet man up on the levee who pointed you out to us.”

That got Christy’s attention. “What man? What did he look like?”

“Why, I’m not sure.”

“I am,” piped one of her eager companions. “He had a dynamite smile and a butt to die for.”

Dallas McFarland! Jolted by the knowledge that she hadn’t shaken him after all—because she didn’t doubt for the space of a heartbeat that it was him, and never mind how he’d managed to catch up with them—Christy beat her way through the ranks of conventioneers.

There was another blast from the boat whistle. Frantic now, she sprinted up the stairs, arrived breathlessly on the broad top of the levee, but was too late. The paddle wheeler, passengers crowding the decks, was drawing away from the landing. Up near the prow stood a smirking Brenda Bornowski, not yet aware of the tall figure of Dallas McFarland stationed at the rail several safe lengths away from her.

The wicked grin that her infuriating rival directed at Christy down on the levee, informed her that not only had she screwed up what should have been an easy surveillance, but that he had somehow managed to snatch another potential client from under her nose. And just to be certain there was no question of that, McFarland stabbed a finger in the direction of a small figure who had arrived at Christy’s side. She looked down to see a boy in a Saints T-shirt extending toward her a rectangle of cream-colored pasteboard.

“Guy on the boat said to give you this.”

He delivered the offering and melted away. And while the Dixieland band went on playing under the April sunshine, Christy looked at what he had placed in her hand. It was one of her own business cards printed with Hawke Detective Agency against a logo of a golden hawk. A bold, insolent black X had been struck across the face of the card from corner to corner.

Chapter One

It fronted on Royal Street, and it had just about everything an old building in the historic district is supposed to have—lacy wrought iron balconies, shutters at the long windows, gas lanterns. A dream of a place, Christy would think whenever she returned to it. Ordinarily, that is.

The carriageway that tunneled through the building framed a view of the courtyard. Whenever Christy emerged from the dim passage, she would find herself delighted all over again by the fountain and vines and tubs of flowers. Ordinarily, that is.

The old converted slave quarters were at the rear of the courtyard. Christy occupied the small structure, her agency on the ground floor and her apartment tucked above it on the second level. It was a cramped arrangement, but, hey, this was the French Quarter and rents were high. So she would count herself lucky that the regular tenant, in a hurry to take a job overseas, had subleased the place to her at an affordable rent. Ordinarily, that is.

But not this afternoon. This afternoon Christy was oblivious to all this quaint charm—which she was in danger of losing anyway, reasonable rent or not—because the only thing she had time for as she stormed across the courtyard and through the door marked Hawke Detective Agency, was the image inside her head of Dallas McFarland sinking slowly in a bottomless pool of quicksand.

The office was silent. But since her assistant, Denise, was bouncing and swaying happily at her desk, Christy assumed that the jazz music she relished was pouring through the radio plug stuck in her ear. Fond though Christy was of the woman, she didn’t consider her much of an assistant. However, as Denise was a retired bus driver with an adequate pension, she was willing to work cheap. This was because she had a regrettable longing for P.I. excitement, the kind of action that was in short supply lately at the agency, a situation Denise frequently grumbled about.

The radio plug came out of her ear with a jerk as Christy slammed over to her own desk and slumped in her chair.

“Uh-oh. Looks like the Prince of Darkness beat us out of the running again.”

“I don’t want to talk about it!” Christy snapped. And then, surging to her feet, she proceeded to do exactly that as she prowled from one end of the small office to the other with Denise’s gaze solemnly following her. “I didn’t like the idea anyway! A controlling father wanting to spy on his daughter just because he thinks her boyfriend is no good and up to mischief! All right, so he’s a rich father, and we needed the money!”

“Uh-huh.”

“But a contest like that? Come on, it’s dumb! I shouldn’t have agreed to it!”

“Uh-uh.”

“I mean, why didn’t he just pick one of us, instead of pitting us against each other?”

“Maybe he gets his jollies that way.”

“And McFarland—McFarland just loved it!”

“Sure, he’s bad.”

“Got that right! Arrogant, unprofessional, no principles!”

“And one sexy dude.”

Christy rounded on her traitorous assistant. “What is it with you and the women in this town and that man? That—that bottom-feeder!”

“Guess by that you don’t want to hear what happened here while I was out to lunch. Guess you’re in no mood for it, huh?”

“What?”

“That the answering machine got itself full up with messages, the fax machine is spitting faxes all over the place, the computer is loaded with e-mail and they’re all from your mama in Chicago lookin’ to hear from you.”

“I see. And all this happened while I was gone. Could it be possible, Denise, that you had a longer lunch hour than you planned?”

Denise thought about it. “Could be. Us full-figured gals need to keep up our energy.”

“I don’t suppose there’s anything else on one of those machines. Like maybe someone needing to hire a P.I. with money no object?”

“Nuh-uh.”

“In that case…” Christy returned to her desk and reached reluctantly for the phone. She hated having to call her mother, knowing exactly what she was going to hear before she heard it. No way around it.

She dialed home, or what used to be home for her, which was the main office of the Hawke Detective Agency founded by her mother and father back in Chicago.

“Hawke Agency.” The familiar voice was cheerful, efficient. It belonged to her mother, Moura Hawke, the energetic doyenne of both the family and its agency, which had branches throughout the country operated by Christy and her four siblings.

“It’s me, Ma. What’s up?” As if she couldn’t guess.

“A celebration, my darling. I hope. Did you win the Bornowski case?”

“Afraid not, Ma.” Oh, how humiliating it was for Christy to admit her defeat. She was twenty-six years old and still regarded as the baby who had to be protected from the big bad world, still fighting to be recognized by her family as a P.I. in her own right.

“Oh.” The eagerness faded from Moura’s voice. “I suppose it went to McFarland?”

“Looks like it.”

“I’m sorry.” There was a pause, and then Moura’s tone became very gentle. Christy realized what was coming. “The thing is, I’ve been doing all the accounts for the first quarter, and…well, basically, sweetheart, you don’t have a quarter.”

“I know, Ma. Things have been a little slow.”

Slow? They had ground to a halt, and both of them knew it. The other phone in the office rang and Denise answered it. Christy paid no attention. She was too busy being heart-broken. She had done everything but promise her firstborn to convince her parents she was competent enough to open her own branch of the agency, and now she was on the sharp edge of losing it.

Moura had a suggestion. “Eden has a break between cases. What if she came over from Charleston and just sort of helped you to—”

“No!” Christy loved her family, Eden included, but she was damned if she was going to let her sister rush to New Orleans to try to save her agency for her. If she had to go down, she would sink on her own, thank you very much.

“Then what about Devlin?” Moura said, offering Christy’s eldest brother.

It was Denise, bless her, who rescued Christy. She had lowered her own phone and, with a lot of head-bobbing and eye-rolling, was signaling Christy to take the call.

“Absolutely not. Look, Ma, I have to go. There’s a call for me on the other line. I think it may be a new client. Love to Pop.”

“But I haven’t told you yet what your father—”

“Later, Ma.” She hung up and eagerly whispered to Denise, “Is it a potential client? Do I get a miracle?”

“Now how’d I know if he is or isn’t? But you’d better pick up. He sounds serious. Real serious.”

Christy snatched up her phone, stabbed in the other line, greeted the caller with a brisk, “Christy Hawke speaking,” and felt her heart lurch in her breast as the mellow male voice, from a past she thought she had buried, spoke to her earnestly.

“It’s me, Christy. Glenn.”

“How are you, Glenn?” Now how did she manage to sound so cool when her heart was still misbehaving?

“Not so good, actually.” He seemed surprised that she could ask such a thing. “I need to see you, Christy.”

“Personal or professional?”

“Professional,” he said.

Should she resent him for contacting her like this? No, she decided, she had made peace with that particular episode in her past, forgiven him long ago. “Are you in trouble, Glenn?”

He paused. “Maybe.”

“Like to tell me about it?”

“I think we need to get together as soon as possible.”

Christy could appreciate his wish for a meeting. Clients rarely wanted to discuss their problems over the phone. “I’m free right now.” Oh, boy, was she free. “Do you know where my office is?”