DIRTY LITTLE SECRETS by Mallory Kane Page B

were gone all day tomorrow, it would be another day before her official signed statement got into the file, and that was just sloppy paperwork. Plus, it wouldn’t hurt to check on her, make sure she was doing okay.
    What he wasn’t doing was making up an excuse to see her. Okay, maybe he was, but it was for her benefit. He just wanted to be sure she was safe at home, after that incident with Buddy Davis’s car on the sidewalk that afternoon.
    The phone rang again.
    “Delancey. Where y’at?” Dixon said when Ethan answered. It was a common casual greeting in New Orleans, but usually when Dixon said it, he meant it literally.
    “In my car, headed—home.” He didn’t want his partner to know he was checking on Laney. He wasn’t sure why.
    “Good. Got any brandy?”
    “Sure. That bottle of Courvoisier you brought over around Christmas is still there. Why? You have a fight with my cousin?”
    “No. Rose’s mom is at the house with her. They’re shopping online for baby clothes.”
    Ethan smiled and rubbed a place in the middle of his chest where he felt a twinge. “How’s she doing?” His partner had married his cousin Rosemary, whom he’d tracked down after she’d been missing and presumed dead for over a decade. Dixon had been ridiculously happy ever since, but now that they were expecting their first child, he was over the moon.
    Ethan had felt an odd twinge under his breastbone ever since Dixon had told him about the baby. He rubbed the place in the center of his chest again.
    “She’s fine. Feeling great,” Dixon said, sounding impatient.
    So Dixon was not inviting himself over to talk about babies or the joys of marriage this evening. That was fine with Ethan. He’d had enough of Dixon’s parental joy to last him a long time.
    He figured that Dixon must want to talk about something related to the search warrant he’d executed at Senator Sills’s home in Baton Rouge. It had taken Dixon and three forensics specialists two days to confiscate all of the personal papers in Sills’s house, box and transport them back to New Orleans, and organize them in an empty conference room at the courthouse. “So what’s up then?” he asked. “Did you unearth something at Sills’s house?”
    “How far are you from your apartment?”
    “About three minutes,” Ethan replied, taking the next left and heading back toward Prytania Street.
    “Okay. See you in ten. Pour me a double brandy.”
    “You got it.”
    Ethan had changed into jeans and had the brandy poured by the time Dixon arrived. “Come on in and take a load off,” he said when Dixon knocked on the screen door after clomping up the wooden staircase to Ethan’s second-story walk-up.
    “Thanks,” Dixon said, picking up the snifter of brandy that sat on the table Ethan used as a bar. He sat in the recliner next to the couch where Ethan was stretched out.
    “Have you eaten? Want to order pizza or something?” Ethan asked.
    “Nah. Rose has something for me when I get home.”
    “Chips?” Ethan nodded toward a crumpled bag of potato chips on the coffee table.
    “I’m good.” Dixon took a sip of brandy. He sighed and settled more deeply into the recliner.
    “So what’s up?” Ethan set his soft drink down and dug into the chips.
    “We executed the warrant on Sills’s residence yesterday.”
    “Yeah, I heard. A lot of paperwork. I guess he was planning on writing his memoirs or something.”
    “Or something.” Dixon took another long swallow of brandy.
    “You’re not attractive when you’re coy, Detective Lloyd.”
    “I’m getting to it. All in all we brought seventy-three boxes of papers down from Sills’s house. It took most of yesterday to load the truck, transport them and then haul them into a conference room at the courthouse.”
    “Seventy-three boxes. Big ones?”
    “Mostly they were those 1.5-cubic-foot boxes that movers use for books.”
    “Big enough. So what did you find?”
    “You know I stayed there all night,