UPTOWN NEIGHBORHOOD, NEW ORLEANS

She wasn’t supposed to be doing this.

It was the first and only thought that entered Jade’s mind as she climbed out of her car and scanned the park. Children shouted and chased each other in the playground, and then, under the shadows of the live oak trees, runners and bicyclists whizzed on down the graveled path.

Inhaling the clean scent of pine and grass, Jade withdrew her cell phone from her work duffel and scrolled to the latest text she’d received: I’ll be in the first gazebo to your left after entering the park.

It was Jade’s first time visiting the historical Audubon Park since moving to New Orleans, but she didn’t allow herself the time to soak in its natural beauty. She’d come with a singular purpose, and that purpose was Shawna Zeker.

Tugging the strap of her workbag over the curve of her shoulder, she sidestepped two teenage boys on skateboards and bypassed the large, stone entrance gates. With quick strides, she made her way down a path marked with a chalk-drawn, walking stick figure.

She paused at the crossroads—left or right. You are doing the right thing, girl.

But was she?

Jade hesitated. Setting up a meeting with Shawna Zeker, the former lead suspect in a homicide case, was nowhere near the umbrella of responsibilities assigned to her job. This was not her job. If her boss found out . . . Well, to be perfectly honest he might not give a rat’s butt, so long as the brunt of the blame for Charlie Zeker’s death was lifted off of crime lab.

Still, even if Mike didn’t care, she knew a certain someone who certainly would: Nathan Danvers.

They’d opted against reaching out to Shawna, but Jade just knew that she held the key to the information they needed. While Nathan spent time trying to enlist a judge to favorably sign off on a search warrant of Miranda Smiley’s home, they were making no progress on the case. Speaking to Shawna Zeker signified progress.

Bolstered by her decision, Jade jogged across the path and spotted the gazebo. One goose attack, two almost hit-and-runs by speeding bicycles and three minutes later, Jade practically threw herself into the first gazebo that she came across.

“Are you Jade Harper?”

Jade lifted her gaze from the mud on her shoes to the woman seated in the corner of the gazebo. She was . . . striking, though perhaps not classically beautiful. Long blond hair covered her shoulders and she was dressed casually in a set of shorts-length coveralls.

“Miss Harper?”

Jade jolted into action, closing the gap between them and sticking out a hand in greeting. “Yes, I am.” When the other woman didn’t immediately answer the call for a polite handshake, Jade ran the palm of her hand over her pants. “Have you been waiting long?”

Shawna sent her a sharp glance. “Depends, I guess, on whether you’re talking about you showing up or the city’s determination to prove me a murderer.”

Jade steeled her spine. No chitchat then. Muy tambien. She hated chitchat anyway.

With a sudden bout of startling self-clarity, she realized that she had no idea what to do or say. This wasn’t her job, not her place. Her knowledge of interrogations—was a casual meetup classified as an interrogation?—was limited to shows like The First 48 and Dateline. Which, she supposed was better than relying on CSI or NCIS, but really, she was screwed.

Royally screwed.

Jade carefully picked a spot on the gazebo bench and took a seat, adopting a neutral expression. Her new position put her diagonal to Shawna Zeker. If she peered hard enough, she could make out the stress lines fanning her mouth and the dark circles beneath her eyes.

“Thanks for meeting me,” she said, choosing to ignore the other woman’s inflammatory comment. Feeding into the woman’s anger wouldn’t help her any. “I won’t take up too much of your time.”

“You cops have done that already,” Shawna clipped out icily, “when y’all threw me into jail like a common criminal.”

Perhaps this wasn’t the best time to admit that Jade was no police officer.

She subtly pushed the duffel bag against the wall of the bench, hiding her department’s logo.

“Right.” Jade coughed into a closed fist. “I asked you here today to ask you some questions.”

Shawna rolled her eyes. “No, I did not murder my husband. Did you not see the DNA report?”

Lifting a hand, palm out, Jade tried to redirect the conversation back to where she needed it. “I’m not asking about the DNA report.” From within her duffel she withdrew a sheet of paper. She held it out and waited for Shawna Zeker to take it.

Moments passed in a quiet stalemate. Then, with a huff, the other woman snapped it from Jade’s grasp and smoothed it out across her knee. Angry brown eyes jumped up to her face. “This is—”

“I need information on Miranda Smiley, who is also claiming to be ‘Mrs. Zeker,’ and who has said that you and Charlie have been divorced for three or four years now.”

The sheet of paper crumpled in Shawna’s hand. “That little bitch.”

Gracias al cielo that Jade had had the foresight to make photocopies of the marriage documents from Heavenly Met. She didn’t even bother to try and pry the sheet from the blonde’s grip.

Heart threatening to leap right out of her chest, Jade feigned a nonchalance she certainly didn’t feel. “Were you aware they’d married?”

“He couldn’t possibly have married her when he was married to me,” Shawna spat out with all the defensive air of a possible liar. “Charlie would not have done that.”

“I don’t know what Charlie would have done.” Jade said this slowly, testing the waters of just how far she could push Shawna Zeker for the truth without making her snap. “But I can tell you that the marriage license you’re holding is real, though if the two of you had divorced by then . . . ”

“We are not divorced.”

If that was the case, then Jade felt incredibly bad for the woman. But if she were right and Miranda Smiley had orchestrated the entire wedding, well, then perhaps Charlie Zeker had not been so awful of a husband.

Except for the fact that he was the father of Miranda’s three children, so clearly adultery had been a rather, erm, repetitive issue.

“Miranda Smiley said that you two have known each other for years.”

Not surprisingly, Shawna’s expression turned cold. “You could say that.”

“Would you say that the two of you were ever friends?” She paused, sucking in a deep breath. “Would you say that you knew each other well enough that she might have a key to your mother’s house?”

“A key to my mother’s house?” Shawna echoed, brows pulling low.

Jade’s heart rate doubled, it felt like, threatening to explode from her chest. “When your mother’s home was broken into, was it likely, maybe, that Miranda Smiley might have been the one to enter? Maybe she needed, or wanted, to take something that she felt belonged to her?”

Aside from the chirping birds, silence descended over the gazebo. Then, “She wouldn’t have had a key—unless she stole it, which is possible. We were mortal enemies, but there were times when she would come by, screaming and shouting, for me to leave Charlie alone. But he was my husband. I refused to go anywhere.”

It had to have hurt, tremendously. For all of John Thomas’s faults, Jade realized that she was fortunate that infidelity had never been the issue.

The issue had been that they were just two incompatible people trying to make a relationship work.

Wanting to put a hand on Shawna’s arm in comfort, Jade stifled the urge and clamped her hands together in her lap. Now wasn’t the time to feel sympathy.

Jade tightened her ponytail, and got back down to business.

“And Charlie?” she prodded gently. “What would you say about him?”

Screwing her eyes shut, Shawna muttered, “He was a lying, cheating scumbag but I loved him so much.”

“Enough to stay with him despite the fact that he was having children with another woman?”

Shawna slid her an icy glare. “I’m still not convinced that Miranda’s kids are his, but she always refused to do a paternity test.”

Interesting. “Any supporting evidence to show that they aren’t his?”

The blond woman’s shoulders slumped. “None, just a hunch. A woman’s intuition type of thing.”

“And the marriage document you’re holding,” Jade said, reaching out to tap the crumpled paper, “your intuition is telling you that it’s not real.”

“It’s not. I know it’s not. I think I would remember getting divorced. We never even discussed it.”

Jade arched a disbelieving brow. “Never?”

“Okay,” Shawna breathed out, “fine, but it was just once or twice. We never went through with it.”

Between the two women’s differing sides of the story, Jade felt a whole lot like a ping-pong ball being bounced back and forth across a net. One said the divorce was real; the other said it wasn’t. One claimed the marriage was a sham; the other said it was real and there was documentation to prove it.

What Jade needed was a bubble bath and a glass of red wine.

But not yet.

“I need you to take a look at that paper and tell me why you think it’s not real. I can tell you that I personally photocopied it from a wedding chapel’s database, and I certainly didn’t fake it.”

With a push of her fingertips, Shawna Zeker unfolded the crumpled sheet across her knee again. For a moment, she said nothing as her gaze skimmed the printed text. Then, she spoke, and validated everything Jade had already thought.

“It’s not Charlie’s signature.”

Bingo.

Jade clamped her arms by her sides to keep from fist-bumping the air. “Are you sure of this?” she asked.

Shawna sent her an are-you-serious glare. “He was my husband. I know what his signature looked like.”

Do not get your hopes up, girl. Rein it in. A fraud signature didn’t exactly mean that Miranda Smiley had murdered Charlie Zeker, but it was certainly a step in the right direction to figuring it out. And the fact that Miranda had been known to cause a frenzy at Ms. Hansen’s house?

She couldn’t wait to tell Nathan about this.

Doing her best to sound unaffected, Jade asked, “Do you have a copy of his signature anywhere? On a bill, maybe, or a contract?”

In succinct, sharp motions, Shawna folded the sheet in half and then doubled it again into a square. “Will getting you Charlie’s signature show that I’m no suspect in his murder, once and for all?”

Jade didn’t have an answer for that. “It can’t hurt,” she hedged uneasily, going for a vague, in-between sort of answer. “It would certainly help to show that you’re aiding the case.”

Shawna released a heavy sigh. “All right, okay. I didn’t do it. I know that my mother said that I—” She cut off abruptly and coughed into her hand, sparking Jade’s interest.

“What was that?” Jade leaned forward.

Glancing away, the other woman fisted the paper in her hands. “Nothing. It’s nothing. Anyway, I have a copy of Charlie’s signature at my house. I mean, my mom’s house. I’m staying there for now.”

Jade so wanted to pry for more information. Let it happen naturally. “Can you bring me to your mom’s house now? The sooner the better.”

“No, I can’t today,” Shawna said, shaking her head. “Tomorrow, maybe.”

Maybe?

“Shawna,” Jade started, “tomorrow might be too late. If we can get a match of his signature today, then this could all be solved by tomorrow, don’t you see?”

“Not today.”

Shawna straightened off the bench, a clear-as-a-bell signal that she was about to head out. Jade scrambled to her feet, hooking her duffel over her head and across her chest in one smooth move. She stepped in the other woman’s way, blocking her exit point from the gazebo.

“Shawna,” she began again, “you providing your husband’s signature could end this. Your name could be forever cleared—isn’t that what you want?”

“What I want,” was the short reply, “is for my husband to be alive, Detective Harper. I want Miranda Smiley”—the name was ground out—“to understand that my husband loved me. She was nothing but a sidepiece. I’ll text you with the time that you can come by tomorrow or the next day and collect what you need.”

This couldn’t wait for tomorrow or the next day.

“Mrs. Zeker—”

A flash of the woman’s palm cut off Jade. “I know how this works by now. If you want to enter my mother’s house, you’ll need a search warrant. I’m cooperating with what you want but just not today. Tomorrow.”

Maybe, if Jade had been a cop, she could have slapped some handcuffs on Shawna Zeker to keep her from walking away. But she wasn’t a cop. She worked in Central Evidence Processing, and she was so far outside the normal scope of her job that she felt very much like a fish out of water.

As Shawna Zeker’s figure grew smaller as she left Audubon Park, Jade realized that she needed a plan.

No, what she needed was Nathan Danvers.