Killing Kate: A Novel (Riley Spartz Book 4) by Julie Kramer Page A

lottery.
    “I don’t know my sister anymore.”
    I took my eyes off the dollar sign with all the numbers. I didn’trecognize the company issuing the check, but noticed the words “Desiree Fleur” typed on the memo line.
    “What do you think it means?” I tried to keep my question neutral. I didn’t volunteer that my first thought was the name sounded like a porn star. But Laura was way ahead of me down that path.
    “It means my sister was a smut peddler.”
    My eyes widened. I hadn’t expected her to use such harsh language. And she talked like she meant it.
    I mumbled something about being sure there was a good explanation—just the kind of thing I’ve learned over the years to say on the job when there really isn’t a good explanation.
    “Follow me.” Laura grabbed my arm and led me past the murder scene and down the hall into a home office. Messy, like mine. A laptop computer sat on a desk near the window. A bookcase dominated the room. I looked closely because I believe you can tell a lot about a person by their books.
    Laura pointed to the bottom shelf, and immediately I saw why she was so agitated. About a dozen paperbacks bragged “Desiree Fleur” on the spine. I pulled them out and saw sensual covers with sweaty couples in erotic embraces. I set them on a table in the office, and noticed another one titled Black Angel Lace .
    “Tramp,” Laura said.
    “Calm down. So your sister wrote novels. Sure the covers are a little racy. But authors don’t get to pick their covers. That’s a publisher—”
    “But nothing, read inside. Raunchy.”
    I opened the book randomly and started reading a graphic depiction of a boy and girl having sex in a cemetery. I flipped through the pages and noticed the plot seemed to move from one steamy scene to another.
    I understood Laura’s point. While Black Angel Lace wouldn’t legally qualify as pornography, it was a long shot from a Harlequin romance or even Lady Chatterley’s Lover .
    “Whore.” Laura was going overboard with the name-calling.
    “It’s not as bad as you think. Your sister was not a prostitute. If she was a whore, she was a whore of words. You could say the same thing about lots of lawyers or politicians.”
    Laura wasn’t buying the comparison. “She knew what she was doing was shameful. That’s why she kept it hidden.”
    The sisters came from a strict Catholic family who probably believed reading The Da Vinci Code to be sinful. Clearly Kate was able to shake that philosophy.
    “Possibly she wanted to shield you from embarrassment or just avoid a family fight,” I said. “She wrote for the money, she certainly wasn’t writing for fame.”
    I reminded Laura that her sister used a pen name. And her book jacket bore no author photo. The bio on the inside cover vaguely stated only that she lived in the Midwest.
    Those points seemed to calm Laura. “You’re right, Riley. I just have to hope no one else finds out.”
    Here’s where journalism gets tricky. And why it’s best not to get involved in stories with friends or relatives. Discovering that the deceased was a secret and successful author of erotica suddenly made her murder more interesting than it was an hour ago, when she was merely a dead medical transcriptionist.
    I wouldn’t be so cruel as to debate the rule of on the record versus off the record with Laura. But this bit of information about her sister was more than just a news scoop for me. It could be a clue to finding her killer.
    “Laura, you have to take this to the police.”
    She shook her head, sat in the office chair, and put her hands over her face. “Absolutely not. Clearly my sister felt guilt or she’d not have kept this hidden.”
    “I know you’d like to keep this hush-hush. But it’s not the kind of thing that can stay quiet. For one thing, you have to tell Kate’s publisher that she’s dead.”
    “No way. I’m not talking to those freaks.”
    She grabbed Black Angel Lace from my hands and threw it