Revenge of the Chili Queens by Kylie Logan

on to you as a suspect and they’re not going to look any further. If the two of us are working our own angle—”
    “I don’t need to work an angle; not when I didn’t do it.”
    “Okay, not an angle then. That’s not what I meant,anyway. I mean if the two of us talk to some people and see what we can find out, we’ve got a better chance at uncovering the truth. And with two of us, it will go faster.”
    The way his brows dropped low over his eyes, I knew he was trying to find a way to dispute this, but in the end, he really couldn’t. He puffed out a breath of surrender. “I’ve already done some digging,” he said. “But so far, I haven’t come up with much.”
    “Teddi’s worried about something,” I told him. “You know, the drag queen. We need to figure out if she knew Dominic. She’s jumpy and nervous and she wore a housedress tonight.”
    When Nick shot me a look, I figured it was easier just to keep going rather than to explain. “And I saw one of the beauty queens give Laurentius a bowl of chili last night. Too bad he wasn’t poisoned, huh? That would make things nice and easy. I saw him talking to Eleanor Alvarez, too. You know, the woman in charge of the whole shebang. She says they were just chatting, but I’ll tell you what, whatever they were talking about, she didn’t look happy.”
    “That’s all good.” Nick nodded, confirming this to himself.
    “But really, Nick, I think the first thing we need to do is figure out what Dominic was doing in San Antonio in the first place.”
    “I did some digging of my own, and I’ve already got that covered,” he said. “Dom was working security. For Consolidated Chili.”

CHAPTER 6

    Lucky for me, Nick got a call just then. Something about some drunk guy over near the entrance to the fund-raiser who was trying to get in and rescue all those dogs he heard barking. Thank you, drunk guy. I didn’t have Nick tagging along when I made my way over to the Consolidated Chili tent.
    I got there just in time to see the butt of the guy in the very nice suit and the very big ten-gallon cowboy hat when he got into the back of that sleek black limo of his.
    “That’s John Wesley Montgomery, right?” I asked a woman standing nearby. “He’s some big shot, huh?”
    “The biggest,” she told me. “There’s a lot of money in canned chili.”
    And a lot of sodium, too, I suspected, along with along list of chemicals and other ingredients that were never intended to be consumed by man or beast.
    John Wesley Montgomery couldn’t see me, but I made a face at the limo, anyway, as a way of showing my solidarity with real chili lovers everywhere.
    Then I got down to business.
    I looked over the crowd of jeans-clad animal huggers enjoying heaping bowls of Consolidated Chili’s products and dodged a couple beauty queens who were insistent (in a very nice and toothy way, of course) about shoving hokey souvenirs at me. It wasn’t until after I was the proud owner of four cardboard coasters, two bottle openers, and one of those rubbery jar openers that was shaped like a can and had the word Consolidated emblazoned across it that I found the beauty queen I was looking for, the one I’d seen giving Dominic Laurentius a bowl of chili the night before. I made a beeline for her.
    This particular night, she wasn’t looking so beautiful. Oh, she had on a very short, very tight black dress. Just like she had the night before. And she still wore that corny sparkling tiara and the satin banner across her chest that proclaimed her Miss Texas Chili Pepper . And that big hair? It was just as blond and just as big, and every single hair of her amazing shoulder-length flip was exactly in place. How it stayed that way when the humidity pressed around us like a smothering pillow, I can’t say.
    No matter. She looked as perfect as a beauty queen could.
    But I knew the telltale signs when I saw them—Miss Texas Chili Pepper had been crying. The tip of her nosewas just the