raked through the papers for months,” his father said acidly. “And it’s not just the promotion. We’re talking your mother here. You know her. With all this stuff in the papers, she’d either haul off and kill me herself or just have a stroke, long before I got the DNA results back.”
“Mom.” Jake swallowed. He hadn’t thought about her reaction. He loved his mother dearly, but she wasn’t what you’d call a clearheaded, rational person when it came to her husband. She was hotheaded and had a jealous streak a mile wide. Always had. Mom, confronted with these accusations…ouch.
“And now, as if it couldn’t get any worse, the girl has disappeared.” Michael Calhoun shook his head.
“What do you mean, disappeared?”
“I mean she set up another meeting,” he said grimly. “A week ago. I was sitting out there on my park bench, waiting for her. But she never showed.”
“You think she got scared off and took a powder?”
His father shrugged. “I don’t know what to think. I put Vince on it, and he can’t find a trace.”
“Vince?” Jake rolled his eyes skyward. This just kept getting worse. Vince had been his father’s right-hand man on the force for twenty-five years. He was loyal to a fault, a good guy from the get-go, but not exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer, even on his best days before he went deaf and had one knee and a hip replaced. Not exactly an ace investigator. “Dad, Vince retired six or seven years ago. What are you doing bringing him in on this?”
“He’s my friend. I can trust him,” he replied. “You got a problem with that?”
“No, of course not, but…” But now the leading candidate for First Deputy Superintendent of Police was not only conducting some kind of secret personal investigation concerning allegations of blackmail and professional misconduct, but he was also involving other people. Other people like Vince, who could stumble into all sorts of trouble. Carefully Jake asked, “You’re not using department resources to do this, are you?”
All he got in response was a very dark look.
“Okay, forget I asked.” Jake sighed. “But if she’s gone, why isn’t this over?”
“’Cause I’m worried, okay? What if she’s laying low till she can blow the story? Or plotting some new strategy? Or something worse?” He shuddered. “I need to know. Now.”
“And what is it you want me to do?” Jake asked slowly, dreading the answer.
“I know you’ve got a couple of weeks off. And your profile is a lot lower than mine.” He paused. Jake knew what was coming. Not that that made it any more appetizing. “I got a real bad feeling about this, like she’s out there somewhere waiting to strike. Or that she was consorting with a more dangerous class of perp and got herself offed or something. You gotta find her and make this go away before she can cause any more trouble.”
“Dad, I…” I don’t want to get knee-deep in this mess. I want to go on vacation. I want to go fishing with my brothers, as planned. But he was the responsible one, the one who never said no. Too late to start having the good sense to decline now.
“Did you think about asking Sean?” he tried, clutching at one last straw. “He’s the detective, not me. He’s the one with…” What had the papers said? Sean had cracked a couple of supposedly uncrackable cases and gained a reputation rather quickly. Sean, who never wanted to be a cop in the first place, had been promoted to detective in spite of himself. Jake smiled. Funny how that turned out. He couldn’t quite keep the sarcasm out of his voice when he said, “According to the press releases, Sean’s the one with the uncanny instinct for the truth.”
“I’m not asking Sean,” his father said quickly. “You’re my boy, Jakie. I know how you think. Not that seat-of-the-pants baloney like Sean. You’re like me. Play by the rules.” He tapped his temple with one finger. “Think it through.”
Yeah, I know. That’s me. Play by the rules. Jake, number two on the list of True Blue Calhouns, right behind his dad.
“And I don’t want you involving either of your brothers or your mother in this,” Michael Calhoun continued, looking very fierce all of a sudden. “Nobody knows. This is between you and me. You got that?”
“Yeah.” Between you, me, Vince and the missing tootsie, he thought bleakly. Like he would really want to share this information with anyone, anyway. The more he thought about it, the more he realized Dad was right on that point. No way he could tell Sean or Cooper that their father was being blackmailed by some scam artist claiming to be their illegitimate half sister. Since Sean and their old man had never seen eye-to-eye, the middle Calhoun son would probably get all moody and upset on Mom’s behalf, while the youngest, Cooper, would no doubt think it was a hoot and then want to find this girl and hang out and have a few beers or something. Sean would growl about how the old man couldn’t be trusted, while Coop would be going, A new sister. Cool!
Taking Dad’s side was, as always, left to Jake.
“So what have you got to go on? Real name? Record? Anything?”
His father scrambled to open the briefcase. “She was pretty cagey, so I haven’t got much. Never could get prints or anything to run. But I had Vince take some pictures the last time I met with her.”
He handed over a couple of blurry shots, partially obscured by tree branches and leaves, showing two people sitting on what looked like a park bench. As far as Jake could tell, one of the figures was his father, in the same getup he was wearing now, while the woman sitting next to him had a frizzy mop of platinum blond hair and dark sunglasses. There were a few more pictures, showing her as she walked away from the bench and closer to the photographer, but they were equally lousy.
“Vince losing his eyesight now, too?” Jake asked, squinting at the out-of-focus photos.
“What?”
“Nothing.” Jake flipped back through the stack. The only one that appeared to be completely in focus was taken from the waist down. Oh, great. He had a crystal-clear view of her feet.
The photos revealed that she was medium height, curvy enough to attract a lot of male attention, and trashy enough to be tottering in high-heeled sandals with scruffy, way-too-tight, way-too-low-cut blue jeans. Toe rings. Nail polish. Sparkly hooker shoes with straps that crisscrossed over her ankle. Other than that…she could’ve been anyone.
He frowned. “Is this it?” He’d never find her with nothing more than a few fuzzy photographs taken from behind a tree and one sharp shot of her legs.
“Vince got somebody to run what we had through the system on the sly, but it came up empty. I looked for matches with the old files from the seventies, too, but that led nowhere.”
“Dad, I don’t think there’s any way—”
“I got one other lead,” his father interrupted. “The last time I met her, about a week ago, when Vince took the pictures, I told him to stick with her and see where she went. He followed her to…”
He dipped back into the briefcase, holding up a sheet from a memo pad. “Okay, here it is. Vince tailed her to someplace called Red Sails Specialty Tours, a fancy travel agency on Michigan Avenue. He said he sneaked in behind her, all casual, and pretended he was interested
