Buch lesen: «Hot Prospect»

1

JAKE CALHOUN CAST a jaded eye at the noisy tourists milling around Chicago’s Navy Pier. Lots of people. But not the one he was looking for.

“Where are you, Dad?” he muttered. Damn it, anyway. The last thing Jake needed to be doing this fine summer day was playing spy games with his dad. Especially when he was supposed to be halfway to Wisconsin by now, halfway to an actual vacation, his first in a long time.

But Jake knew the drill. Duty. Loyalty. Responsibility. Those were the words he lived by. So when his father had called and growled, “Meet me at Navy Pier. Ferris wheel. Now,” Jake knew his vacation would have to take a back seat.

“Meet him at the Ferris wheel,” he grumbled. “What sense does that make?” He ground his hands into the pockets of his jeans, casting a quick glance up at the carefree people laughing and waving as they rolled around on the big ol’ wheel. He shook his head. Nope. It made no sense.

“Where is he?” Jake’s frown deepened as he cased the pier one more time. This was so strange. And so very unlike his father. Since when did gruff, by-the-book Michael Calhoun, one of five deputy superintendents of police for the city of Chicago, in line to be First Deputy, set up secret meetings at Ferris wheels in the middle of the day? And since when did Michael Calhoun need his son’s help for anything more important than painting the garage or driving Grandma Calhoun to the dentist?

None of this made sense. Jake’s feeling of foreboding just kept inching higher. And it didn’t get any lower when he finally caught sight of his dad. “A coat?” Jake said out loud. “It’s got to be a hundred degrees out here, and he’s wearing a freakin’ trench coat.”

Add up the coat, an equally ridiculous hat pulled down over his brow, and his studious attempt to appear nonchalant, and the senior Mr. Calhoun might as well have stenciled “suspicious” on his forehead. He was sitting on a bench, staring out into Lake Michigan, looking like any run-of-the-mill criminal waiting to make a drop. Sheesh. The man was a career cop. He knew better.

“You’ve even got a briefcase,” Jake said in disbelief as he neared his dad. “What are you doing?”

“Ssshhh. Sit down. Don’t look at me. Don’t let on you know me.”

Jake folded his arms over his chest. “Aw, c’mon, Dad. Whatever game you’re playing, it’s not working.”

His father snapped, “Sit down and shut up.”

When Michael Calhoun spoke in that tone, his sons knew better than to buck him. Reluctantly Jake took a seat on the other end of the bench, stared out toward the lake and waited for an explanation.

“So?” he tried eventually, feeling like an idiot for not looking at his father as he spoke to him. “Are you going to tell me what this is all about?”

“You in a hurry?”

“I’d really like to get this show on the road and get it over with. Sean and Coop are probably already at the fishing cabin, wondering what the heck happened to me,” Jake reminded him.

“Screw your vacation,” his dad said sharply. “Your brothers can wait. I got a problem. It needs to be fixed, fast. And you’re the only one who can help.”

Jake didn’t know what to make of that. Sure, he was the oldest son. Sure, everybody knew that he and his father were cut from the same no-nonsense cloth, that they spoke the same language, that when he needed something done, Michael Calhoun turned to Jake first. But that didn’t usually involve mysterious meetings at the Navy Pier.

“What exactly is the nature of this problem?” Jake asked, in the same even tone he would’ve used to question a witness.

“A woman.”

Aw, jeez. His father had a problem with a woman? That he didn’t need to hear.

“Not what you think,” his dad said gruffly.

“I wasn’t thinking anything.”

“You better not be.” Exhaling sharply, Michael Calhoun leaned back into the bench. “You should know me better than that.”

No response necessary.

“Okay, so here it is. Some chick showed up out of the blue a few weeks ago,” he explained tersely, still not looking at Jake. “She says her name is Toni, and she says…”

He trailed off, and Jake had to prompt him. “And? What did she say?”

Finally his father began again. Staring straight ahead, he muttered, “She says she’s my daughter.”

Jake blinked.

“Yeah, that’s right. My illegitimate daughter,” he finished in a bitter undertone. “What a load of horse manure.”

But Jake was still back on daughter. Had he fallen into a black hole or something?

“You hear me?” his dad barked.

“Yeah. Some chick named Toni says she’s your illegitimate daughter,” he said automatically. But when illegitimate and Michael Francis Calhoun were spoken in the same breath, the world might as well start spinning on a new axis.

“So this Toni,” his father continued, spitting out the name. “She comes to me, and she says her mother was a good-looking con woman I allegedly gave a tumble back in the midseventies.” His lip curled into a sour smile. “She says her mom was running some kind of lonely-hearts racket out of the Shakespeare district back when I was still walking a beat, and me, being such a good cop as I was, I caught her red-handed shaking some old guy down. But because she’s such a looker, I told her I’d take sexual favors and some cash on the side rather than bust her. Me being such a dirty cop and all.”

Jake didn’t bother to ask if it was true. He knew his old man as well as he knew himself, and there was just no way. He was sure. Or at least that’s what he told himself, quickly, before he had a chance to think about this. The midseventies. When he was barely out of diapers and Sean was on the way. When his parents were poor and happy and as crazy as ever, just starting their lives together, making macramé wall hangings to cover the bare spots and scrounging garage sales for cribs and high chairs. Poor. But honest. Always honest.

The idea that his dad would cheat on his mother with some low-rent con artist was…unthinkable. Wasn’t it?

Absolutely. Jake set his jaw. “So I’m guessing this fairy tale didn’t end there,” he said darkly, waiting for the payoff.

“You guess right.” His father tipped up the brim of his crazy hat far enough to wipe sweat off his brow. “I met with this Toni broad a couple of times, just to shake out what the story was. At first I thought, you know, maybe this line of bull is something her mother fed her, and maybe she really does think I’m her old man, so maybe I should let her down easy.”

“She got you to feel sorry for her?” Aw, man. Tough guy Michael Calhoun, feeling sorry for a hustler with a ridiculous story. Jake sighed. “So she’s that smooth, huh?”

“Yeah, she’s smooth all right.” He shook his head. “Too smooth. It makes me think that part of her story is true, that her mother probably was a grifter. Trained from the womb, you know?”

“So what happened?”

“So she asks me to come across with a hundred thou,” his father went on. “I laugh in her face, like, yeah, your story was entertaining, but not a hundred-grand entertaining. Then she threatens to go to the papers, with ‘Love Child Exposes Chicago’s Number-Two Cop in Protection Racket’ splashed all over the place.”

Jake whistled under his breath. “And why didn’t you have her arrested? Last time I looked, you were still a cop and blackmail was still a felony. Or do you want me to do it? Is that what you need? Hell, I can get a warrant in about three—”

“Use your head, junior,” Michael Calhoun shot back, sending his son a savage look. He hadn’t called Jake “junior” in at least ten years. “If she really does go to the papers with this stuff, no matter how ridiculous, they’ll pass me over for First Deputy so fast it will make your head spin. They can’t promote a guy whose name is all over the papers as part of some alleged sex scandal, even if it is bogus.”

“Dad—”

“No, Jake. That promotion is mine, right in my hands. I been waiting for this ever since I joined the department. I’m not screwing it up now because of some little tootsie making up fairy tales.”

“But if there’s nothing to what she says—”

“I was a beat cop then,” he insisted, “in the Shakespeare district, right where she says. We did have a rash of complaints about a beautiful woman fleecing men in the area, and we never caught her. Her story sounds just plausible enough to cause me a whole lot of trouble.”

“But you can do DNA testing,” Jake put in. “You can prove she’s not your daughter.”

“After I’m 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 in cruises, you know, looking at the brochures, so he could eavesdrop.”

That was when his dad actually cracked a smile, and Jake could see why. It was pretty funny imagining grumpy old Vince shuffling into some travel agency and peering through his thick bifocals at the Caribbean cruise brochures.

“He hear anything good?”

“Yeah.” Once again, Michael Calhoun consulted the bits of paper in his briefcase. “He heard her book tickets on a tour that leaves from O’Hare tomorrow. Two tickets on something called the Explorer’s Journey. Vince said it cost a bundle and she paid cash, right then and there.”

“So maybe you’re not the only game she’s playing? Maybe she squeezed some money out of some other mark and she’s blowing town on her take. Or maybe she’s playing a lonely-hearts racket of her own, and she conned the mark into taking her on some fancy trip.” He considered. “Tomorrow, huh?”

“Yeah. That’s why this is such a rush.” His lips pressed into a narrow line. “This should be easy, Jake. Piece of cake. All you have to do is go to this Red Sails joint, book yourself on to the same tour, get next to her, and get the goods.”

“You want me to take her tour?” Jake echoed. “Can’t I just show up at O’Hare, arrest her, and be done with it?”

“You can’t arrest her! Haven’t you been listening?” He shook his head impatiently. “You have to stay undercover, Jake, get next to her, find out who else she’s scammed, what she plans to do next. Maybe we can take her down for something else and get rid of her without bringing me into it at all.”

Jake didn’t seriously think this woman was his father’s illegitimate daughter. Not for a second. He narrowed his eyes, wondering about his father’s motives. How much of this had to do with his dad wanting to avoid a scandal? And how much with pride?

Did Deputy Superintendent Michael Calhoun want little Miss Toni taken down because he truly thought she was dangerous? Or because she’d dared to mess with him?

“So you seriously want me to sign up for some…” What had he called it? “Explorer’s Journey?” Jake glanced down at the last photo, the one from the waist down. “She doesn’t look like the type to be climbing Mount Kilimanjaro. Not in those shoes.”

His father remained unamused. “Just do it, Jake. Sign up for the tour, figure out what the deal is, make her go away. I’ll foot the bill. But this is your chance to come through for me, Jake. I need you.”

Way to push all the right buttons, old man. Jake really didn’t want to sign up for a tour at the last minute, just to follow some probably half-cocked lead to nowhere. Staring out into the gray-blue water of Lake Michigan, he ran a hand through his hair, letting himself imagine for a second that he was going to say no. He conjured up one last cozy image of the fishing cabin in Wisconsin, of his brothers, a cooler full of beer, a nice big lake trout frying up in a pan…and then he banished it all. The cabin, the boys, the beer, the fish, all of it.

Bottom line—when his dad asked, Jake responded. They all knew that. This is your chance to come through for me, Jake. I need you.

He was the oldest, the responsible one, the one Dad could depend on. He glanced over at his father, sitting there waiting for an answer. Jake nodded. “Yeah, okay. I’ll do it.”

IF THE EXPLORER’S JOURNEY, whatever the heck it was, left tomorrow, he didn’t have much time. He quickly left messages on both Sean and Cooper’s cell phones that they shouldn’t expect him in Wisconsin. For once, he was happy to reach voice mail. At least this way he didn’t have to offer anything more in the way of explanations. Then he headed over to the Red Sails travel agency.

There was only one clerk working this Friday afternoon, and she seemed quite frazzled as she tried to deal with ringing telephones and a beeping fax machine. “I’m new,” she said into the phone about seventeen times, her voice trilling with increasing panic. He heard her wail “Please don’t yell at me!” another five or six times.

Not a good sign. Jake tried to catch her eye as he lounged there in front of her desk, but she kept holding a “wait a minute, I can’t talk to you yet” finger in the air and jabbering on into her headset about something to do with a cruise ship and stranded passengers. “I’m new,” she tossed in yet again. “Please don’t yell at me!”

Feeling more than a tad irritable, Jake let his eyes wander over the posters of Jamaica and Tahiti, hoping against hope that if he had to be on it, the Explorer’s Journey was at least headed somewhere good. Maybe these explorers went in for scuba diving or island hopping. Hawaiian shirts and mai tais with little umbrellas in them might be fun. Man, he needed a vacation.

As the girl behind the desk hyperventilated into her phone, Jake hunted through the racks of brochures, looking for clues, but there was nothing there about any Explorer’s Journey. “With my luck, it’ll be the North Pole,” he muttered.

At last, she punched a button on her phone, took off her headset, heaved a big sigh and stood up. “Can I help you?” she asked doubtfully, as if she already knew that whatever it was he wanted, she wouldn’t have it.

“Hi,” he offered with a smile, trying his best to work around his annoyance level. “Bad day, huh?”

“I’m new,” she blurted out, waving her hands helplessly. “The computer isn’t working, the other agent had to run off to find someone to fix the computers, and there’s a whole cruise ship full of Beanie Baby collectors stranded in Puerta Vallarta with possible dysentery.” Fear colored her face as she stared up at him. “You won’t tell anybody, will you? I mean, if they do have dysentery, it may not be the fault of Red Sails or the cruise. It could be a coincidence.”

“Uh-huh.”

She started to sniffle, her voice rising, tears brimming in her eyes. “I unplugged the phone. I had to. I don’t know what to tell them. It’s not my fault! I wasn’t even here when their cruise was arranged.”

“I’m sure they’ll understand.” He leaned in closer, nabbing and handing her a tissue from the box on her desk. He tried to think of something nice to say. “Look on the bright side—if they’re stranded together, at least they have something to talk about.”

“Well, there is that.” She stared at him. “Did you need something? Not a cruise, I hope.”

“I’m actually not sure what it is. Something called the Explorer’s Journey?”

Dabbing at her eyes, she blinked three or four times, as if that would help jump-start her brain. She shook her head. “I’ve never heard of it.”

Afraid even the slightest impatience would knock her over the edge into a collapse, he tried to ooze nonthreatening, nice-guy vibes. He was usually pretty good at that. “I know someone who booked this Explorer’s Journey from this agency. Is there somewhere you can look for information about it?”

“The computers are down,” she said in a quavery tone.

He crooked his thumb at the filing cabinets lining the wall behind her. “How about your files?”

She scrunched up her face, staring vacantly at him.

“They look alphabetical. Maybe the cabinet that says E-F-G on it,” Jake suggested. “E for Explorers?”

“Oh.” She stumbled back there and pulled open the top drawer. “Hmm…these are mostly European tours. What did you say it was again?”

“Explorer’s Journey.”

“Is that Europe?” she asked, giving him a hopeful glance.

“I don’t know.”

She sighed again. “I don’t see anything.” After poking through those files for a few more minutes, she continued on to the second drawer, fumbled through a few more folders, let her shoulders sag in defeat, turned back, saw the look on Jake’s face, and—just at the point where he was ready to leap over the desk and start looking himself—reluctantly returned to her halfhearted search. “Nope. I don’t see anything…oh, wait. What did you say it was? Explorer’s Journey. Here it is.”

Jake held his breath. Although she seemed astonished to have located it, she actually had a file folder in her hands. The label pasted to the front really did identify it as Explorer’s Journey. She slid it onto her desk and opened it up, carefully, slowly flipping the pages over one at a time.

“Is there a brochure or anything in there? Any information?”

“No. Just the registration pages. They look really full. It must be popular.” She continued to turn pages at the speed of mud. Slow mud. “There’s one a month, I guess. Here’s March… April…”

Could she be any slower, even if she really, really tried? “I need July,” he reminded her, holding himself back from snatching the file away from her. “It’s supposed to leave tomorrow.”

“Here it is. July.” Peering down at it, she smoothed the page with one hand, blocking his view, neatly detaching a piece of pink memo paper clipped to the corner and setting it aside. “Oh, that’s too bad. All the spaces are filled.”

“Can’t you add me as an extra?” How hard could it be? He could see, even upside down, that there were names on all the lines, neatly divided into two columns. A quick count told him there were forty people scheduled to be on this trip. So what difference would it make if they went to forty-one?

“Oh, no, I couldn’t do that.” She turned the page around, pointing to the instructions scrawled across the top. Someone had written No Extras! No Waiting List! in big, bold letters.

Jake ignored that little problem for the moment, glancing down the list now that he had a chance to see it right side up, scanning for possibilities. One Antoinette, a Tonya, a Tori, and two names that just used T as a first initial. Plus there was one listed under the last name Antonini. The woman he was looking for could be any of them. Or none, if she had a pile of aliases.

“So you see I can’t add you,” she continued. “It’s very clear that I’m not allowed to do that even if I did know how to register you for this trip, which I don’t, because the computers are down and I can’t even look up what it costs or anything.”

She painstakingly reattached the pink memo and its paper clip and then moved to close the folder, but Jake laid a hand on top of hers. “Isn’t there any other way you can let me in on this tour? Anybody else I could contact? Any other source of info? Anything?”

“Not that I would know about…” Looking even more unhappy and put-upon, she glanced back at the beeping fax machine and blinking phone. “Here.” She shoved the folder at him. “You look.”

He flipped through it again, noting no contact name, no info, no help. But then he saw the pink memo attached to the June sheet, and his eyes caught the word “cancel.” Holding up the sheet of pink paper, he read aloud, “‘Zoë Kidd tried to cancel 6/12. Told her no cancel/no refund but would pass on her name if anyone wanted to buy her spot.’” He raised an eyebrow. “What about this? Can I buy her spot?”