Hot Prospect

“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?”