Cut To The Chase

Well, he couldn’t disagree. Bebe’s clear, sharp photographs showed a dyed-blonde with obvious roots and a frizzy ponytail, big sunglasses, and a dark raincoat over her clothes. She had a good jawline, a determined little chin, and what appeared to be a nicely shaped mouth exaggerated by a load of shiny, dark pink lipstick. The raincoat was open far enough in several of the pictures to reveal a low-cut top, very tight jeans, and the most god-awful pair of shoes he’d ever seen. They were clear plastic sandals with very high heels and glitter and stars plastered all over them. He didn’t have to be a detective to recognize hooker shoes when he saw them.

So which was worse? The assumption that his dad was having an affair? Or that he was somehow involved with a prostitute?

“All right,” he said grimly. “You’ve got photos of him with a suspicious woman. Is there more?”

“That’s the thing, Sean. I was waiting for him to have, you know, another unexplained absence. But he hasn’t. Well, until today, but his secretary heard him on the phone arranging to meet Jake, so I think that was okay.”

“Yeah,” Sean put in. “I got a message from Jake canceling the fishing trip. He said Dad had an errand for him. So that checks out.”

“So since the meeting where Bebe got the pictures, he’s been clean. But now…” Her voice was positively triumphant as she made a flourish Bebe’s way.

“I saw her again,” Bebe whispered.

“At the park?”

“Oh, no. At the airport.” Bebe leaned forward, her eyes wide. “I had to go pick up my niece, who is such a nice girl. And so smart. She had a scholarship to Johns Hopkins. You should meet her, Sean. She’d be perfect for you.”

“Uh huh. How about the rest of the story?”

“Well, I went to pick up my niece, and who do I see? That same woman from the park! Oh, she was trying to look different all right—her hair was a different color and she had a headscarf, a bandanna kind of thing, but that did not fool me.” Bebe, now the queen of scarf disguises, nodded sagely. “I recognized that trick, I’ll tell you.”

“You saw her at the airport,” Sean said patiently. “So she was leaving town. Which is good, right? If Dad was somehow mixed up with this woman, he’s not now, because she left town.”

“Oh, no, that’s the thing,” Bebe interrupted. “She wasn’t leaving. She was arriving.”

“I don’t get it. If she was already in Chicago, why was she arriving?”

“We don’t get it, either,” his mother said, patting his arm. “But that’s where you come in.”

He had a very bad feeling about this. And since Jake had just canceled out on the fishing trip, Sean didn’t really have a good excuse to duck and run, either.

“Sean, my sweet, adorable son,” Yvonne Calhoun murmured, putting her head on his shoulder, “we all know you have this…”

He knew what would be next.

“You have an uncanny knack for seeing the truth,” she finished. “Sean, you are practically psychic when it comes to these criminals and figuring them out. Disguises, deceptions, it’s nothing to you. You just see right through.”

Already feeling trapped, he asked, “What do you want me to do?”

His mother sat up straight, laying it out for him without mincing words. “Here’s the deal. Bebe saw her at the baggage pickup, she thought it was her so she followed her, she lost her again, but then she picked her out at the Help desk.”

“I spotted the headscarf,” Bebe said helpfully.

“So she got right in behind her at the Help desk and eavesdropped.”

“Wow, Bebe, maybe you should join the force,” Sean suggested, trying to keep the edge out of his voice. Keystone Kops on a stakeout.

“I know,” Bebe said with a smile. “I was pretty good, I’ll tell you.”

“And what did you hear when you eavesdropped?” he asked tersely, knowing he didn’t really want to know.

“She wanted to know how to get to…”

Sean bent closer, waiting for the word that would come at the end of the dramatic pause. “Where?”

“Champaign,” both women said at once.

“Downstate Champaign?” he asked doubtfully. “University of Illinois?”

“Exactly.” His mother sat back. “She caught a bus to go downstate to Champaign. So I want you to go there, too, and find this tart and figure out what she wants with your father.”

2

AS SEAN UNPACKED AT the Illini Union, he could feel himself begin to relax. A beautiful summer day. A nice hotel room overlooking the Quad on a serene, green college campus where most of the students were gone for the summer. And just about no chance in hell he would ever run into anything remotely connected to the bimbo in the hooker shoes his mother wanted him to find.

Okay, so he felt a little silly being on a wild-goose chase. But as long as he already knew it was a wild-goose chase, what difference did it make? He could hang out in Champaign-Urbana, enjoy himself for a few days, and then head back to town and tell his mother with a crystal-clear conscience that he had done what she’d asked and gee whiz, he just didn’t find hide nor hair of the woman she was looking for. Sounded like the easiest case he’d ever been assigned.

And, hey, accepting her crazy mission got him out of town, didn’t it? Out of town, away from his desk, away from Mom and her endless string of fix-ups, and away from the responsibility of baby-sitting Cooper at a fishing cabin for a week. Not so bad. Especially when it meant he was back in Champaign-Urbana, which struck him as a great place for a little R&R.

He’d gone to college here, and he had fond memories of pickup basketball games, excellent pizza, lousy beer and general irresponsibility. Good times.

After stowing his belongings, he didn’t waste any time, grabbing a bottle of water and quickly taking the stairs down to the ground floor of the Union. He planned to make a fast trip down memory lane to check out some of his old haunts and get his bearings. Then he would tool around town with the blonde’s picture, put out a few discreet inquiries, enough to truthfully say he’d done his duty, and get beyond that to the beer and pizza as soon as possible.

First, memory lane. Sean was actually smiling as he slid out the big white doors onto the Quad, feeling footloose and fancy-free for the first time in forever. That smile lasted approximately four minutes, which was as long as it took him to walk down the west side of the Quad, past a group of kids and a guide walking backward on a college orientation tour, and glance up at the auditorium looming ahead.

Because that was when she showed up.

Her. As nearly as he could tell, the same one from the photo.

From out of nowhere, she came walking toward him. Automatically, he assessed the details. Head down, looking at the sidewalk. Left hand rammed into the pocket of a long denim coat. Right hand wrapped around the handle of a canvas tote bag with Chicago White Sox written on it.

Her eyes were hidden by dark, impenetrable sunglasses, similar to the ones in the picture. She had brown hair, cut kind of choppy, with the ends visible under a bandanna. Pale skin. Clean, elegant jaw. Feisty little chin. Perfectly formed lips.

Sean blinked. Was he nuts? Or was that really her, the one in Bebe’s photographs?

He felt like someone had set off a signal flare inside his head. Surprise, excitement, the thrill of the chase… The zing in the air was as unexpected as it was unwelcome.

Luckily, he had the presence of mind to keep moving after she cut across in front of him and took up residence under a tree. As casually as if he were any old tourist retracing his college memories, he ambled around the steps of the auditorium, turning to gaze back up the Quad, pretending to take in the vista of sun-dappled trees and stately buildings as he gathered data on his mystery woman.

Although she looked a little nervous, fussing with the ends of her hair, arranging her coat, adjusting her sunglasses, she seemed unaware of his scrutiny as she plunked herself down on the grass under a maple tree. Sean bided his time, watching, sipping quietly at his water bottle, wishing his instincts would knock off the high alert already and quit pumping adrenaline through his veins.

Forcing himself to judge the facts, he noted that she wore a lot less makeup than the woman in the picture, plus her hair was a different color and length, and there was no sign of trashy footwear, just plain flat sandals. On the other hand, her lips, face shape, and overall bone structure were a good match, she was the right height, she was wearing a bandanna, which was something Bebe had specifically mentioned, and…

And he had a strong gut feeling, the kind he had learned to trust. After all, an “uncanny knack for seeing the truth” was right there on his resume.

Impatient with that “knack,” as always, Sean went back to hard, cold facts. His mantra was that bones didn’t lie, and those sure looked like the cheekbones and chin line of the woman in the photo.

What else? He couldn’t see much of her body inside the bulky coat, but that itself was suspicious, considering the fact that everyone else around was in shorts and T-shirts or tank tops in the hot weather. Plus she was wearing sunglasses and a scarf and her hair was a phony shade of brown, all of which had “disguise” written all over it. In his opinion, her demeanor was anxious, somewhat furtive, as she huddled there under the tree, deliberately not looking at anyone. She was definitely sending out “pay no attention to me” vibes.