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“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?”
“Oh. Well. I don’t know. I guess you can try,” she said with a shrug. “It’s nothing to do with me.”
Then she wandered back to the fax machine as Jake considered this stroke of luck.
The tour was full, but Zoë Kidd wanted to cancel and had a space available to give. For the first time since he’d heard his father’s unlikely tale, Jake Calhoun began to smile.
Zoë Kidd. She wanted to cancel. He wanted her spot.
Sounded like a match made in heaven.
2
ZOË BREATHED in the scent of sandalwood from her meditation candles. Lovely. Soothing. Cleansing.
Sitting there on her new purple yoga mat, she maneuvered her legs into the full lotus position, balancing her elbows on her knees and curling her index fingers and thumbs into the proper O’s.
She had a terrible impulse to sneeze, and she decided she probably shouldn’t have lit all eleven candles at the same time. The waves of sandalwood were really kind of overpowering. But eleven was her lucky number. And now that she had gotten herself twisted like a pretzel into the full lotus, she really didn’t want to extract herself just to blow out a few candles.
She closed her eyes and concentrated. Lovely. Soothing. Cleansing. Breathe the sandalwood, she ordered herself. And don’t think. Whatever you do, don’t think.
Yeah, right. Don’t think about the fact that today was supposed to have been her wedding day and tomorrow was supposed to have been the day that she and that snake Wylie left for their honeymoon on the Explorer’s Journey.
He was the one who’d wanted to get married, damn it. She was perfectly happy to live together. Or not even, just to coexist peacefully in their separate apartments. But no. He’d insisted they had to be married. And she’d said, But we’re not ready for that. We have issues. And he’d said, But, hon, I want to be a real couple, like regular people. I want to build a real life together. Which made her heart melt a little, just like he knew it would. If we have issues, Wylie had told her, so sincere, we can work through them.
Which should’ve been a hint right there that Wylie was off his rocker at that particular moment, because he was so not the work-through-your-issues type. But then, like the dim bulb she was, she had been thrilled to hear him finally admit that, yes, there were things that he needed to improve—because this was sure as heck the first time he’d ever said that, seeing as how he was convinced he was perfect. So she’d said, quite sternly, actually, Yes, Wylie, I will marry you, but only if we go on the Explorer’s Journey for our honeymoon because I just saw it on Oprah. Newlyweds only, all about communication, harmony, trust, blah, blah, blah, all the things we have trouble with. It’ll be the perfect way to work through some things, right there, right then. And we can begin our married life as full and equal partners, communicating, harmonizing, trusting.
Had there been a funny light of terror in his eyes when he’d agreed? Or was that just hindsight?
“Did you ever have any intention of doing the Explorer’s Journey with me?” she asked out loud. “And if not, why the hell couldn’t you say so before I paid for the damn thing?”
Well, there she was, with her eyes wide-open, not calm or relaxed or cleansed at all. And her right ankle was starting to kill her where it was mashed between her other leg and her lap, not to mention the fact that the backs of both thighs were plastered to her mat.
“Ow…” She wrenched herself out of her lotus position, peeling the sticky mat away from her skin. She was positively dripping with sweat in this hateful apartment. It was so humid, without a hint of a breeze. And all those candles were making it worse. “I shouldn’t be wearing shorts. But it’s too hot for long pants! And I could’ve afforded air-conditioning if I hadn’t paid for that stupid Explorer’s Journey. They can just stuff their no-cancellation policy.”
Well, she wasn’t feeling particularly meditative, was she? Maybe a few rounds with her tarot cards would help her get in touch with her higher power and stop all the angsting already.
Refastening one reddish-brown braid back over the top of her head, she slicked the moisture off her forehead with the back of one hand, swearing again, louder this time. Stupid, stupid Wylie for being too chicken to be part of a real couple. Stupid, stupid Zoë for ever thinking he was worth it in the first place. She’d ignored her cards on that one, when they kept throwing her the Prince of Hearts every time she asked about Wylie. Everyone knew the Prince of Hearts meant an Inconstant Suitor. Which described Wylie exactly.
“How can you respect a man who doesn’t know his own mind?” she groused. “I should’ve believed the cards.”
Zoë picked herself up off the ground and started rooting around on her bookshelves for her pack of Enchanted Tarot Cards. They had beautiful pictures and she really did find them soothing as long as they kept that nasty Inconstant Suitor card to themselves. The deck was on the bottom shelf, and she was bent over, reaching for the last card, which had slipped to the very back of the shelf, when she heard the clomp of footsteps coming up the stairs to her apartment. She paused. Maybe a new student, she thought. Which would be a very good thing, because she needed the extra money now that she’d spent every last dime she had on the nonrefundable Explorer’s Journey.
She raised her head, planning to call out to whoever it was to just come on in, but she lifted up too quickly, cracking her head squarely on the next shelf.
“Yeow!” she cried, stumbling back, scattering a waterfall of tarot cards like something out of Alice in Wonderland. There was only one card left in her hand.
She rubbed the back of her head, almost slipping as she stepped on one of the slick cards on the floor. She groaned. It had to be bad karma to drop all your tarot cards. “I guess I’d better pick ’em up.” She slid the one card she still had into the back pocket of her shorts and bent down to get the deck back together before the potential student walked in and saw the mess. But when she bent over, she started to feel really dizzy. “I must’ve bumped it harder than I thought,” she whispered, stretching her fingers to her toes, letting her head hang down to the floor while she recovered her equilibrium. It was at that point she heard the door open behind her.
“Come—” she began, but she only got the one syllable out.
“Stop, police!” a very male voice announced. “Don’t move!”
“What? Stay where I am?” Bent over with her backside in the air? Frozen to the spot, she stared at him through her legs. Good God, he had a gun! Kinda cute, but scary, with both his arms outstretched and that creepy gun pointed mostly at the floor. But he wasn’t wearing a uniform. Man. Gun. “Are you really a cop? Show me your badge!” she screamed.
He immediately pulled out a shield and flashed it at her. Okay, good. So he really was a cop.
“Were you shouting at someone?” he asked in a calmer voice, relaxing his stance a little as he surveyed the empty room.
