Julie Kistler - Hot Prospect

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.”