Conan shrugged. “If your thief attempts to cover his traces, he’ll fail. I have your server mirrored on my hard drive. It’s only a matter of time and accountants to trace money.” He hesitated, then added, “I think it may be time to check on all your clients.”
“Why the clients?” Dorrie asked in puzzlement as the waitress finished setting out their plates.
Once the waitress had left them alone, Conan replied, “What are the chances that the clients of the inactive files disappeared from the foundation books against their will?”
Dorrie stared at him in puzzlement. Where the hell had that thought come from? “Are you saying that a thief deleted their records or…” At his impatient look, the full extent of the possibility and connection to Bo appeared. “You’re saying they might have been murdered? And Bo may have found out?”
Chapter 9
Conan squirmed as Dorrie’s wickedly green eyes narrowed, and her expression shut down. He usually didn’t feel discomfort when he made his logical announcements. Murder, kidnapping, or deportation were perfectly rational assumptions given the amount of money diverted from her clients. There could be many more. He’d only just begun his search.
From her reaction, he’d guess she thought he was full of hot air.
She finished her salad in silence, making him feel like the criminal.
Her thorny prickles stuck in his thick hide worse than a porcupine’s, and he didn’t like it. When she insisted on returning to the office so she could offload him at his car, he uncharacteristically dug in his heels.
“Where do you think you’re going from here?” he demanded, refusing to leave her car once they pulled into the garage. It wasn’t as if she could throw him out. He weighed twice as much as she did. “Your house is falling into the ocean, and your office may harbor a murderer who will soon know you’re on to him. I’m not letting you out of my sight unless you can tell me you’re going somewhere safe.”
At his tone, the shaggy dog scrambled from the back seat to the front, landing on Dorrie’s lap and licking her face. She buried her nose in the animal’s fur.
Conan suffered the uncomfortable notion that she needed closeness of some sort right now. Instead of helping her, he was hurting her. He knew how to offer sex. Hugs and reassurances…not so much.
Refusing to squirm any more, he remained firm on the subject of most importance—her safety.
“Look, if I let you rearrange my basement, will you be comfortable there?” Conan hoped he hid his grimace at the notion of her moving his gear to places he’d never find again—like the dump. “It shouldn’t take long to find who’s been diverting funds, and once we have him, your office will be safe again.”
She seemed to look right through him, and his skin prickled. Her eyes had darkened to oceanic depths, and he could almost swear he saw his reflection in them. He wasn’t much on looking at himself.
“You’d hate that,” she said, perceptively. “Just as much as I’d hate living with that clutter.”
He didn’t know why he was arguing. He couldn’t introduce her to his family if she was a danger to them or to others, and that was the only message he could take from the Librarian’s warnings.
“Well, maybe it’s time I made some changes,” he countered, while mentally smacking himself. What if Oz and Pippa showed up while she was staying there? “The contractor was supposed to have built a galley kitchen on the bottom level to create a second living space. That’s why I had to wall off my stairs. I can’t build a kitchen right now, but I can get the door fixed.”
She still didn’t look convinced, but her phone rang again. She hit the TALK button rather than answer him. Even though she’d switched off the speaker, Conan could hear the loud male voice shouting at her. He couldn’t discern the words, but her slender shoulders slumped as she listened.
She had an awful lot of men shouting at her. And he wasn’t helping.
“Yes, Dad, of course,” she said mildly, although her body language said she felt anything but calm. “Zimmer shouldn’t have called you. You’re supposed to concentrate on getting better.”
Conan growled when the shouting resumed. Family shouldn’t be allowed to yell at family, but his did all the time. He’d learned to deal, but obviously, this female didn’t take well to it. He was developing some understanding of why she’d learned to fight back with passive-aggression. He noticed she didn’t tell her father that his house was falling off a cliff, and she had no place to live. Conan would have done so just to see if he could give the old grouch an apoplexy. Probably one of the reasons women flung slushies at him.
“No, Dad, it was probably just vandals. I’m a little more concerned about the financial statements, though. Did you read the report I sent you? Let me take you out to dinner so we can discuss them.”
She winced at the booming thunder in her ear, and Conan decided he’d had enough. He swiped the cell phone from her.
“Mr. Franklin, this is Conan Oswin. We met when I set up your firewalls. Your external computer security seems to be in fine shape, but you have a serious internal problem. I’m on the case. I’ll give you a full report as soon as I’m sure we’ve covered all the territory. Your daughter is right on top of the situation, but I may ask that she stay incommunicado for a while. There could be a tap on this line. Will you be all right with that?”
Dorrie’s eyes widened to circles, not easily done given their natural shape. She didn’t even try to take the phone back from him, given that he was bullshitting nonsense from top to bottom.
“I want a full report, Oswin,” the old man threatened. “If someone is stealing from me, I want their heads on a platter.”
“Consider it done, sir,” Conan said before hitting END. He would happily behead anyone stealing from orphans. He handed the phone back to Dorrie, boy scout duty done.
“I think maybe I’ll take you up on your offer,” she said in what almost sounded like awe. “Anyone who can make my father take orders has a hide of steel. Or asbestos. Want to tell him to get his rear out of his room and back to the office?”
Conan took her admiration with a grain of salt. “Giving orders is the only way to survive in a family that knows no other way of speaking. I prefer going my own way and not listening to my brothers. Sometimes that doesn’t work, so I’ve learned to fight back.”
“Perhaps it’s easier with brothers,” she said thoughtfully. “I was taught to respect my elders, so I can’t fight back. Do we need to go into the office for anything or shall I follow you back to your place?”
“Follow me back and I’ll give you a door opener so you can come and go as you need, and I’ll start digging. Just don’t go anywhere near the office without me.”
He was taking temptation in a power suit home with him. He was officially out of his friggin’ mind.
***
Conan made Dorrie’s head spin. First, he tells her that FF’s money was being stolen by one of her employees, and their clients might have been murdered or maybe deported to keep them quiet. And maybe Bo somehow got caught up in it. She could barely wrap her head around that.
And then he effectively tells her father to go jump in a lake. No one ever talked like that to Ryan Franklin. Worse—or better yet—her father had listened to his blatant lies. Conan had told him that there was a tap on her cell phone line, and her father hadn’t called him an idiot. He’d believed him. What on earth did Ryan Franklin know about Conan that made him believe anything he said?
Conan was scary enough all on his own without knowing his background. And his house…
Dorrie took a deep breath as she entered from the garage.
The energy flow—or lack thereof—in Conan’s home would suffocate her if she stayed there long. The suppressed chi would wrap around her and literally squeeze the air from her lungs. How could she possibly be turned on by a man who lived in total stagnation?
Prepared for the onslaught of bad air, she refrained from gasping until her host retreated upstairs. S
he didn’t mean to be high maintenance like her mother, but she could hardly explain her sensitivity to bad chi. She was no more than a canary in a badly ventilated mine.
Unless she wanted to live in her car, she’d have to temporarily set aside her fears about Bo and the foundation and concentrate on her new living space for a few hours. As usual, her father hadn’t taken her up on her offer of dinner. Partial paralysis shouldn’t stop a force of nature like Ryan Franklin, but he’d made up his mind to retire and be an invalid, and she couldn’t change it.
Of course, if her father was as smart as he thought he was, he should have realized Dorrie not only sensed chi energy like her mother but could manipulate it. And then he might have understood that she’d been flinging furious energy arrows at him the day she’d told him she didn’t want to work in the office any longer—right before he’d keeled over. She hadn’t intentionally practiced dim mak, and she hadn’t touched him, but her father’s heart was weak and his blood pressure was high and…it had just happened.
Since then, she had stayed out of her father’s way unless invited.
So the rest of her weekend would be spent rearranging Conan’s space and staying out of everyone’s way.
She headed for the bedroom and her suitcase. She couldn’t wear a suit while rearranging a house. She’d brought her favorite broomstick skirt and a loose cotton sweater. With a tank top beneath it, she’d be decent and free to move easily. She didn’t have to impress Conan with her master of business attire.
Once she was comfortable, she turned off the security alarm. Then she propped open the front door and some windows and surveyed the dump. He’d said she could arrange it. She was pretty certain that didn’t mean she could heave it all out.
Which meant she would have to be very creative. If she wasn’t so freaked out about life collapsing around her, she might look on this space as a challenge. She dearly loved decorating…
That was another avenue that was too deadly to explore. She didn’t understand the motivation of the men who’d killed her mother, but she had a strong sense that it was related to her mother’s paranormal talents. Dorrie would rather not tempt fate by publicly brandishing those same abilities.
Being able to breathe at night was a worthy goal, however. She surveyed Conan’s clutter and the layout of his first floor.
She didn’t even need her compass to locate the center of this level—it was right up against the wall dividing the finished living area from the unfinished. He’d cut his health sector in half! Short of ripping out the wall, she needed square objects and earth tones to encourage the flow of chi.
She gathered all his unpacked cartons and pushed and stacked them against the dividing wall to form a square. If Conan wanted anything from the boxes, tough. She needed her mother’s red and gold embroidered tablecloth to cover the cardboard… She started a list of things to be retrieved from her father’s house once it was declared safe to enter.
In the meantime, she found a brown sheet and fat yellow candles in the bedroom and began turning the boxes into a table. She had some green porcelain in her car, and she would buy a plant when she went shopping. That should settle the health sector of the bagua for now and add a soothing focal point to that gaping hollow of a room.
She couldn’t leave the surfboards destroying the health center she was trying to improve. If she stood them upright, the wood ones would work excellently in the family sector, which conveniently happened to be in the attached garage. Maybe Conan would get along better with his brothers. Or she wouldn’t hear anything from her father while she stayed here. That worked.
She piled all the various balls in gym bags and leaned them against the farthest wall of the front room, in the corner where the flimsy dividing wall met the exterior wall. Round shapes would enhance her creativity, and maybe it would improve their luck with finding Bo or taking care of his kids since that was also the children’s sector. Besides, it would get the damned balls off the floor.
The energy was already circulating more freely.
She brought in her porcelain vases and added a few earth-colored ones to the box-table. She definitely felt better just having a piece of home with her. The metal shelves at the front door were next. She shifted them over next to the balls, along with all Conan’s metal tools and equipment, arranging them so he could find them without digging under wetsuits and canvas.
She carried a small white glass bowl from her collection to the entrance and set it on a black metal copier table with rounded edges to serve as an entry table. She looked for something undulating or black to approximate water to welcome the ocean energy into the house. Wickedly, she used his wetsuit as a rug. The blocky tile floor simply had to be covered up.
She still hadn’t heard anything from upstairs by the time the carpenter arrived to rehang the badly hinged front door. She persuaded him to paint it a welcoming red while he was at it, but a real doorstep apparently required bricks or concrete. The carpenter promised to call a friend of his to build a small porch. She probably wouldn’t be here long enough to add pots of welcoming flowers when the porch was done, but she would have improved Conan’s energy, at least.
Now that she had the trunk unpacked, she could load the car up some more, if the road was open to her father’s house. She glanced at her watch. If she was allowed in the neighborhood, she had time for one load before nightfall.
She didn’t want to distract Conan from his investigations. For all she knew, he believed he was harboring a murderer in his basement. She needed to disprove his ridiculous suspicions about missing clients and then decide how much she trusted him. It wouldn’t be easy to explain why she thought Bo might have been kidnapped by a madman. It would be even less easy to explain why she might be living with her own personal Death Star hanging over her head.
Explanations might require calling in her paranormal family. She shuddered at the prospect but started a mental list. Her psychic grandmother? Perhaps the more logical Francesca—except what could a psychic pilot do? Cho, the Finder, then. But would he believe Bo was alive?
Chapter 10
Given the incredible list he was staring at, Conan thought he ought to be reaching for the aspirin bottle about now, but amazingly, his head didn’t hurt as it usually did at this hour.
He swigged from his water bottle, leaned back in the chair he’d vaguely realized had been moved to the wrong side of his desk, and glared at the spreadsheet he’d created.
He’d started out looking at the active FF files that felt dead to him. In the computer, the clients appeared to be very much alive and cashing their monthly checks. But once he started contacting those clients, either they had found jobs and were surprised to have heard from the foundation…or they were dead or missing.
Every one of those clients had been handpicked by Miss Dorothea Franklin.
Beware Chinese predators.
Chinese cellar danger.
He couldn’t believe the Librarian was telling him dotty Dorrie was a murderer, especially for sums as relatively insignificant as these. Sure, over the years, small checks might add to a substantial sum, especially when all the diverted funds were added together, but she was driving a damned Prius and living with her father! Her father was worth millions. Theft did not compute.
What did make sense was that someone was targeting Dorothea. Why? What he was looking at had taken place over years, which could make it an old, very odd grudge—unless one counted the disappearance of Franklin’s heir apparent, which made everything much, much trickier.
He opened the documents he’d saved on her mother’s murder. The murderer had only been charged with theft and manslaughter. He sent a question to one of his team asking them to check on whether the bastard was still in jail and for how much longer. He didn’t see how that related, but he’d work every angle.
For the Librarian to become involved… He’d thought that meant Malcolms were involved. So far, his weird messenger had only expressed interest in people who contacted t
hat sticky Malcolm genealogy website, the one that had held Conan obsessed since he’d heard his sister-in-law’s story. He’d checked and didn’t see any record of Dorothea Franklin accessing that site.
But Malcolms were definitely vanishing. Like Magnus, who had Malcolms way back on the family tree. Did that mean Dorrie’s brother might be a Malcolm? And Dorrie’s clients?
Conan’s adrenaline pumped harder. Using his back door to the genealogy site, he began comparing her client files to names and addresses in the Malcolm server.
He found matches for a couple, but not all. Crap. Before he dug deeper into this sewer, he needed to talk to Dorrie. Standing up, he realized he needed food, too. He glanced out the two-story-high windows and saw that the sun had lowered to the horizon while he was working. It would be dark shortly. She was probably starved. Despite her petite size, Miss Frosty ate real meals.
And while it was still daylight, he probably needed to check the curb for stacks of garbage bags containing all his stuff. Judging from his kitchen appliances and—he glanced at the turned-around chair and computer—and other bits, the woman could not leave well enough alone.
He was pretty certain that red painting hadn’t been on that wall either, he decided, jogging down the stairs, carrying the blazer he’d yanked off earlier. An old girlfriend had painted that oil for him, and he’d always hated it, but it kind of lit up that dark wall better than the…he couldn’t remember what had been there before.
Downstairs, he heard no sound of Toto yipping or Dorrie throwing fits or flinging junk. Toto and Dorothea! He should have known better than to get involved. If she thought he was the Wizard of Oz, he was in heap big trouble.
To his surprise, the downstairs was empty. Dropping his blazer over the banister, he checked his newly hung front door. It was red. He stared at it in incredulity for a moment before verifying that stacks of garbage bags didn’t litter the lawn. He shut and locked the new door, then opened the garage. Her car was gone.
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