Mad Bad and Blonde

by Cathie Linz

  “Nolan is still in the area,” Faith said. “And he’s still working as a chemist in the biofuel field. Have you talked to him, Weldon?”

  “No. We never really got along very well.”

  “He’s a prick,” Buddy said. “I tried talking to him and didn’t get anywhere.”

  “Maybe he’d talk to me,” Faith said.

  “Why?” Buddy asked. “Because you’re a woman?”

  “And a former librarian,” Caine said.

  Buddy raised both bushy eyebrows. “No kidding. I’m impressed. But I doubt Nolan would be.”

  “It can’t hurt to try,” Faith said.

  “Unless he’s the one who framed Karl,” Buddy said. “In which case he could hurt you quite badly.”

  “We’ll go talk to him together,” Caine said.

  “Maybe we should just speak to him over the phone,” Faith said.

  “Good luck with that,” Buddy said. “He ignored all my calls. I had to go see him. He was not a happy camper.”

  “Let me take care of Nolan,” Caine said.

  Faith gave him a look. “We’re in this together, remember?”

  “You seem like strange partners to me,” Buddy said.

  “We’re not partners,” Caine said.

  “What are you then? Rivals?”

  “No,” Faith said. “It’s . . . well, it’s sort of complicated.”

  “I can see that.”

  “I’d like to make a toast.” Weldon raised his glass. “To Karl, the comic chemist.”

  They all raised their glasses. “To Karl.”

  “Did he tell you those chemistry jokes at work?” Caine asked Weldon.

  He nodded. “What do chemists call a benzene ring with iron atoms replacing the carbon atoms?”

  “A ferrous wheel,” Caine said with a grin. “Why do chemists like nitrates so much?”

  “Because they’re cheaper than day rates,” Weldon said with a matching grin.

  Buddy groaned.

  “What is the dullest element?” Weldon said.

  “Bohrium,” Caine said triumphantly before giving Weldon a fist bump.

  “Those are good memories,” Weldon said wistfully.

  “Yeah,” Caine said.

  “Bad jokes, though,” Buddy grumbled.

  As they all laughed, Faith was left wondering whose dad—hers or Caine’s—would ultimately be found guilty. The possibility that her dad might have botched the investigation wiped the smile right off her face. Because that gut feeling she’d had in the beginning that something was off with the way this case was handled just kept increasing bit by bit. In addition to that, she still didn’t know if her dad was cheating on her mom. She needed to find the truth on both issues.

  On Monday, Faith met up with Caine a block from their respective office buildings.

  “Didn’t want to risk being seen by your father, huh?”

  “He was already suspicious that I took off an hour early.”

  “I told you I could handle Nolan myself.”

  “And I said we need to do this together.”

  “Because we don’t trust one another. I see you’ve donned your undercover geek attire,” she said.

  “Sometimes you talk like a show on PBS.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Don’t be. It’s kind of cute.”

  She didn’t want to be cute. She wanted to be strong. “You know the cover story, right?”

  “Right.”

  Nolan didn’t live far from the downtown campus of the University of Chicago. It was a bit of a trek, but it was a nice day, so they walked it. Caine was unusually quiet. So was she. Her thoughts were focused on the role she’d be playing in this scenario.

  They reached Nolan’s home and waited outside until he arrived. She knew from her research that he always came home at the same time every evening, which made her plan easier. Sure enough, he showed up right on time. She approached him with her hand out.

  “Dr. Nolan Parker?”

  He nodded and ignored her hand.

  “Hello, sir,” Faith said. “My name is Andrea Morehead, and I’m writing an article about research chemists in the Chicago area who are working on biofuel projects. I’d love to interview you for the article. I tried calling you, but your voice mail was full.”

  “Right. I’ve been meaning to fix that. I’ve been too busy.” With his receding hairline, rimless glasses and big ears, Nolan reminded her a bit of one of the Teletubbies. The yellow one.

  “I’m on a very tight deadline for this article, so if you want to be included, I’d have to interview you right now,” she said.

  “Who’s he?” Nolan pointed at Caine.

  “He’s my photographer.”

  “This is very unusual.”

  “I understand. I just thought I’d give you a chance to be included in this article featuring the best and the brightest. But if you don’t have the time . . .”

  “I didn’t say I didn’t have the time. No article about the best and the brightest would be complete without me.”

  The guy clearly didn’t lack self-confidence.

  “I can spare you a few minutes.” He made the simple words sound condescending. “We can talk out here.”

  They stood on the brick steps leading to his building. He didn’t invite them in. Why not? What was he hiding?

  “My wife has the flu. I don’t want to disturb her,” Nolan said.

  “Okay.” Faith started with the easy stuff, his background, where he went to university. She’d done her research on him, so she knew a lot already. “I understand you worked at the American Research Corporation for a time.”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Were you in charge of the biofuel project there?”

  “No, but I should have been. They put an inferior person in charge, and he ended up ruining everything.”

  Faith saw the tic in Caine’s jaw. Not a good sign.

  “The guy was unstable,” Nolan continued. “ARC never should have trusted him. I knew from the beginning that he was no good.”

  “How could you tell?” Faith said.

  “He was unstable, like I said. He ended up committing suicide, you know. Set the project back by two years. But now I’m working for a new company, and we’re really making a lot of strides in this field. Of course, I can’t give you details, because the material is classified by my employer, and you probably wouldn’t understand it anyway, unless you held an advanced degree in chemistry and had years of experience.”

  “I got a C in high school chemistry,” Faith admitted. “I’m not a science person. I’m more into words.”

  “Humph.” Nolan gave her a disapproving look. “We need more young people to go into the fields of math and science. We need chemists and engineers.”

  “What character trait makes you a good chemist?”

  “Curiosity and a willingness to experiment and the intelligence to figure out what works. You can’t be a weakling in this field. That was Karl Hunter’s problem. He was weak.”

  Okay, now Caine had two tics in his clenched jaw.

  “Thank you, Dr. Parker. You’ve been very helpful.”

  Caine stepped forward, and Faith wasn’t sure if he was going to take Nolan’s picture or hit him with the camera. As it was, he took a flash photo that had Nolan blinking myopically.

  “We’re done. Thank you again,” she called out over her shoulder as she grabbed Caine and started down the steps.

  “Wait!” Nolan said. “When does your article come out, and where will it be published?”

  “I’ll leave a message on your voice mail with the details.”

  As they walked away, Faith noticed the sheer curtains on the main floor of his duplex move.

  “Did you think that was strange?” she said.

  Unlike Buddy, Caine apparently hadn’t given up cursing, because he swore a blue streak.

  “Okay, I may have gotten a C in chemistry, but I did get an A in biology, and I don’t think what you�
�re threatening him with is actually physically possible,” she said.

  Caine took a deep breath, and then his expression went hard and cold. Faith shivered despite the sticky eighty-degree weather. If her father had messed up, he was in deep shit.

  Faith’s caseload picked up at work, and the next day was more hectic than usual. Her newest client was Lisa Farmer, a young woman worried about her boyfriend, a Chicago Streets and Sanitation worker named Robbie Hillsboro. “He’s started acting strange. He ups and leaves in the middle of dinner or whatever we’re doing. He just says he has to leave, and he won’t tell me why. I get a large inheritance when I turn twenty-six in a few months. My grandfather made a fortune on nuts. You know, peanuts, cashews, that kind of thing. I don’t have anything to do with the business, but he left me a sizable amount of money. Robbie doesn’t know anything about it. At least I don’t think he does.”

  “So what do you want us to do?”

  “Find out where he’s going when he takes off. If there’s another woman, I need to know.”

  “We can do that.”

  Lisa’s story wasn’t that unusual. These days, there was a con around every corner. As the economic times got rough, there were always those who did whatever it took to get cash.

  The problem was that after only a few weeks on the job, Faith saw these cases all the time. It would be easy to get burned out or cynical from all the bad things she saw going on: husbands cheating on wives, wives lying to husbands, employees stealing from their bosses, bosses using company funds for their own use.

  The trick was to stay uninvolved, as Abs had told her. So Faith tried to simply focus on finding the truth, to discover what really happened.

  That brought her back to Caine’s father’s case. After their dinner the other night, Faith had asked a forensic accountant friend of hers to try to track down the missing money in that offshore account.

  She had to keep her investigative work on this matter from her father. She also couldn’t let her dad know that she was trying to figure out what was going on with him. So that meant two big cases had to be top secret, while she still completed the workload on the rest of her cases so no one would get suspicious. It also meant she often got home after seven, as was the case tonight.

  She was hoping the pouring rain would hold off until she reached her condo, but it didn’t. Although the heaviest commuter traffic had lessened, the sidewalks were still crowded, and umbrella wars were won and lost. Her White Sox umbrella stood up well to the battles along the way and didn’t bow to the city’s famous wind that blew sheets of rain almost horizontally into her face and mangled other, weaker umbrellas. Hailing a cab was impossible in this weather, so she trudged on along with her fellow Chicagoans. The locals were accustomed to freaky weather that could easily go from serene to severe and back again.

  Yuri stood ready to open the door for her the second she reached her building, soaking wet and exhausted. “You need an ark to go out in this weather,” he said with his customary big smile.

  She closed her umbrella and wiped the rain from her face before emptying her mailbox and dumping the contents into her Golden Book tote bag. Not only did she still need a new tough author mentor, she needed to get a new professional tote bag. But who had time?

  “This didn’t fit in your box.” Yuri handed her a large, thick envelope.

  “It’s from the library.” She ripped it open to find a pile of handmade cards from the regulars of her story time group. “WE MISS YOU,” they wrote over and over again. Maria Sanchez had put a Love Your Library Post-it note on one of them: “You’re not replaceable, please come back.”

  Faith sighed. “You walk away, and they pull you back in.”

  “Sounds like the Chicago mob,” Yuri said.

  “Al Capone had nothing on Maria Sanchez. She’s very determined. Like your friend Caine.”

  “Did you two have another fight?”

  “No. Did he tell you we had?”

  “No.”

  “What did he tell you?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Then why did you think we were fighting?”

  “Because you’re always fighting.”

  “Not always.”

  “No?”

  “No. We actually worked together the other night and were cordial.”

  “Cordial?” Yuri sounded skeptical.

  “I was cordial. Caine was Caine.”

  “He’s good at doing that, being Caine.”

  “He certainly is. The man has definite trust issues.”

  “Is he the only one?”

  “No. I have the same issues. I question his motivation. He questions mine. It’s just all so crazy. I never used to be into crazy.”

  “And now?”

  “I’m eating the man’s sliders and sharing tandoori appetizers with him. What does that say about me?”

  Yuri grinned. “That you have good taste.”

  “Maybe, but I’d rather have good judgment.” And anyone with good judgment would know she was playing with fire by working with Caine.

  The next day, just before five, Faith decided it was time to confront her dad directly. Not that she planned on asking him if he was having an affair. But she needed to start a conversation that would give her some clues. So she cornered him in his office, trying to look and sound casual while doing so.

  “Did you see that story online about work spouses?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “It was interesting. Who do you talk to about work?”

  “My brother Dave.”

  “Who else?”

  “Gloria.”

  Faith tried to imagine Gloria as a work spouse but couldn’t. She saw her more as a mix of Jewish mom and drill sergeant.

  “Anyone else? Do you talk to Mom about work?”

  “Not really.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because she’s not interested. What’s this about?”

  “I told you. I saw this article online about work spouses.”

  “You mean couples who work together?”

  “No, I mean the person at work you confide in and how it can lead to more intimate relationships if you’re not careful.”

  “I don’t think you have to worry about that with Dave and me,” her dad noted dryly. “In fact, I can guarantee it.”

  “So those are the only two people you confide in about work stuff? Dave and Gloria? No one else?”

  “I don’t know. From time to time I may talk about a particularly difficult case with one of the investigators.”

  Aha! “Has that happened lately?”

  “No.”

  “What about Renee from Human Resources?”

  “What about her?”

  “Weren’t the two of you working together on a new employee handbook?”

  “Yes.”

  “She’s a very attractive woman.”

  “Yes, she is. Her partner, Marta, thinks so too.” Her father eyed her suspiciously. “Has your mother been talking to you?”

  “About what?”

  “About me working too much?”

  “Has she said anything to you?” Faith countered.

  “She doesn’t appreciate the responsibilities involved in running a business this size.”

  “She might if you talked about it with her.”

  “Right. I’ll add that to my to-do list. Right after I visit Disneyland.”

  “I’m trying to have a serious conversation with you here.”

  “I don’t have time for serious conversations right now.”

  “You never have time.”

  “Now you do sound like your mother. Look, I’ve got to go. I’ve got a dinner appointment.”

  “With a client?”

  “I’ll be late if I don’t leave right now.”

  It was only after he’d left that she realized he’d never answered her question. So she did what any PI daughter would do. She followed him.

  Fifteen minutes later she was seated in the co
rner of a prestigious restaurant. A screen of greenery separated the room where she was seated from the adjoining one where her dad was studying some paperwork and sipping his wine.

  She was so focused on him that she didn’t notice Caine until he sat at her table. “Why are you trailing your father?”

  She didn’t even bother asking Caine why he was trailing her. She’d gotten accustomed to his knowing her every move. “None of your business.”

  Caine said, “If it has something to do with my father’s case—”

  “It has nothing to do with that. It’s personal. So go away.”

  Before he could, Gram joined them. “What are you two whispering about over here in the corner?”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Faith tried not to panic. Her grandmother did not have the quietest voice in the world. What if she was the dinner date Faith’s dad was expecting? What if she wasn’t? “Shh, Gram.”

  “Don’t shush me. You’re not a librarian anymore. Why are you over here skulking in the corner with this sexy man? Why don’t you join your father? I’ll tell him you’re here.”

  “No.” Faith grabbed her grandmother’s arm. “Don’t do that. Please.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because. I don’t want him to know I’m here.”

  Gram eyed Caine. “Do I know you?”

  “No. I’m Caine Hunter.”

  “Ah. The ex-Marine who works for our rival.”

  “Former Marine,” Caine corrected her.

  “My husband fought in World War II. He was in the U.S. Army. I was twenty years younger than him, but there’s just something about a man in uniform. Have you seen him in his uniform?” she asked Faith.

  “Grandfather? Yes, I’ve seen photos of him—”

  “No, I mean this former Marine here. Caine. Have you seen him in his uniform?”

  “No.”

  “Good. Don’t you go trying to break my granddaughter’s heart,” Gram said. “She’s had enough trouble in her life lately. She doesn’t need a former Marine messing things up. Even if you are good-looking. Don’t you go trying to seduce her in some dark corner.”