Mad, Bad and Blonde - Cathie Linz [59]
“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