Malcolm and Ives 02 - Trouble With Air and Magic (7 page)

He shoved a coffee-stained mug at the pot and poured. “I’ll take you to work if you insist on going in. I’m meeting a security expert at ten to look at your personnel files. You may have more problems than you thought.”

Ignoring this indication that he’d spent the night inside her computers, she replied, “I’d rather you concentrated on Bo and your brother. The foundation can’t afford outside help.”

“Screw that.” He sipped the coffee, and then narrowed his eyes as he registered the rearrangement of his small appliances. “Your
life
could be in danger. That’s more important than money. Good security is cheaper than theft.”

“I can’t pay for security if word gets out that FF is losing money,” she corrected.

“We’ll work something out. You’ll need guards in that garage and at the ground floor lobby entrance, too. I’ll talk to your landlord.” He gulped his coffee and began pacing the tiled floor as he spoke. “I can’t find any sign of a hacker, so your problem has to be internal. Those slashed tires look like the work of a disgruntled employee.”

“My father owns the building, and the foundation employs people dedicated to our cause. We’ve had basically the same staff since forever.”

“Two new hires,” he said reflexively.

Her
hires. She hid her wince. “Bo can handle the financials—if he’s still alive. Did you look into the helicopter crash at all?”

“Couldn’t tell you if I did. It’s classified. I’ll get dressed,” he said. “You call your friend and tell him you have a ride. I don’t want you wandering the streets alone.”

Supergeekman walked away, giving her no room to argue. Dorrie sipped her coffee and winged mental energy arrows at his broad back. He massaged his shoulder as if one had hit him.

***

Ever since his nose for trouble had detected something off about the nanny his older brother had hired, Conan had regretted ignoring his instinct in not telling Oz to hire someone else. At the time, he hadn’t wanted a nice girl to lose her job.

Instead, his nephew had ended up kidnapped and Oz had suffered a year of hell because Conan had been too chickenshit dull to acknowledge what his gut—or his nose—was telling him.

And now, after spending a night rooting through computer innards, his nose said the Franklin Foundation had a lot of dead files, and he had the Librarian’s weird—and oddly correct—warnings to set his gut on fire. Could it be a coincidence that the half-Chinese heir to a real estate fortune disappeared while his father’s money was being siphoned off?

Dorrie hadn’t lied about her mother’s murder either, but Conan couldn’t see how a random event over a dozen years ago could affect a helicopter crash.

Logically, he could write off dotty Dorrie as a screwball and probably a screw-up, but if his instinct meant anything, her brother and the money hadn’t disappeared by mistake. And Magnus had gone down with her brother. That really gripped his gut. If there was any possibility whatsoever that his older brother was still alive, he’d rip apart walls and laws to find him.

This time, he couldn’t ignore his internal alarms, even if they made about as much sense to him as Hungarian written in Cyrillic.

Conan wasn’t a people person like Oz. He didn’t know what made Dorothea Franklin tick. But the posturing hysteric he’d seen last night did not compute with the uptight witch in her power red suit who stalked through her office this morning. She walked as if she had a broomstick up her ass as she cruised the windowed corridor past empty employee cubicles.

In the rain, she’d not only looked human, but sexy cuddly. Weird. What made the difference? The hair wound so tight it looked as if it should pull her head off her shoulders?

At least he’d taken time to pull a brown blazer over his black polo and jeans, faking businesslike as they cruised her office. He’d been kind of ticked that she hadn’t taken him seriously yesterday. Maybe the clothes would make a difference.

He followed in Dorrie’s wake, not sorry there were no employees available to interview personally. He couldn’t spot a crook if one stood in front of him. He needed machines to detect patterns. He read computers the way other people read books.

With a bit of luck, he should have time to clean up FF’s little bookkeeping mess while he was waiting on that defense contract. He didn’t want anyone blaming his security walls for a breach in a charitable foundation’s accounts. That would cream his career for certain. Small businesses like his relied heavily on reputation.

Of course, if the government found out he’d been poking through their computers, he’d be going to jail, but that was another matter entirely. Magnus was worth risking prison time.

His brother could take an engine apart and put it back together faster than any mechanic he knew. Magnus had hot-rodded all their cars when they’d been teens. Which only aggravated Conan’s itchy instincts. Magnus worked on top secret government engines these days. He’d have known if anything was wrong with the helicopter’s mechanics.

With every ounce of his pathetic existence, Conan wanted Dorothea to be right that their brothers were still alive.

Taking a desk that overlooked her corner office, Conan had a good view of Dottie Frost as she settled her furball into a dog bed, threw her coat on a hook, and got down to work. The concern etched in her brow marred the façade of inscrutability while she clicked through her keyboard.

He tuned into her computer system and hunted through personnel files but nothing obvious—like employees with prison records—jumped out at him. Working his way through employee Internet histories, he could see the foundation’s treasurer had a fondness for porn sites but not online gambling. The bookkeeper amused herself on YouTube and shopped on bargain sites. He could have done all this from home, but he didn’t want to leave the dragon lady alone.

He began sifting through client records. As he’d discovered in his preliminary search, the foundation’s money financed individuals who fell through the system, people who were working hard but just not able to get a grip and pull out of the hole.

No wonder Miss Frosty was so uptight. She had the weight of hundreds of families on her shoulders.

Conan glanced up to see Dorothea reading over his shoulder.

At his frown of annoyance, she said, “Your security guy just buzzed up from the garage. Do you want to let him in?”

The shiny straight hair she’d wrenched into a knot was already starting to escape and curl. Conan remembered how soft and curvy she was under that stiff suit, but he wasn’t in the habit of sexually harassing the clientele and needed to stop thinking like that. He shoved his chair back and headed for the elevator without speaking.

Because of the Librarian’s eccentric warning, he had deliberately called Grogan Security instead of Chong’s, but the man Grogan’s sent was every bit as Asian as Chong. Conan grimaced, shook hands, and led Fred Liu upstairs to introduce him to Dorothea.

Fred tried speaking Chinese to her—Conan assumed it was some form of Chinese since he didn’t know the difference in language much less dialect—but Dorothea merely nodded and glanced at Conan. “Is this firm insured and bonded?”

“I wouldn’t settle for less,” he said irritably. He wasn’t accustomed to his clients questioning his judgment. Of course, most of them had read his credentials. He didn’t think Miss Frosty had. She was probably judging him by his bad feng shui. Maybe he should let her read his palm.

Fred produced a folder. “Here are our references and copies of bonds. We would not consider working without presenting these.”

“Thank you.” She looked to Conan. “May I speak with you privately before you show Mr. Liu around?”

Not easy in this cubicle farm. Conan took Fred to the front office and left him there, out of hearing, before returning to Dorrie. He raised a questioning eyebrow at her.

“Fred has an ax to grind,” she said without inflection, as if she’d just said his security expert had black hair. “I need to check his personal references with my family before we show him anything important. He may just dislike my father or the foundation or you, for all I know, but he may not be the best person for this job.”

Conan opened his mouth to object, but the words wouldn’t come out. He’d seen his sister-in-law accomplish inexplicable weirdnesses with her voice. He would keep an open mind to Dorothea’s nutty arguments. Instead of protesting, he asked, “How do you know?”

She lifted one shoulder. “I don’t. It’s just what I feel. I could be interpreting that arrow of hostility completely wrong. It’s not strong. It’s just there. I’d say he resents something, but that’s a little too specific.”

At least she was honest and straightforward about her craziness. He appreciated that she didn’t try to conceal it. He refrained from rolling his eyes. “All right, I’ll put him to work on physically securing the entrances. You said your father owns this building. May I speak with him about hiring guards?”

“No,” she said curtly. “My father is not to be disturbed. He uses a rental management company. We can call them on Monday.”

Irritated that she shot down his every suggestion to protect her—with unreasonable explanations—he growled, “If you really want to run this place, you’d better start practicing standing up to your old man.”

He walked out, satisfied that he’d left her with her mouth hanging open. If he had to put up with her idiosyncrasies, she’d have to learn to put up with his.

“My gratitude, Aunt Li,” Dorrie said, holding the phone receiver with one hand and flipping through Fred Liu’s folder of references. “I miss the family, too. Perhaps, by the new year, Dad will be ready for guests. You must visit.”

Provided the house hadn’t fallen off the cliff, but Dorrie refused to relate her troubles to her San Francisco relatives. Her mother’s family was large, ambitious, and clannish. They would be down here on the first flight to order the contractors to work faster buttressing the cliff and harass the city to better care for their hills and to flutter around her insurance agent’s office until the man went mad.

Well-meaning but impossible—which was why she hadn’t mentioned that she hadn’t felt Bo’s death. Given their family history, they would believe her without doubt. They would tear apart his military base looking for answers and quite possibly destroy all their careers in the process. She didn’t have enough confidence in her instinct to allow that.

But having a cadre of relatives infiltrating every layer of society was like having a private detective agency at her fingertips. She was ready when Conan returned after leaving Fred Liu checking out the exits. Toto sniffed his shoes, then wagged his tail hopefully.

“We’re wasting Fred’s time and your money if I can’t give him access to personnel files,” Conan said, settling into the uncomfortable folding chair to scratch Toto’s head.

She was getting used to Conan’s bluntness. She wasn’t quite as used to his blatant masculinity. He looked good in that blazer, but the black knit polo stretching across his chest looked better. Even clothes couldn’t stifle all the male pheromones bouncing off the walls of her father’s office.

How the devil was she supposed to explain how she
knew
things to a man who clearly only understood computers? She was pretty amazed that he hadn’t laughed in her face about Fred’s arrow of hostility, which was the only reason she was still speaking to him.

“Without going into all the annoying details of which high school he attended, who he married, and where his sister lives,” she continued, not showing her irritation, “my aunt says Fred used to work for one of my father’s realty firms. He was fired because he talked too much, which probably means Fred told one of his family about a good deal my father was after and they got there first. My father always got his Irish up when my mother’s family knew all his business, but at least they were family. Fred isn’t.” She shoved the annotated reference file across the desk at him.

Looking properly puzzled, Conan donned his black-rimmed glasses to scan her hieroglyphic scribbling. Really, her family was as difficult to explain as her semi-psychic abilities—and that was just their normal professional knowledge. If she enlightened them on Ling paranormal powers, he’d walk out laughing. She hadn’t been oblivious to his amusement yesterday.

She preferred admiring the scholarly expression on this steaming hunk of male. The combination devastated her libido. She almost voiced her disappointment when he returned his glasses to his pocket.

He tossed the file back to her desk. “So you’re saying you can’t hire Fred because your father fired him, and now Fred resents you or the foundation or some other shit?”

She wondered if he’d quit if she agreed, but she didn’t intend to find out. Much as she hated to admit it, Conan was her only hope.

“I’m saying Fred’s anger is an honest reaction,” she said, “and if he ever did anything to harm me or mine, he knows my family and knows he’s a dead man, so hire him.”

Conan ran a callus-roughened hand through his shaggy hair, scratched his head, then stretched his long legs across her carpet as if he were settling in to pick her brains. She did admire his curiosity.

“Your family is some kind of Mafia?”

Dorrie smiled at the idea of Grandmother Ling as Mafia. “Something like that, except they’re so honest they’d make Abe Lincoln cringe. My mother’s family is a matriarchy of legendary power. They know everything, sometimes even before the person involved knows it.”

“You’re saying they’re psychic?” he asked warily.

He was remarkably willing to expect oddities. Interesting. And promising. Could she tell him about Bo’s GPS abilities?

“Not precisely,” she hedged, unwilling to reveal the full extent of her family’s weirdnesses until she could trust him. “My mother was a feng shui expert. I have an aunt who is a phenomenal success as a chef, another who makes perfumes, one of my cousins is a dedicated county prosecutor, and my family pretty much swears that my grandmother can read minds. She’s pretty spooky, but her wide network of friends is probably a better explanation. When we want to be, we are our own Internet.”