Malcolm and Ives 02 - Trouble With Air and Magic by Patricia Rice Page B

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 that 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