Free Trace (TraceWorld Book 1) by Letitia L. Moffitt

retorted, “Your dad’s so lame.” Another time, slightly older, she mustered the courage to join in with a bunch of girls complaining about their fathers by grumbling that hers always said the most embarrassing things in public. Gretchen Phelps gave her a withering look. “Your father is a saint compared to mine.” Olivia Zablonski chimed in scoldingly, “He’s so nice, Nola. He never hit you in his whole life, I bet.” No, her father had never hit her, or her mother, or done any of the things those girls claimed their fathers did—getting wasted, getting high, stealing, cheating, running off. The divorce, the one thing she could hold against him, was, she believed, in the long run a sensible course of action that benefited them all. She did wonder sometimes how much this belief had contributed to her own inability to have a serious, successful relationship. At those times, she’d remember those girls from her childhood and tell herself to shut up. It was pointless to sit around your whole life blaming your folks.
    And this time she hoped she might actually get something useful from this particular parent. She called to say she would be on his side of town; could she stop by? The call was a pointless formality. She knew he’d say “Sure!” even if half the time he’d be out.
    This time he was in and making enough dinner for both of them, though it looked an awful lot like breakfast: coffee and eggs. “That’s my dad,” she said, giving him a quick hug as she entered his apartment.
    “That’s my Nola!” he said. “How’s my girl?” Without waiting for an answer, he nodded his head toward the kitchen table. “Finished that Dennis Lehane. You can have it back. Good read. Got something else for me?”
    She lifted the book she’d brought along. “P.D. James.” Her father went through books crazy fast. She probably should have brought at least a dozen, since she probably wouldn’t see him again for another couple of weeks.
    “Great. Omelets ready in a bit. Coffee ready now.”
    She followed him into the kitchen and set the murder mystery down on the dining table. Seeing the giant bottle of Tabasco sauce he kept alongside the salt and pepper shakers, she picked it up and set it next to his coffee cup. “I’ll have my coffee black. You’ll have yours red, of course.” Her father would put Tabasco on everything, soup to nuts to breakfast cereal. People always thought she was kidding about the breakfast cereal, but she wasn’t. Steven Lantri liked his shredded wheat spicy.
    “Red coffee sounds damn tasty,” he said good-naturedly. “Think of red-eye gravy. And, hey, the Aztecs put chilies in their hot chocolate. Why not?”
    “Number one, this is coffee. Number two, you aren’t Aztec.”
    “Go back far enough in the family tree, I bet one of the Lantris sired a little Aztec bastard. A Bastec.” He chuckled and set two plates of eggs on the table. “So, what’s new with you, my Aztec princess?”
    “Not much,” she said, savoring her first bite of omelet, gooey with cheese. It was one of only two things her father knew how to make—the other was spaghetti Bolognese—but he did both to perfection.
    “Work going OK?” Her father knew she did some kind of consulting work for the police, which she explained vaguely as having something to do with her “training” in psychology. That was detailed enough for him.
    “Work’s good. Actually, I’m working on something new for the cops. It involves Culver Bryant. You know Bryant, don’t you?”
    “Talked to the guy a couple times. Wouldn’t say we’ve become bowling partners since then.”
    As casually as she could, Nola continued. “A . . . friend of mine, someone who knows Bryant well, described him as a man who wants to do right by everyone. That seems hard to believe.”
    “Scobie,” her father said.
    When her mother uttered what seemed like non sequiturs, Nola’s strategy was nod-head-and-ignore, since there was little point in