AN: Hello All! I just have to say that I almost never post a chapter without my husband reading it first. He is working late tonight and I am trying to remain on something of a schedule when it comes to posting. So here it is, not Beta tested by my man, so be gentle! Thank you for all of your comments, reviews and for sticking with, or coming back to a story that I've been MIA from for so long.

"What?" I asked. "I'm on my second marriage, and I was practically engaged to Joe; the news that I've had sex can't be that big of a shock to him."

"I don't know what the hell is going on," Val said. "Angie just called me to tell me that dad saw her boyfriend kiss her, she won't tell me who it is either, but I have a strong suspicion it's one of the Molnar boys."

"It's not," I said, as the light began to dawn.

"She told you who it is?" Val said. "Oh, tell me, Stephanie. I promise I'll…"

"Val…. Dad… Homicide…" I said in an attempt to urge her back on track. Dad seeing his perfect angel of a granddaughter kissing a Morelli may solve the mystery of why Morelli was about to be on the receiving end of a murdering. But dad typically only thought about murder; he hadn't acted on the impulses before.

"That's it. Angie called and said that dad gave her shit and that he was on his way to kill Uncle Joe."

"When was that last time you saw mom and dad?" I asked. "Was dad acting weird then?"

I was sort of worried that he'd overdosed or poisoned himself with his evil coffee concoction.

"No, it was mom that was weird. I went over because Mary Alice has decided to be vegetarian and wanted to try fondue as a vegetarian meal option. I asked mom if I could borrow the fondue pot."

"Oh shit," I said. Dad's secret stash had been discovered.

"What am I missing?"

"It's a long story," I said.

"Well, mom threw something in the trash and said that dad was going to be learning the meaning of low cholesterol."

"Okay," I said. "I'll take care of it."

I hung up with Val and got out of bed. I threw on some clothes and reefed my hair into a ponytail, not bothering to coffee or eat before I went down to my car. The minute I got out of the garage, I called Morelli.

"So," I said, my tone as casual as I could make it. "Where are you? Still in Boston, right?"

"Nope, we got back early this morning. So I could be at work in time to sit behind a wall of paperwork, counting down the minutes before I can go home for lunch. Why?"

I checked the time. "Going home for lunch may not be a good idea."

"Why?" Joe asked again, this time, his voice resigned.

"My dad is pissed that you and I have had sex. He wants to kill you."

"He's a slow burn, that man," Joe said.

"Yeah, not really. He's just really good at denial."

"It's a family trait," Joe said. "What's set him off?"

"He saw your nephew and my niece making out. I'm not sure of the particulars, but I'm handling it."

"Well, handle it quickly," Joe said. "I'm hungry, and I'm out of coffee."

He hung up. Joe didn't handle desk work well. Being out of coffee would make him cranky. I empathized. I hit Slater street a few minutes later and saw my dad's cab parked by the curb. I recognized JigSaw's Cutlass parked a little behind him and walked over to Molly's protection first. He wound down his window and looked up at me, his face inscrutable. Out of all of Ranger's men, JigSaw sort of creeped me out the most. The majority of them had warmed up to me, but I strongly doubted JigSaw warmed to anyone, and I suspected that his loyalty to Molly would be scary if he hadn't been tamed by Ranger somewhat. "Hey," I said. "So the guy in the cab?"

"Yeah?"

"Don't kill him. He's my dad."

"Is he a threat?" JigSaw asked, not at all concerned by the familial relationship.

"Only to Morelli."

"Noted," he said and wound up his window, conversation over.

I went to dad's car and knocked on his window. "So, dad," I said. "I hear you're feeling a little murdery today."

Dad didn't look away from Joe's house; he just nodded once.

"Why, Joe?"

"Because I can't kill his shithead nephew."

"Okay, you don't want to kill a kid. I get that, but umm, killing Joe is still not a great plan," I said. "First of all, it's not nice, and second, Joe's a cop; people tend to frown on cop killing. Like a lot."

"I don't care," he said.

"Oh, okay," I said, "So long as you've thought this through then. Can I come in?"

Dad unlocked the passenger door, and I climbed inside the car. "Have you thought about how you're going to do it? Only I'm going to have to call your son-in-law to help clean up the mess."

"I'm going to shove my hand down his through and rip his testicles out through his mouth."

"Okay," I said. "Ew. Also, and I don't mean to keep being a killjoy, but I see a few flaws with that plan...too. The first being that I don't know that it's anatomically possible."

"I'll make it possible."

"Good. Good. Um, the other thing is, Joe's not home right now."

"I can wait."

"I had a better idea," I said. "Why don't I buy you breakfast at Denny's. All that sausage and bacon, and unlimited coffee…"

Dad opened the car door and got out, laser-focused on what he was going to do.

"Dad! He's at work!" I shouted.

"I saw someone at the front door."

"It was probably Bob!" I said. I ran beside him, but he ignored me and really aggressively pushed the doorbell; just once, but it looked satisfying as Hell. I didn't know you could do that.

A few seconds later, Molly opened the door. She was wearing a long-sleeved, loose-fitting peasant dress, with sleeves that were slashed from her shoulders to her wrists, where it was cuffed. It was a beautiful pale blue, and with her hair still styled in the tumbled out of bed look, she looked freaking cool, and comfortable as all get out. More importantly, she was holding a cup of coffee, and we could smell it.

"Stephanie?" She said, looking at me with a bemused expression on her face.

"Hi, Molly," I said. "This is my dad, Frank. He's here to kill Joe."

"Oh, I'm sorry, Mr. Plum, Joe's not home yet," Molly said. She looked at my dad, who was staring at the mug in her hand with a look of such pathetic longing, I wanted to hug him. "Is there any particular motivation behind this homicide?"

"He hasn't had coffee in a couple of days because my mom is punishing him for convoluted reasons."

"Oh," Molly said. She handed my dad the cup she was holding. "I just poured that. Would you like cream and sugar?"

My dad looked at her as though she were some heaven-sent angel of mercy and took a sip of the caffeinated Ambrosia she had given him. I don't know if it was good or it was just the fact that it was real coffee, but my father looked like he was about to cry.

"Why don't you come inside, Mr. Plum?" Molly said. "I was just about to start making lunch. Can I offer you some? It's just chicken salad made from leftovers, but there's plenty."

Dad looked tempted to kiss her. She stepped out of the way as we came in, and I looked around for Bob, who was nowhere to be seen. "Where's my buddy?" I asked.

"He's with Joe's mom. The forecast calls for thunderstorms."

"Right," I said. Joe's mom always took Bob for thunderstorms. She was afraid of them, and Bob wasn't. I think she was just lonely, if truth be told, and it was an excuse for her to borrow Bob. We walked through the house, to the kitchen, where Molly had blueprints spread out on the table, and a graph-paper notebook and pencils laid out.

"Sorry," she said. "Normally, I use the dining room as my office, but it has another project taking up space. Just give me a second."

She rolled up the blueprints, and shoved them in a cardboard tube, and put the pencils in a pencil case. All of it was consigned to a corner of the kitchen. While she did this, I looked into the backyard, and it looked like Dino the Dinosaur had been hiding brontosaurus steak bones in the backyard. There were craters everywhere. "What happened?"

"The foundation was sinking. It's been fixed, but the backyard is still looking a little post-apocalyptic," Molly said. "That's the project in the dining room. While the yard is still dug up, we're debating the merits of astroturf versus grass. If we go with grass, Bob's just going to kill it by peeing on it. It'll look prettier if we get decent astroturf, but I'm worried about carbon footprint and the fact that plants are good for the environment. Joe's all over the idea of unleashing a Roomba in the backyard instead of having to mow the lawn. So I'm researching ideas."

"Cool," I said.

She poured me a cup of coffee, and I took a seat at the kitchen table. This was really freaking weird. I think she felt it, too, because she gave me an awkward smile and then pulled an apron on over her dress and started cracking eggs into a bowl. All was quiet as my dad communed with his coffee. The only noises in the house were the sounds of a whisk being beaten against the side of a bowl and the sound of chopping on a cutting board. I took a sip of the coffee and nearly died. I understood dad's facial expression now. Without a doubt, this was the best coffee I'd ever had. I looked at Molly and felt a massive irrational stab of jealousy. I was more than happy with my choice in Ranger, but there was nothing domestic about me, and there she was looking relaxed and elegant, and she made this coffee, and now she was cooking what she claimed was chicken salad, but there seemed to be a lot going into its construction. That was the stuff I could never do for Joe.

She went to a cupboard door and pulled out some Tupper Ware, and the phone rang on the wall. She picked it up, "Hi Shirley," she said after her initial hello. "Well, that was too good to be true, wasn't it?" She glanced at her watch, and cradling the phone at her ear, she got more Tupperware out of the cupboard. The lids were all matching too, which wasn't fair. It might actually have been witchcraft. "I have a meeting until 2:30. I know you have to pick up the kids at 3… oh, lucky you. I'll meet you there at 3 then. Yep. Bye."

She hung up the phone and began dolling out chicken salad onto tortillas; she put two each into the Tupperware containers and filled a thermos of coffee. That done, she made two more wraps and brought them to the table and put them in front of dad and me. Dad picked up the wrap, took a bite and this time, I know I saw tears. Trusting his instincts, I took a bite myself.

"Jesus, fuck." I said. Dad nodded.

Molly brought her own to the table, minus the wrap; she'd opted to eat her straight, with a fork. "Does it really taste good with coffee?" She asked, looking at us dubiously. "It's a strange flavour pairing."

"It's delicious," I said.

"I'm glad," she said.

I heard the front door, and Joe called out. I looked nervously at dad. Was he still homicidal? No. He was my dad when faced with food. He wasn't wasting tasting breath on talking. I was sort of worried he might bite someone if they tried to take his lunch away from him. "Hey, Sweetheart," Joe said when he walked into the kitchen. "Look, I know I said…"

"I know," Molly said. "Shirley just called." She handed him the two Tupperware containers and the thermos of coffee. "Give one to Eddie."

"Fat chance," Joe said with a grin.

"It's nice to share," she said. Joe kissed her briefly and then looked at the table where dad and I were sitting.

"Hey," Joe said.

"Hey," I said awkwardly. The domestic scene I'd just watched was weirder than watching them on the date.

"Frank," Joe said.

Dad grunted a hello.

"I've spoken to the kid," Joe said.

"You told him what'll happen to him if he hurts my granddaughter?"

"I informed him there would be a sizeable line," Joe said.

"Good," Dad said.

"Okay," Joe said to Molly. "I'm off."

"Do you want me to bring dinner to the station?" Molly asked.

"I'll let you know," Joe said. "What is for dinner?"

"Either meatloaf or pasta and the butter sauce you like."

"See, I know what you're doing," Joe said. "You're punishing me for skipping lunch."

"Rewarding you, actually, but not for ditching lunch."

Joe grinned, "Later, Sweetheart."

"Bye," she said.

"Frank, Cupcake," Joe said and then he was gone. Molly turned back to the counter, added some spices to the remainder of the chicken salad, and mixed it. The door opened again, just as she finished putting it into a third Tupperware container. JigSaw walked in and handed her a notebook. "Does this shit make sense?"

She read it, "It's grammatically troubling," she said. "But yes."

"Why is it troubling?"

"There are better words to use to express the sentiment. Whoever wrote it wasn't a native speaker."

"Thanks," he said and took the chicken salad and his puzzle book out to the car. She sat back down at the table and avoided eye contact with me. Yep, this was awkward, and I would excuse myself, except that dad was still eating, and I didn't want to shake loose his tenuous grip on sanity by suggesting we leave. Molly toyed with her chicken salad. "Sooo... How about those Mets?" She said.

"Don't get me started," Dad said. "I lost a hundred bucks on that game."

"Oh honey," Molly said reproachfully, "You can love the Mets, but you don't bet on them."

"I didn't bet on them," Dad said, "But if they are going to blow a lead like that, the least they can do is let the other team cover the spread."

"Have you tried fantasy baseball?" Molly asked. "It's better than praying for the Mets to get humiliated every game."

"We have a league," Dad said.

"How are you doing in it?" I asked dad.

"I'm ahead for now," Dad said. "We'll see how things go leading into the postseason."

If dad played fantasy baseball, it was just possible he might be able to figure out the math that was in the book, or at least tell me what the Hell I might be looking at. I reached into my bag and pulled out the binder I'd filched from the dugout at Linton. "How do you pick your players?"

"I look at their stats, consider their age, and the makeup of their team that year," Dad said.

"Would you use math like this?" I asked and showed him the page. He looked at me like I'd lost my fucking mind.

"No," he said. "I don't do this shit. Do I look like Stephen Hawking?"

"Easy," I said. "I took a shot. It's in a book full of team statistics and a bookie's ledger. I thought maybe they could be odds calculations or something."

"I don't fucking know," Dad said. "Ask her. She's the engineer."

I looked over at Molly, who was watching the exchange between dad and me with some interest. "She's a florist."

"She's an engineer. Look at her little finger. That ring means she's an engineer."

I looked at Molly's hand, and she was indeed wearing a plain stainless steel band on her pinky finger. "He's right," Molly said. "I have a degree in Architectural Engineering and a minor in Mechanical Engineering."

"Seriously?" I asked.

"I was an architect before I became a florist," Molly said. "I don't usually wear the ring anymore except Tony's thrown me some consultation work, and you'd be surprised how many people look for the ring when you say you're an engineer."

"Cool," I said. "So you're a genius like Lester."

"No," she said with a laugh, "I'm really not. He's a computer trapped in the body of a jackass. Engineering is just a good field for the anally retentive. But your dad is right; I do know how to calculate odds. I can tell you what you're looking at in that book if you want."

I slid the binder over to her, and she looked at the page, and raised her eyebrows, and then turned the pages. She got up from the table, grabbed her notebook, a pencil and one of those scientific calculators with a pretentious number of buttons. I'm convinced that most of them are only there to make the people who use them look smarter and don't actually do anything.

"Odds calculations?"

"Standard Deviation," she said absently. That didn't particularly answer my question.

Dad's phone rang. He answered it and stood up. "Thanks for lunch. I have to work."

"No problem," Molly said. "Chicken salad is a small price to pay in exchange for Joe's clemency."

"You keep him in line," Dad admonished.

"I'll try, but he is a Morelli," Molly said.

Dad grunted and started towards the door. I saw him out to his cab, and he looked at me, "Are you okay?" He asked.

"I'm fine," I said.

"He loves her," Dad said. "This isn't a fling. You're looking at the next Mrs. Morelli."

"You think?" I said. It was pretty fast. She was living with him now because of exceptional circumstances. I doubted they were thinking that far ahead yet.

"Yeah," Dad said. "I recognized the look on Joe's face when he came in the kitchen. I saw it looking back at me in the mirror when I was still just thinking about asking your mom the question. He's thinking about asking, and she's got that same look your mother had, the one that says she's thinking about saying yes when he does. And it has nothing to do with you."

"I know that," I said. "I'm married now. Remember?"

"Yeah, but you got close with Morelli, and it wasn't that long ago either. You wouldn't be human if it didn't sting."

"It does a little, but I'm happy with Ranger. Very happy."

"Remember that," dad said. Honestly, the number of people who were freaked out that I'd do a massive nutty because Joe had found someone new. Okay, maybe I asked Ranger to perpetuate that myth a bit, but I really was okay. It was just a bit weird sitting in Joe's kitchen, knowing that it wasn't really Joe's kitchen anymore; it was definitely Molly's. I went back inside said kitchen, and Molly was punching data into her calculator.

She wrote something down on a long equation and shook her head. "So I can tell you two things," Molly said. "The first stuff is stuff I'd expect to see in most statistical calculations, but the second page is much for advanced, and not what you'd expect to see in bookmaking."

"Okay," I said. "What's the second thing?"

"Whoever is doing this math did not come up with this."

"You're sure of that?"

"Oh yeah," Molly said.

"Explain the easy stuff first," I said.

"Okay, so this stuff, basic standard deviation calculations." She drew a bell curve on her graph paper and drew a vertical line through the bell's apex. "This here is the mean or average of a distribution of data, but that information doesn't tell us how spread out that data is. For example, let's say you have a small sample of six people, and you measured foot size. One person with really big or small feet is really going to skew the average. Standard deviation is one way to check that. If there's a large standard distribution, it means that the data is spread out a lot."

"Okay," I said. "I'm following so far."

"So now let's say you have a different set of numerical data with a mean of say 37 with a standard deviation of 2. Then anything between 35 and 39 is considered within the average."

"Got it," I said. "So that in itself isn't strange."

"Not in the slightest. It would be stranger to see statistical calculations that didn't involve it. Before you do a lot of calculations in statistics, you figure out your mean, median, mode, variation and standard deviation."

"Okay," I said. "Which equation is Standard Deviation?"

She circled two of them on her graph paper. "The one with n-1 is for when you're dealing with a sample size, rather than the full population."

"What's the n stand for?"

"Population. Or in the case of a sample, the population of your sample minus one."

"Okay," I said. My brain was already starting to cramp, but I was following it. "If this is all normal stuff, what's the tricky part?"

"This is a prediction algorithm, but it incorporates variables in a way that's going to take me more than twenty minutes to figure out. Like we're talking, I'm going to be rooting through my big brother's old school books to understand what I'm doing."

"Do you know what it's predicting, even if you don't know how it's predicting it?"

"From context, I'd say it's predicting athletic potential."

"Okay," I said. "So let's say I get on base forty percent of the time, with a standard deviation of five, and for a little while say four games, I was a solid 35 maybe even 34 percent, what would you think?"

"I'd say you might be in a bit of a slump, but not a statistically significant one," Molly said.

"Would that algorithm you don't understand pick it up?"

"Like I said, I don't know. I doubt it, though. As long as you're within one standard deviation from the mean, nobody's going to look at your slump as statistically significant."

"Why do you think the guy who is doing the math in that book, didn't come up with it?"

"Because he makes far too many simple mathematical errors to come up with something this elegant. They are careless errors. Like squaring a number incorrectly, forgetting the order of operations here and there."

"I don't suppose you could walk me through doing a Standard Deviation Calculation?"

"I could, but why not ask Ric. This is math he can do. He hates it, but he can do it."

"Yeah, I could, but..."

"You hate that he knows everything?"

"Yeah," I said.

"I know the feeling," she said. She set aside the binder, turned to a clean set of pages in her graph notebook, created a chart with a bunch of random numbers, and gave me a crash course in introductory statistics. It went on for about an hour before she kicked me out because she had to meet Joe's brother Tony at a house renovation. I took the papers she gave me and went back to the office. I bypassed my own office and went to Lester's empty cubicle, and grabbed his fancy calculator, and began pulling up not just the team statistics but the data from each individual game of the previous season. Using what Molly taught me, I started doing the math. It was monotonous work, but not particularly difficult now that I knew what I was looking at. After about two hours, my neck hurt, and I was done with Math. I wished that I'd had more of Molly's coffee and decided the smartest thing to do was to ask Ella what the Hell Molly did to it so I could make it myself.

I found Ella in her apartment ironing some of Ranger's dress shirts.

"I spent some time with the domestic goddess/engineer today. She taught me math," I said and sat down at her kitchen table.

"Molly, you mean?" Ella asked. "I bet that was odd. Help yourself to a cookie."

"It was weird," I agreed, "But Joe is happier than I've ever seen him, and that's what matters."

"She is, too," Ella said. "Now, did you come here looking for mothering, or did you need something, dear?"

"I'll take the mothering," I said. "But I came here to ask you what the hell she puts in her coffee?"

"Lester and Ranger have spoken about running it through a mass spectrometer to figure it out. The going theory is that it's a narcotic that the government cooked up in a lab, and the colonel gave her for Christmas."

"The Colonel?"

"Her biological father," Ella said.

"What you're really saying is you don't know how she makes it, and it could be magic."

"Afraid so," Ella said. "Same goes for her chicken salad."

"Damn," I said.

"It's just those two things," Ella said. "Anything else she cooks, I can make. And she and her friend did once set fire to a condo while making cannoli, so she's not perfect."

"That makes me feel better," I said. "I was beginning to think she was."

"Not even close," Ella said. "You're just seeing her at her best right now. Everyone looks perfect when they are at their best. But I've known that girl from the time she was a babe in arms, and I'll tell you, of Javier's Santos's children, Lester was the easy one. Even before their mother died. Afterwards, well, Molly's the reason Javier is grey."

"Ah, but at least he's still sane. The jury's out on my parent, and I know I'm responsible for that."

Ella laughed. We chatted for a bit, over cookies and hot chocolate, and I took Ranger's laundry upstairs. I felt a bit grimy because I hadn't showered, and the day was a bit muggy, so I went to the bathroom, chucked my clothes on the floor and started up the shower. I was standing under a blast of hot water, soaking it in, letting it wash the afternoon and the math off of my head when I felt a draft and the presence of company. My company was definitely not looking to get clean in the shower.

"I bet you forgot," Ranger said, turning me so I faced him under the spray.

"Forgot what?" I asked. He was grinning at me like he was the Big Bad Wolf and I was Red Riding Hood.

"Well, Neudendorf freaked out because of you, not me. He admitted it."

I gulped. "Am I paying up now?"

"No," he said. "For that, I'm going to need a lot of time. But it occurred to me, in a meeting, that you have quite the tab built up, and I've spent the last two hours thinking about how you're going to pay it off."

"D-did you?"

"An afternoon isn't going to cut it either," Ranger said.

"What about a weekend?" I asked.

He shook his head. "Come the end of hurricane season, you and I are getting on a plane, and we're going South. There will be no distractions. There will be no phones. No work. Just you, and me, and your debt."

"Gulp," I said. I couldn't actually gulp; my mouth was too dry.

He smiled the full 200 watts. "This planning, however, has resulted in a little problem," He said. I looked down. Little was not how I would describe the problem.

"I like helping you with your problems," I said. "Big or… well Big."

"And I came upstairs to find you already conveniently naked."

"It's like it's fate," I said. Ranger nodded. There was no more talking after that. Though I may have heard a choir of angels taking advantage of the excellent acoustics in the shower.

AN: Hi, again. As usual when I go into anything technical I like to say that I am not expert and in the case of Molly's knowledge of Stats, it stems from the two courses I took in University and that was sadly a long time ago. If you are an expert, I urge you to go with the flow unless I've made a mistake so glaring it gnaws at you, in which case do drop me a PM and I'll fix it!