Sammy’s voice is almost a whisper. “Why not? Do they kill them?”
May shakes her head. “No. But it brings them very bad luck, and next time they try to fight, they get injured. You don’t want to injure a real ninja, do you?”
Sammy shakes his head. “No. But I do want to touch hith thordth.”
She rubs his head affectionately. “I know you do. Maybe one day he’ll let you touch one, but not today.” She stands up and turns him toward the dogs who have just entered the room. They trot over to a large dog bed and curl up together. “Go play with the doggies. They’re bored.”
Sammy runs off to lie down in the bed with the dogs, and May looks over at me. “We good?”
My son is lying in a dog bed when he should be at daycare, and I’m working in a warehouse where I was formerly kept prisoner in a panic room. I’m perfect. I smile back at her. “Yep. All set.”
“Call me later,” she says, holding her hand up to her ear with two fingers extended, mimicking our future call.
“Oh, I will. Don’t worry.” I wink so she knows I’m not mad at her. But we do have a lot to talk about. And at some point, I’m going to have to try and slip into the conversation a question about why Dev wasn’t at the meeting today. I’m just hoping it’s not because he’s regretting flirting with me and heard I was going to be here.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
After everyone’s gone, it’s just Lucky and me in the room together. He has a pen out and a blank piece of paper, and he’s staring at me attentively.
“Do you know when you might be available to do a night visit to the job site?” he asks.
“I don’t know. I guess it would depend on what you think we’re going to be doing, and how long you think it’ll take. Since it’s at night, it’s possible May could watch my kids for me, but it depends on her schedule.”
“Okay. So, we need to talk to May.”
“I could text her, if you want.”
“That’s a good idea. Why don’t you go ahead and do that?”
Taking my phone from my purse, I quickly tap out a message to my sister, asking her when she might be free for a sleepover so that I can get down to business here with the Bourbon Street Boys.
“What’s next?”
“I was thinking we could get over there to the administrative offices around eight p.m. and work until about four in the morning. Mr. Jorgensen tells me that the last person is usually out the door by six-thirty in the evening, and they come in around eight o’clock in the morning. I’m guessing it’ll take us a few hours to go over all the computers, but just in case, we’ll have more time than that before we can expect anyone to show up and spoil our fun. Does that sound right to you?”
I nod. “Yes, it sounds about right, but I wouldn’t want to commit to anything until I actually got in there and started working. It’s really difficult to say how long it’ll take without having more details about the people who work there. Because we don’t know the background of any of the employees and how sophisticated they might be with their computer use, we won’t know for sure how deep the problem goes until we have our hands on their drives.”
He nods. “Yeah, you’re right.” He pauses for a moment and smiles at me. “Did I mention how happy I am to have you working on this case with me?”
My heart warms at the sentiment. “Maybe? Yes? No?” I chuckle. “Everyone has made me feel very welcome.”
“I think you’re really going to like working here, despite your first impressions. I promise it’s not normally like it was on Friday.”
I try to focus on the positive and not the incident in the panic room. That was just a wrong place, wrong time kind of thing. Except for the part where I spent quality time with Dev. Wrong place, right time? “Well, my sister May loves it, so it must be a nice place.”
“I realize that right now you only plan to be here temporarily, but if you decide at any point that you might like a more permanent gig, you should let me know. There’ve already been several cases we’ve worked on where we had to bring in outside talent, and we’ve had to turn down several more jobs because we just weren’t sure we could bring in somebody qualified enough to help. From what your sister and Thibault both tell me, you can pretty much handle anything we’ve been approached about so far.”
I’m flattered but also a little worried. “How does Thibault know anything about what I do?”
Lucky leans back in his chair a little bit. “He’s in charge of background checks. Whenever we think about working with someone from outside the team, he does a thorough check. Law enforcement allows us to use their databases.”