Alex Harris 00 - Armed

our escapades the other night, the three of us make quite the little felonious threesome,” I turned to glare at Millie, who had pulled on sweat pants but still had her red flannel pajama top on, “and I’m afraid to be in there alone at night.”
    “You need to work on your phobias, Alex.”
    “Hey, watch it or next time I’ll bring a chicken along,” I said to my sister, who had a life-long fear of chickens. “Cluck cluck cluck.”
    “Well, we better find something cuz you ruined my plans. My Good Housekeeping arrived today. Damn.”
    “I just started a new book when you called. I snuck out so I wouldn’t wake my mom and gram. I haven’t done that since…well, I’m not sure I ever snuck out,” Millie said.
    “You never snuck out?” Sam asked with awe.
    I looked at Sam again in the rearview mirror again. “When did you ever sneak out?”
    My sister stuck out her jaw. “You don’t know everything about me. I may have done it once or twice.”
    I laughed. “Yeah right. Okay. We’re here. Millie, you don’t have to be a lookout. If security comes by, they’ll recognize my car and we should be okay.”
    Five minutes later I had the computer turned on. I peered into the screen, the glow illuminating my face. “I don’t know what caused her to look for diamonds in the first place, but she’s got a lot of Web sites flagged about diamond smuggling.”
    “Do any of them mention Emmanuelle?” Sam asked, her eyes closed and her arms folded across her chest.
    “Look at this. She’s got online phone directories marked for a bunch of cities in northern California, I think. That’s kind of odd.”
    Sam groaned. “Maybe they do a lot of diamond smuggling in northern California.”
    Millie grabbed a chair and pulled it up next to the computer. I eyed her pajama top enviously. It sported a red and black Scottish plaid style. I started to ask where she got it when I remembered I needed to make a stop at Victoria’s Secret. I wondered if they had anything in red and black plaid.
    I turned my attention back to the computer screen. “And look here,” I said in much too cheery a voice for so late in the evening. “Here’s a junior college’s Web site in some town called Santa Rosa. What the heck?”
    “Maybe she had a reunion coming up and wanted to locate some classmates?” Millie speculated. “You said she came from California, right?”
    “Yeah. Diamond smuggling and school sites and just a bunch of work related stuff. Jeez.” I powered down the computer as the faint crunch of tires on snow echoed through the lobby. The computer turned off and plunged us into darkness.
    The three of us hit the floor and, with the help of the faint light coming from the reception area, crawled down the hall as a set of taillights exited the parking lot.
    “Probably just the guard,” Sam said.
    “Probably,” I echoed back.

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

    The following morning, working on the job of finding a replacement for Mrs. Scott, I left Sam and Millie to the task of gearing up for the ad agency staffing. Millie already contacted several people with copy-writing experience and a few with art degrees. She had deftly arranged for all of them to come in after Christmas, juggling times and days and coordinating it all with my schedule. Appointments filled the first three weeks of January. Samantha had also lined up another large job through a lead she received from a friend of a friend. It felt good to be busy again. Meme was right. Everything goes in cycles. Up and down.
    I leaned back in the chair, glad to give my fingers a rest from the keyboard. Outside my office window the sky looked like the color of cement. Large flakes of snow, the size of the granola clusters I’d had for breakfast, fell silently to the ground. I reached down and picked up the newspaper and checked the front page, and then the next and the next. I wanted to see if Emmanuelle had been ensconced behind a door reinforced with metal bars—hopefully with Jerry in the next cell—but found nothing. I mentally kicked myself for never having gotten around to questioning him, but the few times I tried, he deftly avoided me.
    “Alex? It’s Detective Van der Burg,” Millie announced over the phone.
    “Well, hello,” I gushed a second later, hoping he couldn’t hear the excitement in my voice. “I’m dying to know what’s going on. There’s nothing in the paper.”
    “Sorry to disappoint you, but we still haven’t made an arrest.”
    I sat