“Sure you can. If you’re in town tomorrow night, have dinner with me.”
“No,” she said firmly. “The reason I gave you last night still stands.”
“Ah well, it was worth a try.” He smoothly changed subjects. “When is your flight to Dallas?”
“Two something.”
“Are you coming back tonight?”
“No, I’ll stay the night and catch the first flight out tomorrow morning.”
“Take care, then, and I’ll talk to you when you get back.”
“I will. And thank you. Oh—” she said, abruptly thinking of something. “Did you find out Diaz’s first name? The assassin Diaz, that is. We can use that to sort out all these rumors we hear, and discard the ones pertaining to him.”
“No, I didn’t get his first name,” he said, but there was the tiniest hesitation that again made her think he knew more than he was telling.
Since he was going out of his way to help her, though, she wasn’t about to give him grief about his overprotectiveness. She thanked him again, said good-bye, and began preparing for her trip to Dallas.
She had laundry to do, bills to write checks for, some light housekeeping; outside of laundry, dust was her biggest cleaning problem. But she liked her house to look nice and smell nice, so she made the effort. Every week she freshened the potpourri she had in each room, so whenever she came home she was greeted by a wonderful scent. Sometimes that was the only comfort she could find.
By nine-thirty, her last load of laundry was in the clothes dryer. She put stamps on the envelopes she was mailing and decided to take them to the post office rather than leave them in her box overnight, since her credit card payment was among the bunch. She grabbed her car keys, then at the last minute checked to make certain the phone number the tipster used was still on her cell phone. Sometimes the numbers disappeared, and she didn’t know why. Perhaps she was hitting some combination of keys that told numbers to go away, but for whatever reason, it happened. Sure enough, when she pulled up the menu and accessed her incoming call log, nothing was there. Nothing. Not a single number.
She puffed out her cheeks in frustration, then ran upstairs to get the scrap of paper on which she’d scribbled the number last night. Thank goodness she’d written it down. She could go by the office, take care of some paperwork, and check the number on the computer there.
The warehouse was closed on Sunday, the gravel parking lot usually empty. Today, however, Joann’s red Jeep Cherokee was parked right next to the door. Milla parked beside the Cherokee and climbed the steep flight of exterior stairs that led to the second floor. When she tried to open the door, she found it locked, which was good, since Joann had been here alone. Milla unlocked the heavy steel door and went in, calling, “Joann?” both to locate her friend and to let her know someone else was here. To be on the safe side, she locked the door behind her.
“In here,” Joann called, and came out of the break room. “I’m nuking some popcorn, but I’ve got another bag. Want some?”
“No, thanks, I had a real breakfast.”
“Popcorn is real. And I had a Pop-Tart, too.”
Joann was a junk-food junkie, which made it all the more amazing that she was so trim. She was forty, divorced, had an eighteen-year-old son, who had left the week before to spend what was left of the summer with his dad before heading off to college, and she looked no older than thirty. She wore her blond hair cut almost boy-short, and her blue eyes held a permanent twinkle. Joann was often the voice of reason when emotions erupted out of control in the office, which happened on a regular basis. The job they did was so intense, and sometimes so heartbreaking, that mini-crises were the rule rather than the exception.
“Why are you here today?” Milla asked.
“Paperwork, what else? How about you?”
Milla sighed. “Paperwork. And I wanted to run a phone number through the computer.”
“What phone number?”
“The one that came in on my cell phone Friday afternoon, with the tip about Diaz. It’s an El Paso exchange, so I’m curious.”
“Have you called it?”
“Not yet. I started to last night, but it was late—or early—and I decided to wait. And if I can find out who I’m calling beforehand, so much the better.”
She went into her office and booted up her computer. While the machine was going through its digital contortions, she turned around to her desk and flipped through the stack of paperwork to pull out those things she could get finished in the short amount of time she had.
Their computer system needed updating, she thought as she listened to the beeps and whirs behind her. That was one more expense that was continually shoved to the back burner, because there was always something more important, more urgent, that took their funds. As long as their current system still worked, she couldn’t justify spending thousands to upgrade.
When the booting was complete, she swiveled her chair around, went on-line, pulled up Google, and typed in the phone number. In two seconds, she had the name of the service station where the call had been placed, and the address. Behind her, she heard Joann come into the office.
“Find anything?”
“It’s a service station.”
Joann leaned her hip on the desk and waited as Milla dialed the number. It was answered on the fifth ring. “Service station.”
An informative greeting, Milla thought. “Hello, this is Milla with Finders, and we received a call from your location about six P.M. Friday afternoon. Can you tell me—”