“Any new calls?”
Rachel shook her head.“We’ve only just started, Gina.It takes time to build a business.”
Of course it did.But in the meantime, I had two employees and no income.
Actually, Rachel wasn’t so much employee as partner.And she had a severance packet that she could live on for a couple of months, until we—hopefully—got some money coming in.But Zachary had quit his job at the Apex—the building where David’s penthouse was—and he was working for Fidelity Investigations full time.And he had to eat and put gas in his car.Unless we got some actual paying clients through the door in the next couple of weeks, I’d be paying Zachary’s salary out of my savings account.
“Is Zach here?”
“He’s working on the website,” Rachel said, with a glance toward the rear of the building, where the offices were.“Search engine optimization, he said.”
Excellent.“I need him to do something for me.Steven left the university and drove to a house in Crieve Hall.He spent almost two hours inside, and then he drove home.”
Rachel nodded.
“I want a look at whoever lives there.So I want Zachary to deliver a pizza.”
“Pizza?”
“It’s a classic ploy.Private Investigating for Dummiessays so.You knock on the door with a pizza and say you have a delivery.They tell you they didn’t order a pizza.You double check the address.They insist they didn’t order the pizza.You offer to give them the pizza anyway, since your boss will be angry if you bring it back.They open the door and take the pizza, since nobody turns down a free pizza, and...”
I broke off.“You know, never mind.That’s for process servers.But I bet it would work for us, too.”
“Can’t hurt to try,” Rachel agreed.
“Can’t hurt to try what?”Zachary asked.He must have heard us talking, and come in from his own office.Now he was lounging in the doorway, looking from one to the other of us.
He’s adorable, in a very young, freckled way.Barely taller than me—I’m five-nine—and as bright-eyed and bushy-tailed as the proverbial squirrel.I think he was as excited about working for a PI firm as I was.Maybe more so, since he didn’t have any of the financial worries.
I told him where Steven had gone this afternoon.“We need someone to get a look at who lives there.You’re our best bet.You can deliver a pizza.”
Nobody would believe that I, at my age, was a pizza delivery person.And Rachel was even older than I was.
Zachary flushed excitedly, from the neck of his blue T-shirt all the way up to the roots of his carroty hair.“You mean I get to go undercover?”
Rachel opened her mouth, probably to tell him not to get carried away, and I got in first.
“Yes!Exactly.You’d go undercover as a pizza delivery person.I’d need you to bribe someone at the pizza place to let you borrow a uniform shirt or hat and one of those lighted signs they put on their roofs.And then I need you to go to the house and see if you can get someone to open the door.Most people will open the door for a free pizza.”
Zachary nodded.“I’ve read the book.”
“Then you know what to do.”
“Now?”
“Finish up what you were doing first.And give me a chance to go to the bathroom.I’ve been in the car a long time.”
“You’re coming, too?”It sounded like he wasn’t entirely sure whether he was excited or the opposite about going out in the field with the boss.
“Just in the car,” I said.“If you get them to open the door, I want to see what they look like.And try to get a photograph.You can’t do that if you’re holding the pizza.But you’ll be on your own at the door.And inside the pizza parlor.”
He nodded.“I’ll go shut down the computer.”
“I’m going to the bathroom.”I headed down the hallway while he went back into his own office.
By the timeI came back out to the lobby, Zachary had finished what he had to do, and was waiting for me, twitchy with excitement.Rachel was there, as well, twitchy with worry.“Do you want me to wait until you come back?Just in case?”
“In case of what?”Zachary wanted to know.“We’re just delivering a pizza!”
