Jansen’s thrilled to see us, practically dancing as he shows us all the work he’s done on the place, and I have to admit it’s not bad. The kitchen is bright and clean, the cabinets sanded down and stained a warm tan color. The stairs have no holes in them, and as far as I can see, the walls don’t have any holes either. They’re not painted yet, but it’s an improvement.
“Where’s Emma?” Walker asks after the tour, pulling out drinks for us from his bag, a kettle already warming on the still disgusting stove for Jansen.
“She’s at work.”
“Is that smart?” I ask.
Jansen pushes himself onto the kitchen island, sitting cross-legged. “She scoped it out, and it looked safe. They’re happy to have her back. She’s been texting once an hour to check in the whole shift, and so far, nobody seems to be looking for her there. So unless something changes, she should be fine. With what Clara said, they don’t even know her full name.”
I take one of the folding chairs, opening my Mountain Dew. “There was sound in that video feed. But you’re right. We only called her Emma, and who knows how many Emmas there are at the U.”
Walker’s kombucha sits unopened in his hand. “Let us know if that changes, though. If we let something happen to Emma, I’m not sure Clara would forgive us.”
“She would,” Jansen says. Then he adds what we all know. “Eventually.”
“Anyway, we’re here with a different problem,” I say.
Jansen leans forward, his attention locking on. “A problem that takes a thief?”
“Maybe,” Walker says, finally claiming one of the other chairs. “We need to get my drawings to Clara and Trips. Without the guards or his family seeing.”
“When?”
I take another sip. “Hopefully tonight. They’ll be at the orchestra.”
“Could we plant them in the car?”
Walker opens the kombucha, still not drinking. “We could, but how would they get them into the house?”
Silence meets this issue. “What about just bringing them to the house?” Jansen asks.
Walker scoffs. “You want to break in again? How’d that go the last time?”
Jansen leans back, staring at the ceiling. “It was going fine until somebody tried to shoot Clara. You’d have done the same thing.”
“I never would have been there to begin with,” Walker snipes, and I realize for the first time the weight he’s been bearing on our behalf. He’s run out of rope. I promised I’d be a better teammate, and I’m not doing my part.
I cut in. “Hey. Focus, you two. Could you get in and out clean, Jay? They’ve got tight security, we can’t mess with thecameras yet, and we can’t get close enough to see possible gaps. Especially not before tonight.”
Jansen flops onto his back, stretched along the top of the counter in a way that would make both Walker and Trips cringe. “Probably not,” he says.
I glance at our artist, and he’s carefully avoiding looking at the whole-ass human spread across a food prep area.
Focusing back on our problem, I have to admit I’m not much help. I know a dozen ways to get information in and out of secure networks, but I’ve got exactly zero ideas about how to get a fat pile of paper into a secure building.
Jansen pops up, his grin bright as his eyes droop. “Their coats!” he proclaims, assuming we’ve followed the same path he has.
Walker and I just stare at him, uncertain of what he’s going to say next.
“We can sew the papers into the lining of their coats.”
I’m blinking at him, still trying to catch up when Walker laughs. “Dude, that’s genius. They’ll leave their coats at the coat check for the whole performance. That would give us a ton of time to stitch them in.”
Jansen hops from the counter, grabbing a pen and writing notes on the wall, which, weird, but it’ll be painted over anyway, so I guess it’s safe. “So, we’ll need thread and needles. What else?”
“A seam ripper,” I say, thinking back to my mom grumbling every time I outgrew my church clothes a week after she bought them, ripping out the seams and restitching them a little bigger, to buy time before we needed to go shopping again.
“Okay. Anything else?”
