The Silence That Speaks (Forensic Instincts 4)

“You think they fought about her?”

“Yes, I do. I wish I knew why.”

Marc was quiet for a moment. “That bruise wasn’t fresh. It could have happened a few days ago.”

Claire understood where he was going with this. “Such as right after Casey had lunch with Janet.”

“Yup. Maybe that lunch pissed someone off—someone who didn’t want Casey plying these hallowed halls, where she might learn something they would prefer remained hidden.”

Claire and Marc slowed down as they reached the subway stop and hurried down the steps to catch the next train.

“Janet has no intention of staying away from Casey,” Claire stated, keeping her voice as low as she could for Marc to hear her over the throngs of people moving with them. “She’s scheduling a dinner with Casey. Plus, she was superfriendly to us, too. Clearly whoever struck her didn’t scare her off.”

“That doesn’t mean she shouldn’t have. Janet could be grossly underestimating her enemy.”

Something about Marc’s words gave Claire a dark feeling. “I’m afraid you’re right.”

21

THE FI TEAM was, yet again, gathered around the conference table, reviewing all the updated information that Marc and Claire’s outing had yielded. Patrick had rejoined them, after arranging for both John and Dave to safeguard Madeline and doubling up security for Conrad at Crest Haven.

Ryan was conspicuously absent.

“What’s the deal with Ryan?” Marc asked. “I heard him cursing all the way from the basement. What’s he up to?”

“Playing with his toys,” Claire supplied.

No one even blinked. They all knew that when Ryan was überfrustrated or pissed, he went to the robot section of his lair and tried out some of his new techno creations.

Patrick scowled. “Does that mean he’s having trouble cracking the encrypted files?”

“Yup,” Claire replied. “And I wouldn’t go down there if you paid me.”

“Well, I want an update, good or bad,” Casey said. “So I’m not going down there, but he’s coming up here. Yoda,” she called out. “Please tell Ryan I want him to report to the conference room now with whatever data he has.”

“Immediately, Casey,” Yoda replied.

“This should be fun,” Emma commented, not looking particularly worried. To the contrary, she looked like the cat who swallowed the canary since Casey had invited her to sit in on this meeting—her very first meeting in the “Oval Office,” as she called it. Hell, it had been worth her morning candy striping shift to do this.

“Yeah, take cover,” Marc said drily.

A few minutes later, Ryan strode into the room, a pile of printouts in his hand, and shut the door. He walked over to the table, plopped his paperwork down and dropped into a chair.

“I’m here,” he announced, looking and sounding like a petulant child.

“Are we going to throw a temper tantrum?” Casey inquired. “Because if we are, don’t break anything.”

Ryan shot her a look. “I’m frustrated as hell. See all this crap?” He pointed at the papers strewn across the table in front of him. “It’s all my attempts to crack Lexington’s encryption key. And I came up empty. Here’s the list of file names and the key phrases I tried—every fucking password I could think of. His birthday. His kids’ names. His wife’s name. His anniversary...”

Casey sat up straighter. “What list?”

Ryan shoved a sheet of paper toward her. “File names, none of which I can get into. Each one of them is a number, and they’re not sequential. Some have two digits, some have three or four, and there’s no pattern.”

Casey glanced at the page. “We have no way of knowing why Ronald chose those numbers or what they connect to.” She frowned. “What we do know is that whatever this list represents, it’s pretty important. Otherwise, he wouldn’t go to such great lengths to protect its contents.”

“Which doesn’t do a damned thing for us unless I can hack into those files,” Ryan replied. “I’ve been on this since Emma and I did our thing and I brought home the USB drive. I’m hitting one brick wall after another. And I don’t hit brick walls. It’s just not who I am.”

Emma lowered her head to stifle a smile.