THIRTY-THREE
W
illow looked across Rafe’s office at a brisk knock on the door.A second later, his assistant opened it, giving them an apologetic smile.“Sheriff, sorry to interrupt, but there’s another gentleman here who says he needs to see you urgently.”
“He won’t mind, trust me.”
Willow swiveled around in her chair as Blaine strode past the woman into the room.
“Hey, man.”Rafe stood and held out his hand, a big grin on his face.“You get your deal done?”
Blaine nodded but didn’t say anything, waiting until the assistant shut the door behind her before speaking.“Got something for you.”
“Maddy came through?”
“She did.”
Rafe banged his palm on his desk.“Yeah, thatta girl.What’d she say?”
Blaine bent over between her and Tripp and put his phone on the center of the desk for everyone to see.He smelled amazing.Was hella good-looking and charming.
But he still didn’t hold a candle to Tripp.No one could as far as she was concerned, and that was the problem.Because for some stupid reason he seemed set on keeping them firmly within the friend zone.Exasperating, soul-crushingly sexy man.
“She ran it through whatever terrifying things she uses on her scary custom laptop, and cracked it fast.She said we were looking at it all wrong.”
“Wrong how?”Willow asked.
“They’re not letters.They’re numbers.”Blaine swiped to the next screenshot, showing the list of code translated into columns of numbers.
She leaned closer, fascinated and disappointed.“Ah, hell, why didn’t I think of that?”
“You would’ve eventually,” Tripp said.His confidence in her was heartening.“We asked Maddy because we’re in a hurry.”
“So what do they mean?”She still couldn’t make sense of any of them.The numbers in the first column were slightly shorter than the ones in the column beside it.The numbers in the second column all began with the same few digits.“Are they code for letters?”Maybe whoever had dreamed this up had added an extra layer to help protect the code.
“Mads doesn’t think so.She said she’d take another look when she got back to her rental later, but that won’t be for at least another few hours,” Blaine said.
They were all silent for a few minutes as they tried to puzzle it out.Willow mentally tried different letters for each number, trying to see if anything formed words.“I’m not having any luck with letters.Anyone else?”
“Nope,” Tripp said, and the others shook their heads.
Okay, so maybe they were making this more complex than it actually was.Back to numbers themselves, looking for something more basic.“Could that first column be dates?”
“Damn, yeah,” Rafe said, bracing both hands on the desk to look at the phone.“It’s so obvious now.Starting a couple months ago.Do they correspond to the dates the book was checked in and out of the library?”
“I can find out.”Willow called the library and asked Beth to pull up the information so they could double check.“No,” she said when she got off the phone, pushing the written list she’d just jotted down on a piece of paper into the middle for everyone to see.“They don’t match.But the numbers listed are in between the check-in and check-out dates.”
“Second column could be bank accounts,” Blaine said.
“Maybe,” Rafe said, but he didn’t look or sound convinced.
