He unexpectedly glanced her way then, and she flushed as he caught her looking at him. Her gaze darted away, even as she tried not to, knowing it was a guilty reaction. She wanted to simply stare him down, showing he didn’t just mean nothing to her, but that she loathed his very presence.

“I... It’s Greg’s,” Adam said. “But you must already know that.”

“Yes,” Hayley said, her tone quiet. “Amanda told us. And how he hated typing.”

Adam nodded. “He was old school. Said the process was different, mentally, between typing and handwriting.”

“There’s truth in that,” Hayley agreed. “They’ve done studies.”

Again he nodded. “So he’d write things and then take photos of the pages to have a digital record.”

“Must have gone over well on police reports,” Quinn said.

“I did those, mostly. I was pretty fast at it.”

“Do you recognize this, specifically?” Quinn asked.

Amanda found herself holding her breath as he looked back at the projected page. She hadn’t realized until that moment how much she hoped he could make sense of the jumble of seemingly unconnected words and letters and numbers.

“I don’t think so, but I can’t be sure. That’s Greg’s code, though.”

“Code?”

Amanda couldn’t stop herself from asking. Adam started to look toward her, then stopped. And she saw suddenly he didn’t like this any more than she did. It gave her a little jolt, to realize she had never, ever considered or cared about his feelings back then, other than to hope he was as miserable as he deserved to be. And her earlier thought about how much older he looked than the young-faced rookie she’d remembered came back to her, and she could only conclude that her hope had come true. Somehow it made her feel worse rather than better.

“He had this personal code he used when he wanted whatever it was kept private.”

“You mean secret?” Quinn asked.

Adam nodded. “Usually it was just hunches, speculation, things he couldn’t be sure of or prove. He didn’t want to send anyone off on a wild hair he had no proof of.”

“Our tech expert was able to break the encryption on the file and open it, but he hasn’t been able to decode the document itself. And because it’s in handwriting, an algorithm for the computer to work on it would be iffy at best.”

Adam nodded. “One of the other reasons he did it this way. He had a healthy skepticism about putting everything digital.”

“He’s not alone there,” Quinn said, rather grimly.

Cutter, restless again, got to his feet and started to pace. Which she understood, since she felt the same way, as if she were hovering on the precipice, and one breath of air would send her over.