“It’s all in code.”
He blinked. “What?”
“They’re all there, the files I mean, but they’re encoded.”
“Hot damn,” he breathed. “That means there’s something there really worth hiding.”
Realization dawned on her face, and he knew she had been so intent on solving the new problem that she hadn’t thought of the ramifications of the results she’d already gotten.
“Hot damn,” she echoed. And grinned.
Darien was exhausted. Exhausted, but still determined. They’d brought her into this job because of her computer skills, so she was darn well going to prove that they’d made a good choice. So she kept at it. She’d taken a three-hour nap last night in one of the few offices with a couch in it, but at 5:00 a.m. she’d been up and at it again. She’d been antsy to get back to working on Franklin ’s computer. She knew it was in part because that was safe, familiar ground where she knew what she was doing, unlike this seemingly endless legwork.
She didn’t look up until her partner wandered in about a half an hour later.
He’d obviously been to the locker room and taken a shower; his hair was wet and slicked back. It emphasized the even, chiseled features of his face, strong masculine jaw and cheekbones she hadn’t really noticed before. A drop of water from his hair trickled down the side of his face, then traced a path along his neck.
“-having any luck?”
She jerked her gaze away from the unexpectedly fascinating travels of that droplet.
“What? Oh, no, not yet.” She looked at the message that had flashed on her screen, tapped a couple of keys, then looked back at him. “What do you suppose he was hiding?”
He leaned a hip against his desk, and she noticed then he’d put on a pair of jeans. And judging by how snug they fit, it must have taken him ten minutes just to get into them, especially if his skin was still damp, she thought.
At the images that raced through her mind she felt a blush that began somewhere around her navel. And again she missed the first part of what he said.
“-anything. Could be just secret business files, maybe something on a takeover.”
“Maybe he cooked some books,” Darien said, still working to recover a poise shattered by her own too-vivid and suddenly overactive imagination.
“Or if we’re real lucky, it could be even worse, something criminal.”
“You mean something bad enough that it could have gotten him killed?”
“It’s a possibility,” he said.
“All the more reason to get this broken fast,” she said, and turned her gaze back to the screen.
“Coffee?”
She looked up again, surprised. “Yes, please.”
“How do you take it?”
“One each cream and sugar.”
He nodded and exited the cubicle, leaving her still a little bemused that he’d even offered. When he returned a few minutes later, a luscious aroma made her look up.
“The guy was just bringing them in, they were still warm, and I couldn’t resist.”
He set a small plate down in front of her, and put a matching one on his own desk. She looked down at the obviously freshly baked cinnamon roll, and nearly grinned as her stomach growled in Pavlovian response.
“I can see why,” she said with heart-or stomach-felt sincerity. “Thanks.”
She tore a piece off the edge, and found it tasted as divine as it smelled. She looked up to thank him again, and found him licking icing from his fingers in a way that made her think again of those rebellious shower thoughts she’d had earlier. Immediately she tried to distract herself by peeling off another layer of the roll and popping it into her mouth.
So, the hunk has a sweet tooth, she thought.
“It’s a weakness,” he said rather sheepishly, and for an instant she feared she’d spoken aloud. “Baked stuff. Can’t help myself.”
She found that rather endearing. “Did your mother bake a lot?”
“No. She was all thumbs in the kitchen. But my stepmother, now she can whip these up with her eyes shut. Cakes, cookies, you name it. She always joked she had to run five miles a day to keep from weighing a ton just from sampling.”
Darien grinned. “Sounds like my kind of woman.”
“She’s great. I was ten when my mom died, so when my dad brought her home a couple of years later, she stepped into a pretty difficult situation. She did a great job, though. Even if I didn’t really appreciate it until much later.”
That he appreciated it now said a great deal about him, Darien thought. “You’re close, still?”
“Yeah. My dad was killed in an accident three years ago, but we’ve stayed close. She’s the mother I lost, and a friend, too.”
She gave him the warmest smile she could, and he shrugged as if embarrassed and turned his attention back to his own treat. In short order, she finished her own.
“I’d better get back to this. Use the sugar rush,” she said wryly, knowing the crash when the sugar burned off could be ugly.
She hadn’t spent a lot of time trying to break coded files, but she knew the basic approaches and she had the software to run them. She had tried them all, so far with no results. So now she was starting on combinations, knowing she was shotgunning, hoping a few pellets would hit.
“I wish I knew how you thought,” she murmured.
“ Gardner?”
She nodded without looking up. “Then maybe I could figure out what he would have done to protect these files.”
“Well, you know he both hid them and encoded them,” Waters said.
“Yes. That right there tells us something, I guess. But I would think the complexity of the code itself would depend on the importance of the information.”
“That makes sense,” her partner agreed. “If this is a list of his girlfriends, it would likely have less protection than, say, if he was dealing drugs or something like that, and those were his contacts.”
She glanced at him. “If there really is a connection between these files and his death, then we know this is dynamite. Of some sort.”
“That’s a big if,” Waters cautioned her.
“I know. So I’m just going to break this sucker so we can either act, or move on.”
“Anything I can do?”
She smiled at him. “You just did it,” she said, indicating the crumbs that were all that remained of the cinnamon roll. “That’ll keep me going for a couple of hours, at least.”
And it did, Colin thought later, watching her with amazement. She might be everything he stayed away from in a woman, she might have the kind of looks that had Neanderthals like Palmer guessing she’d slept her way here, but Colin had to admit now that she not only had good instincts, but she had the dogged determination the job required.
Looking up, he saw that the brass was filtering in. He knew it was only a matter of time before they came calling; on a high-profile case like this, no one had any peace until it was resolved. And every day that passed only increased the pressure.
“Brace yourself,” he told his partner. “The powers that be are starting to arrive.”
She glanced up, frowning. “Rats,” she muttered. “I need a little more time, quiet time. I’m almost there, I know it. I can feel it.”
“I’ll try to keep them off you,” he said.
“That would help,” she said, “if you don’t mind.”
He shrugged. “I can’t do what you’re doing, so I might as well do what I can.”
“Thanks,” she said, her voice carrying a little more gratefulness than he would have expected for the simple offer he’d made.
He looked up and saw the commander headed toward them. Colin stepped out of the cubicle and went to head him off.
“What progress?” Portman asked, dispensing with any amenities.
Quickly Colin outlined the interviews they’d conducted, both in person and on the phone, and his own business search.
“Suspects?”
“We’ve got a lot of possibles,” Colin admitted. “Just as you’d expect with somebody as rich as Gardner. A couple that stand out, but nothing I want to hang the name on yet.”