Page 90 of Between the Lies

‘Hold on.’ Nina frowned at them. ‘Hold on. For someone to be able to kill from there, this couldn’t be a random crime but premeditated murder. Someone had to know Shah would take me out there. He was trying to kill me, but wouldn’t most people have killed me inside the shop? He planned to dump me in the bins.’

When she’d told him Shah’s plans, Robert’d had fought the urge to kill the man again. What sort of sick bastard left someone to be crushed to death in a bin?

Billy cocked his head. ‘Did someone try to save you or implicate you?’

‘That’s yet to be ascertained, but seeing as Nina successfully evaded them when Jonas and Anne died, I think someone kept her alive for a reason.’ Robert bit his lip in thought. ‘Or things went wrong, and they eliminated Shah. But all this can also mean that whoever killed him has been a part of this since the beginning.’

‘The mastermind,’ Finn said from his side of the counter. ‘You’re looking for a mastermind who gets off on human suffering.’

CHAPTERFORTY-THREE

They all jumped out of their stools to huddle around Finn. The man didn’t appreciate it, lowering his laptop’s screen. ‘I’m not having strangers breathing on me.’

Daisy rolled her eyes. ‘Don’t be a bairn.’

Robert fought the urge to smack the man on the head. He gritted out, ‘What did you find?’

Finn huffed. ‘Nothing much. At least, I can’t make sense of it.’

When Nina raised her eyebrows and pointed to the laptop, Finn adjusted the screen so they could all see. ‘They’re just a bunch of pictures of some sort of register.’

Robert leaned in to see the screen. His chin nearly rested on top of Nina’s head as she too peered at what Finn was showing them.

It was a register, like a roster at a factory.

Nina gestured for Finn to keep scrolling through the images. After images of the registers came pictures of a table with numbers scribbled in the columns. Once more there were rows and rows of them.

Robert held up a finger. ‘Hold on. Scroll back to that one.’

Finn complied, but his scowl only deepened. ‘It’s the same as the rest of them. Some odd numbers scribbled on either side.’

Aye, after seeing the last five similar images, Robert’s brain had tuned those out, but this image had caught his eye. ‘It’s not the table. Look at the background. There’s a window right there in the corner.’

Finn zoomed in on the window. Unfortunately, the more he zoomed, the grainer the image became. ‘I can try to enhance it.’

Under Robert’s chin, Nina shook her head. ‘You don’t need to. I know where that is.’

And that’s what Robert had spotted, too. ‘That’s the street outside the crime scene. How did Jonas take these pictures? You said the lead asked you to meet at that place within thirty minutes of getting in touch.’

Nina placed her palm on her forehead. ‘I don’t know. And he’s taken those pictures in the daylight… We didn’t get there until dark. Jonas wasn’t who he said he was, was he?’

Robert tapped Finn’s shoulder. ‘Find everything you can about the person who owned this device. Jonas Pederson.’

‘I’m not your intern. I have work to get back to.’

‘I’ll pay you,’ Nina snapped. ‘Just do it. And send me a copy of those numbers. I need to know what they are.’

Nina tried to straighten, but her head collided with Robert’s chest. He reached out to steady her, holding on to her for just a moment. Then he stepped away.

Once they found who had framed Nina, when it was all over, would Nina stick by him?

‘You don’t.’ Finn’s grumble pulled Robert out of his thoughts.

‘You will be compensated, Finn,’ Robert said. ‘Please, just get this done. It’s important.’

The man had a serious problem with responding to anyone’s orders. And pleas it seemed like. Instead of getting on with whatever it was he did to find information on people, Finn had angled the laptop so they could all see his screen.

‘When I said those are numbers, what I meant was… er… I?—’

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