Page 46 of Just Now

Coldness clenched at his stomach. Despite his best efforts to keep her safe, something must have gone wrong.

CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR

Cami clenched her fists in astonishment, staring at the contents of the “Private” folder that she’d been able, finally, to access.

Rows and rows of names and addresses and phone numbers. They were entered neatly, in date order. The list was about three months old, and up to forty or fifty names had been added each day. They all looked to be customers of the diner.

“They must be customers!” she said. “What else could they be?”

There was a way she could check, of course.

Feeling as if her heart was in her throat with excitement at this lead, Cami scrolled down. It didn’t take her long to reach the most recent day that Priscilla had been at the diner.

There she was! Her name was there.

And her address. Her home address. And her phone number. Everything. All of Priscilla’s information, set out in a private folder, in Tom Gaynor’s computer.

Cami breathed hard, her mind racing. She wished Connor was here. He was confronting a suspect and she didn’t know if she should call him to tell him about this.

She had to figure out what to do, and how she should deal with this bombshell. No point in calling him until she had more of the facts straight.

Trying to keep calm, she checked off her options on her fingers.

“Okay,” she said. “Firstly, how was this information obtained? I need to find that out. This puts the owner in the spotlight again, but he’s worked at the diner every day. Can I confirm that?” She paused. “Yes, I can. I can confirm if he was here on Wednesday, because there’s a camera pointing at the till. He seems to be back and forth the whole time around that till.”

It might be a good idea to do that immediately, Cami thought, her heart pounding harder as she wondered if he’d told a lie to them, a lie that they’d believed. He’d brought her coffee and soda but he could be the killer. She could be shut away in the killer’s office right now. That was a precarious situation to be in.

Quickly, Cami accessed the camera footage and ran it back to Wednesday evening.

She watched carefully as the footage fast-forwarded.

Then she let out a long sigh of relief. Gaynor had told them the truth. He’d been at the till, bustling around, taking payments, greeting customers, just about nonstop through the whole of Wednesday, right up until closing time. There’d been a few breaks of ten to twenty minutes when he’d obviously been eating, or checking tables, or in the office, but those had not been long enough for him to have driven to Kate’s house and grabbed her. She lived twenty minutes away from this diner.

So, Gaynor was cleared.

But now the question remained—the million-dollar question—how had he gotten hold of all those customer details, and what were they doing in a private folder on his computer?

Cami perched on the edge of her chair, thinking frantically. She needed to preserve the evidence first. She couldn’t risk him deleting the folder or destroying it, and then claiming it had never existed.

The first thing she should do was copy it.

Immediately, she did just that, sending the data to the cloud. This case had taught her that people in possession of information that could bury them would rush to delete it at all costs.

Now, it was copied to the cloud. And now, she couldn’t hide away in this office any longer. She needed to get out there and ask Gaynor what the hell was going on with this.

Cami opened the door, hoping that this would go well.

Mr. Gaynor was at the till, ringing up a payment, warmly greeting an incoming couple, but she could hear an edge of worry in his tone that hadn’t been there before.

Was it just because the police were poking around in his office? Or was there a more serious reason for it? As soon as he’d finished, she called out to him, speaking loud to be heard over the Queen ballad that was playing.

“Mr. Gaynor? I need to find something out.”

He turned to her, stress deepening the lines on his otherwise pleasant-looking face. “Sure. What is it?” he asked.

Cami took a deep breath and asked in a calm tone, “I accessed your computer and found a private folder with all the customers’ info, including their home addresses and phone numbers and even what they ordered. Can you explain why that information is there?”

Gaynor’s face went from worried to alarmed, “I…uh…that’s confidential information. It’s only meant for the diner’s records. I didn’t think anyone would access it. I put a password on that folder so that it would remain secure.”

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