“Yes.” Her brow furrowed in frustration. “It’s right here in front of me. I’m just not looking at it in the right way.”
Quinn took her hand, his gaze on his rearview mirror again. “Dinnae be hard on yourself. You’ve had a concussion, and you’re tired. Let’s get you home.”
* * *
It was tenat night by the time they got back to Glasgow.
Elizabeth went straight to the office, dropped her jacket on the desk, and picked up a marker. “Let’s go through this again but from the killer’s point of view.”
“Not until you’ve taken something for that headache.” Quinn disappeared down the hall and returned with a glass of water and a paracetamol tablet. “Here.”
“Thanks.” She took the pill and swallowed it. “Okay. The killer is someone Jack knows fairly well, someone who knows that Jack is wearing body armor.”
“One of the other guards would know that.”
“True.” Elizabeth wrote that on the board. “The older guard tonight—he lied about being friends with Jack.”
“They werenae happy to be talkin’ wi’ us.”
Elizabeth smiled at him. “You know, you’re pretty good at reading people.”
“I’m no’ like you. You read people’s minds.”
“Hardly.” She turned back to the board. “The killer lures him to an out-of-the-way location and inflicts a lethal knife wound, taking his phones, wallet, and watch. He doesn’t use the credit card. He doesn’t sell the phones. They vanish at approximately the same time he was killed, probably shoved into some kind of Faraday container. As far as we know, the watch hasn’t shown up anywhere either. So, what was his motive?”
She studied what she’d written down.
“Maybe Jack’s belongings have nothin’ to do wi’ this. Maybe the killer just wanted to silence him and make it look like a robbery.”
“I agree. It wasn’t a robbery.” Elizabeth wrote that down, too. “Less than a week later, someone—probably the killer—breaks into Jack and Ava’s house and rips the place to pieces. He was looking for something but was interrupted by a certain good-lookingeejitand stole Jack’s laptop. Why the laptop?”
She paused again, rubbed the ache in her temple.
“Maybe you should go to bed. It’s been a long day.”
She wasn’t stopping now. She was close to putting the pieces together. She couldfeelit. “Then the same person breaks into our suites. He searches yours, so we can assume he searches mine, too. Then he plants drugs on us and tips off the police to get us out of the way. But why did he search our rooms? What is he trying to find?”
It’s right in front of you, Shields. Why can’t you see it?
She stared at the board. “What was he looking for?”
Adrenaline—it started in a slow trickle then hit her with a rush.
“Where are his phone records? Where did I leave them?” She hurried to the desk, tossed her coat to the floor, grabbed the pages, sorted through them.
And there it was.
Chills skittered down her spine.
“I don’t know why I didn’t notice this before. Look.” She held the pages so Quinn could see, comparing the data from Jack’s calls to his GPS location, barely able to contain her excitement. “He called you from here. That’s the building with the puppy food store and the Indian restaurant—and the post office.”
“Aye, I remember it.”
“I’m betting he mailed the original phone to you to keep it safe. That’s what these bastards are looking for—his original cell phone.”
There was no other way to explain it.
“I’m callin’ Denver.” Quinn dialed Tower’s number.