CHAPTER 74: GRAYSON

Grayson unlocks the puzzle box with the faux USB and removes a panel, revealing a hidden compartment. The panel is rigged with glass vials meant to destroy the box’s contents if broken, confirming Sheffield Grayson protected his secrets with extreme paranoia. Inside are only two items: a Montblanc pen and a leather-bound journal.

Grayson immediately understands the journal as a record, and Nash focuses on the danger of what those records might contain. If Sheffield’s final actions could implicate Avery or the Hawthorne family, Grayson is prepared to destroy the evidence. Xander examines and dismantles the pen, but Grayson determines that the journal, not the pen, is the real object of importance.

The journal contains dated entries made entirely of numbers, leading Grayson and Xander to identify it as a coded text. After hours of trying basic substitution ciphers, Grayson fails to produce anything but gibberish. While Gigi texts that the FBI has left, Grayson refuses to stop and begins thinking like Sheffield, imagining how Sheffield would have encoded entries in Colin’s room.

Grayson realizes Sheffield would have needed a reference, then searches the box again. Feeling hidden seams inside the compartment, Grayson uses the magnet tool to remove another concealed square panel. Under it, he finds a cipher wheel with letters and common digraphs on one disk and scrambled numbers from 1 to 32 on the other.

The brothers still need to know how Sheffield set the wheel for each entry. Grayson reconstructs Sheffield’s routine and focuses on the saved bank withdrawal slips. Because the withdrawal amounts include uneven cents even though Sheffield supposedly gave his sister even amounts, Grayson concludes the extra digits indicate the wheel settings for entries with matching dates.

Using the slips and cipher wheel, Grayson finally decodes part of the journal. The first meaningful message records money moving through shell entities in the Cayman Islands and Switzerland, but the useful text is embedded within nonsense. Grayson then notices small marks at the tops of pages and realizes they are not tears but notches, likely tied to the index card taken from Sheffield’s office.