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car.
    Copy,
Deck typed in.
    New guy. Don’t know this guy. Got pictures,
Chace texted back.
    Good,
Deck replied but didn’t share about the ring. He’d do that in person tomorrow when he could state plain to all involved how they were going to proceed.
    He shoved his phone back in his pocket and moved through the woods.
    He stood and waited, hidden by a tree, and only came out when Jeff Jessup rolled up in his SUV.
    Jessup took Deck to Chace’s Yukon and while he did, Deck did not invite discussion. Jessup, not stupid by a long shot, didn’t push it. Jessup also had a very pretty wife and a new baby so he didn’t have time to shoot the shit. Deck knew the man just wanted to get home.
    Jessup dropped him at the Yukon and Deck swung into Chace’s vehicle. Chace and Deck would switch trucks tomorrow.
    Deck drove home.
    When he got there, he pulled out the files, flipping through, finding it.
    A picture taken for an insurance company.
    He got out his phone and pulled up the shot of the ring.
    He looked between his phone and the picture.
    McFarland had given Emme a stolen ruby ring.
    Dumb fucking moron.
    And they had the dumb fuck but they had him with fruit from a poisonous tree. He’d got the photo searching Emme’s home without a warrant and Deck not yet being deputized.
    It was inadmissible evidence seeing he got it essentially while breaking and entering.
    They couldn’t use it.
    “Fuck,”
Deck hissed.
    With no choice but to wait until the next day, he put the file back, got ready for bed and slid between the sheets.
    He did not find sleep.
    This was not unusual. Since he was a kid, he slept deep but he never slept long. For as long as he could remember, he needed four hours a night, no more. It drove his mom and dad ’round the bend. Elsbeth hated it, bitched about it all the time and refused to entertain the idea of keeping him close so he could read, or do other things, when he woke early. So when he woke, he left her in bed and spent his early awake hours elsewhere.
    But he wasn’t finding sleep that night because this was the norm.
    He wasn’t finding it because, thirty miles away, Emme,
his
fucking Emme, was lying naked in a bed in a ramshackle mansion that looked good but needed a shit ton of work that, on her own, would take a fuck of a lot longer than a decade and a half, a bed where she’d been fucked by a criminal, a stolen ten-thousand-dollar ring sitting on her nightstand.
    “Fuck,”
Deck clipped and rolled.
    An hour later, still not finding sleep, he knifed out of bed.
    Not knowing why, he went to the kaleidoscope on the mantel. He nabbed it, its box and took them to his bedroom.
    He put them on his nightstand and stared at its shadow in the dark.
    Five minutes later, he found sleep.

Chapter Five
Where I’m Takin’ Us
    I looked out my office window, down to the yard, my eyes to the bustling activity, and I did this tapping my phone on my desk.
    I should be working but I wasn’t thinking about work.
    I was thinking about Jacob.
    More precisely, I was thinking about calling Jacob, had an overwhelming urge to do so.
    I was also trying not to do so because I had a boyfriend, even though he was a boyfriend I wasn’t all that sure about. He was sweet, he was into me, but he was just… off.
    Then again, I didn’t have a lot of experience so what did I know?
    Additionally, after my dinner with Jacob last night, within an hour, I’d called him after ten at night and now it was only eleven thirty the next day.
    I didn’t want him to think I was psycho, and calling him would imply psycho behavior. Further, when I called him last night, I’d asked him to dinner, which was dinner two nights in a row with a woman he hadn’t seen in nine years, a woman with a boyfriend, and that was semi-psycho.
    Okay, maybe it was totally psycho.
    I didn’t want Jacob to think I was psycho.
    Ever.
    But I wanted to hear his voice. I wanted to connect with him on the phone. I’d missed him and I liked having him