What had Jarrod said—that she needed a man? She’d never believed him. Until now. Because of Luke Gates. “Oh, Katie, you’ve got it bad,” she said, realizing the aching truth that she loved Luke Gates.

“I never intended to hurt you.” His final words had rattled through her brain all night long. But it didn’t matter what his intentions had been. He had hurt her. And loving him only made it worse.

* * *

“Okay, Katie, I should be shot for this, but I think I made the rash promise to let you know anything I found out about the Isaac Wells case,” Jarrod said when she answered the phone the next morning.

“Sounds like you’ve had a change of heart.” She poured herself a cup of coffee and looked through the back window only to discover that Luke’s pickup was missing.

“No way. You be careful. But I figure someone down at that rag you work for is going to write the story, so it may as well be you.”

“Can’t argue with that.” Holding the receiver between her shoulder and ear, she scrounged in a top drawer for a pen and a notepad. “Okay, brother. Shoot.” She sat at the table and listened.

“Okay, the deal is this. It seems that Isaac isn’t quite the loner everyone thought. In fact, he was a crook, or the guy behind the scenes with all the brains. The police don’t know for sure, but they suspect Isaac was involved in a string of burglaries that happened around Medford and Ashland a few years back. Ray Dean was his accomplice, the actual thief. Ray took all the risks and got most of the money. Except for one job—the big one.”

“Which one was that?”

“When Octavia Nesbitt was robbed.”

Katie stopped writing. Her hand froze over the paper. “Wells and Dean were involved in that one?”

“It looks that way. They got away with it and were about to split the loot when Dean was caught for his part in an earlier break-in. He was convicted and, as they say, sent up the river. All that time in prison he kept his mouth shut about the Nesbitt job because it was the biggest one he’d ever pulled off. He had some phony alibi, so the police were thrown off. No one suspected that Isaac Wells might be involved and eventually Dean ended up paroled. The problem was that Isaac had used all the money—either gambled it away, paid off back taxes, used it to keep up that car collection of his, whatever.”

“He told them this.”