“Good! After what I did to you, it pleases me to see you enjoying life a little.”

Erin gave her a warm smile. Not so very long ago, she and Noreen had been archenemies, with Noreen making sure Erin never had a moment to call her own. But Noreen had done her best to make up for that over the last few months, and Erin was now helping her memorize police codes despite her difficulty with reading. It was fun, and Noreen was amazingly receptive to alternative methods of learning. She’d even stopped chewing bubble gum at work.

Erin wagged her fingers at her friend and headed into the back room, which was partitioned off from the front by a wall of glass windows and a personnel door. Only two deputies had desk duty, and both of them were on the phone, either fielding questions or trying to mitigate a domestic dispute without dispatching another officer to the scene. Erin enjoyed desk duty. It was one of the few things about police work that she actually liked.

Her colleagues only nodded in greeting. She inclined her head to acknowledge the gestures and found a desk in a back corner where no one could look over her shoulder while she did some sleuthing on a department computer. In only minutes she was so immersed in her research that she barely heard the telephones ringing or the other deputies talking. Knowing Wyatt’s name had made short work of finding information on him.

It took her an hour to read everything, and afterward she felt sick to her stomach. With shaky hands, she cleared her Internet history on the computer, then collected her purse and left the building with only one thought in her head. She needed to talk with Julie. It was almost eight thirty, a little late to knock on someone’s front door, and Erin knew Julie was normally in bed by nine. But this was an emergency. What Erin had learned shocked her to the core. She also had no idea what she should do next. No two ways around it, she absolutely had to hash it out with Julie, who always kept a level head and thought of every possible consequence before she offered Erin advice.

Erin hoped the drive to Julie’s house might clear her head, but twenty minutes later, she still hadn’t calmed down. She hurried up the front steps of the Victorian-style home’s front veranda and rapped her knuckles against the ornately carved door. Then she leaned on the doorbell, which sent out a muffled peal of musical notes. Moments later she heard the hollow thump of bare feet on the hardwood floor of the entryway, and the next instant, the door flew open to reveal Julie in silk pajamas and sporting a pillow-tossed mane. The blue streak, which she’d worn in her dark hair since her divorce, feathered over her hazel eyes like a bedraggled geisha fan.

“Erin?” she said, blinking owlishly. “What on earth? Has something awful happened?”