Cutter gave a short little woof that sounded for all the world like “Yep!” Adam spent a lot of time with dogs on the ranch, but he’d never seen one quite as communicative as this one.

Liam went back to studying the file, then gave a slow shake of his head. “Sorry, boss,” he said to Quinn. “It’s not likely any character recognition program would be able to translate this accurately.”

Adam thought he heard a trace of a drawl in the man’s voice, and wondered where he was originally from. Texas, maybe; they had a hand on the ranch from Tyler, and he sounded like Liam.

“Cursive’s very tricky in the first place,” Liam explained further, “since even the same letters can be shaped differently. Add in that there are too many spots where the size of the letters and numbers change to fit what space he had left, and the pages they’re written on were unlined and so the rows of text aren’t always straight, and it’s impossible.”

“So in this, at least, the human eye and brain has it all over the electronic one,” Hayley said.

Liam grinned. “Yes. Hard though that is for me to admit.”

He sent the photographed images to the printer as he set up a decoding grid with the double alphabet laid out for each of them. They would be doing this the old-fashioned way. There were twenty-five pages of notes on the drive, so they each took five and settled in at the table to translate, letter by letter, dating each page with the date on the original.

Even Cutter seemed to realize this required concentration and quiet, because he padded over to first look out the window, then plopped onto a comfy-looking dog bed beneath the glass and settled in to wait.

Adam had to shift things a bit, to get to the angle he needed to write—thankfully no one seemed to notice the rather odd positioning—but he still finished first. Maybe because he had a better idea of what he was looking at, more familiarity with his partner’s phrasing. He recognized place names quickly, and thought maybe he’d absorbed more of Greg’s code than he’d realized. He sat there reading through the decoded pages he held, frowning a little. When Liam handed him his pages he only nodded and started reading those, too. Quinn, Hayley and Amanda finished moments later, and they all slid their pages across the table to him. He was already putting them in date order before he realized what they’d apparently all tacitly decided, that he was the one to read all this and figure out what it meant.