Amanda shot a glance at Quinn, wondering if that was for her benefit. But her gaze was drawn back to Adam as if by a magnet, and she thought that if Quinn and Hayley weren’t here she would apologize right now, just because she couldn’t bear the guilty feeling any longer.

“I...had a hard time believing it was really permanent,” Adam said lowly, still staring at his coffee.

“That why you turned down the desk job?”

Adam’s head came up, and Amanda looked at Quinn, startled yet again. One more thing she hadn’t known.

“I didn’t want to spend my life being that cop who got shot and couldn’t do the job anymore,” he said, still not looking up. “And being tied to a desk would have been...” He waved a hand as he shook his head, apparently at a loss for words bad enough to describe how that prospect felt to him.

Amanda was still trying to process, her disgust at herself building at every moment, when Quinn briskly went on.

“Liam’s been running all sorts of checks, trying to find any correlation between the dates in Greg’s file and anything else, but it’s a pretty broad search so it hasn’t turned up much so far. He’s already sent what we have to Ty Hewitt—” he glanced at Adam again as he spoke “—our tech guy at our headquarters in St. Louis, to see if he can come up with anything.”

“I’ve been thinking about those dates,” Adam said. “Or more accurately, that time period. In between radio calls he would stop a lot to talk to people. Most of the time it was following up on something we’d handled, and I remember thinking I liked the way he did it, that he was working the community to build trust.”

He glanced at Amanda then, as if he wasn’t certain he should say what he’d been going to in front of her. “Go ahead,” she said quietly.

He looked back at Quinn, who was waiting silently; obviously he felt this was worthwhile. “But about six months or so...before, he started talking to people about things I knew we hadn’t handled. At the time I assumed it was something from before we rode together. But now...”

“You’re thinking it was this,” Quinn said. “What was on that flash drive.”

“More wondering if it could be,” Adam said. “If that’s why I didn’t recognize a lot of the cases in that file as ones we handled. Because we didn’t handle them, but Greg was linking them as he went, because of...whatever it was he was onto.”

“Liam ran that, too, trying to match the dates and names to reported cases or crimes.” At Adam’s look he added rather blandly, “It’s good to have friends. And computer proficient help.”

“Did he find anything?”