“I’m walking in from around the corner. Or hopping rather.”

She hurried to let him in from the night. He wore a black T-shirt draped over his gun and faded soft Levi’s that were molded to his long, tough form, hunched slightly these days as he used the crutches to walk. There was a Lakers cap on his head and a deceptively relaxed air to him as he moved toward her.

He held out his hand. She put the cell phone in it. Wordlessly he shifted gears and looked at the display. His jaw was scruffy, unshaven, and she stared at it while he read the text message. She remembered all the nights he’d rubbed that sexy stubble against her body, remembering the things he’d said to her, done to her, the way he’d made her feel. “I really did miss you,” she whispered softly.

He looked at her for a beat. “I’m going to call this in.” He hobbled into the kitchen, murmured into the phone for a few minutes, then hung up and faced her. “We’ll go to the station in the morning to make a report. Do you have the accounting stuff you’ve been working through?”

“On the table.”

“Let’s look.”

“It’s two in the morning.”

“Let’s look,” he repeated stubbornly.

They spent an hour at it, Summer showing him how she’d put the deposit slips in date order, and had painstakingly matched each to the bank statements. They typically made a deposit every day, sometimes every other. In the past twelve months, cash had gone missing out of approximately one deposit a week, the amounts varying from three hundred and fifty dollars to two thousand dollars, for a total of thirty-six thousand four hundred dollars.

Just for the past year.

“Multiply that by all the years they’ve been in business…” Joe let out a low whistle. “Someone’s been getting a nice bonus. Let me see the employee schedule.”

She handed it over, but that was a problem too. There wasn’t, and never had been, a regular schedule. Tina and Camille kept it in their head, changing plans on a whim to accommodate all of them. And even if a schedule had been kept, it couldn’t be relied on because of how often it would have been adjusted at the last minute. So they went through the payroll records, through each individual time sheet, and began a new list, writing down the employees that had worked each day there’d been cash missing. It took a few hours, and when they were done, they had a new problem.

“Not a single person worked each of these dates,” Summer said.

“Except…” Joe looked at her, his face impassive. His fire marshal expression.