“Not yet. But it’s more than we had.”
“I bet Charlie’s ready to come home. She probably misses Autumn.”
“She does,” Baz agreed, starting the truck.
“How’s her mom? Do we need to do anything for her while she’s out of town?”
“Autumn’s taking care of that. She visits her every day in the assisted living center,” Baz explained. “Charlie says her mom’s really happy there. She’s making friends.”
That was good news. JJ recalled Charlie’s mom having disappeared not too long ago. She suffered from Alzheimer’s and had managed to wander off. They’d found her quickly, but she knew Charlie had been beside herself with worry. Rightfully so.
“I told them to finish up and come on back,” Baz continued. “She said she needed one more day, but they’d book a flight out tomorrow night.”
“Good.” JJ understood the need for the team to go off on their assignments, but she preferred when they were around.
“What did Brantley have you workin’ on?”
She peered over at him. “Findin’ information on Deck.”
“Like what?”
“I think he thinks this might be personal. That it doesn’t have anything to do with Saoirse Kavanagh.”
“So we believe Ronan? That he didn’t hire Deck to keep an eye on her.”
“Yeah. I think so.” JJ wasn’t sure about much of anything anymore. Every time she started down one path, it twisted and turned and dumped her into Nowheresville.
“What did you find?”
She leaned back in the seat and relaxed, placing her hand on her belly and rubbing lightly. “Nothin’ yet. I’m doin’ a full background on him.” She looked at Baz. “When he was workin’ with us, did you ever really talk to him?”
He flipped on the turn signal as they pulled out of Brantley’s driveway. It made her laugh since it was a rural neighborhood—not much more than farmland, really—and there was never any traffic, yet Baz did it every time.
“I never got a chance. He’s not really a forthcoming guy.”
No, he wasn’t. JJ had tried to engage him in conversation a few times, but Decker always managed to shut her down. Politely, of course. He wasn’t rude or anything, but he never divulged much information about himself.
“I did ask him once why he wanted to make a change,” Baz mentioned. “He went from bein’ a personal bodyguard to lookin’ for missing people.”
It had been quite a leap, but JJ had never really thought about it. It was true, though. Baz had been a detective with the Austin Police Department. They’d encountered him when they were looking for Corinne Greenwood. As for Evan, he’d been a homicide detective, but he had experience looking for missing people since he’d been part of the search when his wife had gone missing years ago. And Slade and Atticus had both been bounty hunters. They were used to looking for people. Deck was like Trey in the sense that they ventured down an entirely different path.
Then again, JJ couldn’t really talk. She’d been hopping from one company to the next, attempting to find something that fit her skill set. Not too many people were interested in hiring a hacker. When Brantley returned, she’d been working for her ex-boyfriend, Dante. A fact her best friend hadn’t been at all thrilled about.
After what Dante did, she understood.
“What did Deck say when you asked?”
“He was kinda cryptic, actually. Said you never knew when your past would come back to haunt you.”
JJ frowned. “He said that?”
Baz nodded.
She turned her attention out the window. His past had come back to haunt him? If that were the case, why would he have left the city he grew up in to come to Coyote Ridge? It made absolutely no sense at all.
***
Never in her life had Becs everseen anyone as beautiful as Saoirse Kavanagh. She was almost too pretty to be real as she opened her apartment door and allowed them to come in.
