Jaded by Anne Calhoun Read Free Book Online

phone call reminding him that he’d flat-out forgotten to tell Alana about Cody Burton prompted him to consider exactly how much he’d changed since his days with the DPD. When he started out with DPD a kid like Cody would have been on his mind constantly.
    Not anymore.
    The call from dispatch about a break-in ended all thoughts about Cody Burton.
    He braked the Blazer to a stop in front of the weathered farmhouse and slid out of the truck. Gravel crunched underfoot as he shifted his jacket back from his right hip and approached the front door. The screen door, worn gray by years of wind and snow and summer heat, was closed, but the interior door stood open. His hand tightened reflexively when a gnarled hand appeared, then pushed open the door.
    “They’re gone,” Gunther Jensen said.
    Hand still on his weapon, Lucas stepped through the opened door and scanned the wreckage of the old man’s living room. “You check the cellar?”
    “No,” Gunther said, white-knuckling the railing on the porch. “The stairs bother me some.”
    Lucas could see a twin mattress stripped of its sheets and shoved awkwardly into the corner. Gunther probably moved downstairs after his last fall. “Sit down. I’ll take a look around,” Lucas said. “Stay here. Don’t touch anything.”
    Old habits died hard, so he released the snap and kept his hand on the Glock’s grip as he climbed the stairs. The board creaked under his feet, alerting anyone upstairs to his presence, but something in the house’s shocked stillness told him whoever had trashed the seventy-nine-year-old widower’s house while he was visiting his sister in the county home was long gone.
    He checked the four equally wrecked bedrooms, closets, and bathroom, then opened the narrow door to the sharply pitched stairs leading to the attic. A thick layer of undisturbed dust covered each riser. No one, including Gunther, had gone up there for some time, but Lucas still put his back to the wall and edged up the narrow stairs. He peered cautiously over the landing and found nothing more threatening than an ancient dressmaker’s dummy and a hundred years of Jensen family history crammed into boxes, crates, and trunks. Cobwebs covered the dust. No one had been in the attic in decades.
    Sneezing once, he retraced his steps and did a quick check of the cellar, which was in much the same condition as the attic, except it smelled of damp and mildew. “Whoever did this is gone,” he said to Gunther.
    “They got my wife’s jewelry,” Gunther said. He pointed at a small mahogany box, and his hands trembled, although whether from Parkinson’s or shock, Lucas couldn’t tell. “She didn’t have much. I buried her with her wedding ring but kept the engagement ring. The diamonds weren’t more than chips shaped like a daisy. These days the gold was worth more than the diamonds. Thought I’d give it to my granddaughter for her sweet sixteen next month. But they took it.”
    Lucas remembered the ring, so similar to the one his own grandmother had lost. As a boy he’d rashly promised her he would find the ring for her, spent hours digging for it in the backyard. Even now when he worked on the plumbing, he automatically kept an eye open for the glint of gold or light refracting off a tiny diamond, insignificant by today’s standards. Even though his grandfather replaced the ring with an anniversary band, Lucas never stopped looking. Then he got busy in Denver, and finally accepted that the ring was gone forever. Sometimes lost things weren’t meant to be found again.
    He’d been a cop too long to make those kinds of promises. Instead, he stepped forward and clasped the man’s shoulder. Gunther nodded twice, then seemed to steady himself. “Mind if I take a look in your medicine cabinet?”
    As he suspected, Gunther’s supply of pain pills for his herniated disk was missing. Determining what else was missing from the wreckage took an hour. He righted the furniture and