Royce sat wearily at the desk in his office, his feet up on the smooth surface, with the toes of his dusty work boots pointed toward the ceiling. Situated squarely between his palms was a lemon-colored stress ball. He had acquired quite a few of them over the years, the first of which had been given to him by his wife, back in what Royce had considered his and Molly's early years.

That was the year that they bought what would prove to be their forever home. It was also the year that Royce took the job as sheriff in Hart's Ridge. Molly had always been uncomfortable with his line of work but she made due. Mainly, because she knew that police work had always been his dream. She had hoped that when he accepted the position it would mean more time in the office and less on the streets. "Besides," she had told him one night over dinner, "how much crime could there be in such a tiny corner of the world?" The answer surprised them both. Hart's Ridge turned out to be more than either of them had bargained for.

As the work load increased, he got into the habit of bringing his more difficult cases home with him (and, in the beginning, the difficult cases had been plentiful). He would hole up in his office with a stiff drink in one hand and the day's newest file in the other. He would have a drink or two, sometimes on an exceptionally hard day a drink or four, while reading through a stack of arrest warrants, rap sheets, and witness statements.

Molly didn't say much about his little ritual until it moved out of the realm of occasionally and started to rub elbows with daily. That's when she put her foot down. Even now he could hear her voice, stern and angry, echoing up through the dusty recesses of his memory as she issued that long-ago ultimatum.

She had been on the couch with her feet up, a healthy two decades and some change away from the cancer diagnosis that would eventually be her demise. Open on her lap was a well-worn novel. She had been a voracious reader and usually kept some book or another near at hand.

That night though she had turned her attention away from the story that had so enthralled her to watch her husband cross the room in his bare feet, fresh from the shower, to pour himself a drink at the small sideboard in their living room. When she slammed her book down on the coffee table it ripped through the peaceful silence like a bomb. Royce jumped. The tumbler that he had just retrieved from the sideboard's dark wood surface slipped from his fingers in slow motion and exploded into a million large, jagged, glittering pieces as it made contact with the hardwood floor. He just stood there staring stupidly at the shattered pieces for a moment as Molly got to her feet.

"Royce," she said in a low, even tone, "I have supported you in your choice of profession, even though I spend most days terrified of what could happen to you out there." She threw an arm wide as she motioned toward the outside world. "I have sat up nights waiting for you to come home, more relieved than I know how to explain, when I see your car turn into the drive."

Her voice had cracked a little as she finished that last sentence and he looked up, his eyes meeting hers for the first time. The hard steel of those light blue eyes spoke of her anger, but the too-bright shine spoke of long nights full of unshed tears. The look of disappointment on her face was like a gut punch.

"I signed on to be an officer's wife. I signed on to be the wife of one of the most stubborn, hard-headed men I have ever met. What I did not do, was sign on to be the wife of a drunk," she finished, crossing both arms over her chest. He could see her bottom lip tremble slightly, and he knew she was quickly coming to the end of her resolve.

"You have a choice to make," she said, already gathering her book off the coffee table, "I will not continue to stay married to a man like that. If you're going to continue to carry on the way you have been, then you'll do it as a single man."

She didn't say another word. She didn't need to. She just turned on her heel and stalked off toward the stairs her auburn hair swinging angrily between her shoulder blades.

He was still reeling as he watched her depart. Royce had felt a little shell shocked, as if he had been on the wrong end of a grenade blast. They rarely fought and she had never raised her voice to him, nor he to her. Maybe it was for that reason alone that her reaction had brought up a tangled knot of emotions. He did his best to sort through what he was feeling, as he dumped the glittering shards of glass into the pail.

He realized that mixed with the shame of knowing he had wounded her was also an overwhelming sense of love. He had loved her more at that moment than the day they had married, a feat he had not thought possible. Of course, there had never been a choice to make. There wasn't a thing on the surface of God's creation that Royce had loved as much as he had loved his Molly. If she had asked him to stop breathing air his response would have been very much the same. So he quit drinking.

It wasn't until years later that he was able to admit to himself that she had been onto something. The job had been harder than he expected. He had let the stress of it overwhelm him. He had been on a slippery slope and, as she had so many times since she met him, Molly had been there to stop the slide.

The cases didn't let up though, in fact, they had only gotten harder. More than once, Molly found him pacing his office like a caged animal. That was when she brought home the first of the little foam balls. She had picked one up on a whim while on an impromptu shopping trip. When he asked Molly what had compelled her to buy it, she just shrugged and said she had thought of him. Royce had thanked her and then tucked it away in a desk drawer, convinced he would never use the ridiculous thing, but it turned out her intuition had been right, like so many other times in their marriage. It had become like a security blanket for him when he was perplexed. He couldn't explain it, but something about it helped him focus.

And that's how it came to be that Royce found himself in his office on this warm spring evening, rolling the odd little gadget between his palms instead of a finely aged Scotch, while he went over the case file on Emily Lansing's strange disappearance. In all his years as an officer, and there had been more than he cared to think about, he had never been stumped like this.

He and Sully had gone over it time and time again, but there just didn't seem to be a solution. To make matters worse, they were quickly running out of time. In lieu of actual police work, Agent Simmons was looking for any excuse to pin the whole thing on Jake and Emily.

Royce had been doing his own investigation into how Jake Merrill had reappeared here in town, but had yet to find anything that implicated him in this case. He had, however, noted an odd spot in his work history. There was a matter of several months where Jake had dropped off the map completely, somewhere between the termination of his employment with Lassiter and Troy, an up-and-coming commercial finance company in New York City, and his appearance here in Hart's Ridge. Royce was more than a little interested in what had occurred in those missing months, and why he had left the firm in the first place. It was far from a smoking gun, but curious nonetheless. Why would he choose to leave a career in a multi-million dollar company to come home and be a glorified delivery boy and field hand? These were questions that Royce didn't have an answer for but he intended to, and sooner rather than later.

In the spirit of due diligence, he had also looked into Emily's past, but as he had suspected there had been nothing of consequence. Most of what he had found he had already known, considering that he, like everyone else in their small town, had a front-row seat to the majority of her adolescence.

Her friends and an ex-fiance had already been questioned, but Royce and his men had again come up empty-handed. There wasn't a single person that they interviewed that didn't have an alibi, and every last one of those had checked out. Feeling as if he had sufficiently dotted all his I's and crossed all his T's, he began to work his way outside her inner circle, but there just wasn't much to go on.

Their biggest clues so far were the house, a few footprints that had been left in the soft earth outside the back door, and last but not least the dead body - who the coroner had just this week identified as a young man named Leo Cooper.

They had identified him through dental records and the family had confirmed it when they identified several of his, rather unique, tattoos. He had a rap sheet as long as Royce's arm, but all for petty crimes. His death, like everything else in this case, had left more questions than answers. How had a small-time criminal with no history of violent crime wound up dead in the same house as a missing person?

Even with all of that, there was no evidence that pointed to Emily as anything more than a victim.

To be fair, there had been cases of faked kidnappings. Royce had even watched a true crime documentary about just such a case that had occurred in California. It wasn't that there was no precedent for it. The issue continued to be that there was no evidence to support it, but this particular fact didn't seem to register with the Good Agent.

Royce was desperately hoping that Sully would have some good news for him. Shortly after their breakfast meeting, they made a plan to meet at Royce's office to discuss the identity of the deceased individual. The best-case scenario was that this new information would blow the case wide open, or at the very least give them a rock-solid lead to follow. Otherwise, Royce was worried that this case could be going lukewarm and headed for cold in no time.

Royce stood, stretching his sore tired muscles. He was staring down the barrel of seventy and if he had learned anything, it was that his mind was convinced it was still twenty but his body was sure he was in his eighties. The punishment he had put it through over the years had finally caught up with him, and just in case he was unsure he had the popping, creaking joints to prove it. Rubbing the small of his back, he pulled his cell phone from his pocket to check the time. The bright white numbers told him that it was 7:45 pm. Sully was due here at any minute.

As if on cue, there was a loud commotion from the front lobby. He heard Bobby greeting someone and then the loud deep rumble of Sully's laughter.

"He's in his office," Bobby said.

"Thanks, man," the big man answered, his voice already sounding closer.

Before Royce could make a move to open the door, Sully was already pushing it open. In his hand was an oversized paper bag, spotted with large grease stains. The mouthwatering aroma of garlic and oregano wafted out of a small opening in the top of the bag. As the smell filled the room, Royce's stomach rumbled loudly. Sully laughed when he heard it.

"I was hoping you hadn't eaten yet," he said, chuckling.

Royce had eaten, but he wasn't about to tell Sully that.

"What have you got in that bag?" Royce asked.

"Heaven," he answered, moving toward the desk and unloading packages wrapped in foil and thick wax paper, before pulling up a chair across from Royce.

"I do my best celebrating on a full stomach."

"Celebrating?" Royce asked him, unable to hide his curious anticipation.

"Yep," Sully replied, a large smile lighting up his handsome face, "my friend, we have a brand new lead."