Hero responded with a wagging tail.
Milo’s home wasn’t exactly on the way to Long Beach, but Brinna had plenty of time for the detour. Still pumped with adrenaline after the successful search, she felt like she could drive to the moon and back.
It was a couple of hours before she reached Highway 138, which cut across the Mojave Desert through Palmdale, very near where she’d been found by Milo twenty years previous. The highway connected with the 14 freeway, which took Brinna to Santa Clarita, where Milo lived.
I haven’t been out to his house in a while, she thought. In truth, Milo had been distant since his retirement. He’d hung up his badge and gun about the same time Brinna had been partnered with Hero. Brinna got the feeling Milo had a difficult time saying good-bye after his thirty-two years on the job. In the two years since his retirement party, she’d only been out to see him twice, each time on his birthday. His calls were few and far between, and Brinna detected boredom and frustration in his tone when they did speak.
If he had a good fishing trip, his spirits should be high, she decided as she took the off-ramp toward his house. At eight thirty the summer sun had set, and Brinna smiled, happy to see lights on as she approached Milo’s small tract home. She parked in front and made a lot of noise as she let Hero out of the truck, wanting to give Milo a heads-up.
Hero bounded up to the front door, sniffing and wagging his tail. Milo’s last service dog, a shepherd named Baxter, and Hero were great friends. When Brinna reached the porch and rang the doorbell, the absence of Baxter’s bark struck her as strange. The TV was on, so she knew Milo was home, yet she and Hero stood on the porch for a good five minutes with no response.
Brinna punched the bell again, hearing the tones echo inside the house. “Milo, it’s Brinna. You there?” she called out, briefly wondering if she should have called first. Maybe he wasn’t home.
About to give up, Brinna knocked a couple of times, then stepped off the porch. The dog kept sniffing the bottom of the door.
“Hero, come,” she ordered. He turned and jumped off the porch just as Milo opened the door.
“Hey, you are home.” She stood with her hands on her hips. “I almost gave up and decided this surprise visit was a mistake.”
“I was in the back of the house. Got home day before yesterday.” He covered his mouth and coughed a rib-shattering smoker’s cough.
Brinna clenched her teeth, hoping to hide the surprise on her face as she took in Milo’s appearance. The ex-Marine, ex-cop used to be meticulous about his dress and personal grooming standards. She noted his normally neat flattop needed a trim as badly as his jaw needed a shave. As he waved her into the house, she didn’t miss the bloodshot eyes, the soiled T-shirt, and the odor of cigarette smoke mixed with unwashed body.
“You catch a cold in Mexico?” Brinna asked as she took a seat on his couch.
“I caught something,” he wheezed, coughing again before sitting in his recliner and chugging from a bottle of beer.
“Where’s Baxter?”
Milo put the bottle down and picked up a smoldering cigarette. “Dead.” He took a puff.
“What?” Brinna jerked forward in her seat.
“It happened just before I left for Mexico. Took him to the vet to check out a limp. Doc said he had bone cancer. I had to put him down.”
“I’m so sorry. Why didn’t you call me, let me know?”
Milo shrugged. “Wasn’t anything you could do. Doc couldn’t help him, and I didn’t want the dog to suffer. He was hurting bad the day I took him in. Doc said he could live on pain pills for a while, but I couldn’t dope the guy up, have him live his last days in a stupor. I had too much respect for him.” He emptied the bottle of beer.
“Wow. That must have been hard.” She absentmindedly scratched Hero’s head. Baxter had worked with Milo for his final years on the job. Brinna knew it must have been like losing a kid.
The untidy living room did not escape her notice, and she wondered if Baxter’s death had sent Milo into a tailspin. She spotted a pile of books on the table in front of Milo, some open as if he’d been studying.
“Looks like you’re doing some homework.” She nodded toward the books.
“Passing the time. You want a beer?” He stood.
“You got a Diet Coke?”
Milo nodded and walked into the kitchen. He came back with another beer for him and a Diet Coke for Brinna.
“What brings you out this way?” he asked as he opened his bottle.
Brinna leaned forward in her chair and told him about the kid in Utah. “It was such a great feeling, rescuing that kid out of the desert,” she concluded. “Man, it brought back memories. I’m glad you were such a great teacher.”
Milo grunted and gulped some beer. “I taught you to trust your instincts.”
“Yep.” Brinna relaxed in her chair and sipped her Coke.
“What if instincts fail you?” Milo asked.
“What?” Brinna frowned. “Has that ever happened to you?”
Milo set his beer down and picked up a book from the table. To Brinna, it seemed suspiciously like a Bible, but she said nothing and waited for Milo to speak.
“I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately.”
“That what the burning smell is?” Brinna gibed, grinning.
Milo ignored her. “Your mom always said it was prideful that I trusted my instincts, that a person should trust God. She sincerely believes there is a God up there—” he pointed to the ceiling—“controlling everything.”
Brinna squirmed in her seat, suddenly uncomfortable. “My mom means well, but I thought we agreed that was all nonsense?”
“As I get older, Brin, I wonder if it really is nonsense. I’m closer to the end than the beginning, and I wonder what waits for me when I die.” Milo turned his gaze to the front window, a faraway look in his eyes.
“Come on, you’re going to live forever. Why so morose all of a sudden? Is it Baxter?”
He shook his head. “I miss him, but I couldn’t watch him suffer. It’s just that . . . Well, what if there is a God and I’ve ignored him all this time?”
He turned back toward Brinna, but she couldn’t read his eyes.
“You know, when I met your mom twenty years ago, she told me that she prayed I’d find you and I did. She was so certain that God led me to you. Even though I didn’t believe, she said God used me to answer her prayer.”
Brinna waved a hand, searching for the words to get Milo off this subject. Her mother always told people that Brinna’s rescue was divine. God had his hand in it, Rose Caruso insisted. Brinna loved her mother, but this was one subject they couldn’t talk about without arguing.
“If her prayer was so effective that day, why doesn’t prayer work for all the other kids who go missing?”
“I asked her that.” Milo crushed out his cigarette. “She talked about God giving man free will. Because of that, there is evil in the world. If God pulled everyone’s strings all the time, we’d be puppets.”
“I’ve heard that and don’t buy it. If we were put here by an all-powerful God, couldn’t he stop the suffering, the murder?” Brinna bit her bottom lip, unable to process her mentor’s demeanor and mind-set.
“He will when he returns. That’s what your mom says. She also says that heaven is a perfect place, a place without murder and pain.”
“You believe that?”
“I want to.” Milo covered his mouth as another cough shook through him. “For thirty years I’ve witnessed the worst people can do to one another. I’ve always tried to solve things with these.” He pointed to his head, his chest, and held up his hands. “Right now, you better believe I hope there is someone stronger and something better somewhere else.”
He sat back and took a deep drag on his cigarette, blowing out a plume of smoke. “Your mom makes sense about some things.” He nodded to the book in his hands. “I’ve even been reading the Bible.”
Suddenly frustration bit Brinna like a
snake. The two people she loved most in the world suffering from the same delusion? What was going on here? “No, Milo, no. You’re too strong for that.”
Milo sighed as if the world sat squarely on his shoulders, then put the book down. “Am I? All I know is that you and my son are the only people in this world I care about. I’ve taught you everything I know. But what if some of the things I passed on were wrong?”
9
NIGEL DIDN’T MISS the next article about the dog cop. She’d actually shot someone. He whistled in admiration. He’d taken the paper to work with him and left it with his lunch. Right now his rent-paying job was in beach maintenance, a fancy name for outdoor custodian. He kept the beaches and marinas clean during the summer months. It was only a seasonal position, but it worked for Nigel.
No one noticed the guy picking up trash from the sand and off the docks. The job facilitated his favorite pastime—little-girl watching. He could snap a surreptitious picture now and again with his digital camera.
It was a great gig.
Careful not to linger because that might arouse suspicion, Nigel couldn’t help but notice a group of five little girls playing in the gentle, breakwater-regulated waves Long Beach was known for. They were all wearing two-piece suits, his favorite, and they were running in and out of the water, squealing with delight. Nigel loved to hear little girls squeal like that.
The two moms weren’t watching very closely. One slept while the other had her nose buried in a book.
Nigel emptied his trash bag into a bin without taking his eyes off the girls. He then ventured somewhat closer, picking up trash along the way. When neither mom reacted, he brought out his camera. Very carefully Nigel snapped three pictures, then slid the camera back into his pocket.
Moving away, he kept watching the little girls from the corner of his eye. Would one of them be special enough for his dog-cop plans? he wondered. He doubted he’d be able to snatch one of them today. It’d be too hard to take one out of five, even if the moms were totally clueless. Instead, he decided he’d take his time, snap pictures, review them, and pick the next Special Girl very carefully.
The dog cop deserved his best work.
10
BRINNA SHUT OFF the AC and rolled the window down as she and Hero neared the coast of Long Beach and home. Taking a deep breath of warm, salt-water-smelling air, she sighed and tried to erase the frown she knew had creased her brow all morning.
Uncomfortable memories of Milo’s strange demeanor the night before blunted the good coming-home feeling. Echoes of the conversation bouncing in her brain left her feeling uneasy, as if she’d put a shirt on backward and the tag were scratching her throat.
The image of her hero and mentor reading the Bible and believing it was as incongruous as snow falling on the Hawaiian coastline. Milo had always been so confident in himself and his own beliefs that he’d never needed the crutch of religion. Why did he need it now?
He wants to believe there is an all-powerful being in control of this world, she thought, working hard to wrap her mind around the concept. If there is such a being, I sure have a bone to pick with him. Shaking her head to banish the thought, she glanced in the rearview mirror at Hero.
“Well, baby, we’re back near the ocean and out of the hot desert.” Brinna tapped the steering wheel in rhythm to an upbeat country tune Kenny Chesney sang, trying to force Milo’s moroseness from her mind.
She’d been able to lift his mood only briefly. The subject of her shooting had stopped his introspection for a few minutes and he’d been the old Milo. He’d impressed upon her not to worry about it, to stick to the facts as they unfolded before her that night. “Don’t let the fat Monday-morning quarterbacks sack you,” he’d said.
Brinna was more comfortable with the caustic cop than the reflective retiree. She’d spent the night in his guest room, but he’d been gone when she got up. He’d left a note next to the coffeemaker saying only that he had an appointment.
Still concerned about his state of mind but having no good excuse to hang around and wait for him to return, Brinna loaded up Hero to head home. She found a store that carried batteries for her cell phone on the way out of Santa Clarita. As soon as she powered the phone up, it beeped with several messages. Most were from friends, calling about the shooting investigation and offering support and encouragement. But there was one official-sounding message from Janet Rodriguez. She wanted to see Brinna about the shooting and had a meeting scheduled for Sunday night.
Brinna yawned as she wondered about the meeting and if something about the investigation had gone sideways. No, not possible, she thought. It was a pretty clear-cut situation. Smiling, she remembered Milo’s football analogy and vowed that she wouldn’t let anything about the shooting or investigation get to her.
Once home, she got out and stretched, while Hero did the same. She bent to pick up the newspapers piled in the driveway during her five-day absence. After tossing them in the recycle barrel, she surveyed the yard to see if anything else was amiss.
Her small two-bedroom house had been built in the thirties. The warm Craftsman style, with a welcoming front porch, was to Brinna what the house with the white picket fence was to dreamers in the fifties. Located on a quiet street in an area of Belmont Shore north of Second Street, the home had a nice-size yard and mature foliage that served to make it all the more comfy and inviting.
For Brinna, being close to the ocean was the best part of the house. Until the age of six, she’d lived in a desert portion of Los Angeles County, on the outskirts of Palmdale in a dust bowl called Lake Los Angeles. If there had been a lake there, it had dried up a hundred years before Brinna’s birth. She liked to tell people her soul was as dry as a desert dust storm until her parents wised up and moved to the coast. Stepping onto her small lawn, she never grew tired of inhaling air heavy with ocean moisture.
Brinna picked some weeds, tossed them in the trash, and turned the hose on. She’d sprayed about half the lawn when her cell phone buzzed. Dropping the running hose to water a flower bed, she checked the number before she flipped it open.
“Maggie, what’s up?”
“You home yet?” Maggie asked.
“Just pulled in the driveway. What’s going on?”
“A lot of nonsense, that’s what’s going on. Have you read any local papers yet?”
“No, like I said, I just got here. Just tossed a bunch of them, why?”
“Read them. You’ve been out of the loop. You need to know what’s happening.”
“Is this about the shooting?” Brinna turned the hose down to a trickle and sat on her front steps.
“You have heard, then.”
“All I know is that Janet called me and said she wanted to meet about the shooting. She didn’t elaborate.”
“I’ll elaborate. That moron reporter has had diarrhea of the mouth about the shooting.”
“Clark? What could he have to say about the shooting? He hid in the car the whole time, and when he got out, he puked all over the street.”
“That’s not what he’s saying. He’s teamed up with an attorney and the family of the dead kid. They’re saying you shot the kid for no reason.”
“What?” Brinna’s eyebrows scrunched together, and she reflexively scratched Hero between the ears as he came and sat next to her. “He shot at me first! And why are you saying kid? How old was he?”
“I forgot. They identified the dead boy after you left. He was only fifteen.”
“Fifteen?” Brinna nearly dropped the phone. “But I saw him. He was a good six feet tall and at least two hundred pounds.”
“Yep, he was a Poly High wide receiver. They expected to start him on varsity next year.”
“Then what was he doing shooting people and speeding through town with a gun?”
“It’s gotten so convoluted. The family retained Hester Shockley—you know, that civil liberties lawyer? They’re saying their innocent kid tried to give up, and you shot him in cold blood.”
“Ben searched for the slug the kid fired at me that night but couldn’t find it.” Brinna rubbed her forehead. “What about the kid’s victims, the ones you talked to that night? Did they ever say why he shot them?”
“They still won’t cooperate. Both of them had minor injuries and long police records. The kid you shot, Lee Warren, had no record. Shockley’s MO is to make a saint out of the crook and a sinner out of the cop.”
“Wow. I’ve seen these situations go sideways for other cops, but I shot that kid because he shot at me first. It’s so black-and-white.”
“Shockley excels at clouding the issue. Rumor is you’re going to be reassigned until it all blows over.”
“That’s why Janet wants to talk to me.” Brinna slapped her thigh. “She wants me in her office tomorrow night.” She stifled a curse. “Just where do they think they’re going to put me?”
“Haven’t heard that. What time do you meet her?”
“Five. This is so bogus. I can’t believe it. Every time Hester Shockley says jump, the PD asks how high.” Fatigue fled, kicked in the butt by anger.
“Call me after you talk to your sergeant. We’ll meet for coffee.” Sympathy tinged Maggie’s voice.
“Will do. Thanks for the heads-up.” Brinna snapped the phone shut and groaned.
Are they going to move me inside? Or just to another shift? What about Hero? And what about my Innocent Wall? Will I still be able to search? With each question she couldn’t answer, anger swelled.
After a while, Milo’s pep talk of the night before echoed in her ears and Brinna calmed somewhat. Milo’s advice was like armor. She couldn’t believe that he could ever think anything he’d taught her was wrong.
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