A Trace of Hope

by Blake Pierce

  “I knew you’d come for me,” Evie finally said quietly.

  “How did you know?”

  “They took me, they hid me, and they used me for six years. But they couldn’t keep the world out that whole time, Mom. I saw the news stories. The guy who took me actually showed me the press conference after he kidnapped me, the one where you were crying in the parking lot. He was laughing at you.”

  “I’m so sorry, sweetie,” Keri said, trying to keep her voice from cracking.

  “He thought it would break me,” Evie continued, her voice surprisingly neutral. “But what he didn’t get was that just seeing your face gave me comfort. Knowing that you cared so much…I held on to that for years when it seemed like there was no hope. And then…”

  Her voice trailed off. Keri desperately wanted her to continue, but she didn’t want to push too hard and shut her down. Anything her daughter volunteered was a blessing, considering the circumstances. But Evie regrouped and continued.

  “And then I heard you became a cop. I saw some of the stories about you saving kids. And I knew that eventually you’d find me. I never had a doubt. Well, mostly.”

  Keri started to ask about the “mostly” but was interrupted by a phalanx of medical personnel who all swarmed into the room at the same time. They wanted to take Evie to a different room for a private examination but that was shut down by both mom and daughter immediately.

  At some points during the exam, Keri could barely see Evie, there were so many people in the room. After a half hour, one doctor came over and whispered in Keri’s ear that Evie had some internal vaginal bleeding and they needed to do a procedure immediately requiring general anesthesia.

  She gave her consent, insisting that they share a room after the surgery was complete. While Keri waited for them to finish, the doctors caring for her provided the treatment she should have received after the cliff fall that morning.

  It turned out that she had three cracked ribs from her leap onto the canyon rock outcropping. There were still tiny bits of asphalt and clothing embedded in her legs that she and Mags had missed in the bath cleanup session. The big chunk that had lodged in her shin had actually chipped off a small piece of her upper tibia, which helped explained the nonstop throbbing in that area.

  A couple of her fingers were sprained and her left palm was so torn up that she might eventually need a skin graft. She required multiple stitches vertically along the right side of her face from her eye down to just below her nose. She had also mildly sprained her shoulder climbing the mansion balcony at the Vista and would need to wear a sling for a few days. She was a mess.

  So when the doctors offered to give her a morphine drip while they dealt with much of that, she happily accepted. What she didn’t expect was that she’d completely pass out while they were working.

  When she woke up, light was streaming in through the hospital room window. Evie, fast asleep, was lying in the bed next to her. Ray, as he so often seemed to be, was sitting in an uncomfortable-looking chair beside her bed. He was asleep too and she saw a large bandage on his left forearm. Otherwise, he seemed uninjured.

  He seemed to sense her eyes on him and stirred. After taking a moment to get his bearings, he whispered.

  “What time is it?”

  Keri glanced at the clock on the wall.

  “Six fifty-six a.m.”

  “Good,” he said. “That means you got about three hours of sleep. Better than nothing.”

  “And you? How much sleep did you get last night?”

  “About…fifty-six minutes,” he answered, smiling sheepishly.

  “Raymond, you really should take better care of yourself.”

  He didn’t respond to that, instead staring at Keri, then looking at over at Evie sleeping peacefully beside her.

  “She looks so much like you,” he said. It sounded like he might be about to add something else but he didn’t. He just smiled.

  “I can’t believe I have her back,” she whispered.

  “It was a long time coming, Keri. I’m so happy for you.”

  “Thanks, Ray. You know, I wouldn’t have been able to…without you, I couldn’t…” She wasn’t able to finish.

  “Hey, don’t get all soft on me yet, Thumbelina. There’s still a long road ahead for both of you. This right here—lying in the hospital with tubes in your arms—it’s the honeymoon.”

  “I know, Ray. I’m terrified of the road ahead. The damage that’s been done to her, I don’t know how to undo it.”

  “I hate to say it, but there’s no undoing it. What happened, happened. It’s not fair but those horrors will always be with her. Now it’s about finding ways to deal with them, to move past them, to create something like a normal life.”

  “You’re right,” Keri agreed. “I guess the sooner I accept there’s no easy solution, the better it is for both of us.”

  “I’m glad that’s your attitude, partner,” Ray said, sitting upright in his chair in a “down to business” way that made Keri nervous. “Because ‘sooner’ starts pretty much the second you walk out that door.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that I gave the doctors and nurses strict instructions not to let anyone else in this room besides medical personnel. But you should know that there is an army of people out there champing at the bit.”

  Despite the pain, Keri used the button on her bedside remote control to force her hospital bed upright.

  “What are you talking about? Who’s out there?”

  “For starters, Lieutenant Hillman, who’d very much like to know why someone I reported dead is in the hospital after conducting a rogue takedown of a sex slavery ring. The rest of the unit has a few questions too, as does LAPD police chief Beecher. The mayor is supposedly here too, along with a couple of city supervisors.”

  “Is that all?” Keri asked sarcastically.

  “Actually no. The entire press corps is here. Not just local—national as well. They’re setting up for a press conference. They’ve already had two of them overnight but the big one will be with you and…and Stephen.”

  “Excuse me?” Keri asked, trying to keep her voice down despite the anger she felt rising in her throat.

  “Yeah,” Ray said softly. “Your ex-husband has been out there doing interviews, saying how happy he is to have Evie back, how he always believed they’d be reunited one day.”

  “Are you kidding me? Every time I went to him for help, he told me I was crazy to keep looking for her. He said I needed to accept that she was dead. He resented me even bringing her up.”

  “I know, Keri. But that’s not what he’s saying for the cameras now. And he’s been pretty aggressive about trying to get in here to see her. The only reason he hasn’t is that I convinced the doctors not to let anyone else in while she’s asleep, at least not until you were awake and could give consent. But once she wakes up, that won’t fly. He is her father.”

  “Barely,” Keri muttered.

  Ray glared at her and nodded in the direction of Evie, who was beginning to wake up.

  “I’m going to step outside so you can have some private time,” he whispered. “But don’t expect that to last long.”

  He blew Keri a kiss and closed the door just as Evie opened her eyes.

  *

  Ray was right. From the moment Keri opened the door to her hospital room, madness reigned. Almost immediately, she was accosted by her ex-husband, Stephen, who insisted on seeing Evie right away.

  Despite his lack of interest in her whereabouts in recent years and her sense that his sudden return of paternal instincts was more opportunistic than genuine, she couldn’t deny him. Evie was his daughter, after all. And before she’d been taken and everything had fallen apart, he’d been a good, loving, if slightly uninvolved father.

  As he tore past her into the room and rushed over to Evie’s bedside, Keri saw the rush of relief in his eyes at the realization that she really was alive. Maybe he’d insisted Keri was crazy to believe
it all those years because allowing himself to share in that hope was just too painful. She could understand that desire. But she couldn’t forgive it. Evie was their daughter and he should have kept fighting for her rather than just giving up.

  Evie was still out of it and after about fifteen minutes she drifted off again. The nurses shooed everyone out so she could rest and Keri watched her through the door’s window as she dealt with a succession of visitors.

  First was Lieutenant Hillman, who looked torn between wanting to ream Keri out for faking her death and being involved in the infiltration of the Hollywood estate and just being happy she was alive and reunited with her daughter. Ultimately, he chose to focus on the latter, making only a passing mention of a major debrief down the line.

  The rest of the team showed up to offer their well wishes too. Detectives Suarez, Edgerton, Patterson, and even Frank Brody, the generally surly vet just weeks from retirement, seemed truly happy for her. Only Officer Jamie Castillo was slightly reserved and Keri suspected she knew why.

  Castillo almost certainly wondered why Keri let her think she was dead; why she didn’t call her in to help break into the Hollywood estate and instead trusted some mall security kid who hadn’t even entered the police academy yet.

  Keri wanted to explain the truth—that there was a mole in the unit and though she was sure it wasn’t Castillo, the only safe play was to keep everyone but Ray out of the loop for now. After all, with his dying words, Jackson Cave had warned her to watch her back and she intended to. That meant staying quiet until the mole was discovered, even if it left Jamie confused and angry.

  The press conference was set for 8 a.m. Evie was sleeping comfortably in her room—heavily sedated on the recommendation of her doctors. Despite Stephen’s suggestion that it might be cathartic for her to participate, Keri refused to let her anywhere near cameras or reporters.

  Just before it started, Keri was pulled to the side by Reena Beecher, formerly the captain of her division and now chief of the entire LAPD. In her mid-fifties with deep worry lines and grayish-black hair tied up in a tight bun, Beecher was tall and slender, with angular features that reminded Keri of a hawk constantly in search of prey. She seemed about to say something when the mayor and several members of the Board of Supervisors walked up behind her.

  “We ready to get this thing started, Chief?” he asked pleasantly. The mayor was tall and dark-haired and couldn’t have been much older than Keri.

  “Yes, Mayor Alvarez. Have you had the chance to meet Detective Locke yet?” Beecher asked.

  “I haven’t had the honor,” the mayor said, shaking her hand. “I want to save some of my praise for the cameras but for now I’ll just say thank you. I know you were trying to save your daughter. But in the process, you saved a lot of other young girls. Isn’t that right, Carl?”

  “Absolutely, Mr. Mayor,” said an older, well-manicured man standing to Alvarez’s right, who stepped forward at the mention of his name. “Carl Weatherford, County Supervisor for the Third District. Nice to meet you, Detective. The Vista estate was in my district. I don’t know if you’re aware, but each Supervisory District represents almost two million people. That’s close to triple what a member of Congress represents. It’s a huge, diverse community. And you’ve done an incredible service to our community by disrupting such an unsavory business.”

  “‘Unsavory’ strikes me as a pretty mild word for what was going on there,” Keri said.

  “Of course,” Weatherford agreed. “I guess when something is that awful, I tend to hide behind euphemisms. But you’re right. It doesn’t begin to capture it.”

  An aide came over and indicated it was time to start.

  “See you up there,” the mayor said before heading to his seat, followed closely by Weatherford and the other supervisors who had managed to escape Keri’s disdain.

  She started to make her way to her seat when Chief Beecher grabbed her wrist and leaned in close.

  “Detective Locke,” she said quietly. “Remember to keep your cool up there. There will be a lot of grandstanding. There will be a lot of credit-taking. There will be a lot of blame-placing. But you need to keep your eye on the ball. You have your daughter back. The sex ring and the man who ran it have been exposed. But you are still on suspension and under investigation. Under the circumstances, the fact that you are an honest-to-goodness hero should get you enough brownie points to bury the mistakes you’ve made in the past. But only if you stay cool and let me help you. Do you think you can do that?”

  “I can try.”

  “Trying won’t be enough,” Beecher said, looking at her sharply with her hard, birdlike eyes, the ones that had seen even more cruelty and violence than Keri’s had. “It’s going to be hardball up there and you’re going to have to sit there and bite the bullet if you want to come out clean on the other side of this. Are you capable of that? Are you able to give bland, inoffensive answers to biting, accusatory press questions? Are you able to commend people you don’t believe deserve it? Because in the past, that’s hasn’t been a sure thing.”

  “I didn’t have my daughter back then, Chief Beecher,” Keri told her. “So I was more about shooting bullets than biting them. But I have her now. And if saying the right thing or just keeping my mouth shut is what it will take to move past all this and get her started on a normal life, then that’s what I’m prepared to do.”

  “Glad to hear it,” Beecher said, offering a rare smile. “Let’s do this thing.”

  For most of the press conference, keeping her promise to Chief Beecher wasn’t too hard. The mayor was effusive in his praise of law enforcement generally and a mother’s love and dedication in particular.

  He promised to root out the corruption that was currently rocking the city and indicated that some of the community’s biggest powerbrokers were among the clients of what the press was already dubbing “The Hollywood Child Brothel.”

  Supervisor Weatherford parroted the mayor’s comments, with particular commendation for the LA County SWAT unit which had converged so quickly on the scene. Chief Beecher then got up and updated everyone on the status of the investigation before praising Keri, Ray, and a new recruit to the police academy named Keith Fogerty, who had assisted in the operation. She then surprised and angered the assembled reporters by saying that while Detective Locke would be making a brief statement, she would not be taking any questions at this time.

  As Keri got to her feet with the assistance of Lieutenant Hillman, who was seated beside her, she saw someone else rise from across the platform. It was Stephen. As she approached the podium, he smiled and met her there, taking her hand. She felt a pit of uneasiness stir in her gut as he leaned in toward the microphone.

  What the hell is he doing?

  “Thank you all so much for coming,” he said before she had a chance to open her mouth. “This is very hard because the truth is that losing Evie cost Keri and me so much. Not just our marriage but something deeper—our sense of optimism about the world. But one thing we never lost was our faith that our daughter would come back to us, right, Keri?”

  She stood there, frozen, unable to speak. It wasn’t true, not even a little bit. How many times had she gone to him, begging him to help her, to give her the money to help pay for a private investigator to follow up leads? And every time, he’d refused, acting as if the very request was an affront to the new life he’d created with his crappy actress wife and his bratty little new son. He’d lost faith a long time ago.

  But what was she supposed to say? That it was all crap? What if Evie was watching from her room? Should Keri reveal that her own father was more interested in moving on with his picture-perfect life than finding the daughter he suspected was dead and feared would be a horrible complication if she was still alive?

  Stephen was looking at her, the smile still plastered to his lips but his bluffing eyes filled with apprehension, wondering if she’d go so far as to call him out at the expense of their only daughter’s love for her
father. She wouldn’t.

  “There was always hope,” she said quietly.

  “That’s right,” he agreed, the relief obvious in his voice. “We always had hope. Sometimes Keri would come to me, after a brutal case, fearing the same fate might have befallen Evie. And I would tell her not to lose the drive that kept her searching, the sense of purpose that fueled her. And she’d return to the fight, stronger than before. We were no longer husband and wife. But in that way, we were still a team.”

  Keri felt the bile rise up in her throat. She wanted to retch so badly. But she forced the urge down, remembering what Chief Beecher had told her. Whatever grandstanding Stephen engaged in, whatever bullets she had to bite, whatever glad-handing and politicking was required to get her through this event and back to a normal life with her daughter, Keri would endure it.

  Because she had endured far worse. And because this wasn’t about her.

  It was about Evie.

  CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR

  One thought stuck in Evie Locke’s head, no matter how hard she tried to push it out.

  Everything hurts.

  It was the day after the big press conference—the one she’d slept through—and she was adjusting herself in the hospital bed, trying not to grimace as she sat upright. The pain from the surgery was still there but she didn’t want to worry her mom. She had overheard a nurse saying that “the poor woman never goes to sleep until her daughter drifts off and even then it’s fitful.” Evie didn’t want to make it worse.

  She waited patiently as her mom gathered herself for what was clearly going to be an uncomfortable conversation. For half a second, she considered how weird it was that she automatically thought of the woman across from her as “Mom” now. The last time they’d really spoken she was calling her “Mommy” and yet she couldn’t bring herself to think the word, much less say it.