Avenged

by Janice Cantore

  “I’m just keeping an eye on my dog,” Brinna explained, wiping her forehead with the back of her hand. “He’s definitely following a scent.”

  “That’s good news, isn’t it?” Maggie asked. “It means we should find the boy. Why the frown?”

  Brinna shrugged. “I want to find a boy and not a body.”

  “Harrumph.” Maggie waved a hand dismissively. “There’s no indication Josh was snatched. The best guess is he got lost playing hide-and-seek. El Dorado is to parks what Disneyland is to carnivals. He could be anywhere. You always imagine the worst where kids are concerned.”

  Brinna gritted her teeth. “Because you know as well as I do, if a kid is abducted, the chances are overwhelming that they will be a victim of murder.”

  Jaw set, Brinna returned her full attention to the dog. She’d had this conversation before, with Maggie and others, almost every time a child went missing. The guys on her team liked to say that since Brinna didn’t believe there was a God watching out for kids, she’d given herself the job.

  “The operative word is if. You’re such a glass-is-half-empty person.” Maggie slapped Brinna’s shoulder with the back of her hand. “What about the ones found alive? Elizabeth Smart, Shawn Hornbeck, Brinna Caruso?”

  “For every three of us rescued, there’re nine who die,” Brinna shot back. “You know my goal is 100 percent saved.”

  Maggie snorted in exasperation. “All the time you spend riding rail on registered sex offenders and monitoring any missing kid case flagged suspicious.” She shook her head and wagged an index finger. “You can’t save them all.”

  Brinna said nothing, hating that truth. Hero came to a stop, and like dominoes, so did Brinna and then Maggie.

  “Maybe I can’t save them all,” Brinna conceded. “But it certainly won’t be for a lack of trying.”

  Maggie followed Brinna’s gaze to Hero, then turned back to her friend and smiled. “You sure earn your nickname, Kid Crusader.”

  Brinna watched the dog. His nose up, testing the air, Hero trotted off in a more determined fashion than before. When he caught a scent, the hackles on the back of his neck rose ever so slightly. Brinna felt her own neck tingle as if there were a sympathetic connection between her and the dog.

  “He’s got something stronger.” She stepped up her pace after Hero, Maggie on her heels.

  They jogged to the left, into an area thick with tall pines and full oaks. After about a hundred feet, Hero barked and sat, turning toward Brinna. It was his practiced alert signal. Brinna’s heart caught in her throat. If her dog had just found Josh, the boy wasn’t moving; in fact, he wasn’t even standing.

  She followed the dog’s gaze to a pile of leaves and held her breath.

  When she heard muffled sniffling coming from the leaves, Brinna exhaled, rolling her eyes in relief. Then she saw the toe of a small tennis shoe sticking out. The boy was hiding. Turning to Maggie, she pointed at the shoe. Maggie smiled.

  Brinna spoke to the quivering mass. “Josh, Josh Daniels. It’s the police. Is that you?”

  A half sob and an intake of breath emanated from the pile. The leaves moved, and a dirty-faced blond boy peered out at her.

  “The po-police?” He cast an eye toward Hero. “That’s not a coyote coming to eat me?”

  Kneeling, Brinna bit back a chuckle. The boy’s fear was plausible. He’d wandered into a particularly dense section of the park. The only things absent were dangerous animals. She understood a lost boy’s imagination getting the best of him.

  “Nope, it’s my dog, Hero. Hero is a police dog. He doesn’t eat little boys. He helped me find you.”

  Josh sat up and the leaves fell away, revealing a boy smudged with sweat, soil, and grime. He sniffed. “I was playing and I got lost. I called and called, but my mom didn’t come. Then I heard noises. I was afraid of wild animals, so I hid.”

  “Well, your mom and dad sent us to find you,” Maggie said. “Are you ready to go home?”

  Josh nodded vigorously and stood, brushing off dirt and leaves as he did so. “Can I pet your dog?” he asked Brinna, the tears already drying.

  “Sure,” Brinna said as she stood, ignoring the triumphant smirk Maggie shot her. Brinna pulled out her handheld radio and notified the command post that the situation was code 4, all over and resolved. “We’re on our way out.”

  Brinna smiled as she took the boy’s hand. The statistic tumbling around in her mind disappeared in a poof, like a dud.

  •••

  “Officer Caruso! Officer Caruso!”

  Brinna groaned. Tracy Michaels, the local police beat reporter, was hailing her. Brinna had almost made it to her car avoiding all contact with the press. She wished Maggie were still with her. Maggie always knew how to talk to the press. But Maggie was with her own partner, seeing to the happy family reunion.

  “Officer Caruso! I have the okay for an interview.”

  Brinna stopped at her K-9 unit, a black-and-white Ford Explorer, and turned, counting to ten so she wouldn’t say anything she’d regret. Reporters only wanted bad news. They thrived on tragedy. She faced Michaels, a young, eager woman who approached with a pad and pen in her right hand.

  “Tracy, we found the kid in a pile of leaves, alive and unmolested—not much excitement in that story.”

  The reporter shook her head. “I don’t want to talk about Josh Daniels. I want to talk about your upcoming anniversary.”

  “My anniversary?” Brinna frowned.

  “Don’t tell me you don’t mark the day in some special fashion,” Tracy said, hands on her hips. “Next week, it will be twenty years to the day since you were rescued after being abducted.”

  •••

  At 4 a.m., Jack O’Reilly awoke from the dream as he normally did, screaming his wife’s name and clutching his pillow as if he could somehow use it to drag her back from the dead.

  The cries died in his throat as he opened his eyes to the dark living room, and the terror of the dream faded. Since Vicki’s death, the couch had become his bed. The bedroom he left untouched, preserving it as it was on the last day his wife left it.

  He sat up, breathing deep, heart pounding. For the briefest of moments he imagined he caught a whiff of his wife’s scent, and he inhaled deeply, hoping to prolong the illusion, but it evaporated.

  The dream was always the same. He and Vicki were walking and smiling. He held one hand while she rested her other on her expanding belly as if hanging on to the life growing there. The first feelings associated with the dream were those of profound happiness. The bleak reality of the last year disappeared in the pleasant subconscious illusion.

  But it didn’t last.

  At some point Jack was aware of an approaching car. He wanted to tell Vicki to watch out, to move, but his voice was suffocated by dream-state paralysis. The car roared by and took Vicki with it. Her hand was wrenched from his as his screams wrenched him from sleep. He awakened to the empty life he’d lived for almost a year.

  Tossing the pillow aside, Jack headed for the shower. To sleep again so soon after the dream would be like trying to put toothpaste back in the tube.

  Standing in the shower with hot water pounding into his chest, Jack stared at his hands. He clenched and unclenched a fist, touched the cool tiles, and wondered how it was that he was still alive.

  I don’t feel alive, he thought. Maybe I’m dead, and I just don’t know it. If it weren’t for the pain, I’d feel nothing.

  Toweling off, Jack grabbed a robe and padded barefoot into the kitchen to start coffee. He glanced at the calendar stuck to the refrigerator and saw what was keeping him alive. The date circled in red was a little more than two weeks away. It was the date of the sentencing.

  Vicki had been driving to an afternoon doctor’s appointment in her economical Honda. She’d called Jack before she left the house, bubbling with excitement about how active the child inside her was. “He’ll be big and strong like his daddy,” she’d gushed, though they didn’t know what
sex the baby was yet. Jack knew now. A little girl had died with his wife.

  Fresh from a wet lunch, Gil Martin had started up his brand-new Hummer. Ignoring at least seven vehicles who’d honked a warning at him, Gil got on the 710 freeway going north in the southbound lanes. Investigators estimated his speed was close to sixty when he crested a small rise and hit Vicki head-on. She never had a chance.

  Martin had already been found guilty of gross vehicular manslaughter. All that was left was the sentencing. Jack hated the man as much as anyone could hate.

  The hate, he thought. That’s what’s keeping me going, keeping me alive. I just need to be sure he gets what he deserves. If the court doesn’t give it to him, I will.

  Jack sipped coffee in the kitchen, staring at nothing, until it was time to get dressed and go to work. He put on his suit and tie, clipped his badge and duty weapon to his belt, and climbed into his car.

  Hanging from the rearview mirror was the cross he’d given to Vicki on their second wedding anniversary. It had hung around her neck until the coroner removed it and placed it in an envelope for Jack. While Jack no longer believed in what the cross symbolized, he cherished the necklace because it had been near Vicki’s heart when it had beat its last.

  Half-listening to the radio, Jack would reach up from time to time and rub the cross between his thumb and forefinger as he drove. There’d been an officer-involved shooting last night. If he’d felt alive, he thought, the news would have given him a jolt. Homicide investigators handled all officer-involved shootings. But Jack felt no excitement, no drive to learn the details.

  He’d asked six months ago to be taken off the normal homicide rotation. Now he filed paper and reviewed cold cases all day. But not the pictures. Jack couldn’t stand the bodies anymore. In every female victim Jack saw Vicki’s mangled body and in every dead child the little girl they’d never had a chance to name.

  I’m a dead man working homicide, he thought. But only for two and a half more weeks. I just need to hang on for two and a half more weeks.