Critical Pursuit (3 page)

“We’re trying to get a fix on the suspect. You stay down. I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.” She returned to where Sergeant Klein directed the situation. He sent two officers along the ground behind the wreck to get a visual on the suspect.

“He’s down, not moving,” they reported after a few minutes.

A moment later, they confirmed their suspicion. The man was dead. One of Brinna’s bullets had hit its mark.

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 Bridges 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.

Bridges 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.

NIGEL PEARCE
read the headline three times before he slid a couple of quarters in the slot and bought a copy of the newspaper. “Local Cop Tells Pedophiles, ‘Watch Out; I’m After You.’”

He sat down on a bus bench and unfolded the front page to read the entire article under a streetlight:

Local K-9 officer Brinna Caruso seeks to right twenty-year-old wrong.

Twenty years ago this month, six-year-old Brinna was snatched off a dusty Lancaster sidewalk in broad daylight by a stranger. The man drove her to a desolate section of the desert, molested her, and then left her tied to a railing outside an abandoned building.

Nigel stopped reading and studied the picture of the cop with her dog. It showed a sturdy-looking, dark-haired woman in uniform. She had an olive complexion, brown eyes, and short-cropped hair.

What a determined expression on her face.
Nigel figured she was probably attractive to some, but she was way too old for him.

Setting the paper on his lap, he leaned back and tried to remember her as one of his Special Girls but couldn’t.

But I did have one or two in Lancaster back then. She must have been one. I just can’t place her face. There have been too many girls in between. I never hurt my precious Special Girls. I simply leave them. If they’re found, they’re found. If not, well, that’s up to fate.

Now,
he thought,
fate has apparently brought this Special Girl across my path again, twenty years later. There must be a reason.
He picked up the paper and continued reading:

Nearly forty-eight hours after she was left to die in the desert by her attacker, Brinna was miraculously rescued by a sheriff’s deputy K-9 officer. Deputy Gregor Milovich, aka Milo, followed a hunch and unleashed his dog, Scout, outside the grid his fellow officers were searching. He came across a purple Care Bear, identified as Brinna’s, and kept going, working twenty-four hours with no sleep. He and Scout found Brinna at 5:30 in the morning.

Though cold and frightened, Brinna showed some of the pluckiness that characterizes her now, telling Milovich, “That mean man took my Care Bear.”

“I don’t really remember everything that happened that night,” Officer Caruso says now. “What I do remember is Milo and his dog coming
to my rescue. I knew right then and there that’s what I would do when I grew up.”

Now, at twenty-six, Brinna Caruso has realized her dream. She’s been a police officer with Long Beach for five years, two as the K-9 handler for Hero.

Last year she made news when she and Hero found Alonso Parker, the toddler kidnapped by known sex offender Darius Graves. Hero tracked the child to a garage in an abandoned building where Graves was living, before Graves could complete his plan to molest the boy and sell pictures on the Internet.

“It’s all about bringing kids home safe,” Caruso said. “Megan’s Law was the best thing to happen to kids because it allows people access to information about known sex offenders. If we can keep track of pedophiles, we have a better chance of keeping kids safe. I don’t believe child molesters are ever cured. Making sure they register with law enforcement and mind their p’s and q’s is the only way to limit their opportunities to reoffend.”

Stopping again, Nigel smiled.
Provided, of course, they are caught and forced to register.
He snickered.
I’m smarter than that. They didn’t catch me twenty years ago, and except for that one slip ten years ago, they’ll never catch me again.

He ran his hand over the cop’s picture.
Maybe I should plan something to celebrate our twentieth anniversary.

Something very special.

“HOW DO YOU FEEL
about everything you just walked us through?” Doc Bell, the LBPD psychologist, leaned casually against a light pole. The brightening morning sky had caused the light to click off a few minutes before.

Brinna inhaled deeply and considered how to answer the “soul slicer,” as Milo would call him. While she had nothing against psychologists in general, she felt uncomfortable with the probing they did. Brinna preferred asking questions to being asked. At this moment, Bell reminded her of a psychologist she’d talked to twenty years ago after her rescue. Back then, all she’d wanted to do was go home to her Care Bears, but that man couldn’t believe anything was so simple. He wanted shades of gray, and to Brinna
 
—back then, as now
 
—the entire incident was black-and-white.

I was snatched and then rescued. Home was all I wanted. Tonight I was shot at and I shot back. And all I want right now is my own bed.

What shade of gray is Bell after?

“I’m not sure what you want me to say.” She held the doctor’s gaze, unable to read him.

“Just what I asked. How do you feel?” He smiled. “It’s not a trick question.”

“I feel lucky.” She shrugged. “It could just as easily have been me under that blue tarp.” She crossed her arms, conscious that her hands were shaking. Bell had already told her that was a normal reaction to the adrenaline roller coaster she’d been on that night.

He nodded. “You’ll probably replay the incident over and over in your mind.” He waved a hand at the others still milling around the scene
 
—the chief, the handling homicide detective, members of the DA’s shooting team. They’d all participated in a walk-through of the incident, where Brinna explained the events while they were fresh in her mind.

“No one here thought anything seemed wrong with the shooting. Remember that when the flashbacks come.”

“I’ll do that.” She relaxed, tension in her shoulders easing. Bell wasn’t going to try to dig for something that wasn’t there. She moved him to an okay list in her mind.

“Come see me if you feel the need. Other than that, I think you’re fine to return to duty after your mandatory three days off.” He shook her hand and walked off to confer with the chief. After a few minutes they both climbed into an unmarked car and drove away.

“I take it that went well.” Ben Carney, the homicide investigator, broke her chain of thought.

“Yeah.” Brinna exhaled. “He says I’m fine, normal.” She arched an eyebrow. “Got him fooled, huh?” She liked Ben.
They’d worked together briefly when she’d finished her probationary period, the first year in patrol after academy graduation, and she’d always thought of him as a solid cop.

Ben smiled. “Everything is clean so far, so I have to agree with him. Only thing that will make it cleaner,” he added, “is finding the slug the guy fired at you. We’re still searching.”

“I hope it didn’t end up embedded in a car driving by.” Brinna followed his gaze down the street.

“This was your first shooting, wasn’t it?” Ben asked.

Brinna nodded.

“You did what you had to,” Ben said.

“He didn’t give me any choice.” Brinna sighed. “I’m just glad instinct kicked in. Sorry he’s dead. Glad I’m not.”

“Me too. You can take off now, get some sleep. Try not to worry about any of this.”

“Thanks, Ben.” She shook his hand and practically ran to the Explorer. Clark, the reporter, was long gone. After he threw up in the street when he witnessed the scene, an assisting unit had driven him home.

Once inside the car, she hugged Hero, then pulled out her cell phone. Though she knew the shooting was justified and she’d done the only thing she could do, she craved a solid debriefing by Milo. He always knew what to say about any situation, better than any psychologist. But the phone was answered by the click of voice mail. Brinna slapped her forehead even as Milo’s recorded voice told her to leave a message. She’d forgotten about the Mexican fishing trip.

She snapped the phone shut and put the Explorer in gear just as the coroner’s van pulled up. Brinna watched as an
investigator she’d worked with often climbed out and headed toward the tarp-covered body. There’d been no ID on the man, so among other things it would be the coroner’s responsibility to determine his identity. That would be the easy part. They’d probably never be able to determine why the mutt went on a shooting rampage.

Brinna shook her head and pulled away from the scene, yawning. She directed the Explorer to the station. When she arrived, the clock on the dash told her it was 9:30 in the morning, seven hours past end of watch or EOW.

She headed for the locker room to drop some stuff off and pick up a fresh uniform. Inside, she saw Maggie dozing on a cot. A well-placed smack to a metal locker with her baton brought Brinna the desired result. Maggie jerked up, the disorientation of an abrupt awakening all over her face.

“Hey, sleepyhead, don’t you want to go home?” Brinna spoke in a singsong voice.

Her friend’s expression cleared and she stood, yawned, and stretched. “You just ruined the best dream. But since I was waiting for you, I’ll let that pass. I never made it to the shooting scene. How’re you doing?”

Brinna worked the lock on her locker and jerked it open. “I’m fine, just tired.”

She yawned as Maggie had. Though she was physically exhausted, her mind still whirled with impressions of the chase and the shooting. The afterimages played as if she’d watched the incident unfold but hadn’t participated.

“I fired from reflex. I guess all that stuff they say when we’re training at the range is true.”

“About reverting to what you’ve learned during stress shooting?” Maggie asked. “Muscle memory and all that?”

“Yeah. I reacted.” Brinna shrugged. “Hate to say I got lucky, but that’s what it felt like. What was the guy’s problem? I heard he shot two at your scene.”

Maggie nodded. “Neither of my victims was cooperative about identifying their assailant. It was witnesses who saw the shooter split in the Monte Carlo. The victims’ injuries are minor. One got hit in the arm, the other in the foot. Some kind of gang beef. They probably want their own retaliation. Homicide will have their work cut out for them sorting it all out.”

“Ben Carney is the lead on my end. He’ll probably end up with both cases.” Brinna stretched, her gun belt feeling as though it weighed a hundred pounds. She closed the locker and hung her clean uniform on the lock.

“Good; he’ll be thorough.” Maggie stepped to the mirror, groaned, and waved both hands at the mirror as if to make the image go away.

Brinna chuckled. “He helped me relax a lot before the walk-through, and things went okay.”

“I saw the chief and Doc Bell when they came back to the station.” Maggie rubbed bloodshot eyes. “They didn’t seem upset about anything. I’m sure the shooting is clean.”

Brinna nodded and tapped the locker with a knuckle. “You know the drill. I’ve got three days off. Since last night was Monday, I don’t have to be at work for six whole days.” She held up one open hand and an index finger on the other. Her normal schedule had her working four ten-hour days
with a three-day weekend. But the shooting meant that the mandatory three days off would extend her weekend.

Maggie groaned. “Show-off. I’m jealous.”

Brinna grabbed her uniform, and then she and Maggie headed for the door.

“Not only is six days off awesome,” Brinna gloated, “but I got the interview with Dr. Bell out of the way. I don’t have to visit his office unless I want to.”

“Excellent. No one wants to visit him during normal business hours.” Maggie rolled her eyes.

Brinna nodded as they walked out of the locker room. Most cops were like Milo when it came to psychologists. “Stay out of my head,” he would say.

“By the way, since you keep up with all the department gossip, where is Ben’s partner?” Brinna asked. “He was by himself at the scene.”

“Jack O’Reilly?” Maggie snorted. “I hear he’s a certified nutcase now. Went around the bend when his wife died, hasn’t come back. I’m sorry he suffered such a loss, but speaking of the psychologist, I’m surprised he hasn’t relieved the guy of duty.”

“But I thought I saw O’Reilly walking to the station from the parking structure as I pulled in. He’s a tall redheaded guy, right?”

“That’s him. He’s still in homicide physically. I think he’s working Ken Opie’s job, reviewing cold cases, until Opie gets back from knee surgery. Mentally, I think he’s
 
—” Maggie made a circle around her ear with an index finger
 
—“about five fries short of a Happy Meal.”

They’d reached Brinna’s Explorer. “So what are you going to do with all your time off?” Maggie asked. “If it were me, I’d be on the beach the whole time.”

“Right now I feel like I need to unwind with a short kayak trip,” Brinna said as she opened the door to her SUV. Hero stood to greet her with a wagging tail and a K-9 yawn.

“I knew you didn’t know how to relax.”

“Kayaking
is
relaxing. Besides, I have to burn off the residual adrenaline. Then I’ll sleep.”

“Okay, just take care. If you need to talk, call me.”

“Will do. See you later.”

Brinna climbed into the driver’s seat. She turned and checked on Hero in the back, who lay curled up on his mat.

“Well, we’ve got six days off. What do you want to do?” Getting only a tail thump in response, Brinna started the SUV and turned right out of the station lot. The two news vans parked in front of the station didn’t escape her notice.

“I know they’re here about the shooting,” she said as she glanced in the rearview mirror at their shrinking images. “Glad we won’t be around for the start of the circus.”

At home Brinna shed her gun belt and jumpsuit in favor of shorts and a tank top. She fed Hero first, then made herself a tuna sandwich, taking a seat at her computer to check her e-mail while she munched.

Above her computer screen hung a shelf loaded with Care Bears and Beanie Babies. She made a mental note to grab a couple to put in her car. She still hadn’t replaced the ones she’d given to Josh.

While she waited for the computer to power up, she
glanced over to her Wall of Slime. Tacked on the west wall of her office were information posters containing the faces and statistics of twenty high-risk sex offenders residing in the city of Long Beach.

Overall, Long Beach was home to nearly eight hundred registered sex offenders. Brinna had chosen the worst of the lot to post in her office and “ride rail on,” as Maggie liked to say.

Shifting her gaze to the east side of the room, Brinna perused the Innocent Wall. There, ten missing posters lined up in three rows, the most recent cases on the top, stared back at her. Heather Bailey’s smiling face was first
 
—the same poster Brinna kept in her car. The eight-year-old had disappeared without a trace from her front yard a month ago.

A ding from her computer indicating she had mail brought Brinna back to the screen. Four e-mails awaited her. The first message was from Chuck Weldon, the local FBI agent. She paused before she hit Open, anxiety tingling her fingertips at the thought of what news Chuck’s message might bring.

The FBI generally took over any missing case labeled a stranger abduction. Chuck could be sending her bad news about Heather. Sighing, Brinna opened the message. The contents were a mild relief. No news on Heather. Chuck just sent an update on how the last lead panned out: nowhere.

She remembered what a fight it had been to get the department to recognize her as a search-and-rescue specialist, a position that didn’t exist anywhere on the Long Beach Police Department. Finding a toddler named Alonso Parker had silenced a lot of opposition and opened a door she’d charged through.

Hero didn’t need to be a normal patrol dog chasing criminals, she’d argued. He was scent-trained. He could find kids and he’d proved it.

Chuck had provided the nudge the brass needed. He stepped in and agreed with her. After that, the sergeant in homicide sat down with Sergeant Rodriguez in the K-9 detail and okayed Brinna’s freelancing into missing children cases. There was no position in the LBPD budget for a full-time missing person patrol officer. But Hero’s grant and the FBI’s endorsement allowed Brinna to be the closest thing to it.

She ran her hand over the plaque she kept to one side of her computer monitor, given by her patrol shift teammates:
To the Kid Crusader, Our Search-and-Rescue Stud
.

She punched open the second message, from the Center for Missing and Exploited Children. The text contained an alert about a ten-year-old boy missing in Utah. Brinna checked her watch. The kid had gone missing about the same time she’d been facing off the lunatic in the Monte Carlo.

Ignoring the next two messages, both from her mother, Brinna finished her sandwich and downed the remainder of her Diet Coke. She walked across the hall to her bedroom, where Hero slept curled up on her bed, and pulled a map of western states from her nightstand, tracing the route to Bryce Canyon, Utah, with her finger.

Utah is way out of my hundred-mile radius for weekend searches,
she thought,
but very possible with my time off. And the desert is a horrible place for a kid to be lost.

As often happened when thinking about children lost and alone, for a second Brinna was six again and back in the
desert outside of Lancaster, leaning against the post she’d been tied to and crying.

Shaking away the memory, she focused on the facts and went back to her desk. The first hours were the most important. She rubbed her forehead, her gaze running over the audience of stuffed animals. Milo’s words again echoed in her mind:
“Never give up until we’ve got a body, dead or alive.”

She thought about Heather and refused to admit that things didn’t look good for the little girl. She still considered the search active, but it had been a month and all leads had dried up.

This kid in Utah had gone missing hours ago. It was fresh. They had a chance to find him.
And a search will go miles toward getting my mind off the shooting.