Critical Pursuit Read online

  Maggie had whispered, “Ooh, eye candy” to Brinna when she glimpsed Clark at the business desk. Brinna grudgingly admitted to herself that he was handsome, if maybe a little too GQ. A tall, well-built man with stylish glasses and wavy blond hair just long enough to be appealing, Clark had a quick smile that under different circumstances Brinna would have been attracted to. But she hated talking about herself.

  He pointed to the flyer taped on her dash. “Like why do you have this missing poster here?”

  Brinna glanced to the text she knew so well. “Heather Bailey is the most recent unsolved missing case from Long Beach. I use my free time to check up on any leads.”

  “She’s been missing a month. Any leads to follow up on tonight?”

  “Unfortunately, no.” Brinna bit her lip. She’d wanted to go by and check in with the Baileys before dark. No way with this reporter tagging along.

  “Statistics say she’s probably dead.” Clark tapped the dash with both index fingers.

  Brinna fought the urge to argue. “I doubt her parents would like to hear statistics right now. And I don’t give up until the case is closed.”

  Milo’s voice echoed in her mind. “A body, warm or cold, is the only thing that stops the search.” And the question that always pinched her thoughts when murdered children were the subject of conversation: Why was I saved when a kid like Heather might not be?

  “Is Hero classified as a cadaver dog?”

  With a quick shake of her head, Brinna cursed her luck. She’d wanted the conversation to turn to Hero, not to cadavers or dead kids.

  “Hero is scent-trained. I give him a scent and he trails it. He is not specifically a cadaver dog, no.”

  “He’s different from patrol dogs?”

  “Yeah. They’re trained to bite, tackle, chase—that kind of thing. Hero is trained to follow a scent and, once he finds the source, to sit and bark to alert me. He’s not paid for out of the same budget as the rest of the dogs. He’s paid for by a federal grant, a product of 9/11.”

  “I’ve heard he’s experimental. You think he’s working out?” His tapping was rhythmical now, a tune Brinna couldn’t name. “You’ve only found three kids in two years. Is that productive?”

  Brinna felt her face flush. Three live kids are better than three dead kids. The emergency beep of the radio cut off her response.

  “Any unit to handle, 415 shots, Eighteenth and Magnolia. CP reports hearing screams and then five to six gunshots.”

  The radio crackled with Maggie’s voice as she and Rick stepped up to handle the call in their beat. Brinna pressed the assist button on her computer and started toward the area.

  “Somebody get shot?” Clark asked, his voice an octave higher.

  “That’s what we need to find out,” Brinna answered as she planned the approach that would put her in the best position for backup.

  Maggie came on the air again to let everyone know her and Rick’s position.

  “We’re at Twenty-Third and the boulevard, so we’ll be coming from north of the dispatch location.”

  Brinna silently thanked her friend for the information. She was south of the call, so between her and Maggie, they formed the start of a perimeter if there was a shooter to catch. She cruised along Tenth Street, waiting for Maggie to position other backup units, intending to cross Magnolia and head north up the next north-south street.

  The whine of a revved engine coming her way took Brinna’s attention from the radio. She hit the brakes, saving the black-and-white from a broadside collision. A speeding car blew the red light right in front of the Explorer and roared south down Magnolia, barely missing the police cruiser’s front bumper.

  Grabbing the radio mike, she slammed the accelerator down and turned left after the speeder.

  “1-King-8, I’m following a vehicle, high rate of speed, southbound Magnolia. It’s a Chevy, possibly an older Monte Carlo, running with no lights, blowing red lights and stop signs.”

  She saw the reporter grab the dash and heard Hero slide across the back of the Explorer as her tires barely held the turn.

  Clipping the mike back to its holder, Brinna flipped on her lights and siren and glanced at the speedometer. Her speed neared fifty and she wasn’t gaining on the Chevy. She heard dispatch question Maggie, asking her to determine whether or not the speeding car was related to the shots call.

  Brinna punched the radio’s volume button, ramping up the volume as her body ramped up with a surge of adrenaline. Am I chasing the shooter? She forgot Clark.

  The Chevy narrowly missed cross traffic at Sixth Street. Brinna slowed at the crosswalk, then stomped the accelerator as soon as she was clear. Now the Chevy was careening toward Third Street. For the first time Brinna saw taillights as the driver hit the brakes.

  “He’s going too fast. He’ll never make the turn.” She watched as the speeding car cut the right turn too close and smacked the curb, fishtailing westbound onto Third Street.

  Brinna winced. Third Street was a one-way street, eastbound.

  The tail end of the Chevy momentarily disappeared from sight, tires squealing in protest. Then Brinna heard the bang and piercing squeal of crunching metal as the car crashed.

  Skidding to a stop at Third Street, Brinna leaned forward, checked right, and saw stopped headlights. On the south side of the street sat the Chevy, smoking from the impact with a light pole. Miraculously it’d missed oncoming traffic and broadsided only the pole.

  Proceeding cautiously, light bar still activated but siren off, Brinna positioned her vehicle between oncoming traffic and the Chevy. She motioned vehicles around the wreck.

  “Stay here,” she ordered Clark.

  Hero stood, ears pricked with interest, waiting for the call to work. Maggie’s voice sizzled over the radio confirming that the speeding car did contain the shooter from her call.

  Standing outside the open door of the Explorer but behind the door itself, Brinna keyed her handheld radio and explained the crash to dispatch, keeping her eyes on the wreck. The smell of burning rubber and oil hung in the air like an acrid fog. Every couple of seconds something hissed from the wreckage. It wasn’t completely dark yet, and as she peered into the smoky mess, she saw no movement, no one visible behind the steering wheel. The light pole had just about cut the Chevy in half between the front and back seats.

  Replacing the radio, she sent a glance toward Clark. He was making himself small under the dashboard.

  Sirens screamed in the distance as backup and paramedics raced her way. Has he run? she wondered, even as she scanned the surrounding area. There was no place for him to go. He’d crashed next to a fenced construction lot, and there was no way he could have reached cover in the time it took Brinna to park her car.

  Where is he?

  Brinna started for the mangled Chevy, moving cautiously. Halfway to the car, movement near the driver’s side caught her eye. A man, outside the driver’s door, rose to face her, but she couldn’t focus on his face. Her focus zeroed in on the gun in his hand, pointed at her chest.

  Brinna jerked to her right as she drew her duty weapon. She saw the muzzle flash of the suspect’s gun before she heard the bang and felt the bullet whiz by her ear.

  Raising her gun to the target, she continued moving toward cover, pressing the trigger twice as she dove behind a dark-green mailbox, scraping shoulder, elbow, hip. Half on her back, half on her side, she scrambled to pull the lifeline of the radio from her belt.

  “998, 998!” Brinna yelled the code for shots fired into her radio and then took a breath. “Not sure if the suspect is down. He’s east of me. All units approaching, the suspect is on Third Street, west of Magnolia, and still armed.”

  After waiting a few beats and hearing nothing but approaching sirens, Brinna pulled herself to her knees and peered around the mailbox. Several units squealed to a stop at the intersection. Before long, Brinna was surrounded by friendly forces. Together they set up a perimeter, certain they had the bad guy encircled and trappe
d.

  “No movement from the car.” The downtown sergeant, Klein, was on scene and taking control. He’d come in from the west and Brinna had moved to meet with him behind his black-and-white. “We’ll try calling him out. If there’s no response, I’ll send someone in.” He nodded toward her unit. “How’s that ride-along?”

  Brinna slapped her forehead. “I forgot about him. I’d better check.” The safest place for the reporter was in the Explorer, but Brinna wondered if he had the sense to know that.

  She made her way to the Ford. There were two other units in front of the K-9 vehicle now, officers at the ready. Brinna heard Klein on the PA, calling the Chevy’s driver, ordering him out, as she peered inside the Explorer. She sighed and choked back a smile. The reporter still had his head down, hiding. Hero gave a whine that said he was ready to work, and Brinna flashed a hand gesture telling him to sit and stay.

  “You okay?” she asked Clark.

  He looked up at her and nodded, face blanched. “What’s going on?”

  “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.

  3

  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.

  4

  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,” Office
r 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.

  5

  “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.