“Rye,” Hannah told him when he groaned at another photo of him and Grace, this time on the front page of USA Today. “What if Brodie is still alive? She might see you. She’ll recognize the name, if not the face. Maybe all this is a blessing.”
That was Hannah, always finding a positive spin, seeing blessings where Creed saw only chaos. That’s how she had saved him in the first place. Seven years ago she’d seen promise in the drunk and belligerent marine who had taken on three guys in a bar fight. It happened at the end of her shift at Walter’s Canteen on Pensacola Beach.
In all his life, Creed had never had to deal with an angry black woman, especially one whose anger came in a calm and measured sermon that had sobered him more than any drill sergeant ever had. Somehow he ended up with a mop in his hands, cleaning up broken glass and sticky beer, instead of in an alley with a busted skull or broken ribs.
It was Hannah who’d convinced Creed to use the skills he’d learned as a K9 handler in his marine unit to start his own business. And since that night she’d managed to become his business partner, his confidante, his counselor, his family. She was usually right, even about the things he didn’t want to admit. And maybe she’d be right about this.
Fifteen years ago his sister, Brodie, had disappeared, taken from an interstate rest stop. She was only eleven. Creed was fourteen. Brodie’s body had never been found. It ripped apart his parents and forced Creed to grow up too soon, haunted and forever burdened by that autumn day when suddenly Brodie wasn’t in the restroom anymore. She wasn’t anywhere to be found.
His search for her inspired Creed to start K9 CrimeScents. The company had grown into a multimillion-dollar operation with a dozen employees, a training facility on fifty acres, with a waiting list for their services as well as for the dogs Creed trained.
Every cadaver search got his hopes up, because even though Brodie had disappeared as a little girl, there was always the possibility that she had lived on for any part of the fifteen years she’d been missing. So every time Creed’s searches discovered a body — whether it was that of a child, a teenager, or a young woman — there was always a chance, always the slightest possibility, that it could be Brodie. And each time the body was identified as someone else, Creed felt the same overwhelming mixture of relief and misery. Relief that maybe, just maybe, his sister could still be alive. And misery, because if she was, what kind of a life was it?
Initially, when the despair from searching for dead bodies almost did him in, Hannah insisted Creed start training some of their dogs for search and rescue, and then she added bombs and drugs to the list. That was why she had him doing drug searches these past several weeks. When she found him passed out in his loft apartment or saw too many women coming and going, she knew he needed a break from tracking dead bodies. Otherwise the stench of death and the false hopes would suck the life right out of him.
So Creed told Hannah that he’d tolerate the media attention as long as it didn’t bother Grace. And he would do a few more drug searches. But this helicopter ride was bringing back other memories that Creed had not expected, and now he wished he’d said no to Hannah and to this assignment.
Grace licked his hand. She was staring at him. An intense stare was supposed to be her cue to him that she had found what they were searching for. Grace was one of his few multitask dogs. All Creed had to do was put a different vest or harness on her and Grace knew what he wanted her to sniff out. But this stare was different. Dogs could detect their handlers’ emotions, too, and Grace knew that something was wrong. She was an amazing little dog. He had found her half-starved and hiding underneath one of the double-wide trailers he kept for hired help. Hard to believe that someone had discarded her like trash. But then that was how Creed had gotten most of his dogs.
Hannah shook her head at him when he brought in another stray.
“Folks just taking advantage of your soft heart,” she’d tell Creed.
What no one understood, not even Hannah, was that the dogs he rescued — those abandoned mutts that were worthless to someone else — had flourished into some of his best search dogs. There was a loyalty, a bond between Creed and the dogs. He’d given them a purpose, a second chance. In a sense it was exactly what they’d given him.
But now, for Grace’s sake, he needed to shove aside those memories that had jolted him with the simple smell of diesel and the sound of the rotors. It was Grace’s first helicopter ride, but it was hardly Creed’s. Almost as soon as he’d boarded, the vibration had drummed out a rhythm that threatened to swallow his heartbeat. Without warning, his chest felt as if it might explode. He craned his neck so he could look out and down at the emerald-green water below. He took deep breaths and calmed his nerves. He tried to remind himself that it was the Gulf of Mexico under his feet and not the suffocating dust and rock of Afghanistan.
Times like this, it surprised him how much he could still feel that place. And yet, he had no one to blame but himself.
His mistake.
He’d been looking for an escape from his life and thought the marines would take him far away from his troubles, but instead he discovered that there were worse versions of hell than the one inside you.
“We’re almost there.” Commander Wilson’s voice blasted through Creed’s helmet, startling him a bit.
Creed scratched behind Grace’s ears — their signal that everything was okay. Finally she put her head down on his leg, but her ears were still pitched forward, letting him know that he wasn’t fooling her.
3
The water churned around them and the winds had picked up. Creed was impressed with the smooth landing that Commander Wilson had managed onto the deck of the Coast Guard cutter. Its crew had already halted the boat in question. The commercial fishing vessel, named Blue Mist, was a beaut. A seventy-foot long-liner that Creed guessed could keep at least eighty thousand pounds of fish in its hold. But the Coast Guard had reason to believe there might be something extra under that day’s catch.
Commander Wilson had explained earlier to Creed that the Coast Guard had been watching the Blue Mist for a couple of weeks now. It usually long-lined for mahi-mahi in the Gulf, following the fish’s migratory path. But recently the boat had started going down into the Caribbean Sea as far as the coast of Colombia. That in itself wasn’t unusual, except that the Coast Guard tracker watched the fishing boat pass by several mile-long stretches of sargassum. The brownish seaweed floats on the ocean surface, and mahi-mahi traditionally feed on the creatures attracted to it.
Now on board the Blue Mist, Creed looked down into the hold. He was struck by how beautiful the fish were, even piled up on top of one another. Their sides glittered gold, blue, and iridescent green, their bellies white and yellow. They were bigger than he expected, three to four feet long. The heads varied in size and shape, and he suspected that the difference was linked to whether they were male or female. Most of them had rounded heads, a few protruding above the body line.
“Mahi-mahi used to be bycatch fish,” Wilson said, and only then did Creed realize that the commander had followed and come up beside him. On the deck across from them, two guardsmen were getting an earful from a barrel-chested man in a ball cap, baggy trousers, and a white T-shirt, most likely the Blue Mist’s captain.
“Fishermen thought they were a pain because they’d end up on their longlines when they were trying to catch tuna and swordfish,” Commander Wilson continued without any encouragement from Creed. “Now restaurants are going crazy over mahi-mahi — including the European market.”