Bobby Joe Fannin spat a stream of brown tobacco juice.
“Settle down, boys.”
The dogs were straining at their leashes, ready to get it on, the girl’s scent fresh in their nostrils. Bobby Joe headed up the county’s canine search unit, a team of six bloodhounds he had raised from pups. Good job, good benefits, outside most of the time. Not as good as farming this land thirty years ago when his granddaddy still owned this land, but not bad. Except for finding dead people. Bobby Joe never liked that part of the job. Why did killers from the city always dump the bodies in the country?
On the radio: “Bobby Joe, come in.”
Bobby Joe pulled the radio off his belt and pushed the transmit button. “Yeah, Chief?”
He could barely make out Police Chief Ryan at the other end of the park; the search party was stretched out single file across the playing fields. Bobby Joe worked alone, just him and the dogs, which was another thing he liked about the job, not having to work with other people much. In his line of work, other people around just messed things up: the dogs could detect human scent, but they couldn’t distinguish between humans. Another human being around would throw them off the girl’s scent.
“Bobby Joe, we’re fixin’ to get going down here, ” the chief said. “Go ahead and start your dogs. You find something, you call me. Don’t touch nothing, you hear me?”
To his radio: “I done this before, Paulie.”
Bobby Joe had grown up with Paul Ryan. They had hunted this land together as boys-deer, wild hogs, quail-and these very woods for rabbit, back when these woods covered five hundred acres. His granddaddy said this was one of the last native post oak forests left on the high plains of Texas. But that was then and this was now and only a hundred acres were left. And Bobby Joe was hunting these woods for a little girl.
He spat again.
“Let’s go, boys,” he said, giving the dogs a little whistle. They set off into the woods, the dogs’ leashes in Bobby Joe’s right hand and the girl’s red-and-blue plaid school uniform in his left.
“Get off the goddamn grass!”
The chief said to make the mother happy, so Police Officer Eddie Yates was chasing the crowd of reporters and cameramen off the Brice’s landscaped front lawn. They took one look at him-the angular twenty-three-year-old face, the sharp flattop, the dark sunglasses, the bulging biceps that had the sleeves of his uniform ready to bust at the seams-and moved to the sidewalk, bitching as they did.
One riot, one Ranger.
Except Eddie wasn’t a Texas Ranger. He was a patrol cop in a small suburban police department that didn’t even have a SWAT team-not that it needed one, seeing as how the biggest crime the Town of Post Oak had to offer was kids passing around a beer under the bleachers at the little league field on Saturday nights. Eddie usually spent his shift working the town’s speed trap out on the freeway, nabbing speeders while dreaming of being on a big city SWAT team, wearing a black paramilitary uniform, packing military style assault weapons, busting down doors to drug houses, beating up gangsters, and fighting the war on drugs. He would take the Dallas Police Academy’s entrance exam for the fourth time this summer.
Fight back, Johnny-boy!
Be a man!
Go on, run home to mommy, Little Johnny Brice, you fuckin’ crybaby!
All the taunts from all the bullies at all the Army bases came rushing back now. Little Johnny Brice hadn’t been man enough to protect his own daughter at a public park. Just like he hadn’t been man enough back then to fight back against the bullies. When the colonel returned from deployment, Mom would beg him to stop the beatings and the colonel would order the bullies’ fathers to instill discipline in their ranks. But that had only made the beatings worse. He remembered the beatings and his face stung; but from Elizabeth’s hand today and the hurt would not go away.
Back then, he had gone inside himself, deep into his inner child while his outer child was getting the crap beat out of it. Afterward, he had run home to his room. Mom would always come in and hold him while he cried, and she would cry too; she would doctor his wounds and tell him it would never happen again. But it always happened again. Other kids had spent their childhood outside, learning to hit a curve ball; John had spent his in his room, hiding from bullies and teaching himself computer code.
Now, he had sought refuge in his home office, secluded on the backside of the house; he was hiding from his spouse and trying to escape the fear and loathing of the real world, as he often did. But there would be no escape this time. Fear and loathing had followed Little Johnny Brice home.
The phone rang. He let the machine take the call. It was Lou in New York, leaving another message: “John, did you get my earlier messages? Jesus Christ, it’s on the news up here. I’m stunned! I don’t know what to say, buddy. How could something like that happen in a public park? Man, I’m like… shit. Call me.” The machine beeped and went silent.
Because I wasn’t man enough to protect her, that’s how it happened!
A Cray supercomputer occupied the space inside John’s skull; his mind was capable of complex calculations and came with a near photographic memory-but he couldn’t remember yesterday.
Was the game just yesterday?
Elbows resting on the desk, hands gripping his head, eyes closed, John tried to reboot his memory: he’s sitting in the stands at the soccer field, talking to Lou about the IPO; Elizabeth has gone to the concession stand to find Gracie; then a piercing scream startles him so- Grace! He drops the phone and runs to the concession stand where parents are shouting for their children and panic is racing through the crowd like an e-mail virus until the panic and he reach Elizabeth simultaneously.
Grace is gone!
Gone where?
Taken!
Home?
No, goddamnit! Someone kidnapped her!
He has never before seen Elizabeth panicked and out of control, and it scares him. Then the sound of sirens, the police, the search in the woods. And Gracie was gone. And he might never see her again. And Little Johnny Brice hurt in a place the bullies could never touch.
“You’ve worked a hundred twenty-seven abductions?” the mother asked.
FBI Special Agent Eugene Devereaux nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”
“But no ransoms?”
“I’ve worked one ransom in thirty years with the Bureau. Not a child.”
He knew where this conversation would end. These conversations always ended there.
“Your job is to find abducted children?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And do you?”
“Do I what?”
“ Find abducted children?”
He gave her the same answer he always gave the parents, hoping they would not ask the logical follow-up question; most parents didn’t because they couldn’t bear to know the answer.
“Eventually.”
From the mother’s expression, he could tell her mind was working through his answer. Her mouth opened slightly and her eyes bore into him. She was a tough broad, tough enough to ask the follow-up question.
“Were any of the children found… alive?”
Looking at the mother, Devereaux found himself hoping mightily that her child had been abducted for money, as unlikely as that was. But he had hoped just as mightily one hundred twenty-seven times before for a happy ending to an abduction, each time in vain. One hundred twenty-seven abductions of children by strangers- ninety-three had ended with a dead child; the other thirty-four had never been found and were presumed dead-had taught him that holding out false hope only victimized the family a second time.
“No, ma’am.”
The mother’s entire body slumped. The tough-broad lawyer facade faded from her face; for a brief moment, Elizabeth Brice was just another desperate, tortured mother, no different from those dirt-poor mothers of victims living in trailer parks, because they now shared something in common-the peculiar pain of knowing your child was in the arms of a stranger. After a silence, she spoke, slowly and softly.