I looked away from the traffic, reached across the front seat of the van and covered Katie’s hand with mine. Our eyes met, and the smile that passed between us was sad and full of memory. And though I was sixteen and old enough to know better, I wished that I could go back in time. Wished for a chance to run faster, to find a cop sooner, to be brave enough to stay and fight by Katie’s side. I wished for a chance to save my sister just as she’d saved me.
Gran always said to be careful what you wished for.
Chapter 1
Eight years later
Lust.
That’s what any thought of Chad Robinson’s muscular six-foot-two frame, copper hair and green eyes inspired. The sound of his deep voice with its down-home drawl inevitably notched lust up another level, pushing almost-nostalgic warmth in the direction of aching desire. Not a particularly good way to feel about a man I was determined not to fall back in love or in bed with.
So when I answered the phone on a hot, humid evening in mid-June and heard Chad’s voice on the line, I kept my thoughts focused on the business at hand, not the memory of his hands. It was a good strategy for ex-lovers who were determined to remain friends.
In the time it had taken me to cross the kitchen and lift the cordless phone from its cradle, Chad had apparently been distracted from his call. When I put the phone to my ear, he was already speaking to someone in the background.
“Yeah. Good idea. The water gets pretty deep in those ditches. As soon as Brooke and her search dog are headed this way, I’ll take the southbound stretch and do the same….”
“Hey there,” I said by way of greeting, personal issues abruptly irrelevant as the snatch of conversation hinted at the reason for his call. “What’s going on?”
Chad’s attention returned to the phone.
“We’ve got a missing toddler, Brooke. Family lives northwest of town. The forest is right in their backyard. I checked the map. The house is in Maryville jurisdiction.”
As a deputy sheriff for Hardin County, Chad usually patrolled the southern Illinois towns of Humm Wye, Peters Creek, Iron Furnace and everything in between. When no cop was on duty in Maryville, his patrol looped a bit farther south to include the town where the two of us had grown up. Undoubtedly, that had happened tonight. Because, at the moment, Maryville’s entire police force was off duty and standing barefoot in the middle of her kitchen, considering dinner possibilities.
Chad gave me directions that started at the intersection of two meandering county roads. From there, he described his location in tenths of a mile and natural landmarks.
“How fast can you and Possum get here?” he said.
Away from the bluffs of the Ohio River, where the original town had been built, Maryville’s ragged boundaries were created by fingers of human habitation jamming deep into the vast Shawnee National Forest. I lived at the tip of one of those fingers. The missing child’s home was on another, in an area of expensive, very isolated homes. Even with four-wheel drive and a native’s intimate knowledge of the area’s back roads…
“I need half an hour,” I said, then asked him for details.
With the receiver held between my ear and shoulder, I listened to him talk as I walked halfway down the hall to my bedroom. There, I snatched a pair of jeans and a long-sleeved denim shirt from the closet. Though the T-shirt and cutoffs I’d changed into when I’d gone off duty were more appropriate to June’s hot and humid weather, they were poor protection against branches and thorns. I wasn’t even tempted to change back into my uniform. Maryville’s budget paid for one replacement uniform annually. Not quite a year as a rookie cop in the town’s newly created one-person department, and I was already out-of-pocket for two uniforms.
But uniform or not, and although Chad was the responding officer, the location of the house meant that I was not just a searcher, I was also the police officer in charge. So I began gathering the information I needed for both those roles as I exchanged shorts for jeans and slipped the long-sleeved shirt over my T-shirt. I clipped my shiny Maryville PD badge onto the shirt’s breast pocket.
“When the call came in, I had dispatch contact the forest service and pull some rangers from the Elizabethtown district office,” Chad said. “They’re searching the immediate area.”
“You’ve already searched the house?”
“Yep. First thing,” Chad said matter-of-factly. “Every room, every closet, behind the furniture and under all the beds. I checked the garden shed and the garage, too.”
I nodded, pleased by the information. All too often, cops and inexperienced searchers focused their attention on searching areas beyond the house right away, only later discovering a lost child fast asleep in a closet or in the backseat of the family car. Or, more tragically, overcome by heat in an attic crawl space.
“The parents are sure Tina’s wandered off,” Chad continued. “That’s her name. Tina Fisher. Did I tell you she’s four years old? The parents have been searching for her since sunset. Sure wish they’d of called us right away.”
But they hadn’t, which was typical.
Chad provided me with a few more sketchy details as I re-crossed the kitchen, snatched two bottles of lime-flavored Gatorade and a handful of granola bars—tonight’s dinner—from refrigerator and pantry. Then I moved my shoulder to hold the phone more securely against my cheek as I sat down on a wooden bench by the back door and laced on a pair of oiled-leather hiking boots.
From his nearby cushion, my old German shepherd, Highball, wagged his tail and woofed twice, ever hopeful that when I put on boots it meant playtime for him. But Highball was too old for this kind of search. Too old, really, for any kind of search.
“Brooke? You still there?”
“Yeah,” I said slowly. “Give me a minute….”
I spent that minute trying to figure out if I was seeking feedback from a cop far more experienced than I, one who’d been on the force for three years and in the military police before that. Or if I was simply looking for the kind of reassurance that only an old friend or an ex-lover can provide. In the end, I gave up on sorting it out and simply blurted out what was on my mind.
“What’s your feeling on this one, Chad? Do you think she’s really lost?”
It was his turn to hesitate. And I suspected that he, too, was recalling a cool day in early spring more than a year earlier. Back when I was still a civilian, when the county police force knew me as that gal who helped out when folks got lost. Or maybe as the gal that Officer Robinson intended to marry, if only she’d get around to saying yes. Back then, I already suspected that the only possible answer I could give Chad was no. But I still hoped that when folks said that love conquered all, those conquests might include guilt and deception. The reality was, love couldn’t stand up to either.
Anyway, on that particular spring day, Highball and I had been called in to look for another missing child. Possum was still more puppy than adult, and the older dog had always been a marvel at in-town searches, capable of ignoring the distractions of traffic and onlookers and the confusion of scents.
We found the body near a sagging post-and-wire fence that did a poor job of separating a run-down trailer
