Jacqueline Diamond - The Doctor's Little Secret

“If I had girlfriends like that, I wouldn’t let them anywhere near you clowns,” Rachel returned. “Excuse me. Some of us have to patrol. We can’t all work sissy desk jobs.”

Hale snorted. Derek, who seemed less than thrilled about his recent assignment as head of community relations and public information, scowled.

Rachel would hate flying a desk. She loved wearing a uniform and a gun, and enjoyed a little physical action now and then to set the juices flowing.

Too bad she wasn’t getting any physical action in her personal life. At five foot eleven, she either intimidated men or inspired them…to invite her to join their softball team. If she ever met Mr. Right, she’d have to arrest him to reach first base.

Wait. Scratch the reference to first base.

“I wish you wouldn’t encourage them,” muttered Elise Masterson, the other woman on the swing shift. “They’re sexist enough as it is.” She fell into step beside Rachel as they walked toward the back of the building.

“Were they being sexist?” Rachel had difficulty figuring out the finer points of political correctness.

She sympathized with Elise, whose efforts to skin back her blond hair in a bun did little to discourage the masculine attention she considered so annoying. Men had an amazing ability to detect curves even beneath a Kevlar vest.

“Never mind,” Elise answered. “We have more important things to focus on. Finding that lost kid, for instance.”

They’d been advised during briefing to watch for a three-year-old girl named Nina Franco who’d wandered away from her parents a few hours earlier. An intensive search was in progress around the park where she’d vanished.

With luck, some well-meaning civilian would bring Nina in before dark. The disappearance of a child was unusual in the Los Angeles suburb of Villazon. Although it had its share of burglaries and domestic assaults, by and large residents felt safe.

Outside, Elise strode off across the rain-dampened parking lot. A couple of male colleagues paused en route to their cars to study the sway of her butt, graceful despite the heavy lace-up boots.

In high school, Rachel had submitted to dance classes in an attempt to refine her own clunky strut. After she accidentally kicked a classmate and pulled the barre loose from the wall, the teacher had advised her to try the wrestling team. Good suggestion.

Glamour still evaded Rachel with a vengeance. A few months earlier, hoping to update her style, she’d dyed her brown hair to what was supposed to be auburn. It had emerged a brassy red that was still growing out.

Well, she had the right build and temperament for her dream job. What more could a girl ask?

The air smelled of wet asphalt, a testament to the February rains that had soaked Southern California for the past few weeks. Rachel tried not to think about the sodden slope behind her condominium or the risk of its collapsing. Out of her control, so why worry?

Her assigned car was a different matter. Rachel took nothing for granted. Before getting in, she checked the gas level and the tires, tested the lights and oil level, made a survey for any unreported dents and poked around the backseat to make sure some arrestee on an earlier shift hadn’t stashed contraband.

Satisfied, she stowed a gear-filled bag in the trunk and, beside her, secured a metal box containing paperwork and forms. She didn’t want stuff sent flying during a pursuit.

Then, strapping herself into the driver’s seat and switching on the two-way radio and the small computer screen known as a mobile data terminal, she called dispatch to report that she was in service.

Rolling out on patrol provided the usual burst of energy. Rachel treasured the independence and the challenge. On the street, she became her own boss.

Her assigned patrol area today encompassed the central section of Villazon. There was nothing flashy about Rachel’s hometown, she mused as she merged into the flow of traffic, her windows rolled down so she could monitor street noises. Despite its location within a dozen or so miles of Hollywood, movie stars never set foot here unless they got lost fleeing the paparazzi.

The community of fifty thousand offered a mix of shops and office buildings in its core area, along with blocks of Craftsman cottages dating back to the twenties and thirties. Cruising past yards filled with rosebushes and tricycles, Rachel enjoyed the town’s old-fashioned feel. Even its special events had an endearing corniness, she reflected.

Each May, the Pickle Parade celebrated the town’s former claim to fame as the site of a large pickling plant that had processed cucumbers from surrounding fields. The fields were gone, and the pickle factory survived as a farmer’s market that imported most of its produce from either Imperial County, California, or Mexico. Rachel wasn’t sentimental, though. She liked shopping for gifts at In a Pickle.

As she wove a random pattern through the neighborhoods and listened to the radio chatter, she kept watch for Nina. Three feet tall, twenty-five pounds, straight dark locks and brown eyes that smiled from the photo clipped to Rachel’s visor. Last seen wearing blue pants and a pink top with a white bunny on the front.

The searchers near the park hadn’t found her. One witness reported a child of a similar description entering a car driven by a gray-haired man. As Rachel noted the information, her heart squeezed. Kids that age were so helpless and trusting. The possibility of someone harming a child aroused a deeper anger in her than any other crime.

Rachel didn’t remember much from her own life at that age, and what she did recall, she preferred to forget. An alcoholic mother, absent father…Luckily she’d been adopted by a new family who provided as much love and support as a child could ask.

Nina’s image stayed at the forefront of Rachel’s thoughts. After pulling over and citing a gray-haired driver who’d run a red light, she visually inspected the car’s interior and asked him to open his trunk. He complied willingly once she explained the reason, and revealed nothing more threatening than a bag of groceries.

Later, she backed up another officer checking on an elderly woman whose daughter couldn’t reach her by phone. Rachel scanned the children who gathered outside to gawk at the squad car, but none resembled Nina. Indoors, they found the woman with a broken hip and requested an ambulance.

As Rachel returned to her car, early-winter twilight was closing in. On the radio, the exchanges about the search acquired a grim tone. With this lengthy an absence, the possibility of foul play increased.

Still, the story of the gray-haired motorist might be a red herring. If an older child had found Nina and invited her to play, perhaps they’d headed for a playground near the civic center.

Rachel checked out the nearest one, but the slides and climbing equipment stood empty. It was nearly six o’clock. If any children had been there earlier, they were long gone.

Frustrated, she cruised an alley behind the library, passed the post office and crossed the boulevard to the town’s medical complex. This late on a Friday, the doctors’ building beside the Mesa View Medical Center would be deserted, but she decided to make a circuit of the parking structure just the same. You never knew when you’d come across a stolen car listed on one of the hot sheets from briefing.

On the second level, past a support pillar, she glimpsed something that made her mouth go dry. A little girl, the bunny on her T-shirt smeared with dirt, sat on a car bumper while a man knelt on the concrete floor. He’d pulled up one leg of her blue pants and was holding her ankle.

All Rachel could observe of him was a tailored suit and powerful shoulders. Then, evidently hearing her approach, he glanced back. The flat overhead lighting showed nearly black hair graying around the temples.