Kate James - Home To Stay

“We have a missing child. Four years old. He reportedly wandered away from his family’s campsite. We don’t know how long he’s been gone, but the State Park Rangers don’t want to take any chances. They’ve asked for our assistance in finding the boy. They need all the help they can get to cover the twenty-six thousand acres of forest, should it come to that.”

Shannon was familiar with the park, roughly forty miles east of San Diego in the Laguna Mountains. She’d frequented it with her family and her childhood friend, Kenny, when she was younger, and now she liked to go hiking there. In fact, she’d run training exercises in the park with Darwin.

But a missing child...that was not what she would’ve wanted for her first solo search assignment.

She tried to ignore the cold dread that slithered along her spine and wrote down the particulars.

The missing boy was four-year-old Dylan Evans. His father, a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law. Shannon’s heart went out to the man. She was certain the last thing he would’ve expected when he went camping with his family was that he’d wake up in the early hours of the morning to discover that his son had somehow gotten out of their tent and disappeared. Dylan was potentially alone in a wilderness that was home to mountain lions and other creatures that posed a threat to a young boy’s survival.

Oh, she was well aware of the hazards a child could face in the park on his own. Time was very much of the essence.

“I’m on it,” she said and glanced at her clock again. “I should be there in under an hour.”

She didn’t bother to shower. While Darwin ate his breakfast, she had a toasted bagel, then dressed quickly. To get her chin-length blond hair in some semblance of order, she ran a wet brush through it. She retrieved her equipment duffel from the bottom of her closet and rushed down the stairs.

Ten minutes after she’d received the call from Dispatch, she and Darwin were in her SDPD-issue Ford Explorer heading to Cuyamaca Park. The adrenaline was pumping, a good thing, since it was blocking out the dread.

She could do this. She would do this.

A child’s life depended on it.

As she merged onto I-5 San Diego Freeway South, a moment of guilt had her wondering if she should’ve told her captain about Charlie. Would that have made a difference? Would it have kept Logan from assigning her to search and rescue? It was too late for second-guessing. She’d simply have to do the best she could.

When her phone rang, she answered it.

“Shannon, it’s Logan.”

Speak of the devil. “I’m on my way,” she assured her captain.

“Good. I knew you would be. I wanted to tell you that you’re up for this. You’re skilled and so is Darwin. Two of the best rookies I’ve worked with.”

She could hear the sincerity in his voice. The pep talk bolstered her confidence. “Thanks, Jagger,” she said, calling Logan by his alias. “I appreciate your belief in me.”

“It’s earned. Give me an update when you have something.”

“Roger that.”

She focused on her driving and soon she was passing through the entrance to the park. She checked in at the ranger station and was escorted to the Evanses’ campground.

Her stomach tensed as the site came into view.

A tall, rangy man, dressed in plaid shorts, a white T-shirt and wearing black-and-white high-top running shoes, sat at a picnic table. He had his elbows on his knees and his head cradled in his hands. She couldn’t see his face, but his dark brown hair was standing on end. His arms and legs were scraped and bleeding in places, and his T-shirt had a long tear on one side.

A woman, roughly the same age and with nearly the same color hair, sat huddled against him, an arm around his shoulders. Shannon wondered, as she climbed out of her SUV and released Darwin, why his wife—assuming that was who the woman was—seemed to be holding up much better than the man.

Shannon turned her attention to the elderly couple on the other side of the table. The man was holding the woman, who was crying silently. Obviously the grandparents. Shannon waved to a ranger when he noticed her arrival. He walked briskly toward her and quickly briefed her on the situation. They’d been searching for over an hour, and had found no trace of the boy.

Shannon knew—and not just because of her police training—that wasn’t good news.

The ranger pointed out the boy’s father and signaled for her to follow him.

“Mr. Evans?” Shannon said softly when they’d reached the picnic table. The woman looked up but the man didn’t. “Mr. Evans,” she repeated, more loudly this time.

When his head jerked up, his forest green eyes—an unusual blend of green and brown—bored into hers. Their intensity triggered an involuntary urge to step back.

He had a strong jaw, straight nose. Good features. He might’ve been attractive under normal circumstances. But right now, his skin was splotchy, his hair even more disheveled from this angle, his eyes red-rimmed and his lips compressed so firmly they were edged with white. He had an angry scratch on his left cheek, just below his eye. The desperation she saw in his eyes evoked memories of Charlie and nearly destroyed her composure.

Everyone’s attention was now on her and she had to maintain control.

“Mr. Evans, I’m Officer Shannon Clemens with the San Diego Police Department. I’m here to help find Dylan.” She had to give him hope. She could see he was barely hanging on. “We’ll locate him,” she promised. She prayed they could.

Because it was too disconcerting to keep looking into his tormented eyes, she shifted her gaze to the woman. “Mrs. Evans, your son—”

“It’s Ms.,” the woman corrected her. “I’m Meghan. Dylan’s aunt.”

“Okay.” Uncertainty formed a hard, tight knot in her stomach. She wished Cal hadn’t taken this particular week off—and that her first solo search and rescue assignment didn’t involve a boy nearly the same age as Charlie had been...

Shannon forced herself to stay focused, stay sharp. “Darwin.” She pointed to her dog. “He’s trained in search and rescue. Darwin and I will do everything we can to find Dylan. Before we start, I need your help.”

The father straightened. “Of course. Whatever you need.”

She took a deep breath to brace herself. “I require something that’s Dylan’s and has his scent on it, to get Darwin familiar with it. The more recent, the better.”

He lurched to his feet. “Yeah. Sure. His sleeping bag. He was in it before he disappeared.”

“Good, but I also need something smaller. Something I can take with me to refresh Darwin’s memory, if necessary. An article of clothing Dylan slept in perhaps?”

He clenched his hands, the knuckles turning white. “He... He’s wearing the clothes he slept in.”

Twelve years later, she still remembered that all-consuming, devastating feeling of having a loved one go missing. Maybe it was wrong, but Shannon touched his arm. “Let’s see what there is in the tent that we can use,” she said gently.

She settled on a pair of socks that had been stuffed into Dylan’s sneakers. When the father said that was the only pair of shoes he’d brought for Dylan, she made a mental note to consider how far the boy could’ve wandered without shoes.

To be on the safe side, Shannon also took the T-shirt Dylan had worn the evening before and a picture the father had in his wallet.

Again she laid an encouraging hand on his arm. “I promise we’ll do everything we can to find your son.”

CHAPTER TWO

SHANNON CLIPPED A leash to Darwin’s collar. She let the dog smell both articles of clothing before storing them in her pouch, and instructed him to “find.”