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His mother was calling him. Her voice was faint but distinct.
Elation surged through him. Dylan must’ve found his way back to the campsite.
“I’m coming, Mom!” he shouted and thrashed through the forest, running as fast as he could.
The thorns and branches clawing at his arms and legs didn’t slow him. He ran full speed in the direction of his mother’s voice. His muscles screamed and each breath was agony, but the thought of Dylan, safe and sound in his mother’s arms, propelled him forward.
What seemed like an eternity later, he hurtled through the brushwood bordering their campsite.
His energy gone, he bent over. Panting, trying to control his nausea, his eyes landed on his mother sitting at a picnic table. He swept his gaze around, searching for Dylan.
He saw his father and Meg talking to a couple of park rangers, but he didn’t see his son. Limping over to his mother, his voice gravelly, he asked, “Where’s Dylan?” But he knew the answer. Her tear-streaked face, swollen eyes and red nose said it all.
Dylan hadn’t returned.
His mother rose, took a couple of halting steps toward him and collapsed in his arms. He held her while she wept.
When had his mother become so frail? Bird bones, he thought, as she shuddered in his embrace. Over the top of her head, Sawyer met his father’s eyes. The torment in them was a reflection of what he felt himself.
One of the park rangers walked over. “Mr. Evans, we need to speak with you.”
* * *
SHANNON CLEMENS’S DREAM had finally come true. She was now officially a member of the San Diego Police Department’s K-9 Unit. Not on probation anymore, but a full-fledged K-9 officer, with her own specialization. It hadn’t come easy. She’d worked diligently for it.
The K-9 Unit was one of the toughest in the department to get into.
And she’d done it! For the last few months, she’d been conferring with the unit’s captain, Logan O’Connor, to identify the appropriate specialization for her and her police-service dog, Darwin. Well, now she was formally assigned to do search and rescue. She’d thought she might want to do explosives detection, but the incident at the San Diego International Airport half a year ago had helped her decide against it. Search and rescue presented its own challenges for her, but maybe it was destined that was where she’d end up.
She shifted her head on the pillow and watched the beautiful brown-and-black German shepherd lying on his own bed in a corner of her room. Darwin was only two years old, and was already showing exemplary skills and high detection accuracy. He was born in the Czech Republic, bred to be a service dog and had joined the SDPD K-9 Unit about the same time Shannon had. He was trained in tracking, building and area searches, article search, suspect apprehension and, like all dogs in the unit, handler protection and obedience. She was proud of Darwin, not just because she loved him, but because she’d been instrumental in his training.
Darwin moaned in his sleep and curled into a tighter ball. Shannon grinned at the way he’d tucked his snout under his tail.
She couldn’t believe that Darwin was assigned to her and she had her dream job. Here they were...partners!
When her cell phone rang, Darwin immediately looked up. Shannon glanced at her bedside clock as she reached for the phone on her nightstand. It was just after six.
“Clemens,” she said.
“Officer Clemens, this is Dispatch. I’m sorry to call you on your day off, but we have an incident at Cuyamaca Rancho State Park. Usually we’d send Officer Palmer and Scout for this, but he’s not available at present.”
Shannon swung her legs over the edge of the bed and sat up. Since Darwin had strolled over, she rubbed him behind the ears. She knew that Cal Palmer, the only other SDPD K-9–Unit officer who specialized in search and rescue, was enjoying a well-deserved vacation. He and his wife, Jessica, were due to have a baby soon, and they’d decided to take their two girls on a Disney cruise before the arrival of their new addition. They were on a ship, and there was no way to summon Cal back, even if the SDPD had wanted to.
“No problem,” Shannon said. “What’s the situation?”
“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 (#u1cda32a7-428c-5674-a338-a4a643e28692)
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.”
Based on the information she’d been given, she estimated that Dylan had been missing for about three hours. That was a considerable time for a young boy to be alone in a forest.
But not so long that Darwin couldn’t pick up his trail. The dog’s behavior confirmed Shannon’s assessment of the elapsed time. The boy’s scent had dissipated sufficiently that Darwin was sniffing the air rather than the ground. They entered the forest at a run. Shannon said silent thanks for the hours she spent at the gym. Not wanting to break Darwin’s concentration, she matched her speed to his.
She dodged branches, leaped over fallen logs and, when she couldn’t avoid it, crashed through undergrowth to keep up with him. Once or twice when Darwin slowed, she pulled Dylan’s picture out of her pocket. Each time she looked at the image of the smiling little boy, she thought of Charlie. Her remorse over Charlie’s death, and the possibility that she might not be able to find and return Dylan safely to his father caused a constriction in her chest that made it hard to inhale.
Distracted, she nearly tripped over Darwin when he paused at a fork in the trail. He turned in circles, uncertain which way to go. Shannon let him scent Dylan’s clothing again. With a short bark, he was off once more.
Shannon was breathless by the time they reached a narrow gravel lane that appeared to be a service road. Darwin stopped and looked to Shannon for direction. When she held out the sock for him and urged him to “find,” he started down the road, but Shannon called him back.
It seemed that Darwin had lost the trail and was going to run down the road, probably because it was the path of least resistance.
She placed her hands on her knees and leaned forward to catch her breath.
She’d failed Charlie and now she was failing Dylan, too. The thought of that turned the constriction into a roiling, greasy mess in her gut.
No longer able to contain it, she bent over the bushes and lost the contents of her stomach.
Feeling steadier, she forced herself to concentrate on her task. A little boy’s life depended on it, and she wouldn’t risk his life by not doing her job to the best of her ability.
Shannon tried one more time with Darwin, but he kept wanting to run down the road. Dylan couldn’t have walked down that road barefoot. That thought had her considering the good two miles that she and Darwin had run. How likely was it that a four-year-old could’ve walked that far, and without shoes?
Had she made a mistake? Had Darwin? Had they gone the wrong way at the fork in the trail?
The park rangers had dogs and handlers searching, too. If she and Darwin couldn’t find the boy, maybe one of them would. But she knew the rangers’ dogs were multipurpose, while she and Darwin specialized in searches. Because of that, they were considered Dylan’s best chance.
Dejected, Shannon led Darwin back to the campsite at a brisk jog. Along the way, she called Logan and provided him with an update. He said he was en route and would see her at the site.
It was hard telling her boss that she’d failed. She didn’t know how she was going to break the news to the boy’s father. How could she confess to him that her best hadn’t been good enough?
She hadn’t been able to find his son.
The pain of losing Charlie all those years ago seemed as intense at that moment as it had back then. She remembered the police officer who’d broken the news to her parents that he’d found her little brother. But by then it had been too late.
She remembered how it had felt not to know if Charlie was dead or alive...and if he was alive, to worry about him suffering. The officer back then had brought closure for Shannon and her parents. Not the way they’d hoped, but it was closure nonetheless.
There would be no closure for Sawyer Evans, at least not that morning.
The bile had left a bitter taste in her mouth. She popped a breath mint as she neared the campsite. It would be challenging not to let Dylan’s father see her emotions when she spoke with him; he didn’t need to know she’d lost her breakfast.
She saw him standing at the edge of the small lake, his back to her, legs spread, hands in the pockets of his shorts. A quick scan of the area told her that he was alone. She assumed his family was inside one of the tents. A ranger’s pickup was parked by the roadway, the ranger sitting behind the wheel and talking on his phone.
She gave Darwin the hand signal to “down-stay” next to her Explorer, poured some water in his bowl and walked quietly toward the father.
“Mr. Evans?”
His head snapped around, and she nearly cringed at the desperate hope she saw in his features and his bloodshot eyes. As the hope transformed into desolation, she understood that he already knew the outcome, because she’d returned without Dylan. His whole body sagged as if the air had been sucked out of him, and he looked so bereft, she wanted to wrap her arms around him. Instead, she shoved her hands in her own pockets, her stance mirroring his.
“I’m sorry. We didn’t find Dylan.”
Another emotion flitted across his face. Uncertainty? Relief that at least they hadn’t found him dead?
She realized he might have feared the worst, but... She couldn’t even finish the thought. “We followed his trail to a service road,” she explained. “Without shoes, I don’t think he’d have walked along a gravel road...”
“Then where did he go?”
Shannon shook her head. “I’m sorry, but I don’t know.”
“The rangers haven’t found him either.” He gestured toward the pickup. “They said you and your dog would find Dylan. You said it, too.”
He took a step toward her. It was the look in his eyes that told her his temper was brewing. That was okay with her. Anger was better than misery, if it helped pull him out of the depths of despair.
