By the time he merged onto Freeport Boulevard, he was concerned. Where the hell was Olivia, and why wasn’t she answering her phone? Olivia was fourteen, responsible for a kid her age, but that wasn’t making him feel better.
And what about Jessie? He didn’t like the idea of her being locked up. Although she was proud of her by-the-book methodology of investigative work, she had a tendency to act too quickly, seldom taking enough time to think things through. She’d looked pale sitting in the holding room. She’d looked hollow-cheeked, too, as if she hadn’t been eating enough or getting much sleep. Seeing her worn down like that made his heart ache.
Jessie. He’d fallen in love with her the moment he’d laid eyes on her ten years ago. And then his soon-to-be ex-wife showed up, and that was it. Jessie told him to get out of her life and go back to his wife, where he belonged. So that was what he did. Five months later Piper was born. He loved his daughter, and for that reason he’d done everything he could to make it work, but the next five years had been just that . . . work. No laughter, no playful banter, no long conversations about dreams and goals.
His thoughts were cut off when he spotted a group of people huddled together. As he slowed, he got a glimpse of a very familiar fourteen-year-old girl sitting on the sidewalk with five or six people hovering around her.
Olivia.
His heart raced as he pulled to the side of the road, jumped out of his vehicle, and ran toward her. Why was she on the ground? The thought that she might have been injured made his insides turn. He cut between the people, relieved to see that Olivia was okay. It was the dog in her arms that was injured. “Olivia,” he called.
She looked at him. She’d been crying. Mascara she wasn’t allowed to wear streamed down both sides of her face. “It was a hit-and-run,” she said, her voice shaky. “I think he’s dying.”
Colin looked at the people standing around. “Does anyone know who the dog belongs to?”
“There’s no collar,” a woman said.
Colin kneeled down for a better look. The dog was medium size, part bulldog or maybe boxer. There wasn’t a lot of blood, but it didn’t look good. The animal’s breathing was shallow, its ribs well defined, which told him the dog had been living on the streets for a while.
“We have to save him,” Olivia said.
Colin exhaled, told her not to move, and then jogged back to his car, where he grabbed a blanket from the trunk and spread it across the back seat. He hurried back to Olivia and scooped the dog out of her arms. Once she and the dog were situated, Colin drove to the closest veterinary hospital.
After the dog was taken to a back room to be examined, Colin made a few phone calls. Olivia sat in the lobby, her foot tapping nervously against the floor. More than an hour later, the veterinarian, a tall woman wearing green scrubs, walked toward them. Her expression was somber, making it difficult to read the situation. “Could I talk to you alone for a minute?” she asked Colin.
He looked at Olivia. She’d been through a lot in her young life. He’d spent enough time with her to know she was a straight shooter, and she appreciated that quality in others. No reason to keep anything from her. “Go ahead,” he said. “You can talk to both of us.”
“The good news is he’s been stabilized.”
“And the bad?”
“He has a broken leg that will require surgery.”
Ah. Now he understood why she’d wanted to talk to him in private. Surgery wasn’t cheap, and most teenagers, like Olivia, didn’t make decisions based on money. It was all about emotions in cases like this.
The doctor tipped her chin. “Laura will go over the details with you.” She gestured toward the woman behind the counter.
After she walked away, Colin said, “I’ll be right back. I’m going to go talk to Laura.”
“You’re going to tell them to do the surgery, right?” Olivia asked.
“I need to get some additional information first, okay?”
“I have nearly two hundred dollars in my savings account,” she told him. “If you drive me to the bank, I can get it out for you.”
“Why don’t you wait outside? I’ll be right there.”
Ten minutes later Colin found Olivia sitting on the curb next to his car. “Get in,” he said. “I’m taking you home.”
She pushed herself to her feet. “Are they going to put him down? If they are, I want to be there with him when they do.”
“He’s being rolled into surgery as we speak.”
“Seriously?”
He nodded.
She smiled as big as he’d ever seen, then ran over to him and wrapped her long, skinny arms around his waist and squeezed as hard as she could.
He’d missed the kid. “Okay, okay,” he told her. “Don’t get too excited. We’ll have to put an ad in the paper and make sure he doesn’t belong to someone, and then there’s the matter of your aunt Jessie.”
“Jessie won’t mind. She’s going to love Higgins.”
“Higgins?”
“That’s his name,” Olivia said. “I always knew if I ever got a dog, I would name him or her Higgins. Have you seen the movie Benji? Adorable dog who always shows up in the nick of time to save the day?”
“I have a vague recollection. But what does any of that have to do with Higgins?”
“The dog who played the part of Benji,” Olivia relayed as they both climbed into the car, “was actually a shelter dog named Higgins.”
“Interesting.” He buckled his seat belt and made sure she did the same.
“Do you think Higgins will make it?”
He paused to think about it. “Yeah, I do. He looked like a fighter. Tough times make for tough people . . . and dogs.”
FOUR
It was a quarter past five when Ben Morrison left his workplace, a ten-thousand-square-foot cement-gray building that housed the Sacramento Tribune. He’d been working as a crime reporter there for twenty years, the first ten of which he had no recollection of, owing to a car accident that had left him with retrograde amnesia.
After the accident he’d had no memory of his sister or his deceased parents. But something beautiful had come from the tragedy. He’d fallen in love with and married the nurse who’d helped put him back together again. At his wife’s insistence, he’d tried to reconnect with his sister over the years, but she and her husband had moved to Florida, and his phone calls went unanswered.
Today was another hot one. The air was thick and dry, sucking the moisture out of every living thing and making it a chore to breathe. It had been a long day, and he was eager to get home. As he approached his 1978 Ford Club Wagon, he heard a distant call for help and stopped to look around and listen.
There it was again. Was somebody in trouble?
He ran to the edge of the parking lot, where pavement merged with soil that sloped downward into a wooded area covered with brittle leaves.
Although he couldn’t see any smoke, he could feel it burning his throat. He heard the crackle and snap of a fire, but he couldn’t see anything unusual. His heart rate accelerated. “Is someone out there?”
No answer.
“Ben! Is there a problem?”
He turned to see his coworker Gavin Whitney rushing to his side. “What’s going on?”
“Do you smell smoke?” Ben asked.
Gavin took a couple of sniffs. “No. I don’t smell anything.” He wiped his brow. “It’s hot as hell out here, though. I bet we could fry an egg on the asphalt about now.” He planted a hand on his hip. “If this heat wave lasts too much longer, people are going to start dropping like flies.”
When Ben didn’t respond, he added, “More people die from a heat wave than lightning, tornadoes, hurricanes, or floods.”
Ben had a difficult time listening to anything but the hiss of the fire as it moved closer.
“I’ve gotta get going,” Gavin said. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
He wanted to grab Gavin’s shoulders and shake him. Couldn’t he hear the fire or smell the acrid smoke? When Ben looked back at Gavin, he imagined himself reaching into his briefcase for a hunting knife and plunging the blade into Gavin’s chest.