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right out of the station lot. The two news vans parked in front of the station didn’t escape her notice.
    “I know they’re here about the shooting,” she said as she glanced in the rearview mirror at their shrinking images. “Glad we won’t be around for the start of the circus.”
    At home Brinna shed her gun belt and jumpsuit in favor of shorts and a tank top. She fed Hero first, then made herself a tuna sandwich, taking a seat at her computer to check her e-mail while she munched.
    Above her computer screen hung a shelf loaded with Care Bears and Beanie Babies. She made a mental note to grab a couple to put in her car. She still hadn’t replaced the ones she’d given to Josh.
    While she waited for the computer to power up, sheglanced over to her Wall of Slime. Tacked on the west wall of her office were information posters containing the faces and statistics of twenty high-risk sex offenders residing in the city of Long Beach.
    Overall, Long Beach was home to nearly eight hundred registered sex offenders. Brinna had chosen the worst of the lot to post in her office and “ride rail on,” as Maggie liked to say.
    Shifting her gaze to the east side of the room, Brinna perused the Innocent Wall. There, ten missing posters lined up in three rows, the most recent cases on the top, stared back at her. Heather Bailey’s smiling face was first   —the same poster Brinna kept in her car. The eight-year-old had disappeared without a trace from her front yard a month ago.
    A ding from her computer indicating she had mail brought Brinna back to the screen. Four e-mails awaited her. The first message was from Chuck Weldon, the local FBI agent. She paused before she hit Open, anxiety tingling her fingertips at the thought of what news Chuck’s message might bring.
    The FBI generally took over any missing case labeled a stranger abduction. Chuck could be sending her bad news about Heather. Sighing, Brinna opened the message. The contents were a mild relief. No news on Heather. Chuck just sent an update on how the last lead panned out: nowhere.
    She remembered what a fight it had been to get the department to recognize her as a search-and-rescue specialist, a position that didn’t exist anywhere on the Long Beach Police Department. Finding a toddler named Alonso Parker had silenced a lot of opposition and opened a door she’d charged through.
    Hero didn’t need to be a normal patrol dog chasing criminals, she’d argued. He was scent-trained. He could find kids and he’d proved it.
    Chuck had provided the nudge the brass needed. He stepped in and agreed with her. After that, the sergeant in homicide sat down with Sergeant Rodriguez in the K-9 detail and okayed Brinna’s freelancing into missing children cases. There was no position in the LBPD budget for a full-time missing person patrol officer. But Hero’s grant and the FBI’s endorsement allowed Brinna to be the closest thing to it.
    She ran her hand over the plaque she kept to one side of her computer monitor, given by her patrol shift teammates: To the Kid Crusader, Our Search-and-Rescue Stud .
    She punched open the second message, from the Center for Missing and Exploited Children. The text contained an alert about a ten-year-old boy missing in Utah. Brinna checked her watch. The kid had gone missing about the same time she’d been facing off the lunatic in the Monte Carlo.
    Ignoring the next two messages, both from her mother, Brinna finished her sandwich and downed the remainder of her Diet Coke. She walked across the hall to her bedroom, where Hero slept curled up on her bed, and pulled a map of western states from her nightstand, tracing the route to Bryce Canyon, Utah, with her finger.
    Utah is way out of my hundred-mile radius for weekend searches, she thought, but very possible with my time off. And the desert is a horrible place for a kid to be lost.
    As often happened when thinking about children lost and alone, for a second Brinna was six again and