Critical Pursuit Read Online Free PDF Page B

have flamed out and fought to keep his spot in homicide. Now Jack looked past Hoffman, out the window, and decided patrol might be the right place to hide for a couple of weeks.
    “Afternoon patrol?” he asked.
    Hoffman stammered with surprise. “Sure, if that’s what you want.”
    “Yeah, that’s what I want.” What I really want I can’t have, so this transfer will do for now. I can hide in patrol for two and a half weeks.
    “Okay, I’ll work on arranging it. You know you’ll have to work with another officer for the first two weeks? It’s a retraining policy.”
    “Whatever,” Jack said. “I don’t want to rock the boat.” I just want the sentencing to be over so I can quit pretending, he thought.
    Hoffman nodded and turned to leave but stopped at the door. “Jack, I’m not only your boss; I’m your friend. Can I give you some advice?”
    Jack shook his head. “I know what you’re going to say. Thanks anyway.” Hoffman was as deluded a Christian as Ben.
    Hoffman sighed. “You need to be back in church. You need the prayer and support of the church family to help you through this rough time.”
    Stepping to the door, Jack switched off the lights. “No, I don’t. I just don’t believe that fairy tale anymore,” he said over his shoulder as he headed for the elevator.

7
    BRINNA MADE IT to Mesquite, Nevada, before exhaustion hit like a brick. She had to stop, so she picked a hotel in the little border town. She called the search center in Utah to let them know where she was. They told her they couldn’t do much in the dark anyway and advised her to drive safe. The location of Mesquite was a blessing and a curse. A little over halfway to Bryce Canyon, Mesquite was in the middle of barren desert. Brinna hated deserts and wide-open spaces and knew the only situation that could pull her through the desert to a place like Bryce Canyon was a search.
    She preferred her neighborhood, crowded with houses, and her city, packed with cars and traffic. The open emptiness took her back to her childhood and memories of crying out for someone to help her when there was no answer but an eerie, empty echo. Sleep for a couple of hours meant she could resume the drive in the dark and any more barren wasteland would be masked by the night.
    The sky was turning pink as she entered the park.Mountain time made Brinna adjust her watch   —it was an hour later here. She’d looked over a map before she left home and had it open next to her in case she had trouble. But when she told the ranger at the park entrance who she was, he directed her to the staging area. The kid had gone missing in a part of the park called Fairyland Canyon, and the searchers were staging in the parking area at the trailhead. Brinna had to admit the scenery was interesting here. She’d read that the towering geological formations she could see were called hoodoos.
    “It would almost be funny,” she said to Hero, “to be lost in Fairyland with hoodoos.”
    But it wasn’t. The boy had been out for almost thirty-six hours in the vast expanse Brinna could see all around as she turned in to the parking lot at the trailhead. The search and rescue operation was being run out of a large recreational vehicle. Local law enforcement, park rangers, search and rescue personnel, and people Brinna figured were volunteers seemed to be everywhere. She could also see a helicopter in the air in the distance.
    She checked in with Jase Robinson, the park ranger she’d talked to on the phone. A large map covered one side of the RV.
    “The boy, Stevie, was hiking with his family on the Fairyland loop trail.” Robinson pointed. “He thought he lost something on the trail and was angry when his father wouldn’t go back and look for it. He left their campsite on his bike, they think, around 2300 Monday. We found his bike on the Fairyland loop trail, but he has disappeared.” Hedragged an index finger across the map of the terrain marked in grids to indicate the