Pretty Little Things - Jilliane Hoffman

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Bobby’s job, and Bobby, Zo and the director all knew it. To date, all the wannabes who had headed south to try their hand at a new job description had high-tailed it right back to the FDLE Regional Operations Center they’d transferred in from. Because while working Crimes Against Children might get your face on TV more than running down unscrupulous accountants, it was always for a really bad reason. Beaten kids. Exploited kids. Abused kids. Missing kids. Dead kids. For most cops, the carrot at the end of an investigation was knowing justice had been served – the bad guy caught and locked up tight behind bars, the case closed nice and neat. Car stolen. Car returned. Defendant off streets. Victim happy. But with child predators, often you opened your investigation with one victim and ended it with a few dozen. And even when you sent the scumbag to jail for a couple of decades and the case was closed out and put in a box on a shelf, you never really felt it was over. You could never be sure you got all the victims. And because kids generally made for crappy witnesses, and parents didn’t want their babies to have to go through any more trauma, sometimes a cop never tasted the carrot at all – a slap on the wrist and long-term probation was the only justice being served on the courthouse menu. Working Crimes Against Children was like pulling off a Band-Aid and debriding what you thought was a scratch – only to find out under the scab was an infection that was a hell of a lot worse than anything you’d ever imagined. The layers of healthy flesh it had rotted away, unchecked, was horrifying. Only then did you begin to understand just how pervasive evil really was. Only then did you understand that for the smallest and most innocent of victims, the nightmare that would last a lifetime was only just beginning. And at the end of the day or the apprenticeship, few cops could handle that reality, no matter how much bigger the paycheck or how bright the limelight shone down on their careers.

      Bobby got out of bed, opened the blinds and looked out the window. Outside, his wooly-chested, red-faced neighbor, Chet, was dragging the mower back into the garage. In another driveway he spotted a purple jogging stroller and a determined new mom stretching her Achilles against a curb. The twin toddlers next door were probably popping fistfuls of Cheerios, their wide eyes glued to Sponge Bob. If he stuck his head out the window, he could smell the bacon frying and the coffee brewing on this sunny Sunday morning. Inside his own home, the shower had turned off, and the silence was almost deafening.

      Good morning, Suburbia. Bobby watched with a bitter twinge of contempt as everyone’s life went on as usual, as if nothing at all was wrong in the world. Rising gas prices, falling stock prices and a war being fought six thousand miles away by kids they didn’t know anyway, were just mildly worrisome headlines in the morning’s paper. Then it was on to the sports page for last night’s stats and the travel section for some fun ideas on next summer’s vacation.

      Snug in their lucky little cocoons, where really bad things only happened to somebody else. Or better yet, to really bad people who really deserved them. Unaware and completely unaffected by the cold fact that somebody else’s child had just gone missing among them.

       11

      ‘I thought you were gonna try and sleep in,’ LuAnn said into the mirror, mouth open and mascara brush in hand, when he stepped into the bathroom.

      ‘Try’s the magic word. Who the hell can sleep through that?’ Bobby grabbed the tube of Crest off the counter, watching as LuAnn went back to finishing her face. Her short robe clung to the curves of her damp body, glistening with freesia-scented lotion. Against the stark white cotton, her muscular legs looked even more tan than they normally did. The robe was slightly open in the front, tied loosely at the waist, exposing the pale curve of one of her breasts, her flat, toned stomach. At thirty-nine, his wife still had an incredible body. Just looking at her standing there, doing her make-up, stirred things in him, both emotionally and physically. LuAnn always had that power over him, from the moment they’d met under the blinding fluorescents of Jamaica Hospital’s trauma room. It was her face that had calmed him, her words that had made sense as he lay on that cold, steel table, bleeding out from the gunshot wound that had severed his brachial artery. Bobby hadn’t remembered much when he’d woken up days later in a hospital room full of anxious buddies in NYPD blue jackets, still groggy from all the drugs and weakened by the infection that had routed his body, but he couldn’t forget her – the dark blonde with the Midori green eyes and light, melodic Southern drawl. He could still hear her whispers in his head, the bright lights of the trauma room backlighting her head like a halo.

       Officer Dees …

       Dees …

      Bobby, come on, now.

       Don’t be going nowhere on me, Bobby …

      Just stay right here … right here … with me … stay …

      He knew her the instant she walked into his room the morning he was being discharged. She had an angelic face that perfectly suited her name, he’d thought. LuAnn Briggs, the tag on her uniform read. LuAnn – sweet, simple, soft, Southern, delicate, bubbly, delicious. When she’d sat on the edge of his hospital bed and explained how she wasn’t even supposed to have been working the night he was brought in, how it was only her second day in the ER, how she’d checked on him every night when he was in the coma, he knew his life would forever change. He proposed three months later. They were married that same year, ten days before Christmas. This December would mark eighteen years. He shook the distant memories out of his head and turned back to the sink.

      ‘You should talk to Chet,’ LuAnn said, waving the mascara brush in his direction. ‘I have to get up, but you don’t. It’s not right on a Sunday, especially with your insomnia.’

      He squirted a gob of Crest on to the brush. ‘Helen told me he’s OCD.’

      ‘That’s no excuse.’

      Bobby nodded in the mirror, staring at his own reflection. He looked like shit. The silver hairs in his morning gruff looked like they were beginning to outnumber the brown ones. And the laugh lines that feathered out from his blue eyes had apparently decided to take up permanent residence – whether or not he had anything to laugh about. What turned distinguished into disheveled? He was forty by, what? A couple of months? Daily five-mile runs and twice weekly trips to the gym kept the stress at bay and the pounds off, but he knew the mileage was definitely starting to show. It was only a matter of time. The fact that he just didn’t sleep any more wasn’t helping. The past year alone had aged him ten.

      LuAnn dropped the mascara into her make-up bag, and leaned against the sink, pulling her robe closed and folding her arms across her chest. ‘Any reason you’re all dressed up?’

      Even on that rare Sunday Bobby did go to church, it was usually in jeans and a T-shirt. The pressed black slacks, white dress shirt and gray silk tie slung around his neck were a clear indication something was up. No one had died and nobody was getting married – it wasn’t too hard to figure out he was headed to a scene. He wiped his mouth on a hand towel, reached for the shaving cream and turned on the hot water. Steam fogged the mirror. ‘I gotta go in,’ he said quietly.

      ‘I thought you were taking some time off this week,’ she tried.

      ‘I was. But I gotta go in.’

      She stared blankly at him in the mirror, her face blurring from the steam, waiting for the rest of the explanation that he knew she didn’t want to hear.

      He turned to face her. ‘There’s a kid,’ he explained softly. ‘She didn’t come home from school Friday.’

      LuAnn said nothing. She just kept staring straight at him. Through him. Like the lyrics go from a bad song, there once was a time when he could feel himself getting lost in those green eyes. Eyes that just made you want to kiss her when you looked at them long enough. Now they stared at him, cold and empty. Concealor barely hid the dark circles and the stress fractures that feathered out from the corners. They were standing only a couple of feet apart, but there might as well have been a mountain between them in that small bathroom.

      ‘It

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