Prologue
Kat looked over at Badger. “That worked out better than I thought.”
“You’re not kidding.” Badger stared at the door, where Landon and Sabrina and the four dogs had just exited. “With the FBI’s tip line and the cadaver dogs going over that area, they fully expect to find a killing field of rape victims, including the body of Jared’s mom. They’ll update us as their investigations continue. I’m particularly interested in the DNA results of the child born to one woman, so far, who became unexpectedly pregnant. I’m hoping that’ll be a nail in the coffin for Smith, his ass-wipe son, and the sheriff.”
Kat shook her head. “That trio was date-raping their way through their community, which is a complete misnomer, as that was no date when your sexual partner is drugged into unconsciousness and submission. And by two officers of the law? It’s horrid.”
“Yeah, but”—Badger chuckled—“justice came for them all. That punk kid was beaten up pretty badly in jail, enough that he may stay in the infirmary for about a week. The deputy has already been outed as law enforcement and a rapist, so he’s also been targeted by the inmates. And the sheriff? He’s in solitary, but he can’t hide there forever.”
“That’s more good news to come out of that nasty business,” Kat replied.
“I really like Sabrina,” Badger said.
“Me too,” Kat agreed, with a bright smile. “I’m so glad we’re making more friends as we do this.”
He chuckled. “Most of them don’t live close to us though.”
“No, but I think it’s great that this couple is settling here. Besides, it’ll take several fittings to work on Landon’s foot,” she noted, her mind already on the problem of Landon’s prosthetics. “He’s a special case.”
“Sure.” Badger chuckled. “I’m pretty sure you say that about every one of them.”
She gave her husband a sheepish smile. “Maybe, but everyone deserves to have prosthetics designed to work the way they need them to. Sometimes the smaller prosthetics are trickier than the larger ones. Regardless it’s important for him to have a working ankle without pain.”
“Agreed. Now that brings us to the next problem.”
“What’s that?” she asked, directing her attention back to him.
“The next dog,” he noted.
“You know, if we had ten guys ready and available, we could do ten at one time?” she mentioned. “But instead we wait for one to get solved and then go on to the next.”
“And part of that,” he noted, “is the reality of the funding.”
She nodded. “I know. And really, in some of these cases, it seems like we’re waiting forever to get intel on where to even look for the dogs.”
“If we get any intel at all,” Badger added.
At that, the phone rang. She looked down, then smiled. “Hey, Harper. How are you doing?”
“I’m good. I wanted to thank you for the job you did on my brother.”
“What job?” she asked in a joking manner. “The prosthetic is still to come.”
“I know, but he’s a different man. He went out lost and looking for something, but he came back found—and in a way which I hadn’t expected.”
“Neither did we,” she agreed. “Badger is here on Speakerphone.”
“That’s the other thing,” Harper added. “I just kind of wondered … God, it’s really arrogant of me to even ask.”
“Ask away,” she prompted him. “You never know what’s too much until you ask.”
“Well, my surgery has been postponed for six months,” he shared, “and believe me. I’m not thrilled about it, and I’m frustrated as hell. But it has kind of left me with, you know, nothing to do.”
“Meaning?” She frowned, as she looked over at Badger, who just shrugged.
“I just wondered if you needed somebody to go after another dog.”
“Ah.” She gave her husband a beaming smile. “We still have a couple cases that we need to handle. But I don’t want to stress your body. You know as well as I do how important all that rest is for getting your body shipshape, both pre-op and post-op.”
“I understand. I just don’t know if the cases are particularly stressful or not. This last one didn’t seem to be.”
“It certainly had some stressful moments, but it was a different kind of case,” she noted. “Some have been pretty ugly though, so if this past mission had turned into an ugly one, I would not have felt very good about sending you out there.”
“Yet you know yourself that there’s no way to know beforehand, not until we get there.”
“Isn’t that the truth.” She gave a heavy sigh. She looked over at Badger and asked him, “What do you think?”
“We had asked him before, but he was due to have surgery,” he noted, looking at Kat. “So is there any reason to discount him now?”
“I hope not,” Harper spoke up. “It kind of sucks when you think about it because we already tend to do enough discounting of our own.”
“Yes,” Kat agreed. “I get that.” She looked over at Badger. “I don’t know anything about this case though.”
He rustled a bunch of pages. “This one?” He glanced at the paperwork. “No, it looks like maybe it’s pretty tame.”
“Tame is good,” Harper replied cautiously. “But I don’t want you to give me something so tame because you think I can’t handle it.”
“I would never do that,” Badger stated. “Plus we sometimes have very little, if any, knowledge going into these, so there’s no foolproof way to predict what we’ll find. So, even something that might look like it’s pretty mellow could end up butt ugly, and we’ll have no way to warn you ahead of time.”
At that, Harper laughed out loud. “Butt ugly,” he repeated. “That sounds kind of like me right now.”
Kat asked, “Are you up for this? How are the wounds, the scars?”