Chapter 1 - The Man Wearing the Search Vest
The German shepherd hit the mountain of wet leaves so hard that a small brown hand shot out of the pile.
“Atlas, easy!” Officer Malik Ransom dropped to one knee beside his dog. “There’s a child in here!”
Thirty yards away, Imani Cole stopped running. She was thirty-three, seven months pregnant, and had spent the last three hours searching for her eight-year-old daughter in a park growing dark beneath a November sky. Her grocery-store apron was still tied over her faded blue maternity dress. Mud coated her sneakers. She had lost one glove somewhere along the creek.
“June?” she called.
The leaves moved. A little girl with two crooked braids lifted her face. One sleeve of her yellow raincoat was torn, and dead leaves clung to the tears on her cheeks.
“Mommy,” she whispered.
Imani stumbled forward. A man in an orange volunteer search vest came around the far side of the pile first. Quentin Voss, the security director for the apartment complex where Imani lived, had spent an hour directing volunteers and assuring the police he knew every path in the park.
“There she is,” he said. He reached toward the girl. “Come here, June.”
June shrank backward as if his hand were a flame.
Imani stepped between them. “Don't touch my baby.”
Quentin seized her upper arm. “You're interfering with the search.”
“Let her go,” Malik said.
Quentin swung his heavy metal flashlight toward Imani's shoulder. Malik caught the blow against his forearm and struck Quentin once in the jaw. Quentin stumbled into the leaves and dropped the flashlight. Malik stepped back immediately, keeping his body between Quentin and the family. Atlas remained beside June, alert but quiet.
Imani fell to her knees. She reached for her daughter, then stopped when she saw how frightened June was.
“Baby, it's me. Can I hold you?”
June crawled into her arms. Her whole body shook.
“He was helping you look for me,” she whispered.
Malik followed the direction of the child's finger. Quentin was standing again beside the orange search vest he had shed in the struggle. The right side of his orange search vest was torn near its pocket. His right glove was split at the thumb.
June opened her small fist. Inside was a matching strip of orange fabric.
Imani recognized the strip before anyone said a word. The orange vests had been handed out at the registration tent beside the parking lot. Quentin had insisted on taking the largest group to the creek. When Imani asked him to search the footbridge instead, he told her to stay where the police could see her. At the time she thought his instructions were helping. Now she saw the footbridge in the distance, empty and unsearched, and imagined how close she had come to following the wrong person while June waited beneath the leaves.
“He said nobody would believe me,” she said.
That was the moment Malik understood the search had been led, at least in part, by the man June feared.
He radioed for another unit and an ambulance. Quentin began insisting the girl was confused, but Malik kept him in sight, requested that a colleague separate the witnesses, and made sure no one asked June to repeat her story in front of him.
Imani pressed her face against June's hair. The girl smelled of wet earth and the strawberry soap they shared because there wasn't room in the budget for separate bottles.
“I'm here,” Imani whispered. “I'm here now.”
June leaned close to her mother's ear. “Don't take me home.”
Imani drew back. “Why, sweetheart?”
“He has a key.”
Quentin, twenty feet away, stopped talking.
Imani looked at the man she had trusted to replace a broken lock three days earlier. He had told her not to worry when the new key didn't turn properly. He had offered to walk June to the bus stop that morning. She had thanked him.
A woman from the volunteer group muttered, “Maybe the mother should have watched her kid.”
Imani heard it. She also heard the older volunteer beside her reply, “She has been looking for that child since noon. Give her room.”
Malik handed Imani his spare thermal blanket. His broad shoulders filled the space between the family and Quentin; beneath his short hair, his square-jawed face stayed steady despite the swelling beginning around his forearm. He asked whether June was hurt. She shook her head, then looked down at her shoe.
“There's something else,” she said.
Malik kept his voice gentle. “You can tell us when you're ready.”
June slipped a hand into her left sneaker. She drew out a little brass key wrapped in a corner torn from a grocery receipt. Across the paper someone had written, in hurried blue ink: SIX O'CLOCK. BEFORE THEY CHANGE THE PIPES.
Imani stared. The handwriting belonged to her neighbor, Mrs. Bernice Talley, who was supposed to be in the hospital after a fall.
“Where did you get this?”
“Mrs. Bernice gave it to me. She told me to give it to you. Then Mr. Voss saw.”
Malik looked toward the parking lot. Beyond the park gate, two white plumbing trucks bearing the name CALDWELL RESIDENTIAL turned onto the street toward Cedar Court. Their headlights swept across the fence as they passed.
“Why are they heading there now?” he asked.
Imani checked the time on her cracked phone. 5:42 p.m.
Her apartment building was three blocks away, and a notice taped to its front door said that a major plumbing replacement would begin at six. For weeks, residents had complained about brown tap water. For weeks, the landlord had said the problem was cosmetic. Mrs. Bernice had collected samples and demanded answers until she vanished from the tenants' meeting.
June gripped Imani's wrist.
“He wasn't trying to take me away, Mommy,” she whispered. “He was trying to get this.”
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A siren sounded beyond the trees. Quentin looked at the plumbing trucks, then at June's closed hand. For the first time, he stopped pretending to be a rescuer.
And somewhere in the building where Imani lived, a crew was preparing to remove the only pipes Mrs. Bernice believed could prove what had been happening to their water.
