When She Flew (4 page)

3

J
ess adjusted the bulky flak vest under her uniform shirt and strapped on her duty belt. The locker room was empty except for her. She was late for her afternoon shift,

With gear in place, Jess glanced at her blue polyester behind in the mirror on the opposite wall. Even without all the equipment, her butt would look huge in the unflattering man pants. She sighed and slammed her locker shut, then sprinted out the door and up the steps to the briefing room, boots clunking loudly as she twisted her dark hair back into an elastic band. Maybe it was good to always be on the run. She was thirty-eight and couldn’t just skip a dinner or two anymore to get back into size twelve uniform pants.

Sergeant Everett was doing the briefing, his drone recognizable through the closed door. Jess stopped, took a breath, then pushed into the conference room. Everyone looked up. She mumbled an apology and slid into an empty seat at the end of the table next to Officer Ellis Jenkins. He’d been her partner when the city still had enough money to send them out in pairs, and he was still her closest friend on the force.

The sergeant shot Jess a look from the front of the room, then returned to his report. From across the table, Officer Ann Madison handed her a stack of composite drawings that had already circulated.

“Thanks, Maddy,” Jess whispered, and thumbed through the drawings. There he was, right on top: the six-foot-tall sex-assault suspect in various iterations, based on three frightened and traumatized girls’ memories. His MO was to nab his victim as she was walking home from school, assault her in his car, then dump her in a park or forested area. The violence involved had been increasing; the last girl had been strangled almost to death. Jess studied his penciled features, looking for something that couldn’t be seen in a drawing. She shook her head. He looked like the generic example of “man” in an encyclopedia.

Next was a suspect in the rash of burglaries from unlocked garages in the White Oak neighborhood, then a convicted pimp who had been reported doing business along MLK Boulevard. Jess had booked him a year before for beating up one of his workers. She knew there were probably plenty of other women he’d brutalized who’d never reported it.

Everett rumbled on about a new lead in the hit-and-run at last month’s Fourth of July symphony concert in City Park. Even though technically that case belonged to the main precinct downtown, all five precincts wanted to find the driver, bad. There’d been a wildfire of press about the department not catching the guy despite fourteen thousand witnesses, and this on top of two recent police shootings and an allegation of sexual misconduct under investigation by internal affairs. The department had been taking a beating for the past decade—under three separate chiefs—for some good reasons and some not so good. Jess wished the concerned citizens who complained the loudest would go on a graveyard-shift ride-along. They had no idea what cops dealt with every day.

“That’s it,” Everett said. “The search team for the girl in Joseph Woods will be assembling in the parking lot at”—he raised his wrist—“sixteen twenty. In ten minutes.”

Jess raised her hand.

“The late Officer Villareal.” He pronounced her name in the anglicized way: “Villa-reel.” She never corrected him.

“What’s the deal with the girl?” she asked. “Has she been reported missing, or . . .”

“We’ve already covered it. Get here on time.”

“Come on, Sarge. I’m the most prompt person in the room. You never give Jenkins half the crap when he’s late, and he’s late all the damn time. Aren’t you, Ellis?”

She turned to Jenkins and winked. He blushed under his dark skin and said, “I cannot help that I have two kids who are involved in every activity known to man. Take it up with my wife.”

Everyone laughed.

Jess turned back to Everett. “Besides, I was trying to find a birthday gift for Mateo. He’s turning three on Saturday, and starting preschool this fall. Can you believe it?”

Everett softened, as he did whenever she mentioned Mateo or Nina. He had a daughter too, in college now. Jess had met her once at the annual picnic, and her opinion of Everett had changed for the better, seeing the way he watched her when she spoke, that look of pride and wonder in his eyes when she made the crowd of cops laugh at a joke.

The sergeant cleared his throat. “Unaccompanied female juvenile was sighted at approximately eleven hundred hours today north of the wildlife sanctuary property, pretty far up and off trail. Witness says she’s between ten and twelve years old. She didn’t get a good look, even though she had a pair of goddamn binoculars in her hand at the time. Says the girl was wearing a silver cocktail dress—whatever that means—way too big on her. Long dark hair, slight build. Fled when spotted. ‘Ran like her life depended on it’ was what the witness actually said. Another witness chased after her but didn’t get very far. That’s about it.”

“Do we think she’s another one of the sex-assault victims?” Jess asked, even though the other three girls ran toward people who could help them, not away. Victims varied in their reactions to the crimes against them, of course. It was possible that this girl’s reaction to trauma was to run.

“We don’t know,” the sergeant said. “Could just be transient. Could be a runaway. That’s what we’re going to find out.”

Jess nodded. It wasn’t uncommon to find transients living in the forested foothills that abutted the city. She had hiked up into the woods to smoke them out on more than a few occasions. It was part of her beat. Transient camps were not pleasant places—drugs and alcohol, mental illness and extreme hard luck, and always a disgusting lack of sanitary conditions. Once Jess had slipped in a pile of feces, mistakenly assuming it to be from a dog until she realized there were no dogs in the area. Not many things made her vomit on the job anymore, but that had.

Jess knew everyone else in the room was thinking what she was. It was unlikely the girl was up there voluntarily. Runaway juveniles lived in packs under the viaducts and in alleyways, staying close to the city to panhandle, prostitute themselves, buy drugs. She shot her hand back into the air.

“What?” Sergeant Everett gathered his papers.

“I want to be on the search team for the girl.”

“We’ve already assembled the team.”

“With a female?”

Maddy sighed. “Lucky me. Sarge knows how I love to hike.” The other patrol officers on duty, all male this day, laughed. Nobody liked to hike, but Maddy was a large woman, and particularly averse to anything but cruiser work. The city was so desperate for police officers they’d dropped most fitness requirements other than the ability to breathe. The North Station House had the baddest hoods, making it even less desirable to the best and brightest. Most of the cops assigned there were either doing time after pissing off a former CO at another precinct, or just holding on until they could figure out how to get transferred downtown, a more prestigious posting, or out in the suburbs, an easier one. But Jess liked working the North. At least she didn’t spend her days getting cats out of trees and settling squabbles between bickering neighbors.

She leaned forward in her seat.“Let me go instead of Maddy, Sarge. My butt needs the exercise.”

Sergeant Everett studied her, then nodded. “Fine. You’re off the hook, Officer Madison.”

“Thanks, V,” Maddy said.

Jess leaned back in her seat, heart pounding, even though nothing scared her anymore, and hadn’t in years. She didn’t know why, exactly, but she needed to find this girl, and make sure she was okay.

 

 

 

AT ELEVEN YEARS OLD, JESS knew she was going to be a cop. It came to her like Jesus comes to some people, calling them to duty. For Jess it happened late one night while waiting in a hospital emergency room, sitting with her mother, Clara, and three older brothers in a row of hard plastic chairs, wondering if her father would live or die. Either way, she knew that night she was meant to follow his path. If he lived, he would be so proud of her. If he died, she would take his place, doing what he loved.

Her dad had been on the force nearly fifteen years when a car full of teenagers returning from a homecoming dance plowed headlong into his cruiser on Highway 319. Two of the teenagers died, the girls, and the boys walked away with dislocated ribs and bruises.

Jess’s father’s head hit the patrol car’s windshield so hard, he shattered the front part of his skull and shook the contents like jelly. The steering wheel crushed his chest and the engine pinned him inside the car and severed his spinal column. If he lived, he would be paralyzed. He’d never again go out on patrol, and Jess knew that would kill him even if the injuries didn’t.

As they waited for word on his condition that night, the television in the waiting room looped through grainy images of men wearing blindfolds, men who looked like they could be her father or his fellow officers at the station in their street clothes. They were being marched by other young men with slightly darker skin through the door of a building and out into the open. A newsman came on, saying “crisis” and “embassy” and “day sixteen.”

It was day one of her family’s crisis, and Jess wondered if her father would be taken away like these young men, leaving the family alone to fend for themselves. Her mother sat four chairs away with eyes closed, rosary beads clenched in bloodless fingers, and Jess decided to pray along with her. Clara was loving but not strong, and Jess knew her mother was not capable of taking care of four children alone.

When the doctor finally came out and shook his head, her mother stood and fell to her knees on the tile floor, bruising them badly. The purple never went away, leaving permanent stigmata that Clara oddly cherished.

The funeral was a blur of uniforms and flags, hugs from other cops’ wives, frightened stares from their children. Jess’s mother retreated into rituals of prayer and sobbing behind closed doors, and slowly deteriorated from the day of her husband’s death, shrinking, deflating, becoming absorbed by the brown tweed La-Z-Boy that had been his. She acquired a sizable list of ailments and diagnoses that made it increasingly difficult for her to take care of much of anything, let alone her kids or herself. Jess took over, cooking meals when they needed to be made, hunting for quarters in the dryer or beneath couch cushions when she needed lunch money and Clara’s coin purse was empty.

No one expected Jess to go to college, but she found scholarships and school loans to offset most of the cost of her criminal justice degree at the same school her father had gone to. When she told her mother her plans, Clara shook her head, repeating the line that had become her summation of life after her husband’s death: “Just remember, you can’t do good in this world without being hurt by it.”

To Jess’s disappointment, it took her six and a half years to complete her degree rather than four, because she got pregnant at nineteen and married the father. Her Catholic upbringing made it the only option she even considered. She struggled through school with an infant to care for, and then arranged day care and went to work full-time on the Columbia force. Her life was hectic, but she felt a deep sense of comfort in having replaced her dad on the job.

Rick, her husband, worked part-time selling car stereos, and spent too much time away from home, drinking with friends. After ten contentious years together and one really bad night, Jess finally came to her senses. Nine-year-old Nina hated Jess for making him move out.

Nina’s anger accumulated, mushrooming into a dark cloud of misbehavior as she reached adolescence, and then she got pregnant at sixteen. Jess lost it. Maybe it had been the years of sacrifice, or the pent-up emotion of dealing with a difficult child alone, but they fought horribly, destructively. Jess said things she never would have believed could come from her mouth. Nina left, moved in with her dad, and cut Jess out of her life. After Mateo was born, they moved to Tacoma to be closer to Rick’s family, and even though Jess apologized endlessly, she became even further removed from their lives, paying for her sins.

Jess tried not to wallow in the past, though. She concentrated her energy in the present, where she felt needed. The nice part about that was it left her little time to think about anything other than what was next. The driving motivations of duty and love were so intermixed in Jess’s mind that it didn’t matter anymore why she helped someone. It only mattered that she did.

4

W
e came to Oregon after Pater got back from the war. He was called Private First Class Raymond Wiggs when he was in Iraq. He signed up to go because his younger brother did, and Pater wanted to make sure he was there to take care of him. Crystal didn’t like that. She said he loved his brother more than he loved her, or else he’d have stayed in Denver and protected her from the terrorists there instead. She didn’t mention me, but I could have used protecting, too. Especially once he was gone.