Jilliane Hoffman by Pretty Little Things

gunning for his position as Special Agent Supervisor. It was no secret that the new regional director wanted ‘a change’ in Crimes Against Children – namely SAS Bobby Dees out and an ‘as yet to be named’ replacement in. But the reality was, no matter how good the raise or prestigious the title, in the end, no one really wanted 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