Page 10 of K-9 Guardians

She pushed to her feet, meeting him on his level. “You asked about the scar across my stomach. You want to know how I got it? By keeping my word. I don’t give it casually, King, and I don’t give it to anyone who I don’t believe deserves it. But once I do, I won’t give up until I’m finished. Now, we can debate about the worth of my promises all day with examples and my résumé, but your son is out there. He doesn’t have as much time as we need, and I’m one of the only people in this country who knows what we’re dealing with. So are you going to trust me?”

He held his own, seemingly taking it all in one word at a time. “Yeah. I trust you.”

“Good. The principal has queued the security footage taken during the time Julien was checked out. I suggest we start there.” Pent-up energy flooded into the streak of scar tissue across her abdomen as she headed for the door. Most days she could pretend it didn’t exist. That her closest friend hadn’t tried to kill her while they’d been stationed overseas. Today wasn’t one of those days. Scarlett wrenched open the door and stepped into the main office.

Formica-coated, two-tiered desks separated two administrators from the parents and students meant to stay on one side. Cabinets stacked high on one another behind each station and showed off motivational posters like the kind she used to hang in her room as a kid. An entire wall of glass gave school staff a view into the long corridors making up the industrial-carpeted school. Two doors provided access into the main school once entrants were allowed past the auto-locking doors.

Scarlett bypassed the officers taking statements from teachers and staff and headed down the hallway into the back of the main office. She clocked each and every camera installed throughout the space as she moved. Not enough. Not nearly enough to keep these tiny souls safe. Cutting to the principal’s office at the very end of the hallway, she didn’t bother to confirm whether King had kept up. “Principal Doleac. This is King Elsher. Julien’s father.”

“Yes, of course.” A trim woman who looked as though she lived off of long miles, few carbs and a tanning bed got up from behind her desk and offered her manicured hand. “I wanted to express how sorry I am about all of this, Mr. Elsher. We haven’t had anything like this happen before. We will be working closely with Socorro and law enforcement to bring Julien home as quickly as possible. Anything you need, please don’t hesitate to ask.”

“You have the security footage of when my son was taken?” King didn’t bother extending his own hand to shake.

The principal retracted into herself as she took a seat in front of an old monitor from the Stone Age. “Yes. I have it pulled up here. It’s not the most sophisticated system, but as I said, we’ve never had anything like this happen before.”

“Could you give us a few minutes?” Scarlett asked.

Hesitation deepened the lines around Doleac’s eyes and mouth. Midforties, Scarlett would guess. Though she imagined the stress of the woman’s job and the political pressure she handled on a day-to-day basis had added a few unkind years. “I’m sorry. I can’t just leave you alone with the district’s system. These computers contain students’ private information and internal information about our teachers. I’m happy to navigate through whatever footage you need.”

King set his badge on the principal’s desk. “I’m not interested in teacher or student information, Principal Doleac. I’m here for my son. Anything we come across not pertaining to this case will remain confidential.”

She studied the badge for a moment before climbing back onto impossibly high heels that accentuated how short Doleac really was. “Please let me know if I can be of any further assistance.”

Scarlett slid into the principal’s chair as the administrator made her way out of the office. A zing of anticipation crackled through her fingers as she scanned through the thumbnails of footage. “Their system could use an upgrade, but it seems simple enough to navigate. Let me pull up the camera and time Julien was checked out.”

King shifted into her peripheral vision, then closer. Right up against her right side. Leveraging one hand against the desk and the other against the back of her chair, he pressed in. He pointed at the screen. “That’s Julien.”

The window expanded to the full width of the monitor and automatically started playing the footage. The angle looked as though it’d come from one of the cameras directly outside the office, recording students in the corridor leading up to the front of the building. The boy’s face was pixelated, but there was no mistaking the similarity between him and the man beside her.

Scarlett studied King for a moment, taking in the softening of his jaw as he studied his son in the footage. “He has his backpack. So this must be after he was already called down to the office to get checked out. Which means we should be able to see who’s waiting for him.”

She sorted through the other frames recorded at the same time. And pulled up the image of a woman with her back to the camera. Thick curly hair pinned back away from the suspect’s face, but there wasn’t a good angle to get an ID. “She’s avoiding the cameras. Let me see if I can follow them out to the parking lot.”

Which meant whoever’d checked Julien out had been in that school before. Had cased it. Knew the ins and outs. Most likely had a security blueprint or a map of the building. Julien’s abduction hadn’t been a one-off reaction to punish King for sticking his nose where it didn’t belong. This was a coordinated effort.

“Do you recognize her?” Scarlett asked.

“Hard to tell without a shot of her face, but I’ve been through all the surveillance we have on Muñoz multiple times over. The only woman in his crew was killed a few months ago.” King straightened, getting closer to the screen. “Wait. Look. Julien stops when he sees her.”

He was right. Scarlett saw it then. The terror in the boy’s face. A fawn response. She intensified the frame of Julien’s face. “Like he’s seen her before.”

THEREWASONLYone reason for a ten-year-old boy to act like Julien had in that footage.

Fear.

A pressure King couldn’t seem to get rid of followed him as he shoved through the elementary school’s doors and out into the open. He scanned every car, every window from the houses facing the school. His son had been right here. Alone. Scared. Forced to follow the orders of a stranger or get hurt. King scrubbed a hand down his face. Damn it. He should’ve been here. Not chasing some dead end of a case he shouldn’t have his nose in in the first place.

The school’s exterior surveillance hadn’t caught the vehicle Julien had been forced into, but King didn’t need it. He knew who was behind this. And he knew exactly what he had to do to get his son back. He took his cell from his pocket.

“You’re going to regret making that call.” Scarlett’s voice battled the loss and rage spiking through him. Which was impossible. He knew that, but there was something about her that argued with the natural man inside him that wanted to tear through this entire city to find Julien. And, hell, he wanted to give in to her. To feel some sense of peace for himself. For his family.

King let his thumb hesitate over the phone’s screen. “What call is that?”

“The one where you call up the team you have sitting on Muñoz and give the order for them to breach the compound.” Scarlett moved into his peripheral vision with far more grace than should be possible with all that gear she carried. Like she’d made it part of her over the years. Based on what she’d told him of her experience, he guessed that was true. “You’re not in the right frame of mind to think about this logically. You’re too close to it. The second your team crosses Muñoz’s property line, you’ll be declaring war with Sangre por Sangre.”

“And you don’t think kidnapping a DEA agent’s son is an act of war?” His grip tightened around the phone as he turned to her. She was right. There was no logic behind this, but life wasn’t always logical. It was the connections that made the difference between the ordinary and the meaningful, and the only one he cared about right now was Julien. “How about stabbing an agent through the chest?”

“Whoever did this is baiting you, King. They want you running off emotion instead of common sense. That’s how they win, and if you make that call, you’ll be playing directly into their hands,” she said.

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