Page 1 of Colorado K-9 Rescue
CHAPTER 1
The porch was secure. Or so she told herself.
Clouds drifted over the full moon, like curtains with a face peeking through. As Mckenna Parker sat on her back porch in her Victorian mountain house, the smell of one of her neighbors enjoying a fire on their patio wafted through the air.
The July night air was still and hot, almost constricting, although it wouldn’t be much longer before temperatures dropped and the first flakes of snow appeared. Give it about six weeks and Mckenna would need a sweatshirt sitting out here—her happy place most of the time. But not tonight.
Next to Mckenna was her black Lab, Mocha, a crisis K-9 for the FBI. The Lab rested on his bed but periodically lifted his head to gaze at Mckenna, asking if she was okay. She let her arm drop and started petting him. Bear-resistant mesh screened in the porch, a dead bolt lock on the door was engaged and the security camera was on. All of it was supposed to make her feel better.
Safe.
But the reality was, even nine years later, the fear could still paralyze her, gripping her in its own way. Like the moon peeking through, Mckenna would try to push away the cloak of fear and peer through it. Often, she could make those around her feel like she had conquered her nightmares, that they no longer scared her, but deep down she knew the truth.
Her family had begged her to go tomorrow. There was a parole hearing for the man who had created this feeling. The man who had changed the course of her life forever and madesure she would never feel secure again. The reason she lied to her neighbors about why she installed the bear-resistant mesh—it would be harder for someone to saw through. Not impossible but harder, and the same reason the door had multiple locks and the camera sat strategically placed to catch anyone trying to break in.
He’d been in prison the last eight years, but it didn’t matter that there were bars and guards and razor-top wire between them. People escaped from prison more than anyone wanted to admit. Mckenna knew. She’d joined her sister, Cassidy, at the Denver FBI Office as a victim specialist, and they were both aware of the reality. The kicker was, Mckenna had never been able to fully liberate herself from her own prison even though she was the one who was supposedly free.
That was why she’d become a victim specialist. Other victims needed support and she felt like she could help. She understood the emotions. In her family’s opinion, unless Mckenna did what they wanted her to do—speak at the parole hearing and ask the board to make her captor serve the full sentence—she wouldn’t feel safe. The thing was, for her, what was the difference between him being free now or in two years? Mckenna shivered and Mocha stood, putting his head in her lap, feeling the change in her. “I should go ask the board to make him serve the full sentence, shouldn’t I?”
Mocha gave a little whine and put his front paws in her lap, climbing up so he could kiss her face.
“Thanks, buddy,” Mckenna said, holding her dog.
Busy work schedules made it easy to avoid her sister for two weeks until Cassidy caught her in her office. Mckenna stared down her sister. Cassidy drummed her fingers on Mckenna’s desk and didn’t break her gaze. Of course, she never would,because Cassidy was tough as nails and one of Denver’s top FBI agents and K-9 handlers for a reason.
“So, explain to me again why you decided to ditch us all at Toby Hanson’s parole hearing?” Cassidy bent forward, getting closer to Mckenna. “We were all there to support you. Me. Mom. Dad. Everyone. But you didn’t show. Maybe if you’d been there, he’d still be sitting in prison and not out free, where he can commit the same crime again.”
Mckenna leaned back in her chair. She was the younger sister and Cassidy had always been protective. It was worse now. She heard the thumping of a tail and gazed down into Mocha’s brown eyes. Mckenna couldn’t imagine life without him. In fact, in her mind, he was the only guy she needed. He was handsome and never complained about having the same dinner every night. He wasn’t upset that she didn’t attend a parole hearing and he loved her no matter what. There were no guys out there like that. Mocha smacked a paw on Mckenna’s arm, and she answered Cassidy.
“Toby Hanson is a part of my past. I’ve moved on from what happened.”
Even as Mckenna spoke, a shiver went down her spine. Had she moved on? That night changed the direction of her life, creating a before and after for her at only eighteen years old.
“Thank you all for going there, for being there for me,” Mckenna said. “But I need to get on with my life and sitting in a parole hearing wouldn’t have helped with that. Plus, didn’t you say that Toby has a great probation officer? The guy will be so on top of Toby, he won’t even be able to use the bathroom without the PO knowing. Or something like that?”
Cassidy rolled her eyes. “Yes, he was assigned Keith Warren and he’s good.”
“Warren? Didn’t he grow up in our town?”
“Yeah, he left in middle school. I heard his parents moved, but he eventually came back to Colorado.”
“Well, then I have nothing to worry about,” Mckenna said, trying to figure out how to get her sister to leave so she could get back to her work and move on from this event.I should have gone and given a statement at the hearing. Now my nightmare is out, walking around, all because I let fear overcome me.
She was getting ready to tell Cassidy that she needed to buckle down and get some paperwork done when a cry of “Parker!” came from outside her office.
Mckenna and Cassidy glanced at each other.
“Which one of us is being summoned by him?” Cassidy asked just as Mckenna noticed that Mocha had gone AWOL.
“Crap. Me.”
Mckenna leaped out of her chair and darted outside her office. She heard another yell of “Come get your dog.”
Sprinting down the hall, she slid around the corner to find Mocha proudly licking his lips in the office of an agent who’d been recently transferred—Agent Evan Knox.
Agent Knox had been the talk of the office. First, it was because he was ruggedly handsome, with his perfectly disheveled blond hair and eyes the color of the Colorado blue sky. Every female was ogling him. Then, though, the talk had turned to the fact that he was difficult to work with, gruff, and kind of a lone wolf.
He worked long hours and Mckenna could tell he’d even stayed at the office to pull all-nighters at times. He also had recently told her that he didn’t think the victim team was very helpful and only stood in the way of his work. Mckenna had told him that someday, he would eat his words. She’d gone home furious that night; no matter how handsome the guy was, he was a jerk and she hoped she never had to work with him.
