Daniel Mercer was gathering an elderly man’s spilled paperbacks from the floor of Milwaukee’s passenger terminal when Scout pulled the leash tight across his wrist. The German shepherd had been lying beside him on the terminal floor, ignoring the books and accepting the indignity of a romance novel resting against his front paw. Now he was standing. His ears pointed toward a woman and a little girl moving past the benches.
“Just a second,” Daniel told the man. He put the last paperback into the split suitcase and rose, keeping the dog close.
The woman wore a tan raincoat, belted neatly, with a white shopping bag looped over one arm. The girl beside her had an empty paper cup in her hand. As they passed, she reached up and touched the back of the woman’s coat with her fingertips.
Five taps. A pause. Five again.
The woman caught the small hand without turning around. The girl made a sound Daniel almost missed, a breath caught behind closed lips, and Scout stepped toward her.
“With me,” Daniel said.
Scout came back to his knee, but his head remained turned. Daniel knew the difference between the dog spotting a sandwich and taking an interest in a person. There was no trained alert here, no reason to treat anyone as a suspect. There was, however, a child whose hand had disappeared inside an adult’s grip.
The elderly man was still thanking him. Daniel nodded, checked that the man could manage the suitcase, and followed the raincoat.
After four years of tracking missing people and searching buildings together, he could read Scout through small changes: the mouth closing, the head lifting, the shift from one front foot to the other. Sometimes the explanation was ordinary. Once the dog had become fascinated by a woman whose purse contained a foster kitten. Daniel had spent that afternoon finding a cardboard carrier rather than making an arrest.
He let the leash tell him where to look. Then he looked for himself.
The pair stopped near the departure board. The girl stared at the rows of lighted numbers while the woman checked her phone. Her shoes were pink canvas, several sizes too big. When she shifted her feet, the right heel slipped out.
Scout leaned forward again, drawing a breath through his nose. This time the girl saw him.
Her cup buckled in her fist.
“Does she like dogs?” Daniel asked.
The woman’s head came up. “Usually. But we’re in a hurry.”
“That’s all right.”
He stopped several feet away, with Scout on the side farthest from her. He had meant to give her room. Instead, the girl took a half step toward him, and the woman pulled her back against the raincoat.
“Rosie, stand still.”
The girl bent her neck. Daniel could see a strip of skin between the woman’s fingers, pale under the pressure.
“Those shoes giving you trouble?” he asked her.
“She’s been fussing about them all morning,” the woman said. “Her other pair got wet. You know how children are.”
Daniel watched the girl twist her sweatshirt hem around her free hand.
He brought Scout beside a vacant bench and told him to sit. The dog obeyed immediately. His tail swept across the floor once when the girl looked at him.
“What’s his name?” she asked.
Her voice was hoarse enough to make Daniel wonder how long it had been since she’d had a drink.
“Scout.”
“Is that his all-the-time name?”
“It is.”
The woman laughed, a little too loudly for the question. “She’s going through a phase. Everything has to have a special name.”
Daniel crouched to straighten a twist in Scout’s leash. It put his eyes closer to the girl’s height without bringing him nearer. She watched his hands, then the dog’s ears, then the woman.
“Can he drink water?” she asked.
“Sure can. He goes through plenty of it.”
Daniel carried a folding bowl in a pocket on Scout’s harness. He opened it, poured in water from his bottle, and set it beside the bench. The girl leaned forward as Scout drank. She seemed to be listening to every lap.
The woman shifted the shopping bag to her other arm.
“Come on, Rosie.”
The girl stayed beside the bench. One heel slid out of its shoe again, and she stepped down on the canvas, flattening it beneath her sock. The woman released her hand and placed her own between the child’s shoulder blades.
“Dogs at work aren’t for petting. Isn’t that right, Officer?”
“You need to ask first,” he said.
The girl’s lips parted. The woman moved her hand higher on the sweatshirt and began steering her away.
Scout rose, taking one short step before Daniel stopped him. The girl turned at the movement. Her mouth shaped a word, but a departure announcement broke over them, swallowing it.
Daniel rose and moved with them.
“What’s your daughter’s name?”
“I just told you. Rosie.”
“And yours?”
“Karen Bell. Is this necessary?”
“I’d like a minute.”
She held his gaze, her lips pressed together.
“What exactly are you suggesting?” she asked.
“I’m asking because she tried to say something to me.”
“She was asking to touch the dog.”
Daniel looked at the child. “Was that it?”
Her eyes went to the woman’s hand. She shook her head once, so slightly he might have mistaken it for movement in the crowd.
He pressed his radio button and asked Sergeant Keene to join him by the departure board. She was already in the terminal, speaking to an employee about a theft from a luggage cart. Daniel kept his request quiet and ordinary.
The woman heard it anyway.
“We’re going to miss our train.”
“We’ll work that out.”
“You can’t just stop every mother whose child is tired.”
He didn’t answer the accusation. The girl had begun tapping the back of the coat again, her fingertips landing near a metal snap. This close, Daniel could hear the faint clicking. Scout turned his head toward it, and the girl stopped.
“Rosie,” the woman said, “tell him I’m your mother.”
The child stared at the empty cup.
“Go on.”
Daniel waited, keeping his eyes on the girl.
“You can tell me in your own way,” he said.
She lifted her head. “He doesn’t know me.”
The woman exhaled as though her point had been made. “Of course he doesn’t. He’s a stranger.”
But the girl was looking at Scout.
“Will he get mad if I tell him wrong?”
Daniel set the bowl on the bench. “No.”
The woman took a step toward the platform corridor, bringing the girl with her. Scout moved at the same instant, interested in the child’s quick retreat. Daniel held him beside his leg and stepped across the woman’s route himself.
“We need to finish this conversation.”
Her shopping bag struck his sleeve. She pulled it back sharply, and a few passengers slowed to watch. A man raised his phone.
Daniel turned his shoulder, blocking the camera’s view of the girl.
“Give us some room, please.”
Sergeant Andrea Keene appeared at the edge of the benches. She took in the dog, the woman, and the child’s flattened shoe without asking Daniel to explain in front of everyone.
“There’s a quiet room down the hall,” she said. “We can talk there.”
“We don’t need a room.” The woman’s voice had lost its pleasant edge. “We need to board.”
The girl’s cup dropped.
She reached toward Scout, stopping just short of his fur. Daniel loosened the leash enough to let the dog sit beside her while keeping control of his head. He told her where she could touch him, on the shoulder, and showed her with his own hand.
Her fingers settled into the thick coat. Scout stood still.
“Rosie.”
The child gripped a handful of fur. Daniel gently covered her hand before the pressure could hurt the dog, and she loosened it at once.
“That’s better,” he said.
For the first time, she looked directly at him. A tear had reached the corner of her mouth, and she seemed puzzled by it, as though crying were something she’d meant to postpone.
“It’s Maisie,” she said.
The woman moved toward her. Keene stepped between them.
“Let her finish.”
“She’s making up a game.”
Maisie’s hand stayed on Scout’s shoulder. “She told me I had to be Rosie until we got there.”
Daniel lowered himself onto the edge of the bench.
“Who told you?”
Maisie glanced at the raincoat. The woman had stopped protesting. That silence made Daniel watch her more closely than her anger had.
“I’m going to stay right here while Andrea talks to her,” he told the girl.
Maisie shook her head. The movement became stronger, frantic enough to shake loose a strand of hair stuck to her cheek.
“You can’t let her go.” “Tell me why.” The girl pressed her hand flat against Scout, then looked up at Daniel. “There are five more children,” she said. “She locked them in…”
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