How far can love bend around fate before it breaks?
Twelve months after giving their relationship a second chance, vet tech Juneau Olstead and NYPD Lieutenant Damian Rivera are sweeter, filthier, and deeper in love. Their communication is open, hea...
"Honey..." His hand lowered to her back, where he rubbed circles with his palm. "I can do that. Doctor Lin said -"
"I know," she whispered and dipped her head down. "I like having something to do."
"Have a good day." Her eyes shifted to me. "I... made you one too."
"Thanks," I muttered, snatching up the bag of wasted effort.
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Twenty-four hours later, work turned into a nightmare. The fuckers who took June mailed flash drives to me at Vice. With the delay in mail scanning and an inflood of possible tips and leads, we operated on a two-day lag. Once the first drive arrived, new threats arrived every other day.
Hernandez snatched each one, refusing to let me watch them. He only offered that it showed evidence that June was still alive. The weight in his eyes gave away they'd seen images that haunted him.
I was torn between stealing the drive from his office and never wanting to know what it contained. All of NYPD was on alert about June's kidnapping, along with the city being informed daily. After every public statement I issued, calls flooded into our phone lines, email, social media feeds, even people showing up in person at the precinct office.
We sent APB's out past New York's limits, into the rest of the state, New Jersey, Connecticut, as far south as Delaware and Philadelphia. It was a sonar signal cast into an empty ocean, without a single pinged response.
The ten-thousand-dollar reward turned into fifty thousand, then one-hundred thousand. With each increase, more calls flooded in across multiple precincts. Rogue Junes popped up all over the tri-state area. Each lead took time and resources to track down, so much that the call center started issuing fines for bogus reporting.
All those efforts weren't enough. We weren't fucking enough.
One mailed video turned into two, which turned into three. My previous refuge of seeking justice and good will now reeked of disappointing reminders of how I failed June.
Certain circumstances created moments of solidarity that united NYPD officers across divisions, no matter what petty arguments or jurisdiction squabbles existed between disagreeing coworkers and ego turfs. Vice undercover work that involved adult prostitutes and white-collared johns barely batted an eye. Threatened children notched all of us into a sense of urgency and cohesiveness as resources were combined and joint efforts supported.
Another heightened, solidarity circumstance was when another officer or their family was targeted. Kidnapping the kindest-hearted person who'd ever walked through the 34th's front glass doors was damn near a guarantee of all Vice's resources focused into finding June.
Fuck, I even drew from other resources - Investigations, Gang, even SVU, SWAT, and our liaison's office with ICE. Each sympathetic manager assigned one of their detectives under my direction, responsible for scouring their department's undercover intel for any shred of information related to June's location.
