Hold Still by Lisa Regan

working an SVU case.
    As if reading her mind, Kevin grumbled, “I sure hope they all fell asleep at their desks.”
    At the top of the steps, the tension mounting in Jocelyn’s shoulders dissolved. Almost the entire shift was gathered around the tiny block of a television mounted on the wall in the corner of the room. It was hardly ever turned on, but tonight all eyes were riveted to the images moving across the screen.
    Kevin and Jocelyn exchanged a curious glance, one tinged with relief. They sidled up to the rear of the pack. Jocelyn found herself next to Chen and nudged his ribs with her elbow. “What’s going on?”
    “Is that Kensington?” Kevin asked loudly.
    The television showed an aerial shot of a few tightly packed city blocks, some of the residential streets no wider than an alleyway, lined with squat, flat-roofed houses. The words “Breaking News” scrolled across the bottom of the screen. Marked units flooded the narrow streets, lights blazing. From the sky, the images reminded Jocelyn of the old video game Pac-Man, the marked units moving steadily through the grid of city streets, searching for their prey.
    “They found the Kaufman girl,” Chen said, his tone disinterested.
    Jocelyn felt her stomach constrict. For a split second, her breath caught in her throat. She coughed and tried to make her voice sound as normal as possible, but when she said, “Alive?” her voice cracked.
    Chen didn’t notice. “Yeah,” he said. He rubbed a palm over his eyes, as if trying to wipe away some troublesome emotion. “Bound, beaten, and raped, but alive.”
    Jocelyn stifled the breathless “Thank God” that nearly escaped her mouth. Although Northwest didn’t cover sex crimes, during her career Jocelyn had seen her share of crimes against children. Before Olivia, she’d been able to wall up the part of her that reacted emotionally—with hysterical rage at the criminals and aching sympathy for the victims—and do her job with the cool efficiency of a machine. But being a mother had put cracks in the wall, and, sometimes, her true feelings seeped through. It didn’t prevent her from doing her job and doing it well; it just made it harder for her to sleep at night.
    “They found her in this guy’s basement. He escaped out the back, took off in a white Honda sedan. The Kenzos heard the police were pursuing a guy in a white sedan, and they pulled some dude out of his white car at Lehigh and Memphis and proceeded to beat the shit out of him,” Chen related.
    Kenzos was the nickname for people who lived in Philadelphia’s Kensington neighborhood. One of the other detectives picked up the tale. “Yeah, so they realized they got the wrong guy, but in the meantime, the rapist crashes his car into a house on Cedar and takes off on foot.”
    “I hope the Kenzos find him first,” someone else said, eliciting laughter from the rest of the unit.
    “Nah,” Kevin said. “I hope he pulls a weapon.”
    His comment was met with grim but approving nods. Jocelyn swallowed over the lump in her throat. She hated to admit it, but she agreed—everyone concerned would be better off if officers were forced to shoot and kill the child rapist while trying to apprehend him.
    She glanced at her silent cell phone. “Guess I know where Vaughn is.”
    Kevin nodded. “SVU is ass-deep in this right now. What should we do with their suspects?”
    “Hold ’em till SVU comes,” one of the other detectives piped in.
    Jocelyn kept her eyes on Kevin. She stared hard at him until he rolled his eyes. With a groan, he threw his arms in the air. “Fine,” he huffed. “Let’s go talk to them.”
    They tore themselves away from the television and sat side by side at Jocelyn’s desk. She ran a quick background check on Angel Donovan. He was twenty-eight, a native of Philadelphia with a dozen arrests for drug violations. He had done a few years in his late teens. The rest of the charges had been dismissed before Donovan even got to