No movement.
For one tired second, I almost understood why the local precinct wanted it to be nothing.
Nothing is clean.
Nothing lets you go back to your coffee.
Then my flashlight caught red and yellow in the median.
A fast-food bag.
It was crumpled and half-buried in frost, but it was too fresh to be roadside trash.
The grease stain was still dark.
A few yards beyond it, there was a wrapper.
Then a crushed paper cup.
Then another wrapper caught in the dead grass like a breadcrumb that had not meant to become one.
I called the location in and climbed over the guardrail.
The slope was slick beneath my boots.
Every step sent little slides of gravel whispering down ahead of me.
At the bottom of the embankment, tucked under the road where most drivers would never think to look, was the mouth of a concrete drainage pipe.
It was wide enough for a grown man to crawl inside.
Black air breathed out of it.
Cold.
Wet.
Rotten with the smell of mud and old runoff.
I crouched low and aimed my flashlight into the tunnel.
Two eyes stared back at me.
The little girl was curled against the curved wall, knees pulled tight to her chest.
She was shaking so hard that her knees knocked together.
Her feet were bare and gray with cold.
