Hide and Seek or What?

For households with children, you know how it goes…you don’t realize how much the kids are picking up on what you’re saying – especially since they don’t appear to be paying attention – until they place a well-timed f-bomb at the dinner table, or worse, at church.  Police officer’s kids are no different.

In our city, we had a very high profile missing child.  Our officers looked for her for days. They scoured the entire city, went door-to-door and looked under and behind literally everything.  Our officers weren’t going to stop until they found her.  After several days and behind-the-scenes police work, the focus changed.  Our officers had reason to believe that her mother had killed her, loaded her into a suitcase into the trunk of a car, drove her across town and left her in an apartment complex dumpster.  The search of our city would turn into the search of a garbage dump nearly an hour outside of town.

Our officers suited up in haz-mat suits, masks and duct tape.  They stood shoulder to shoulder with small rakes and scoured the landfill for this beautiful child’s body.  It was back-breaking and emotionally exhausting work.  What if they found her?  But worse – what if they didn’t?

Our officers would come home at night smelling like old disgusting garbage.  The sour smell of rot permeated literally everything.  The only thing worse than the smell was the exhaustion they dragged home with every day.  Every day ended with a defeated “we didn’t find her today”.

As wives and moms, our hearts hurt thinking of our officers out there digging for a child…all the while, wondering what kind of animal could do that to her baby.  We talked about it.  A lot.

One weekend, our local department’s spouse group was holding a fundraiser/garage sale.  Moms had brought their kids while they worked the sale.  It was being held in a large back yard, so the kids were allowed to run around and play.  We were watching them, but not really paying attention to what they were saying.  It appeared they were playing a fun game of hide-and-seek.

One of the moms called out to her daughter to ask what they were playing.  The sweet little cherub yelled back, “Dump!”  What?  They knew their daddies were looking in the dump for a little girl – so they would do the same.  I just don’t think they realized the rest of the story.