He checked the ditch near the road, the creek behind the property, the neighboring lots where Brush sometimes stopped to sniff. He called shelters before most of them opened. He printed flyers that same afternoon. He posted photographs online. Friends from the department shared them. Former officers shared them. People who had never met Brush shared them because an old retired K9 with a white muzzle and intelligent eyes looked like the kind of dog no decent person wanted to stay lost.
Sightings came quickly.
Then they kept coming.
A dog behind a gas station thirty miles west. A shepherd mix outside a church parking lot. A limping dog near railroad tracks. A gray-faced stray behind a grocery store.
Daniel drove to all of them.
None were Brush.
At first, hope gave him energy. He could function on urgency, the way he had in actual search operations. Each false lead felt like part of the process. The next one might be right. The next one might matter. But as the weeks passed, hope turned meaner. It rose too easily and crashed too often. Daniel began learning the distance between resemblance and recognition the hard way.
The worst part was that each wrong dog still needed something.
Water.
Food.
A call to animal control.
A slow approach.
Daniel helped when he could. He could not stop doing that. But every animal that was not Brush sharpened the ache of the one he had lost.
Lily started calling every evening.
“Anything?”
“No.”
“You eating?”
“Yes.”
He often was not.