by TA Moore
None of that mattered right now. They both had a job to do.
“Introduce us to the family?” Cloister asked.
Merlo looked like he wasn’t happy about something but inclined his head and led the way back inside. There was an old chip on Cloister’s shoulder that wanted him to sneer at the family inside—absentee yuppie parents who hadn’t even known their child was missing—but the Hartleys didn’t look that different from any other parents in the same situation. Nicer clothes on their backs and better furniture to sit on, maybe, but the same sour-salt smell of fear and the hollow slump of pretrained grief. Deputy Tancredi was sitting with them, giving her best line of reassuring, noncommittal platitudes.
“Ken, Lara.” Merlo dropped his voice to an awkwardly gentle tone. It was obviously not something he was good at.
The parents looked up with eyes desperate to believe that Cloister was going to help. The father was short and dark—the undiluted Slavic lines of his face not quite matched with the unexceptional Hartley surname. His wife was thin and angular, with deep-set, bruised-looking eyes and a puff of dark curls that defied her fear. Perched behind them in the window seat like he wasn’t entirely sure of his place in the room, their son was an unfinished sketch of them both.
William. Probably Bill or Billy to anyone without a stick up their ass. Cloister didn’t have any urge to poke at the miserable kid.
Merlo reached up to tap Cloister’s shoulder. “This is Deputy Witte, one of the sheriff’s department’s dog handlers.” He left it at that.
Cloister freed his hand from the collar and reached down to slap Bourneville’s side. “And this is my partner, Bourneville,” he said. “She’s one of our best trackers.”
She panted at them with her ears up and her jaw open in a dog smile. Cloister could feel Merlo’s irritated impatience with him, but he didn’t get it. The Hartleys didn’t need to have faith in Cloister. They needed to believe the dog was a lot more capable than the pets they saw in everyday life.
The wife—Lara—twisted her hands together in bony, knuckly knots. “He’s a good boy,” she said. Her voice was thin and taut. She was barely holding on over the panic. “Drew wouldn’t just go off with his friends or something without leaving us a note. He’d know we’d worry.”
“They know that, Mom,” Billy said.
Something ugly hit Lara’s face. She grimaced it away and rubbed her hand over her mouth. She took a deep breath, and lifted her narrow shoulders toward her ears before she could speak again.
“No, they don’t,” she said. Billy winced and squeezed himself back into the window. “They come up here, and they look at us, and they think Drew’s just another neglected little rich boy. Well, he’s not. He’s a good boy.”
Cloister tilted his head to catch her gaze and hold it. “He’s a little boy,” he said. “Good or bad, a little boy needs to be found.”
Her face crumpled for a second, and tears welled to tremble on her thick lashes. Then she lifted her chin, visibly pulled herself together, and pressed her lips into an uncompromising line.
“You’ll, umm, need something that belongs to Drew? A toy or some of his clothes?”
Cloister nodded. “Something he’s worn recently, unwashed,” he said.
She nodded and stood up. Her husband reached for her hand, but her fingers slid out of his as she walked away. Once she’d left the room, he turned to Cloister.
“We were late,” he said. “There was an accident at the workshop. Someone cut themselves quite badly, and we’re doctors. It didn’t seem urgent to get back. This place is like home, really. We know everyone.”
What he wanted to hear was “It’s not your fault.” Even the families where it was their fault still wanted to hear that.
“It’s not your fault, Ken,” Merlo said. “I’m sure Drew’s fine.”
Cloister noticed he said “Ken” like an acquaintance, not a cop. It was just a name, not a power play.
“The last time you saw Drew, it was here?” he checked.
Ken nodded and then hesitated. He turned to look at his son. “Bill? You stayed here, right? Like we told you?”
Billy hunched his shoulders, bony with a growth spurt under his Star Trek T-shirt. “’Course.”
So that was up in the air. If the boys had left the cabin, no way Bill would admit it in answer to that loaded question.
Lara came back in, absently folding a crumpled Captain America T-shirt into a neat square. She hesitated but then handed it over. “It’s his favorite.”
“I’ll bring it back,” Cloister promised.
Merlo followed him outside and caught him before he could get started. He caught his hand in the sweaty bend of Cloister’s elbow. The touch prickled down his arm like electricity and made the fine hair on his arms stand on end and his muscles tighten. He cursed himself for being easily led. Right then he didn’t need the distraction.
“Something happened here,” Merlo said. His eyes squinted against the thrown-up dust as he frowned at Cloister. “I know the family. Lara Hartley’s father was an FBI agent and a friend of mine. They’re happy. They’re careful. There’s no risk factors. I want to find this boy.”
“I always want to find them,” Cloister told him. “It’s my job to bring them home, not care how they got lost.”
He pulled his arm free, dropped into a crouch, and offered the handful of T-shirt to Bourneville. She sniffed and snorted and burrowed her nose into the folds to get to the sweat-soaked seams. Once she was sure she had the scent, she looked up at Cloister expectantly.
“Such.” He snapped out the track command.
She dropped her nose to the dirt as she cast around. She sneezed when the dry earth went up her nose, and then she made a beeline down into a gully. In better, wetter weather, it might have been a stream. In the middle of a drought, it was just damp. Bourneville pulled against the lead as she headed east, away from the Retreat, and Cloister broke into a jog.
The lackluster moonlight was enough for the dog to see, but as the lit-up glow of the Retreat faded behind them, Cloister unclipped the flashlight from his vest. He flicked it on with his thumb and played the beam of light over the ground in front of Bourneville.
A startled lizard mad-legged out of the unexpected light and scuttled over the rocks. Its loose-limbed run made it look as though the wind were going to pick it up and send it tumbling.
The gully petered out as its high sides collapsed into rattling scrub and thorns. Worked into the sand and roots, a suggestion of a foot-worn path wound between the mesquite. Bourneville followed it faithfully for yards and then suddenly veered off to the side. She trotted forward, stopped, and tried again. Eventually she found what she was sniffing for. She stopped, growled quietly, and pawed at the dirt.
Cloister whistled her off. She backed up reluctantly, paw over paw, so he could get in and see what it was. Caught in the roots of the tree, a crumpled bottle lay in a sticky, muddle puddle. He put the flashlight in his mouth, his teeth digging into their usual spots in the rubber coating, and poked the bottle curiously. There was a dribble of liquid left inside, and it looked gritty.
Could just be more sand.
Unwilling to leave the bottle to the elements, he snapped a picture and quickly bagged it up. He stuffed it into his vest pocket as he stood up, but the crinkle of it against his ribs as he breathed was distracting.
Bourneville waited until he stood up and then pulled again. There was no path this time, just roots and stones and the wire-strung boundary of the Retreat’s property line. Between two trees there was a body-sized depression in the dirt that probably marked the escape route of a few dozen kids over the years. Bourneville made it under easily, but whatever teen had made the gap was a lot narrower through the chest than Cloister was. It caught at his hair and shirt as he squirmed through, and it hooked into the straps of his vest.
On the other side, there was an old dirt road. The ruts were worn ankle deep and rock hard. It didn’t look like they’d been
disturbed for a while. Probably one of the old farm access roads, he guessed, although he couldn’t swear to what one. After five years he knew Plenty pretty well, but not as well as someone who grew up there.
Bourneville scratched the dirt again and whined anxiously for Cloister to see what she’d found.
“Hold on,” Cloister told her. He scratched the back of his neck where a scrape stung with sweat, and he knelt down next to her. The grass on the side of the road was flattened and creased, and there was an indentation in the dirt where something had recently been pried up.
The stains on the grass weren’t soda this time.
Cloister rocked back onto his heels and felt the pull in his thighs. It could just have been a tumble, but Bourneville had stopped sniffing around. The trail was cold, and there was blood on the ground.
He quickly praised Bourneville, scrubbed his hand down her back, told her she was a good dog, and radioed in. There was a cold weight in the pit of his stomach.
No one would say “snatched.” Not yet. It wouldn’t do to cause panic, and for an ex-hippie, the owner of the Retreat was very good at greasing palms to make bad press go away. But maybe it wasn’t that. Drew might turn up in an hour, next to a gopher hole with a swollen ankle or in a hospital after some Good Samaritan picked up an injured kid on the road.
Except that wasn’t going to happen. The kid wasn’t lost. He’d been taken.
Cloister was still going to find him. That was what he did, but… that was as far as he’d let himself get. After the but was where hope started to fade, and Cloister wouldn’t go there. Until he knew better, there was going to be a happy ending.
Eventually one of the endings had to be happy.
Chapter Three
THE COFFEE was road-stop shit, bought from a gas station that also sold deep-fried chicken gizzards and wilted, wrinkled french fries. It tasted like grease and gas. Javi drank it anyhow. The sun had just risen on the second day of Drew Hartley’s disappearance, and Javi needed all the fuzzy-edged clarity he could pull together.
“Learn to nap. In this job forty winks is better than nothing.” It was Drew’s grandfather, Saul Lee, who gave Javi that advice. Not that Javi had ever seen the man heed his own counsel. It had been three in the morning when Saul died, and he was still at the office—facedown in that day’s caseload, a cup of coffee going cold on the desk.
Javi still owed him. It was Saul’s intervention after Phoenix that got Javi posted here instead of moldering away somewhere quiet and unobtrusive. Plenty wasn’t much of a tourist destination, but it was a solid, professional stepping stone. Even though half the reason his supervisors approved him was for the good optics of having a Mexican-American agent in San Diego.
Probably not so much, though, if the case that made your name was the unsolved mystery around a decorated FBI officer’s missing grandson.
The vinegary cynicism made Javi flinch with guilt, mostly because it wasn’t the first time it had happened, although he’d never let it get as far as a full thought before.
“Results, not intentions, are all that matter in the write-up.” That was Saul too.
KEEPING ONE hand on the steering wheel, Javi drained the coffee to the unappetizing dregs as he drove down Plenty’s Main Street. It was quaint in a way that towns rarely evolved naturally, with leaded glass in the storefronts and no trash on the sidewalks. The shops sold yogurt-and-kale smoothies, designer shoes, and Native jewelry at three times the price they paid the artists. Antique shops sold upcycled furniture and relics retrieved from abandoned farms and houses.
The uglier side of Plenty—the drug cartels and trafficking that were the reason the FBI had a resident agency there—was kept out of sight. Out of mind, for those who could afford it.
He turned left at the bus station and then pulled into the police station’s horseshoe-shaped parking lot. The building was a factory once—iron machinery, scarred wood floors, and red brick walls. These days it was home to the police station, the Plenty Records Office, the town morgue, and on the top floor, where the executive offices used to be, the FBI’s resident agency—their version of a regional office. Thankfully they didn’t all have to share an entrance.
Patrol cars were lined up in neat rows, waiting for the morning shift to roll out. A tired-looking woman in jogging pants and a Batman needs naps too T-shirt leaned against the wall, smoking with the intensity of someone who needed more than just a nicotine fix. Her hair, a flat shade of home-bleached brass, was dragged back into a tight ponytail, and her eyes were puffy and dark ringed.
As Javi got out of the car, she ground the cigarette out against the wall. It left an ashy comma smudged into the brick.
“Fucker,” she said flatly.
Her lack of affect made it hard to tell if she was talking to Javi about her situation or condemning the world at large. She went back inside and left the shredded butt on the ground.
The woman on duty at the front desk glanced up when he came in.
“Special Agent Merlo,” she said. She covered the mouthpiece of the phone with her hand to muffle it. “The lieutenant is waiting for you.”
POLICE STATION coffee didn’t taste any better than gas station coffee, but it was served hot enough that, after the first mouthful, your taste buds were too stunned to register it. Javi nursed a mug as he stood and stared at the search parameters scratched out on the wall-mounted map. Red pins marked the locations of nearby sex and violent offenders. There was a constellation of them.
Up in the foothills, it seemed like the fear and panic over the lost little boy was an intrusion into an idyll. The sort of thing that didn’t happen in a place like that. Except it did, apparently.
“I’ve got deputies checking in with all registered pervs,” Lieutenant Frome said from behind his desk. He licked his thumb and scrubbed at a blotch of coffee stain on his cuff. “That only covers the ones we’ve caught and who do keep up with signing in.”
He shrugged off the last statement tiredly. Javi already knew the issues.
“I want to pull in Mr. Reed for a chat,” Javi said, naming the affable, ethical-clothing-wearing reptile who owned the Retreat.
Frome frowned. “You think he’s involved?” He shook his head dubiously. “We’ve never had much problem with him. Even when he was dealing pot, he kept it quiet and polite. Threw a few ‘pigs’ and ‘filths’ at us when we went up, but that was for show as much as anything.”
“Since the Retreat opened, there’ve been twelve complaints of sexual misconduct and harassment.”
Frome shrugged. “A couple of girls from town who thought they’d get a settlement from a wealthy guest. Or teenagers who got a bit out of hand. It was nothing serious, and no one’s ever made any suggestion that Reed was involved.”
It was an effort for Javi to keep the grimace off his mouth. Frome wasn’t a bad cop, but he was a political one. Sometimes that made for ugly things coming out of his mouth, but calling him on it wasn’t going to help.
“Still,” he said. “He’s king of the castle up there. I’d like to talk to him where he’s less comfortable.”
Frome gave in with a nod, and his pen scratched over the pad as he made a note. “I’ll ask him to come down, tell him we just want to discuss the area?”
“And make sure that we have an officer up there to stay with the family,” Javi added. “Two if you can manage it. Use my authorization. I want to know everything they do when they’re together and when they aren’t.”
“You sure?” Frome asked doubtfully. “We all know them. They’re good people. Lara’s worked in the ER for years. She’s saved people’s lives. Deputies’ lives.”
“Until we have something, I’d rather maintain a nonconfrontational relationship with the family,” he said. “But the parents and the brother are the ones who saw the boy last. If we don’t look at them, you know that would be negligence.”
It wasn’t nice, but the truth behind all those asshole detectives harassing desperate parents in crime dra
mas was that, more often than not—say seven times out of ten—it wasn’t the creepy neighbor or the predatory store clerk. It was someone in the family—one of the people who had unquestioned access to and control over the child.
“I can’t imagine Lara doing something like that. Not to her own son.” Frome shook his head.
The image of the beaten-down woman who was smoking outside a police station like it was a work break flicked through Javi’s mind.
“Every deviant and pervert in jail had people in their life who just couldn’t believe it of them,” he said. “I don’t think they’ve done anything to their son. I hope they haven’t. But if they have, I don’t want them to get away with it.”
Frome sat back, and the chair creaked under him. His uniform shirt strained gently over the gut that made itself known in that position. He tapped his pen against the pad hard enough to leave dents in the paper.
“You should talk to Witte.”
Even from inside it, the expression on Javi’s face felt supercilious. He couldn’t help it. Deputy Witte rubbed him the wrong way.
“About what?” he asked. “Dogs or country music.”
Frome gave him a smile that was amused but not entirely approving. “Don’t underestimate him,” he said. “He’s good at what he does.”
“Chase dogs?”
“Find people,” Frome said. “He volunteers with San Diego’s mountain rescue. He’s trained for Structural Collapse Urban Search and Rescue, and the only reason he’s not up on that mountain right now is that I pulled him off so his dog could get some sleep. He’s dealt with more missing and lost people than either of us have, or probably ever will, and he was the first deputy up there that night. Maybe he noticed something. If anyone was in a position to, it was him. Talk to Witte.”