Bone to Pick

by TA Moore

  He ignored Javi’s skeptical grunt and headed back to the car. Bourneville was pancaked out in the backseat, looking bored. Her ears pricked up as Cloister popped the trunk, and she scrambled to her feet when he dragged her dress-up box out over the wheelwell.

  “What are you doing?” Javi asked.

  “There’s a lot of glass,” Cloister said. He whistled through his teeth and signaled for Bourneville to get out of the car. She jumped out, waited, and lifted her paw up like a furry Cinderella as he crouched down next to her. He slid the heavy-soled sock on and secured the Velcro around the top.

  “Bootees?” Javi said.

  Cloister twisted around and squinted one eye shut as he looked up at the lean silhouette. “You want to walk around here barefoot?”

  “I’m not a dog,” Javi said.

  “Neither is Bourneville,” Cloister said. “She’s a sheriff’s department deputy, and it costs more when she’s on sick leave than it does when you are.”

  Javi snorted like he didn’t believe that. He’d obviously never seen a vet bill.

  Cloister finished getting her booted up, and he stood. First couple of times he tried the shoes on her, she went stiff legged and reproachful like he’d strapped bees to her feet. Now she knew it meant they were going to be doing something interesting—either search and rescue or body retrieval.

  And after ten years, Cloister didn’t think Birdie Utkin needed rescuing. Just finding.

  Cloister grabbed the T-shirt bone out of the car, stuffed it into his back pocket, and tossed the keys to Javi.

  “You can wait in the car if you want,” he said.

  “I’ve come this far,” Javi said. “I might as well see it through.”

  Cloister smirked and stooped over to unclip Bourneville’s leash. He could feel her quivering with pent-up energy as she waited for the command.

  “Bourneville, find RJ,” he barked. “Where’s RJ?”

  It was kinder than corpse if the family was there, or the press, and Cloister was the only one who knew what it really meant. Besides, it worked. The minute he let go of Bourneville’s collar, she was away.

  She trotted the first couple of yards, sniffed around, and doubled back on herself. The burned-out car pulled her over, and she circled in twice on big, gloved feet.

  “She smells the raccoon,” Javi said impatiently.

  “No,” Cloister says. “She can tell the difference.”

  Something had happened in the car, but between the weather, the years, and the fire, it wasn’t enough to hold Bourneville’s nose. She snorted, abandoned the car, and made a beeline for the splintered front door of one of the nearby houses. Like the car, someone had put a match to it at some point. The roof was caved in, and the windows were smoke-stained shards of glass.

  There was enough of a gap at the bottom of the door for her to squirm through. Cloister loped after her and caught up just as her tail disappeared into the dark. The door had been broken up previously. Twisted metal popped out of the charred wood of the door. Cloister shoved it open. A drift of trash behind it scraped over the floor, and he found a room that looked like somewhere you’d find a dead body.

  Profanity was scraped into the walls, stained bedding was shoved into a corner, and discarded balls of tinfoil threaded the vinegary bite of heroin through the piss-and-smoke stink of the place. Bourneville was already gone, though, and the indistinct smudge of gloved paw prints were left in the sooty residue on the ground.

  There was someone dead nearby, and the scent had to be strong.

  Cloister broke into a run. All those late-night sprints down the beach weren’t just to wear himself out until he could sleep without dreaming. Dogs that had gotten the scent rarely remembered their handlers were stuck on slow human legs. He spent a lot of time trying to keep up with her.

  He went through the kitchen, scrambled over the cracked beam that had come down and crushed the sink, and ran across the alley at the back. A disgruntled, scrawny tabby cat, still arched and bristly from an unexpected encounter with a big dog, hissed at him from the top of a broken wall.

  Bourneville wove through rubble and unfinished buildings. She went in one door and came out another, doubled back on herself, and crisscrossed over her own path. Occasionally she’d stop and look around to check that she knew where Cloister was.

  “Has she lost the scent?” Javi asked when he caught up with Cloister. They were both sweating, Cloister’s T-shirt was stuck to him, and the stiff collar of Javi’s shirt was damp and out of shape. Javi wasn’t quite as out of breath as Cloister might have expected, but then—Cloister hitched in a quick breath—he had seen the hard lines of muscle hidden under the sharp tailoring.

  “No,” Cloister said. He pulled the neck of his T-shirt up and wiped his face. “She’s… triangulating.”

  A sniff at the base of a pallet of bricks, and Bourneville took off again. She arrowed in a mostly straight line down the sketched-out street and into the shell of a building that never got beyond the ground floor. At one point the walls had been plastered and the roof intact, but years of sand and the elements had worn both paper-thin and pocked. The windows were intact, and the protective film still clung on in shreds.

  Bourneville flopped down on the floor, chin on her paws, and whined. Her eyes were flat and her tail clamped in around her haunches. It was her tell, but Cloister could never shake the feeling that she felt bad about not finding the corpse while it was still alive.

  “Good girl,” he said as he took a knee next to her. He fussed over her until she relaxed, uncoiled from her tell posture, and sat up. Cloister pulled the T-shirt bone from his pocket and tossed it across the room for her. She skidded after it, nearly went headlong into the wall, and flopped down to slobber on it. While she was occupied, Cloister tapped his knuckles against the sheet of chipboard flooring. It was dry enough to rattle under his knuckles.

  There was no smell. No stain.

  “Did you see a crowbar outside?” he asked. When Javi just snorted at him, he shrugged and fished in his pocket for the chunky rectangle of his old Swiss Army Knife. The cover was chipped and battered, and grime was worked into the hinges, but it was the closest the Wittes had to a family heirloom—three generations, two sets of initials, and taken apart at least twice to get the blood out before it rusted.

  He hooked his finger in the groove and pulled the knife blade out.

  “Maybe it’s not her,” Javi said. He had his phone in his hands, and the flash blinked as he snapped a picture of the floor.

  “It’s still someone.”

  Cloister supposed they could call it in and wait for the CSI team to excavate the area properly. Except he wasn’t keen on swallowing the jeers if it turned out to be a bag of pork ribs a builder had dumped in the foundations instead of the garbage can. Besides, if this was Birdie Utkin, she’d been in this sad, sour place long enough.

  He dug the knife into the chipboard, which cracked and broke under the digging point. He wriggled the blade around until there was a hole big enough to get his fingers in. The sharp edges dug into his skin as he wrenched at it, and the sheet of wood bowed up under the pressure. Two nails popped out of the floor, screeching out of the wood, and a chunk of the chipboard snapped off.

  “Shit,” Javi said. “You were right.”

  The flash went again, the bright light harsh on the plastic covering the dry, wizened face of a girl who’d been too young to end up lost under a floor. She was curled up on her side, hugging herself with wiry, jerky-tanned arms. Her hair was a brittle, wispy halo, more dust colored than anything else. But it had probably been blonde.

  “It’s her,” Cloister said.

  “We don’t know that. Not yet,” Javi said. He tapped Cloister’s ankle with his foot and stepped back as he called the discovery in. “Don’t touch anything. We need to get the forensic teams in here… see if there’s anything useful left. How the hell did they miss this the first time? I thought the Plenty police force were corrupt, not incompetent.
”

  He stalked out of the dusty box of a room to bark orders down the phone.

  Cloister folded the knife back in and stuffed it into his back pocket. His hands shook as adrenaline worked its way down into the tendons. He already knew he’d have the nightmare tonight, but at least one family would have an answer.

  “Time to go home, Birdie,” he said.

  Chapter Fourteen

  THE DEAD girl looked very small as they carried her out of the building on a stretcher. Under the white sheet, her dried-out corpse looked more like a child or an animal. Nothing but bones and weathered skin.

  “I can’t tell you anything until I’ve finished the autopsy,” the coroner said. She wiped her glasses with her thumb, pushed them back up her nose, and squinted through the greasy smears until her eyes adjusted. “In my opinion the corpse was moved here after she’d already been dead for a while.”

  “How long is a while?”

  Galloway sighed. She was a colorless woman with dishwater-blonde hair and washed-out blue eyes. Even her skin had that oddly sallow effect that came from spending most of her life under florescent lights. She was good at her job, though.

  “I prefer not to give my opinion until I’ve opened them up,” she said. Her blanched-out eyebrows lifted. “Do you really think I’m going to do guesses?”

  “Is there anything you can tell me?”

  She pursed her lips and picked distractedly at a bit of dried skin. “No obvious cause of death,” she said. “It looks like she was held somewhere before she died. Her fingertips show signs of damage.” She hooked her fingers and scratched at the air to make her point. “That could have been predation, though. I will know more when—”

  “You finish the autopsy,” he finished for her.

  Galloway gave him a dry smile and turned to go. Before she could, Javi tapped his finger against her elbow to reclaim her attention.

  “Can you put a rush on it?” he asked. “Front of the line?”

  “I could,” she said, but she moved her arm away from him. “Why should I?”

  Javi hesitated. The evidence of a connection between the two cases was reaching a tipping point, but Javi wasn’t sure he wanted to commit his name to it yet. Haring off on wild-goose chases, even ones that proved fruitful, didn’t look good on an agent’s record or when they got to court. Let J.J. Diggs at a case based on gut feelings instead of evidence and investigative procedure, and he’d have a field day.

  “It could be connected to another case,” he said. “Maybe.”

  Galloway grimaced. “Lara’s little boy?” she asked. Of course she knew the family, Javi realized. There weren’t that many doctors in Plenty, and the county coroner’s office dealt with deaths at the hospital too.

  “It’s not confirmed,” Javi said. “And I do not want it getting back to the Hartley family. Not yet.”

  That got him a scathing look. “She’s a professional acquaintance, not my ‘bestie,’” Galloway said dryly. “But I’ll make sure I examine this body as soon as I can.”

  Javi let her leave. As she oversaw loading the body into the back of the coroner’s van, Javi pinched the bridge of his nose between his fingers and squeezed as though the pressure might help make the current situation simpler.

  If the two cases were connected, how? If the Utkin family finally worked out that Kelly Hartley had put pressure on the investigation, they might have snatched Billy as payback. But despite Utkin’s reputed connections, that seemed a severe jump in antisocial behavior for a SoCal builder with no criminal record.

  Except they still didn’t know the corpse they’d found was Birdie Utkin, he reminded himself. Until they did he might as well put a pin in the question of how and deal with the situation at hand.

  Cloister was off playing fetch with the dog, and the news crews had joined the crowd of rubberneckers gathered outside the wire fencing. The deputies on duty were trying to keep them back, but a mixture of nosiness and concern made them press closer.

  He walked to the perimeter and into a battery of questions.

  “Is this connected to the Hartley case?” a vaguely familiar woman asked as she tucked her hair behind her ear. It took a second, but Javi put a name to her—Harriet Green of the local television station.

  “Have you found Drew Hartley’s body?” a more direct man asked. He had hipster black glasses and a laptop bag. Newspaper or blog. “Do you have a suspect?”

  “This is a separate case,” Javi said. “At the moment we have no reason to connect this to the missing local boy, Drew Hartley. We have every hope that we’ll be able to return Drew home happy and well.”

  It had been confidence in the first hours after Drew walked out of the Retreat and didn’t come back. The more time passed, the more he had to manage expectations. There was no kindness in keeping hope alive after a certain point.

  “Who was found? We saw them bringing a stretcher out,” Harriet asked again, leaning forward to get the microphone in his face.

  Before he could say anything, one of the CSI techs yelled for him.

  “Agent Merlo. There’s something you need to see.” Over the collar of the man’s white coveralls, his face was grim with concern.

  “I’m not able to share any more information at this moment,” Javi said smoothly. “As soon as we have more, we’ll let you know. Thank you.”

  He turned and walked away quickly, ignoring the questions tossed at his back. The CSI tech was already walking back toward the building as Javi approached.

  “What is it?” Javi asked.

  “Bad news,” the man said. “We pulled up the floor to get the body out. She wasn’t the only thing under there.”

  The image of a dozen sad, curled-up brown corpses flashed into Javi’s head. He ground out a curse and stretched his legs. He ducked through the plastic sheet they’d tacked up over the door. The area was gridded off with yellow tags and cameras. There were no bodies. It would almost have been better if there were. At least it would have been a clear situation.

  Five plastic bags had been unearthed from under the floor. Each was full of a set of neatly folded clothes, down to a pair of shoes neatly placed on top.

  “Son of a bitch,” Javi said through stiff lips.

  “Look at this,” the tech said as he stepped around Javi. He picked his way over the wooden framework on the ground, shuffling in his oversized boots, and crouched down to pick up one of the already tagged and photographed bags. He tilted it toward Javi. Even through the glaze of milky plastic, Javi could see the faded red fabric of the T-shirt and the Avengers’ logo screen printed on it.

  Captain America was Drew’s favorite, Kay told them when she gave them the description, but he loved the Avengers too.

  “Get them back to the lab, process them, and get me the report before the end of today,” he snapped. Habit made the tech start to hedge, but Javi cut him off impatiently. “This missing-child investigation is about to be reclassified to a serial offender. Get me that report.”

  The tech pinched his mouth—either in resentment or understanding of how the case had escalated, Javi didn’t care—and nodded.

  “Agent.”

  Javi took one last look at the room, fixed it in his mind for later when he would need to make sense of it, and then headed back outside. It was time to tell Cloister his hunch had become a theory. It looked like Drew’s disappearance and Birdie Hartley’s were connected. Javi thought about the other little bags of clothes they’d unearthed and tightened his mouth into a grim line. At least those two cases.

  WHEN BIRDIE went missing, so did whatever held the Utkins’ marriage together. Heather Utkin divorced her husband within the year and moved out of the city. Out of state, in fact.

  “She went back to Illinois,” Lew Utkin said. Shock had knocked the confidence out of his voice, leaving it vague and distracted. He was a big man, although he’d run to fat a bit across his stomach, and probably still handsome usually. Today his face looked like it was slipping a little on
his bones, sagging as though grief had a weight. He sat on the cheap metal chair and fiddled with a plastic cup of water. “I don’t have her number, but, umm… I have her sister’s address. I can get in touch. Are you sure it’s Birdie?”

  It was the fourth time he’d asked that question. Javi wasn’t sure what answer he was looking for.

  “We’re waiting on getting the DNA tests back from the lab,” Javi said. “That’s one reason we asked you to come in, so we could get a sample from you for analysis.”

  Lew nodded before Javi even finished speaking. “Of course,” he said. “I… anything I can do to help.”

  “We also have some of her effects….”

  “Can’t I just see her? I’ll know if it’s my daughter. It’s been ten years, but I’d know my own daughter.”

  Javi mentally overlaid the pretty, smiling girl in the photo over the dead girl’s half-mummified face, her eyelids sagging over empty sockets and lips peeled back from a yard of hard gum and broken teeth. He didn’t think there was anything there to recognize.

  “It’s been ten years, Mr. Utkin,” he said. “Let the lab do their job first.”

  Lew closed his eyes. “Did someone hurt her?” he asked.

  “We don’t know anything yet. Would you feel comfortable looking at some of the items we found with her, to see if you can identify them?”

  The nod took a bit longer that time. Lew finally nodded stiffly and clenched his jaw until Javi thought he could hear his teeth grind. He got up from the chair as though he were much older than his face indicated. “Let’s get it over with.”

  Javi walked him down to the evidence room, where the tech swabbed his cheek. Then he brought out a clean metal tray, carefully laid with the items they thought belonged to Birdie. A yellow shirt and a grubby rag of a top that had probably been floaty, hippy muslin at some point, flip-flops with brittle plastic straps, and a pair of tarnished-to-dullness silver earrings. There was a thread of hair still caught in one—frizzy and crooked in the bright light. Finally a set of keys, all different acid-bright colors, with a tangle of age-yellowed Zac Efron pics attached as key rings.