by TA Moore
“Take your time,” Javi said as he discreetly watched Lew’s face.
It crumpled in around his grief. Lew reached for the tray but pulled his hand back before Javi had to say anything to him. He rubbed it roughly over his face instead and dug his fingers up into his graying, well-cut hair.
“The, umm… keys are hers,” he choked out. “The earrings look like hers too. Little birds. She always wore those. I don’t… I don’t know about the clothes. She liked yellow. She was always wearing yellow. I, ah, I think I need to sit down.”
“That’s fine,” Javi said. He gave a quick nod of thanks to the tech and showed Lew back out into the hall. There was a long bench halfway down with an empty Coke can sitting on it, and he helped Lew to it. Lew sat down hard, folded over, and pressed the heels of his hands roughly against his cheeks.
“Maybe she was robbed,” he said. “That could have been what happened. She was robbed and maybe hit on the head? That would explain why she never came home.”
“Mr. Utkin—”
Lew straightened up and scrubbed his sleeve over his mouth. “I know,” he said. “I do know, but I don’t have to know yet, right? I can not know.”
He sounded desperate for Javi to give him permission, and his face pled for that small kindness. Javi wanted children—or expected children—but the idea of being that vulnerable to something you couldn’t control terrified him.
“We’ll know more once they do the DNA test,” he said.
Lew nodded.
“Can you tell us anything that you didn’t tell Detective Stokes during the first investigation—”
“Investigation? Is that what you call it?” Lew asked bitterly. “They didn’t care about my daughter. They just wanted to write her off. You know how much money I donated when we were campaigning to unincorporate? A fuckload. Just so I didn’t have to see that uniform every day, remember how they let Birdie down.”
“Anything,” Javi repeated patiently. “Even something that didn’t seem like anything at the time. What about Birdie’s boyfriend? She was dating one of the Hartleys, wasn’t she?”
Regret pulled at Lew’s face. “I thought it would be good for her. He was a good boy—smart, ambitious, respectful. Kelly saw to that. Birdie said he was boring—she was probably right—but I pushed it. Not just me, her mom too. We thought he’d calm her down.” He hesitated, and his eyebrows burrowed together over his nose. “You don’t think he had anything to do with it? They said he had an alibi. Kelly—”
“I’m just trying to build a clearer picture,” Javi said. “Sometimes people leave things out because they think it’s irrelevant, or they worry that it might show the victim in an unflattering light.”
“She was fifteen,” Lew said. “The worst thing she’d ever done was skip curfew.”
“Her other boyfriend?” Javi said. “The one you didn’t like?”
“Hector?” Utkin shook his head. “I didn’t trust him. In my line of work, Agent Merlo, you meet people that aren’t… nice. You get to know the signs. Hector Andrews was bad news, and he would have hurt her one day, but not that night. Somebody had put him in the hospital.”
“Somebody?”
“One of his lowlife friends,” Lew said. There was a challenge in his voice, the expression his eyes somewhere between defiance and smugness. “That’s the thing about lowlifes, Agent. They’d stab you in the back for fifty bucks.”
“That the going rate for a bottle to the head?” Javi suggested quietly.
Lew pulled up short of a confession. He turned the corner of his mouth up in a sour, brief smile. “Let’s say that I wasn’t sorry to hear about it.”
“Do you have any idea where Hector is now?”
Lew grimaced and pulled his chin back into his neck. “I didn’t know where he was then. He was homeless. His family had lost their house and left, but he just hung around. I told Birdie. Something’s wrong with a man whose own family don’t want them. She didn’t listen.”
That was when Lew’s ability to lie to himself visibly ran out. He hunched in on himself, suddenly looking lost in his skin, and closed his eyes. His mouth folded down as he sniffed in a deep breath. No tears, but if Lew was having an affair with Kelly Hartley, he’d be crying on her shoulder later after a bottle of whiskey.
“I, umm… I should call my wife,” he said and wiped his hand over his mouth. “My ex-wife. Book flights for her and… and everything. Do you need anything else?”
“Not right now,” Javi said.
Lew nodded and stood up slowly. “You’ll let me know if….”
Javi nodded and put a reassuring hand on his arm. “We’ll let you know as soon as the results are back. Take care.”
“Why?”
Chapter Fifteen
JAVI ASKED a passing deputy to escort Lew Utkin out. He wasn’t sure Lew would have actually left otherwise. Then he headed for the bull pen. There were four deputies at their desks and two teenagers and a biker sitting on the bench against the wall. The biker had his arms crossed and his eyes closed. It could have been a front, but Javi thought the man was actually catching a nap.
The missing-in-action blond Javi was looking for was the deputy sitting in the back-left corner under the window. Cloister had the courtesy to look embarrassed when he realized he’d been caught. He scrabbled at the desk and grabbed hopefully at the scattered paperwork with his big scuffed-up hands.
“I told you I wanted you to sit in on Lew Utkin’s interview. Not”—he plucked one page from Cloister’s hands, glanced at it, and hitched an eyebrow in pointed surprise—“expense claims for dog food and vet bills?”
Cloister scratched the back of his neck. The black sleeve of his T-shirt slid back from the hard bulge of his tricep. It was more distracting than a few inches of skin should have been.
“Bon hurt her foot finding the phone. Better safe than sorry,” he said.
“Until Frome tells you different,” Javi reminded him. “You’re mine.”
Something dark slid under those words, thick and heated and demanding. More than Javi meant to put into his voice. He bit the inside of his cheek in annoyance. Someone sniggered. It was probably louder than expected, from the way it choked off, and almost welcome as an external irritation to aim his temper at. Javi clenched his jaw hard enough to pulse pain up into his skull, and he breathed in. Before he could settle on a response, Cloister jabbed his middle finger in the direction of the snicker. Its source was, Javi discovered as he turned around, a meaty-looking young man with fading acne scars and the look of a high school athlete.
“He knows I’m gay, Collins,” Cloister said. “So now you just look like an asshole. And in front of our ticket-dodging guests.”
Without opening his eyes, the biker snorted.
Meaty young Collins squirmed in place for a second, then muttered something that might have been an apology and hunched over his desk. His neck was flushed dully red all the way up into his scalp, visible through his close-cropped hair, and the pen scratched industriously at the paper. Javi allowed himself the spiteful thought that he was surprised the jock could read. He would have been even more cruel, but it wasn’t the time.
“I’m not telling you to do things for the sake of hearing my own voice,” he said. “So leave the expenses and come with me. I’ve finished with Utkin, but I need you to run some other errands….”
Cloister scowled at the “errands” snark but did as he was told and pushed himself out from the desk. Apparently the dog had been under there with his knees. It scrambled out after him, panting gently. Javi rolled his eyes. It was like having a chaperone, but he supposed the dog had been useful so far.
“Is its foot all right?” he asked as she padded out of the room with them.
“Her,” Cloister corrected him. He reached down absently and ruffled the pricked ears. “And she’s fine. She just got jabbed by a bit of wire, and I wanted to make sure it was clean.”
Out in the hall, Javi glanced sideways at Cloister.
>
“So I really am the only one who didn’t know you were gay?”
Cloister shrugged. “Pretty much.” He hesitated and dropped his hand to Bourneville’s head again. “I should have been there to speak to Utkin. I’m sorry.”
As apologies go, it was unremorseful, blunt, and to the point—rather like Cloister in that way. It was annoying that Javi still found both of them appealing.
“Nobody likes notifying the next of kin,” he admitted. After a second he went on, the memory of Utkin’s blank “why” in his ears. “To be honest, I wonder if he’d have been happier not knowing. He could have kept that 10 percent chance that she’d run away for a new life somewhere. In that situation I don’t know if I’d want the truth.”
Cloister didn’t say anything. The silence dragged on long enough that the moment passed, and Javi cringed, not sure why he’d exposed that much of himself. He swallowed mortification—it was dry and sandy—and tried to change the subject.
“Maybe he—”
“It’s not 10 percent,” Cloister interrupted. His voice was low. “With no body, parents are 90 percent sure their kid is still alive—maybe living a new life, but more likely hurt and afraid. It’s still grief, but you’re afraid as well.”
This time it was Javi’s turn to not know what to say. It felt as to the point as the apology, and it was too honest for him. It was easier if Cloister stayed big, blond, and fuckable, with nothing as inconvenient as feelings. Discomfort itched under his skin, and instead of asking Cloister who he’d lost, Javi veered back onto safer ground.
“Next time I have to deliver bad news, I’ll lead with that,” he said because apparently asshole was his go-to safe space.
Bourneville whined and stuck her nose into Cloister’s hand, her tongue pink as she licked his fingers because she was more emotionally mature than Javi. They reached the doors, and Javi shoved one open, his irritation making him thump it harder than he needed to. It was still warm out, but the winds had finally dropped. There was a dampness in the air that hadn’t been there before, and it was softer on the throat as you breathed in.
“Right now I want you to go and talk to the Hartleys. Let them know we aren’t looking at Billy anymore. It’ll come better from you,” Javi said. “Take the phone with you—the techs haven’t managed to unlock it yet—and get it opened. However the phone got there. Find out what Billy is hiding and who he’s protecting.”
“Why me?”
Javi glanced down at the dog pressed devotedly to Cloister’s leg. “Dogs like you. I bet children do too.”
“He’s not a child. He’s a teenager.”
“Same difference,” Javi said. He shrugged. “Of course, if you’d rather, you can come with me to the records office to go through the property register. I want to see who used to live in that house we found the bodies in.”
He was fairly sure it was going to turn out to be the house that Hector Andrews’s family lost to the bank. If it was, that was a coincidence too many to ignore because of an alibi.
Cloister made a face at that idea because significant periods of Plenty’s official records hadn’t been reliably computerized. Extensive corruption among the town’s public officials meant a lot of people had things they didn’t want easily searchable. In addition to the incriminating evidence, a lot of fairly prosaic records were elided as well to make it harder to pinpoint what was being hidden. So it was going to be a few hours of arguing with the librarian and chasing red tape through old archival boxes.
“I’ll take the teenager,” Cloister surrendered. Then he hesitated and shifted his weight uncomfortably. He looked off-balance, unsure of himself. It was the first time Javi had seen that. Whatever else was going on around him, Cloister always seemed confident in the space his body inhabited.
“Look, last night….” Cloister let that hang.
It was the perfect opportunity to brush him off kindly but firmly. Javi didn’t do relationships. He had a career plotted out, and you didn’t make assistant director by crafting emotional compromises and weathering bad breakups. He already tried that. It ended badly. Predictably but badly. A ridiculously attractive smile that didn’t belong on that rough face or the spray of freckles on a nice ass weren’t good reasons to change that policy.
Except… an arrangement wasn’t a relationship. It was obvious that Cloister wasn’t the type to get attached. He was a grown man with a substantial paycheck who chose to live in a house that could be towed away. That screamed flight risk.
“Last night was—” Halfway through the sentence and Javi wasn’t sure what way he was going.
Before he had to make up his mind, Tancredi burst out of the doors behind them and into Cloister’s back. It didn’t move Cloister much, but the impact made Bourneville jump. Her ears went down, giving her narrow skull a snakelike look, and her lips wrinkled back in a snarl that bared a lot of very sharp teeth.
For a second, Javi felt a visceral cringe that started in his gut and went up into his chest. His imagination had run ahead of itself, already a minute in the future with Tancredi’s face degloved and half-eaten, and he wasn’t sure if calling for an ambulance would be a kindness or not.
Cloister jerked Bourneville’s lead back, choking off the snarl, and snapped out, “Lass es. Bourneville, Lass.”
The dog visibly unclenched at the command, and the quivering violence drained out of her lean, heavy body. She unflattened her ears and whined apologetically at Cloister.
Javi felt heat twist in his groin. The contrast between the hard command in Cloister’s voice now and the easy submission of his body then tugged a wire of want through him. The dark, honeyed idea of him surrendering even wriggled through his head, rough hands and rougher commands on his body as Javi just… unclenched.
The brief image was unexpectedly potent—a shot of heat straight to his groin. It wasn’t something he’d ever do, but he still stored the brief fantasy away for later.
“What the hell, Tancredi?” Cloister said. He sounded annoyed, but not nearly scared enough to Javi’s mind. “You want sick leave while they stitch your fingers back on?”
Tancredi took a discreet step back, her face a bit paler than usual. “No… umm… sorry. We just got a call, though, I knew you’d want it.”
“What?” Javi asked.
She looked at him, and regret and interest jostled for primacy over her expression. “It’s the Hartleys. They were getting ready to leave the Retreat, head back home, when Billy Hartley went missing. They’ve been looking for hours, but they can’t find him.”
JAVI BRACED his arm against the dashboard as Cloister hammered the gas along the rutted country roads. The car swung around one corner tightly enough that he felt the tires jolt off the road as sandy dirt sprayed up against the paintwork.
“Are you sure she’s secure back there?” Javi asked, pitching his voice over the wail of the siren. He cocked his head to check the sliver of rearview mirror he could see. Bourneville’s harness looked more secure than his seatbelt, but he could still see the imagined ruin of Tancredi’s face in his mind.
Maybe his sex life was limited enough at the moment that he was considering an arrangement based on nothing but geographical proximity. His libido stirred back there with the disturbing, sticky fantasies of heavy scarred bodies and various shades of surrender. It mocked him, but that would change. He didn’t want to try to negotiate the queer dating scene with a face that looked like a badly put-together jigsaw puzzle. He didn’t have the personality to get away with not being pretty.
“She’s fine,” Cloister said impatiently. He took his eyes off the road long enough to look over at Javi. “Bourneville wasn’t going for Tancredi.”
“Not what it looked like to me.”
“If she’d been attacking, it wouldn’t have been so easy to pull her back,” Cloister said. “Tancredi startled us. Bon went on the defensive.”
“So there was no danger?”
“Of course there was,” Cloister said bluntly. “
But there’s probably less danger with Bon than with your neighbor’s ill-trained Labrador. The sheriff’s department has spent a lot of money on training her not to attack unless I give the nod. She’s still a dog, though, and dogs can bite.”
“Jesus,” Javi muttered. He didn’t take the Lord’s name in vain often—adult atheism had no traction against a childhood spent threatened with a bar of soap—but it felt appropriate. “You make pet owning sound like running a gauntlet.”
“Bon’s not a pet.” Cloister shrugged. He broke off for a second as they took another turn, and he spun the steering wheel. “She’s a good dog, and she’s never bitten anyone outside of the job, but it would be irresponsible of me to tell you she’s never going to. It would be like saying that if I’ve never shot anyone, it would be safe to leave my gun lying around the house.”
Javi snorted.
“I think I’ll stick to guns,” he said. “They’re more predictable and don’t need to be walked.”
This time the press had gotten there first in network affiliate vans and old cars. In response the Retreat had closed their gates, which pushed the reporters back onto the road. Reed had sent Matt down to stand guard. He looked hunched and uncomfortable as he pulled his hat down and tried to avoid the reporters’ attention.
Cloister pulled in behind a dusty FOX news van. The man standing next to it, slotting batteries into transmitter packs, scowled at them. “Hey!” he protested, waving a hand at the nonexistent gap between bumpers. He looked stocky, but that was an optical illusion caused by the heavy pocket-hung vest he had on. “How am I supposed to get in to get my gear?”
Javi flashed his badge through the windshield. There was no way the man could have identified the FBI seal through the dust and mud and glass between them. All he saw was the gold shield, the heavy black wallet, and a good reason to mind his own business. Still scowling, he threw his hands up in surrender and backed off. Javi opened his door just in time to catch the muttered, “…assholes.”