Bone to Pick

by TA Moore

  The other two headed straight for Cloister, and he braced himself for a scolding.

  “Where the hell have you been?” Javi gritted out, anger smeared like two lines of red paint across his cheekbones. The man with him stepped in front of Javi, ignored his low snarl of irritation, and asked sharply, “More importantly, what the hell are you doing with my client?”

  That let Cloister put his finger on his name, or at least his profession—the lawyer Lara had called in when they brought Billy in for questioning. Diggs. He was dark and pretty, with expensive hair and a suit that made it look like he shopped in the same store as Javi. It was stupid to be jealous, but Cloister felt the emotion latch on anyhow. It sank its teeth into the back of his tongue, and reminding himself that he had no fucking claim on Javi or any reason to think the lawyer did have a claim didn’t do anything to dissuade it. Cloister rolled his shoulders back and tried to work the tension out of the muscles.

  “You’d mislaid him,” Cloister reminded Diggs flatly. The edge to his voice could probably pass for a cop’s easy dislike of a defense lawyer. “Maybe you should be more careful.”

  Diggs took another step forward. He pulled himself up to his full height, chin up and black eyes snapping. He was nearly half a foot shorter than Cloister, but that didn’t seem to bother him.

  “You were told that any future contact with my clients had to be done through me,” he said. “If you ignored that and interrogated my underage client, then I’ll get anything said thrown out of court.”

  He lifted a finger and poked Cloister in the chest to underline his point. Maybe Javi had been telling the man that Cloister was approachable. Down by his knee, Bourneville picked up the bleed of tension through Cloister’s muscles. She growled, and the sound was low and nasty in her chest.

  To his credit Diggs had the good sense to take that as a sign he should step back. Cloister dropped a hand to Bourneville’s head to reassure her he wasn’t in danger.

  “Don’t poke me,” he said bluntly.

  “Then don’t try to do a side run around me to get to my clients,” Diggs snapped back. “Billy’s parents and I have made our position perfectly clear, and we expect—”

  “We talked, that’s all,” Billy said. His voice cracked with nerves, or puberty, as he glanced over at his parents. “I want to talk to them. Okay?”

  It started as a statement, but by the end of the sentence, it was a question. He desperately wanted them to make the decision for him.

  “Maybe that’s a good idea, as long as—” Ken started to say. His attempt at conviction faltered and dropped away the minute his wife interrupted him.

  “What if we don’t want him to?” Lara asked. She glanced at Billy and then away, and the line of her jaw pulled sharply under stress-dull skin. Her voice was very small as she quietly added. “What if I don’t want to know?”

  This time when Ken reached for her, she let him pull her into a hug. It didn’t look like affection to Cloister, just that she didn’t have the energy to keep fighting him. Families fractured over lesser things than a missing child, but maybe he was wrong.

  Healthy emotional relationships weren’t his area of expertise.

  “You need to know,” he told her. “One way or another, you need to know. Trust me.”

  She’d trusted him once, and he told her her son had been taken. Cloister didn’t know if she had it in her to do it again. But after a second, she nodded against her husband’s shoulder.

  “Okay,” she said. She extracted herself more gently from Ken and held her hand out to Billy. He stared at it as though he expected a slap but finally shuffled forward and let her grab his fingers. She squeezed tightly and left white divots on the back of his hand as she dragged her chin down in a sharp nod. “You can talk to them if you want, Billy. No matter what, I do love you.”

  Cloister’s mom had said that too. He really wanted to make sure that, for Billy, it didn’t have to be a lie.

  Chapter Seventeen

  REED WAS feeling cooperative for the first and probably only time in Cloister’s acquaintance with the grasping ex-hippie. When they asked he was only too glad to let them use his office. He would probably have preferred to stay and watch the interview, but Javi coldly but politely closed the door in his face.

  Like the linen clothes, the office reflected Reed’s public persona of aging hippy. The sofa was worn, the fabric threadbare on the arms and along the front of the cushions, and the desk was a repurposed kitchen table with graffiti scarred into the wooden surface. The top-of-the-line safe and the glossy curve of the MacBook Pro charging on the filing cabinet were the only things out of place.

  Those and the people.

  Billy sat in the corner of the battered couch and picked nervously at the stuffing with his fingernail while his parents hovered and Diggs talked with quiet intensity to all three.

  “How did you convince Billy to talk to us?” Javi asked Cloister as he grabbed his elbow and pulled him into the corner.

  “I asked him to.”

  Javi hissed out a sigh between his teeth. “Did you threaten or intimidate him in any way?” he asked. “He’s not a suspect anymore, but with J.J. involved, we need to stick to—”

  Two hours before or two hours later, and Cloister would have let the comment roll off his back. He knew what he looked like. Back home there were plenty of men who looked like him. Between fifteen and seventy-five, the Witte men looked like bad news, and Cloister hadn’t fallen far from the family bad-apple tree. Javi had just picked the wrong time for that particular criticism while Cloister’s skin was still raw from those old truths.

  “You’re the one who wanted me to talk to the kid,” he growled, and he could feel the rasp of it in his throat. “Don’t complain about it now that I have.”

  Javi narrowed his eyes but let it go. He turned his back on Cloister and looked at Diggs.

  “Well?” he said. “Do you have any objections to us speaking to your client?”

  “Plenty,” Diggs said. He smirked acknowledgment of the pun as he made it. The flicker of shared, dry amusement between him and Javi made Cloister clench his jaw. Diggs didn’t even acknowledge his presence as he went on. “But on the understanding he isn’t a suspect, and since both he and his family insist, I suppose I have to allow it. However, if I don’t like the direction this conversation is going… that could change.”

  Javi grabbed Reed’s office chair, pulled it from behind the desk, sat down in it, and leaned forward. His shirt pulled tight over his shoulders as he rested his elbows on his knees and linked his hands together in front of him. Hunched against the arm of the couch, Billy tensed visibly. Lara reached for his arm, hesitated, and then completed the gesture.

  “So talk,” Javi said.

  The calm direction made Billy, braced for interrogation, blink in confusion. He licked his dry lips and glanced at Cloister, clearly seeking some sort of support. Cloister didn’t know what he had left to offer, but he gave Bourneville a nudge with his knee. She got up, padded over, and put her chin on Billy’s knee. He grabbed a handful of her ruff and seemed to soak up confidence from the coarse fur and warm weight of the dog.

  “I was supposed to be meeting a girl,” he said.

  “Allison,” Lara said. “You told us….”

  Color crawled up Billy’s throat and picked out the scabs and spots of encroaching puberty. He swallowed hard, and his Adam’s apple bobbed jerkily under his skin.

  “No, she was someone I met online,” he said. “We were going to… she said she wanted to do… y’know.”

  He trailed off awkwardly, still flushed miserably up to his ears. Despite the obviously exhausted fear that dragged at Lara, she reacted to the familiar fear of internet predators. She slapped Billy’s shoulder.

  “You were going to meet someone you met online? What have I told you about that? You don’t know who they really are, what they really are. Just because they say something, doesn’t mean that it’s true. They could be anyone. They
could be—” She stopped suddenly and pressed her fingers against her trembling lips. Her horrified eyes sought out Javi as her voice spiraled up, shrill and scared. Ken put his hand on her shoulder, but she ignored him. “Do you think that’s what happened? Did this person that Billy was talking to, this pervert, did they take Drew?”

  “We don’t know anything yet, Lara,” Javi said as he raised his hands in a stilling gesture. “Let Billy finish. Who was this girl? And how long had you been talking to her?”

  “Bri,” Billy said. Despite everything that had happened, a dreamy, lovelorn expression swam across his face as he said her name. “We were both into geocaching, y’know, like treasure hunting. She kept beating me, like all the time, and then we started talking online. We… she didn’t have anything to do with this. I… Mom was right. It was my fault.”

  The sound of Lara’s indrawn breath was sharp. A hard look from Javi made her bite her lip, fold the full curve of it between her teeth, and hold her tongue. She clenched her hand into a fist on her knee, and her fingers dug into the flesh through her trousers.

  “Why?” Javi asked patiently.

  Billy looked down and stared intently at his hands as he petted Bourneville. She was panting patiently, not relaxed, but easygoing.

  “I was supposed to meet Bri that night,” he said, not looking up. “I know I was dating Allison, but… Bri is beautiful and smart, and I just wanted to meet her. She told me that she’d come to the party, that we could meet there. Drew wanted to come with me. He always wanted to come with me. I told him not to. I told him that he couldn’t, and that he was a stupid little kid….”

  There were tears in his eyes and snot wet on his upper lip. “I didn’t know,” he said desperately. The tears dripped down onto Bourneville’s head, leaving wet commas on her fur and making her ears twitch. “How could I have known? He should have stayed at the cabin. He should have been okay.”

  “Did you meet Bri?” Cloister asked. The scrape of his voice sounded harsh as it cut over Billy’s muttered confession.

  Billy wiped his face again and shook his head. “She didn’t turn up. I guess her parents stopped her, maybe. She was gonna sneak out.” He looked around the circle of grim faces and seemed to realize what they were thinking. “No. No, you don’t get it. It wasn’t Bri’s fault. It was mine—”

  Diggs put his hands on Billy’s shoulders and squeezed warningly. “I think that’s enough. My client—”

  Billy ignored him and tripped over his words as he sped on. “If I hadn’t argued with Drew, if I’d gone back to the cabin with him, it would have been okay. It was my fault. Bri’s not some sort of pervert, not some sort of creeper. I know her.”

  The indignation in his voice cracked with adolescent certainty. Cloister remembered when he’d been that sure about things. Sometimes he’d been right, but never about the things he wanted to be right about. Javi glanced up at Diggs and traded a reassuring look with him when he reluctantly backed off a step.

  “I’m sure you’re right,” Javi said patiently. The tone made Billy glare at him and hunch his shoulders defensively. “But we need to check. You understand that, right?”

  Lara squeezed his knee. “He does, of course,” she said firmly. “Whatever you need, he’s going to tell you. If this… person… took Drew, they’ll have kept him… safe, right?”

  Alive was the word she meant but didn’t want to say. The shitty hope at the bottom of the box that whoever took your kid had their own twisted reasons to keep them breathing. No matter what else had happened. With Birdie’s tight, sunken face still fresh in his mind, the tiny bones of her wrists looking breakable, Cloister wasn’t sure they even had that.

  “I’m sure they will, Lara,” Javi said. “We’re still looking for him.”

  She stared at his face for a second and visibly decided to believe him. She dipped her chin in a nod and pushed Billy’s shoulder. “So you tell them,” she said. “Everything this person told you.”

  “Bri,” he said stubbornly. “Her name’s Bri. She’s not some old perv. I’d have known. I’m not stupid. We’re friends.”

  “Do you know where we can find her?” Javi asked.

  Billy opened his mouth and closed it again. He twisted his hands in Bourneville’s ruff again, worrying her hair into nervous elflocks. “She… her dad hasn’t bought a house yet,” he said. “They had one, but it fell through. They’ve been staying in hotels with friends and stuff.”

  “What does her dad do?” Javi asked. He sounded interested, almost casual.

  “Building,” Billy said promptly. He looked relieved to have a question he could answer. “He’s a developer. That’s why it’s funny he can’t get a house. You know?”

  Javi just nodded. “Do you have a contact for her?”

  “On my phone,” Billy said. “We talked on Skype and Facebook mostly.”

  Still hovering behind the couch, Ken frowned. “That’s not possible,” he protested. “We have access to his social media accounts. We check them once a week, make sure everything is aboveboard.”

  Lara took a deep breath. “Don’t be stupid. He had another account, didn’t he? One we didn’t know about?” She looked at Billy and waited for an answer. Instead of giving her one, he hunched over and tucked his chin in guiltily. When that was all she got, Lara turned a flinty expression to Javi. “He’ll give you the code to his phone and his secret accounts. Everything.”

  It took two sides of a sheet of a paper for Billy to scribble down all his passwords. He underlined the last string of random words and numbers, which bisected the back half of the page, and held it out.

  “You’ll see,” he said defiantly. “Bri’s real. She’s sent me pictures and everything.”

  It was almost poignant and definitely enough to make Cloister feel even worse for Billy. The quick flash of knowing heat that passed between Diggs and Javi—the sly looks of people who had naked pictures—almost didn’t bother him at all.

  An hour later, in Javi’s office, the contents of the phone opened up across the curved screen that had higher definition than Cloister’s TV back in the trailer. By sent, it turned out Billy meant uploaded to a friend’s locked Instagram account.

  On Javi’s computer the pretty blonde girl grinned out of the screen, stared pensively into the distance, crossed her eyes, and stuck her tongue out over a Starbucks cup. Shiny, delicate earrings sparkled in her ears in every picture, and she had freckles that death had scraped off.

  Apparently the ’80s had been back in fashion ten years ago too.

  “Why use her?” Cloister asked as he leaned his arm on the back of Javi’s chair. He could smell the sharp gingery smell of Javi’s skin, the hint of lemon caught in his dark, dense hair. It tickled the back of his tongue and made his mouth dry, but he tried to ignore it. “If Billy had shown that to his father, there’s every chance that Ken would have recognized her. Even though he was older than her, Birdie dated his cousin and then disappeared. It was memorable.”

  Javi snorted. “He knew that wasn’t going to happen. Billy was already lying to his parents about his use of the internet. He wasn’t going to snitch on himself just to show his dad a picture of a girl he liked.”

  He tapped his finger on the mouse, flicked one picture aside, and pulled up another—a landscape. The caption claimed it was a “site my dad’s going to buy!” The picture was a familiar mix of half-finished and rundown buildings.

  Technically Birdie was in that picture too. Cloister picked out the building they’d found her sad little corpse in.

  The grim mockery of it made both men fall silent for a second.

  After a moment Javi closed the files. “Taking everything else into consideration,” he said. “The risk might have been the point. Until we know more about the other effects found in the house, we can’t say for sure, but I think it’s obvious that the Hartleys weren’t chosen at random.”

  The cold shadow of old dread crawled out of the basement of Cloister’s brain. He could feel
the heat of that long-ago run, the sweat of it itching under his arms. It wasn’t that he didn’t remember his childhood. One of his therapists told him once that the memories were there, but he didn’t let them out. Just the nightmares and the dread.

  “Why take Drew?” Cloister asked. His voice was a rough scrape that made Javi look curiously at him. Clearing his throat, he tried again. “It wasn’t Drew that our killer was grooming, it was Billy. He’s the one who was in contact, and he’s the same age as the killer’s first victim. So why change?”

  Javi pulled up another file scraped from Billy’s phone and maximized the window. It was a log of text messages sent the night Drew went missing.

  Bri: Don’t want to go to party. Just wanna c u. Can we do that?

  Billy: You sure? I haven’t washed in days.

  Bri: Don’t care. Are you alone?

  Billy: I got, like, no friends.

  Bri: U’ve got me. Meet me at the road.

  Billy: K!

  It was almost funny for a second. The “not washed in days” remark nearly dragged a laugh out of Cloister’s throat. Then the tragedy of it all wrapped back around it, and he didn’t want to laugh anymore.

  “Drew wanted to embarrass his brother,” he said. “So he stole his phone.”

  “And while Billy was waiting for his Bri at the original meeting place, Drew walked into the trap. And once he turned up, the killer had to adapt,” Javi said. He had restless hands and fidgeted with the keyboard and tapped the end of a pen against the desk. It was a bit distracting. Cloister kept catching himself watching Javi’s hands as though the long fingers—all straight and unscarred—were doing something more erotic than fussing. “Drew wasn’t the one he wanted, but he couldn’t just try again. Not once Drew told his brother that his girlfriend was a man. That could be… bad.”

  Cloister could see that. Panic made people stupid, and serial killers probably didn’t react well to pressure. But panic was immediate, powered by that first flood of act-first adrenaline. And they’d found a bloodstain, not a body.