by TA Moore
“What?”
“I was going to ask you to step into the interview,” Javi said. “But if you’re napping in the shower, maybe it’s time for you to go home.”
Cloister scrubbed his hands over his face and chafed away the last sleepiness. “I’m fine,” he said. “What happened to keeping me out of the way?”
For a second, as he studied Cloister’s face, it didn’t look like Javi was going to buy the assurance. Then he grabbed the towel from the hook and shoved it against Cloister’s chest.
“He’s not cooperating,” he said as he leaned back against the door. He dipped his eyes for an efficient once-over of Cloister’s wet body and then fastened them back to his face. “Even if you do antagonize him, at least we might get something other than smart remarks out of him.”
Cloister dragged the towel over his arms. It had been bleached to the point that it wasn’t really absorbing water, just scraping it off his skin.
“I don’t get it,” he admitted. “If I’m right, what’s he got to hide?”
The corner of Javi’s mouth tilted up, and he shrugged. “Sometimes it’s easier to be an asshole than admit you’ve screwed up.”
Cloister wiped his face and then between his legs. “Is that an apology?”
Javi raised his eyebrows. “For what?”
“Dick.”
He looked down Cloister’s torso to the heavy dangle of flesh between his thighs. Javi tilted his head to the side. “That it is.”
Cloister balled up the towel and tossed it at Javi’s starched white cotton shirt, and Javi caught it just before the wet fabric hit his tie. The urge to turn it into an argument scratched at the inside of his chest, but… he knew what Javi was like. It worked for him for now. Hell, when it went down in flames, maybe it wouldn’t even be Cloister’s fault for once.
“Have you talked to his housekeeper?” he asked as he stepped around Javi. Despite his irritation and the lingering chill from the shower, being naked around Javi was giving his cock ideas.
“Housekeeper?”
“His parents think—thought—he pissed champagne,” Cloister said. He tugged his locker open and scuffled around inside for something clean. Mostly clean had to do as he pulled on black cargo pants and a T-shirt. “When she was interviewed, the housekeeper thought he was a little brat, but she was worried about him anyhow. So he probably spent more time with her.”
Javi shrugged. “Worth a try if you can’t help us get him to talk,” he said. “Shoes would complete that look, by the way.”
He hadn’t forgotten. Cloister stepped into his boots. The leather scraped his damp feet, and he crouched down to straighten the tongue and dry the laces.
“Like I said, I’ll see what I can do,” he said.
The smart remark he was expecting didn’t come. Cloister glanced up from his laces and caught a distracted expression on Javi’s face. The what almost made its way past his lips. Then he glanced down slightly and realized he was eye level with Javi’s belt. On his knees. Well, it was good to know he wasn’t the only one whose cock kept trying to distract him. He looked back up and didn’t try to hide his smirk.
“Shut up, Witte,” Javi growled and licked his lips. He absently folded the towel that Cloister had tossed him, squared it neatly, and dropped it onto a chair. “Now come on, before his lawyer marches him out of here.”
Chapter Twenty-One
BEING A fuckup from a good family had its advantages. Leo Szerdo had an addict’s acne, but his teeth were still good, and his skin wasn’t covered in sores. Not yet. Unfortunately he also had a good lawyer, if not quite as prestigious as J.J. The difference between good family and Hartley money, Javi supposed.
Javi sat back down and hit Record on the machine again.
“Special Agent Merlo, resuming the interview at—” He glanced up as Cloister pulled out the spare chair and folded his lean form down into it. “Deputy Witte has joined me.”
Leo crossed his arms and pursed his lips. “The other one was prettier,” he said. Snottily.
“Most people are,” Cloister said mildly.
At the same time, the lawyer put a manicured hand on Leo’s arm. “Let me do the talking, Mr. Szerdo.”
Leo hitched his bony shoulders and slouched back. He picked absently at his nails while he waited and peeled away threads of picked-off cuticle. His lawyer watched him for a moment, and then—once he was sure Leo was going to obey the order to stay quiet—switched his attention back to Javi.
“My client was arrested for possession of a controlled substance,” he said. “I’d prefer to keep this interview relevant to that arrest, not a few days of missing time six years ago.”
“A week of missing time,” Cloister said.
The lawyer made a dismissive gesture with his hands and flicked away the correction as irrelevant. It made Leo pick harder at his nails.
“Mr. Park,” Javi said. “Your client has information that could be relevant to an ongoing investigation. If he would cooperate with us, it could make his current situation significantly easier.”
“His situation, as you call it, is about to go away,” Park said briskly. “It was a ‘bad bust.’ You had no warrant.”
Cloister shifted in the chair and leaned forward to put his elbows on the table. He ignored the lawyer, his attention on Leo.
“There’s a little boy missing,” he said in a rough, frustrated voice. “His brother is blaming himself, his mom’s devastated, and that little boy is scared out of his mind. How can you not want to help him?”
It was vicious because it wasn’t. The anger in Cloister’s voice, in between the cracking honesty of it, just sounded confused. Like he didn’t understand how someone could turn their back. It made Javi feel a pinch of guilt for every ass-covering, career-oriented thought he’d had since Drew Hartley first slipped out of sight.
Tancredi was an able interviewer. A little stiff—she’d obviously read more books than she had experience—but with solid technique. She made a good cop. Cloister was like being punched by six foot one of principled redneck.
Park rapped his finger on the table. “That’s enough, I think,” he said firmly. “My client is not responsible—”
“No one helped me,” Leo muttered, barely moving his lips.
“Someone should have,” Cloister said.
Leo hesitated. For a second the hard shell of smarmy, entitled bad boy hung by a thread, and something raw and terrified was underneath. Then he pulled the mask back on and shrugged irritably.
“Even if I wanted to help, and like I said, it’s nothing to fucking do with me, I can’t,” he said. “So just charge me and let me get on with my life, okay?”
His voice was careless, but he had moved on to chewing the skin around his nails. He’d worried them raw, and beads of blood oozed from the quicks. Javi caught Park’s gaze across the table and raised his eyebrows.
It was enough. Park leaned into Leo’s side and whispered intently into his ear. Javi idly tried to read his lips. Demonstrate good faith. If you know anything.
“He’s ten,” Cloister interrupted impatiently.
Javi grimaced but resisted the urge to kick him under the table. He opened his mouth, ready to smooth things over, but Leo had flinched. He blinked hard and swallowed.
“Ten?” he said.
“You didn’t see the news?” Javi asked.
A bitter, self-mocking smile stretched Leo’s mouth. “I don’t really keep up with the news. I knew a kid had gone missing. I didn’t….” He stopped and worked his jaw from side to side as though he needed to loosen up the muscles before he spoke. “Even if I wanted to help, I don’t think I can. It was….”
He stopped and blinked again.
“Anything you can do,” Javi said. “Anything you can tell us.”
Leo took a deep breath and wiped his nose. “And you’ll let this drugs thing slide?”
“We can discuss it,” Javi said.
“It was her,” he said as he eyes flicked t
oward Cloister. “Birdie. No one believes me, but it was.”
They hadn’t released the name of the dead girl they’d found in the construction site. Not yet. Javi paused and felt the case shift in his brain like a puzzle.
“You knew Birdie?”
“We weren’t friends. I talked to her a couple of times,” Leo said. He bit his lip and chewed at the rough skin. “Everyone thought I was making it up, that I was mad or a dick or something. Mom said I was hallucinating, but it was her. That’s why I went to meet her. She emailed me, said that she’d run away—we all knew she’d run away—but that she was worried about her mom. I tried to talk her into coming home, but I was a kid. What did I know about shit, right? She told me about all the bad things her dad had done, like stealing from people and beating them up? She said he used to come into her room at night and, you know.”
The words shuddered out of Leo, spat out one after the other with no pause to catch his breath. There was a brittle defiance to them, as though he were daring them not to believe him. It wasn’t a story that gelled with any other version of the Utkin family’s dynamic. The case files portrayed Utkin as a demanding but doting father, and Javi hadn’t detected any false notes in his grief over the dead girl. That didn’t necessarily mean anything, of course, but the fact that Birdie was dead when she told Leo cast the story into doubt.
“You became friends?”
“We talked on AIM. She texted me sometimes, but—” Leo paused to shrug. “—she was scared of people finding her, her dad finding her.”
He stopped and pressed a finger between his eyebrows and rubbed the skin in tense circles. His lawyer touched his arm and leaned in to murmur something in his ear. Leo shrugged him off and nodded.
“I remember this,” he said. “This bit I do remember, but no one believed me.”
“We believe you,” Javi said. “So you were talking to Birdie. Did she ever ask you to meet her somewhere?”
Leo shook his head. “No. That was my idea. She needed money, and I… I thought that she might, that she was pretty and might….” He shrugged his shoulder with a teen’s awkwardness. “So I said I could get her some. Dad keeps a stash in his safe in case of emergencies. The combination was my birthday. Used to be. So I grabbed it and went to meet her.”
“You met her?” Cloister said.
The hint of disbelief in his voice was enough to make Leo look up angrily and sniffle back snot as he insisted that “Yes! I met her,” Javi bumped Cloister’s knee with his under the table—a mute signal to be quiet.
“Where did you meet her?”
“Don’t remember,” Leo said.
“You do,” Javi said. “Think.”
Leo hissed out a frustrated sigh. “I don’t. My memory’s fucked, okay? It was some garage, all right? Mom had dropped me off at the movies. I walked there. It was dark. Birdie was waiting for me. She’d gotten me a slushie. She—”
“Did she look different?” Javi asked.
“Yeah. She looked like shit. Her teeth were gone, she was all sores, and….” Leo swallowed and glanced down at his hands, with their scars and swollen, chewed-at nails. “She looked like me. If I hadn’t known it was her, I wouldn’t have recognized her. Didn’t wanna fuck her anymore. I didn’t even want to take the slushie. I’d never thought about it before, you know, how shit your life could be and you still think it’s better than something else.”
“But you’re sure it was Birdie?” Cloister said.
“Yes!” Leo bristled. “Fuck sake, how many times do I have to tell you? You said you believed me.”
Javi put his hand on Cloister’s thigh and squeezed. The length of hard muscle clenched under his fingers, but the heat and the rough scrape of denim were a pleasant sensation he put away for later.
“We do,” he said.
“Tell him that,” Leo said, jabbing a finger at Cloister. “He’s got no idea what my life is like. No idea what you’re asking me to do. And he’s sitting there sneering at me?”
“I just don’t get it,” Cloister said, ignoring the fingers that dug into his leg. “You said you hardly recognized her that night. How did you know it was her?”
“She was…. She said….” Leo stumbled over the sentence like a bad starter motor, catching for the conviction and then losing it again. Despite the bad years Leo had on Billy, there was something painfully familiar about them in that second. “It was her AIM. Her profile was a selfie. It was… she said it was her. Who’d lie?”
Javi wasn’t interested in answering that question just then. He dodged it instead and dragged the conversation back to the path he wanted to be on.
“What happened after you gave her the money?”
Leo closed his eyes. They looked bruised and older than they should. “It was really weird. She made me take the slushie. I didn’t want to. There was lipstick on the straw. It was gross. She was gross. But she was getting upset, so I took it, and I had a drink, and she said she’d drive me back up to the movie theater.”
“She had a car?” Cloister asked.
“Yeah. No. There was a guy with her. I know I shouldn’t have gotten in the car with him, but the wind was so bad, and I didn’t want to walk back in the storm. I don’t remember much after that. I think I was sick. The guy said I’d been sick. Nothing after that… nothing that makes sense.”
“Did she get in the car?” Javi asked.
“Yes,” Leo said. Then he opened his eyes and squinted. “Or… no? I don’t think she did. I didn’t see her again.”
“Doesn’t matter. Go on,” Javi said. “What happened next?”
Leo hunched in on himself, wire tight with the strain of remembering. “I don’t remember. Really. It’s just—” He thumped the heel of his hand against his temple hard enough that they all heard the impact. “—noises. It was hot and it was noisy—so noisy I couldn’t think. Someone was talking, but it was like God screaming at me. I knew it was important, really important, but I couldn’t make out the words. I was out of it for over a week. A trucker found me a week later in a truck stop begging for water. There was a fountain right there, but I kept asking people to let me drink.”
He laughed, although there was no humor in it, and did jazz hands around his face.
“This is your brain on drugs, kids,” he mocked as he mugged a dull expression. Then all the energy soaked out of him, and he slouched down in his chair and supported his head on his hand. “I was lucky, I suppose. Guy who found me called the cops. The cops called my mom. They thought I’d been doing drugs and had a bad trip.”
“How were you physically?” Javi asked.
“Okay. I was really dehydrated, high as a kite, and I was sunburned really badly—but I wasn’t dead, and I didn’t have sexually transmitted diseases, which my mom kept going on about. So I was in peak physical form.” He sniffed and snorted the breath out in a dry little laugh. “Hell, couple of years later, and it would have been a normal weekend for me. So I suppose it can’t have been that bad.”
It fit. The pieces were twisted and stained, but they fit. Javi pushed a pad of paper over the table to Leo.
“Write down anything you can remember. Times, people, locations, anything,” he said. Leo looked daunted and wiped his hand over his face. “You’ve already been very helpful, Mr. Szerdo, and we appreciate it. Just a few minutes more. If there’s anything you can think of that can help. Anything at all.”
Leo pulled his lower lip between his teeth and chewed on the skin. “There’s nothing,” he said, but he pulled the pad toward him. The lawyer gave him a pen.
“You know, you didn’t actually do anything wrong,” Cloister said as he stood up. He hovered with his fingertips braced against the table as Leo looked up at him.
“What?” Leo asked, squinting uncertainly up at him. The nib of the pen scrawled to a stop on the page and left a line of text unfinished.
Cloister shrugged and pushed himself up straight. “It’s just that I’m not sure why you’re still punishing yoursel
f.”
The pen didn’t start moving again between Cloister’s statement and him joining Javi outside the interview room. Javi waited until the door swung shut.
“You were right,” he said. “We don’t have a serial killer. Birdie’s death was an unintentional consequence. Probably an accident.”
Cloister gave him a guarded look, his light eyes unreadable. “Well, at least I saved my one good idea for the second half of the year,” he said lazily.
Ah, yes. That. The taunt had felt satisfying, if petty, in the moment—a passing slice at a familiar target. It had slipped Javi’s mind that it wasn’t an entirely appropriate way to talk to someone you’d fucked. Not if you wanted to fuck them again.
He probably shouldn’t fuck Cloister again, of course, but that didn’t mean he wanted to take the option off the table.
“Well, if you’ve been good, maybe Santa will bring you one for Christmas,” he said. It was meant to be disarmingly flirtatious. Even to Javi’s ears, it sounded more condescending. He shrugged mentally. What else was he going to do? Apologize? Hardly. He left the awkward moment hanging, swung back to the case, and talked briskly as he walked down the hall. Cloister couldn’t have been that offended because he strode along with him. “Tancredi said you had a list of the other possible victims. Send it to her so we can get to work on finding our actual victims.”
“I can—”
“You can go and get some sleep,” Javi said. A sidelong glance showed a sullen expression on Cloister’s face, or it might have been sullen. It mildly peeved Javi that he could already guess at how to get Cloister to do what he wanted, and that it wasn’t seduction. “How many hours should a dog’s shift be?”
He took Cloister’s guilty frown as a surrender.
“I’m not sure what good finding Leo did, though,” Cloister said. He rubbed his eye and ground the heel of his hand into the socket while he dug his fingers into his hair. “We didn’t learn anything useful.”
Javi pressed his lips together. A better man probably wouldn’t have been tempted to leave Cloister with that conclusion. He wasn’t a better man, though, and finding Leo had been a nice bit of detective work he knew Cloister would never capitalize on. After a brief battle, his conscience won out.