by TA Moore
“Show them what, Hector?” Javi asked, testing the name.
Silence. He glanced at the tech who was still typing away frantically, his glasses barely clinging to the tip of his nose.
“Hector,” Javi pressed—confident that it was Birdie’s ex, “we just want Drew back. If you give him back, you won’t be in trouble. Not if you haven’t hurt him.”
There was a dry little puff of air as Hector cleared his throat. “I wouldn’t hurt anyone,” he said. “I just show them.”
“What about Birdie?” Javi asked. “What happened to her?”
The throat clearing turned into a dry cough, and Javi heard Hector spit in the background. “I didn’t hurt her. I loved her, but when I tried to show her, she couldn’t see it. She stayed spoiled. She stayed rotten. That was her choice.”
“I don’t think she had a choice.”
“I should go,” Hector said abruptly. “I’m keeping the boy. I’ll stop him being spoiled.”
He hung up.
A low, breathless groan burst out of Lara as though someone had punched her in the stomach. She went limp in Cloister’s arms, and he set her back on her feet and helped her over to a chair. The dog stopped her nervous, pacing patrol—looking for the threat she could sense from the atmosphere but not find—and went over to check on her.
“I’m sorry,” Billy blurted. He shot Lara guilty, terrified look. “I tried. I’m sorry.”
He bolted out of the room. The sound of his feet hammering on the stairs echoed through the still house, and then a door slammed. Lara looked up, and her nostrils flared as she breathed in.
“It’s not his fault,” she said. It sounded as though she were trying out the idea for size. She winced at the sound of it and tried again. “It’s not his fault.”
Cloister squeezed her elbow gently. “You should go and check on him.”
She smiled slightly with a rueful fold of her mouth. “I know. Could you get me a bottle of water first, please?”
Javi left Cloister to calm Lara down and turned to the tech instead. The man continued to jab at the keyboard.
“Did you get a location?” he asked.
The tech looked up. “I’ve got his IP address and general location,” he said. “Give me a couple of hours, and I’ll be able to chase down the ISP and address.”
“Anything to work with on the general location?”
The tech shrugged and scratched his head, and his nails slid through his short-cropped hair. “It was in Plenty.” He lifted his fingers off his skull in a half-hearted approach to a shrug. “North of the city. For anything else you’ll need to wait until I finish.”
It was frustrating, but Javi nodded brusquely. “Fast as you can.”
The tech flicked his eyes to Lara, and sympathy puckered his mouth. “Of course.”
He got back to work, and Javi turned toward Lara.
“I’m going to leave an officer here,” he told her. She held a bottle of water in her hand as though she’d forgotten it was there and absently picked at the plastic label with her nail. “However, I don’t want Billy getting in contact with the suspect again. It’s too much of a risk. So if you could make sure—”
“Who did he kill?” Lara looked to Javi. Her eyebrows pinched together over her nose. “How many did he kill?”
“He didn’t say—”
“I work in the ER. Drug addicts, child abusers, victims. They all think they can lie by misdirection. ‘It was my fault,’ when what they mean is ‘He got angry and hit me. Again.’ So don’t. Who did he kill?”
Javi traded a quick glance with Cloister. “Lara, it won’t make this any easier if you—”
“There’s nothing easy about this,” she said. “I asked for the truth.”
Her eyes were bloodshot and bruised with exhaustion, but they were unflinching. She looked painfully like her father in that moment. Saul had never cared much for lies—not other people’s, at least.
“He doesn’t mean for anyone to die,” Javi said. “But some people still did.”
“Who? Birdie?”
“I can’t tell you that. There are people we have to inform first. People we haven’t informed because we don’t want to scare whoever this is into running.”
For a moment he thought it was going to be too much for her. She looked brittle, as though this final blow might be the one that would make her shatter. Instead she pulled up the neck of her T-shirt, wiped her eyes on the collar, and got up to follow Billy.
“Ten years,” she said as she paused in the doorway and looked back at them. “I don’t want to wait ten years to bring Drew home.”
Javi didn’t want that either. But Hector knew they were looking for him, and if he went to ground, the investigation might be at a stalemate until he struck again. Despite being a compulsive offender, Hector had a lengthy enough refractory period between crimes that it could be another year or longer before they heard from him again.
He squelched the frustration before it could turn into anger. The chance to trap their suspect had been too good to resist, but even if it worked, the case wouldn’t have been closed. There was no way Javi could justify letting a probably delusional offender kidnap a child, even if they had Billy wired, so Drew would still have been missing. In fact it could have made finding him more difficult. A drug dealer always brought a healthy dose of their own self-interest to the table. They couldn’t depend on that with a kidnapper who thought he was “showing” something to spoiled children.
But they had other leads. They’d find Hector.
The tech agreed to stay at the house until the liaison officer—and Javi would be conveying his official irritation to Frome that they weren’t already there—arrived. While he was doing that, Javi could chase those other leads.
Outside the house, the day was just starting for the rest of the street. Commuters lingered by their cars and pretended to be occupied with anything that gave them an excuse to stand and gawk over at the Hartleys’. The few stay-at-home parents in the street had gathered on the driveway and gossiped in pajamas and yoga gear.
“There’s a homeless camp up around the Glades in north Plenty,” Cloister said as he opened the door of his car to let the dog leap in. “A lot of casual and seasonal laborers live up there.”
Javi’s phone buzzed against his hip.
“I’ll send some uniforms up to search,” he said as he pulled it out. “But even if Hector is up there, Drew won’t be.”
The text was from Sean. “Found B. Sobering her up.”
“Go back to the station,” Javi told Cloister without looking up from his phone as he tapped out an answer. “See if anyone has gotten in touch with Luna or the dead boy’s father. The ex-firefighter.”
He waited for some dry snark, or at least for a question about what he was doing. Instead Cloister just grunted his agreement and slid into the car. “I’ll do that. If I find anything out, I’ll let you know.”
The “Special Agent Merlo” loitered on the end of the sentence, unsaid but pointedly there. It was professional. It was even pleasant. Javi was mildly disgusted to realize he’d have preferred the drawled “fuck you” he expected.
“Cloister,” he said as he grabbed the edge of the car door before it could slam, “I—”
“What?”
It was a good question. Javi just didn’t have the answer. That was what he needed—polite distance and occasional fucking. It was what he had the time and inclination to cope with. Anything else would get messy, and he couldn’t afford that. He just wanted to get what he needed without losing what he wanted.
That wasn’t fair. It probably wouldn’t have stopped him if he could work out a way to pull it off.
“Don’t let them go too easy on the fireman,” he said instead. “He’s grieving, but he hasn’t got clean hands in this. You don’t need to mollycoddle him.”
Cloister nodded. “I’ll pass it on.” After a second he quirked his mouth in a half smile. “Besides, despite what you think, I�
�m more of a glowering brooder than a hand holder.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
THE BLACK lettering on the frosted-glass window read Stokes Investigations, Inc. It was the punch line to the joke that had been Plenty PD. What do you call a retired crooked cop? A successful private investigator.
Javi opened the door and stepped into a ripe fog of ethanol sweat and lavender air freshener. The cloud of chemical scent had been so freshly sprayed that it still hung in the air.
“Sorry,” the man behind the reception desk said. He dropped the canister of air freshener into a filing cabinet and shoved it shut with his foot. “We don’t take walk-in clients. Referrals only.”
Javi reached into his pocket for his badge and flipped open the leather wallet to flash the shield and ID.
“My referral,” he said.
The man raised a perfectly groomed eyebrow, leaned over the desk, and supported his weight on one hand as he studied the shield. After a second he nodded.
“Of course, Special Agent Merlo,” he said with a perfectly empty smile. “If you could just wait here, I’ll let Mr. Stokes know you’re waiting.”
He stepped out from behind the desk and headed down the hall. Javi sat in one of the low black leather chairs. He tapped absently against the arm as he glanced around. Unlike Sean’s stripped-clean suburban house, his office looked like it had been designed. Black wood and leather hovered carefully between modernism and the gumshoe aesthetic of the movies. Framed photos on the wall chronicled Sean’s qualifications—from the gold-sealed diploma from the police academy to a story cut out of the newspaper, praising Plenty PD for catching a serial rapist.
That tweaked Javi’s interest enough that he got up to try to read it through the glass. He remembered the story. It was one of the last good things the papers had reported on Plenty’s police department. Javi recalled that even Saul, who took the department apart in his investigation, approved of the detectives involved.
But Sean Stokes wasn’t one of the names Javi’s scan picked out of the text.
The mutter of voices in the other room suddenly rose.
“…you son of a bitch!”
Javi turned. One of the office doors slammed open—hard enough that the handle dug a dent into the plaster—and the receptionist stalked out. He passed Javi without a word, grabbed his coat from the rack, and shoved his arms into it aggressively.
“You know what?” he said as he turned toward Javi. “I hope you are here to arrest that prick.”
He slammed the door behind him as he left. Javi glanced back at the wall. The impact had left the framed news story crooked. He put a finger under the corner and straightened it and then headed to the still-ajar door. A nudge from his toe swung it open.
“Sean?”
“Special Agent Merlo,” Sean said. He was perched on the edge of his desk, hands hanging loosely between spread thighs. At least he was dressed, although the unbuttoned cuffs and yanked-loose rag of a tie made him look like he regretted it. “Sorry about that. You just can’t get the staff these days.”
“Your ex?” Javi asked.
“Ha, no,” Sean said. He rubbed his thumb along his clean-shaven jaw where a bruise smeared under the skin like a stain. “My ex would have laid me out. That was… nothing. He’ll be back. You’re not here about my staff, anyhow. You’re here to meet Betsy Murney.”
He jerked his chin to the other side of the room, where a woman who looked like Angelina Jolie playing a wino sprawled on the black leather couch. Betsy was beautiful in a way that cheap makeup, old clothes, and the stench of hard living couldn’t quite hide. Javi would lay money that she’d had occasion to wish it did. She was also snoring like an asthmatic old man and hugging a bottle of cheap whiskey in her arms as though it were a cuddly toy.
“I thought you were sobering her up,” Javi said.
“I was,” Sean said as he pushed himself up straight. He gave his tie another tug, and the knot gave up completely. “Unfortunately I had to step out, and it turns out she’s pretty damn good at picking locks.”
“Wasn’t it the daughter who was an addict?”
“Yeah, well, bottle doesn’t fall from the tree,” Sean said. He levered himself off the desk and shoved his hands in his pockets. “Ask my brother. You want me to put the coffee on?”
“That’s a myth,” Javi said. He went down on one knee next to the bed and carefully pried the bottle out of Betsy’s grip. “It doesn’t actually help sober you up.”
Besides, if Betsy had been boozing long enough and hard enough, she’d be more lucid with some in her system. He passed the bottle back and waited until Sean took the sloshing weight from his hand.
“Ms. Murney.” He took her hand and patted it gently. Her palm was rough against his and cracked and hard from work and weather. “Betsy, I need to talk to you for a minute.”
She stirred and moved abruptly from unconscious slumber to confused but awake and shoved herself back into the cushions. She registered Javi with dark, bloodshot eyes and then flicked them over his shoulder to check out Sean.
“Last time anyone wearing a fancy suit wanted to talk to me,” she said, voice gently slurred around the edges, “I spent three weeks in a church-sponsored rehab listening to how Jesus loved teetotalers.”
“I’m a federal agent,” Javi said. “We’re looking for your daughter.”
Resistance washed visibly over Betsy’s face. It set her mouth like a knife. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“She’s not in trouble, Betsy,” Sean said. It might have been a lie. “We—the police just need to talk to her about something.”
Betsy tucked her chin in and looked down. She picked and rubbed with her thumb at a stain on her shirt. “Can’t help. I ain’t seen her in years.”
Javi let the silence hang just long enough to get uncomfortable. “I don’t suppose this is the life you planned for yourself, Ms. Murney,” he said. Under a lowered shroud of still-thick lashes, she watched him suspiciously. “I assume that this is the result of some very hard choices, so I don’t really want to make your life any more difficult. But I will.”
She pulled a sour face. “Everyone does.”
“A child has gone missing,” Javi said. “If you impede this investigation—”
Betsy snapped her chin up. “Alice didn’t have anything to do with that,” she said. “She’s not even in Plenty.”
Sean snorted. “I thought you hadn’t seen her in years.”
Javi twisted around to level a cold look at the ex-cop. He didn’t need help from a private investigator with a suspiciously nice location and a suspiciously expensive house. “Mr. Stokes, I can manage.”
They traded not entirely friendly looks for a second, and then Sean shrugged and spread his hands. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to tread on your toes, Special Agent Merlo.”
“It was a good question, though,” Javi said as he refocused on Betsy. “When was the last time you saw Alice?”
“Three, four years ago,” Betsy said. “She took off with this woman she’d met, some do-gooder with a whole bunch of fancy ideas. Turned out… snotty cow actually did some good. Alice got clean. Alice got a job. Alice don’t want anything to do with me. I don’t blame her. She sends letters sometimes. No return address.”
Javi tilted his head curiously to the side. “No offense, Ms. Murney, but I assumed you were homeless.”
“I sleep in my car, up in Groves,” she said. “But Tranq helps me out. He stores my old clothes, keeps letters for me. Alice sends her letters there.”
“Tranq?”
It had apparently been long enough, and Sean had gotten bored behaving himself. “Tranquil Reed… at the Retreat,” he said. “Betsy used to clean for him, didn’t you, Betsy?”
She gave a dirty look. “Not many other jobs around here, back then,” she said. “Man gave me a place to live, some money under the table….”
“You harvested and cured weed for him,” Sean said. “He wasn’t helping you
out of the goodness of his heart.”
Javi held up his hand and pointed back over his shoulder to tell Sean to be quiet. “Did Alice work at the Retreat too?”
Betsy nodded uncertainly. She scraped her hair back from her face with both hands until she could knot it behind her head. It pulled the skin tight across her temples and made the blue veins visible under the skin. Her hands trembled as she worked. “Lot of us did, back then,” she said. “The hippies were nice people. Didn’t ask too many questions, fed everyone. You were supposed to meditate every morning, but lots of us just napped. After they left, Tranq tidied it up. He said I could stay if I kept myself clean, and I did. For a while. It was Alice that couldn’t. We got kicked out, and I didn’t see any point in not drinking. Then she left, and I kept drinkin’. Like I said, she got married, and she got clean and straight, and she’s never coming back here. Certainly not to snatch some kid.”
She shifted on the couch, leather creaking, and itched at the back of her hands in distraction. Her attention kept slipping over Javi’s shoulder, back to the bottle Sean was minding. Javi put his hand on her knee.
“Betsy, when you were living up at the Retreat, do you remember a boy called Hector? Hector Andrews? He’d have been around the same age as your daughter.”
She pressed her lips together as she thought and thumped one hand at her temples as though she could jostle it out that way. It didn’t budge. She shook her head hesitantly.
“There were a lot of people,” she said. “My memory ain’t what it was.”
“He’d have been friends with your daughter. Or spent time with her.”
A ghost of maternal pride and shame slid over Betsy’s face. “My girl was pretty, Agent Merlo. Lots of boys wanted to spend time with her. Men too. Maybe I should have kept more of them away.” Her gaze drifted again, and she licked her lips. “Can I have a drink? My mouth’s dry as the wind out there.”
“In a minute,” Javi said. He shifted to block her view of the bottle and hold on to her attention. The gravity of the investigation was shifting. All he needed was a few more answers from Betsy. “Do you remember nearly six years ago? Alice was still in town then, wasn’t she?”