by TA Moore
Betsy nodded slowly. A confused frown creased her forehead. “Yeah,” she said slowly. “I remember. She had a bad trip, took her forever to put Alice back together out of it. Voices. She said she could hear me thinking. Said I hated her.”
“Why?”
“Because she was an addict?” Betsy lifted her shoulders in a tired shrug. “Because she knew I was going down with her? Because I was not a good mother?”
“Not why did you think she hated you,” Javi said. “Why did she think it?”
The frown deepened. Betsy chewed her lower lip and picked at the dry skin with her teeth until it bled. “I don’t know. It was all broken—sense and nonsense shaken together. She said that we knew what she’d done, that everyone knew what she’d done, but then she wouldn’t tell me what it was. Whatever it was, she probably did it for a hit. Us addicts would do anything for a hit of what ails us. Can I have a drink? I’m thirsty.”
Javi had more questions. He usually did. But the well had gone dry. Betsy might have the information he needed in her head, but she didn’t know it was the answer to his questions.
He rocked back on his heels and onto his feet. Halfway up he stopped to brush the carpet lint and dust from his knee. “Give her a drink, Stokes,” he said.
“I’ve got water in the fridge,” Sean said. “Still and sparkling. I think it’s lemon flavored.”
Betsy barked out a laugh. “What the hell, Sean. You think you can still save me? Doesn’t matter how many times someone cleans me up, props me up, dries me out. I’m always going to end up back down here. So I’m not even going to try anymore. The least I can do is stop hurting the people that wanna help.” She held her hand out and made grabby gestures with her fingers. “Give me the bottle.”
He did.
They left her to drink herself back to sleep on the couch with three quarters of a bottle of very mediocre whiskey, and Sean walked Javi back down the hall. The phone rang with no one to answer it. Sean picked it up and put it back down again.
“Did you get what you needed?” he asked.
“Yes.”
Sean shoved his hand through his dark hair. Silver showed through the dark brown at the roots, and he scratched at his scalp absently. “This. Birdie. According to the press, you found a dead body you can’t identify hidden on a building site. What’s going on in Plenty, Agent?”
“I appreciate your help with Ms. Murney, Stokes,” Javi said. “But you aren’t a police officer anymore.”
“This is still my city.”
Javi glanced at the framed story on the wall. “Why do you have a story you’re not even mentioned in on your wall?” he asked.
“Because Plenty PD weren’t just scumbags,” Sean said with a shrug. “Because unpopular cops don’t get name checked by their superiors. Because it looks good on the wall, and most people don’t bother to read past the headline. Take your pick.”
To Javi, Plenty was a pit stop on the way to a better career. He imagined his prospects as a line that trended steadily upward from Plenty to Washington, DC. Sean, despite the “tarred by association” crookedness of his old boss, seemed to actually care about the place.
“We found Birdie,” he said. “She’d died ten years ago.”
Sean swallowed hard…. “Damn. Poor little bird. So this—”
“This is an open case,” Javi said. “And I’d appreciate it if you kept the information about Birdie to yourself until we’re ready to inform the press.”
Sean stuck his hands into his pockets and rounded his shoulders. He nodded. “For her sake. Her family.”
That made Javi glance down the hall to the closed door. He wasn’t sure if he felt guilty, grateful, or just sad that Betsy had gotten to the point where she just gave up without even trying. It was something, though, enough that he asked, “Will she be okay?”
“No,” Sean said. “Ship sailed on that a long time ago. I’ll let her sleep it off in my office, give her money for breakfast, and pretend I don’t know it’s for drink.”
Javi supposed that was Betsy’s version of a happy ending, and it wasn’t his job to fix it. Or even to care.
“I appreciate your help, Stokes,” he said.
“Don’t get used to it,” Sean said. He straightened his shoulders and smirked. “I still don’t like Feds.”
“I think I’ll live. Stay on the right side of the law in your new career, Stokes.”
Sean curled his lip in a half-hearted sneer at the idea. “Didn’t do me any good before.”
WITHOUT THE Hartley family and their suspect son at the Retreat, the density of the press outside had thinned enough that Javi could get through the gates.
“It’s too many coincidences,” he said, his voice pitched to carry to the Bluetooth. “Drew disappeared from here, and the girl that impersonated Bri lived up here for a while.”
Cloister grunted. “You shouldn’t go up there without backup. If Reed is involved, even peripherally, he could react badly. If you wait, I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”
“I don’t need you to watch my back,” Javi said. “Half the deputies working Plenty are up here with the search party.”
There was a pause. Cloister didn’t say anything, but Javi could hear the echoes of their earlier conversation haunting the line. He grimaced to himself, but Cloister didn’t give him time to fumble over a cover-up.
“Frome sent a car to pick up Scanlon, the firefighter,” he said. “He should be here soon. I’ll let you know if we get anything useful.”
He hung up without fanfare, but that wasn’t new.
“…fire risk is high.” The radio DJ’s voice took over as the call cut off. Javi didn’t really need the warning. You could tell. The desert wind felt like sandpaper, and the air smelled like a box of matches. All it needed was a spark, and if Drew was still up here, Hector would have another murder to his credit.
If he didn’t already.
Javi parked next to the unmarked cars in the small lot. There was no one around as Javi strode to the main office. From the empty parking spaces and open doors, he guessed half the guests had left—either because their reservations ran out or because they were scared of fire or kidnappers—and the remainder, along with staff and volunteers, were out searching for Drew. He could hear the search parties in the distance, their calls of “Drew” stretched out and attenuated by the wind. The hall they’d been using as a base was closed up and padlocked. They must have moved down to the road.
The office building was also closed up when he got to it. Javi tried the door, but it was locked, and the dusty blinds were pulled down over the main windows. Some atavistic compulsion made Javi cup his hand against the glass and try to peer through the slats. It was gritty against the side of his hand, and the dust smeared where he touched it.
Wood creaked under someone’s weight. Javi shifted back onto his heels and reached down. His hand wasn’t on his gun, but it was close.
“You looking for someone, sir?” a low, raspy voice asked politely. “Everyone is out lookin’ for that little boy.”
Javi turned and saw the groundsman he’d spoken to before on the porch. Matthew. The man wiped his hands on a dirty bit of cloth and squinted into the wind.
“Reed,” he said. “I need to talk to him. Is he out with the search party?”
Matthew scratched at his neck nervously and picked at a scab on his throat. “No,” he said. “He’s at the bank.”
That made more sense. Spending all that time as a hippy could not have been easy for Tranquil Reed.
“What about our officers?”
Matthew squinted and reached up to tug on the bill of his cap to protect his eyes from the dust. The shadow shifted down his nose to cover the scruff of stubble on his upper lip. “They went with the search party. I can let you into reception,” he said. “If you want to wait inside, out of the wind?”
Javi nodded his agreement and stepped back to give him room.
“Have you had any luck?” Matthew asked. He
bent over the handle as he rattled the key into the lock. “With finding who took the boy?”
“We’re confident that he’ll be in custody soon,” Javi said. “And Drew will be back home with his family.”
“You’ve been trying real hard,” Matthew said. He pushed the door open and went through ahead of Javi to kick the doorstop into place. “Try that hard, and you gotta find him.”
“We try.” Javi ducked in out of the wind. He straightened his tangled tie and brushed the clinging dirt off his sleeves.
“I can call Mr. Reed,” Matthew said. “Let him know you’re here?”
The phone Matthew pulled out of his pocket was old and battered, the screen spider-web cracked from a chip in the corner. He muttered an apology and shuffled outside to make the call. Javi watched him through the window as he talked on the phone, his body language almost aggressively subservient. He paced along the porch as he talked. He bobbed his head in a series of nods, and he scratched nervously at the back of his head. There was a scar under the hair—a stripe of uneven texture that looked like candlewax.
After a minute he came back. His face, under the tan and the dirt, was flushed with embarrassment and anger. His voice was still low and uncomfortable.
“Mr. Reed said he was coming right back. He said to make you comfortable. Do you want some coffee or tea?”
He wiped his hands on the thighs of his grubby jeans as he asked. Javi pinned a grimace between his teeth and shook his head.
“Just water will do,” he said. He nodded to the cooler in the corner of the room.
“I’ll get you a glass,” Matthew said. He looked up and smirked a little. “Mr. Reed doesn’t believe in plastic cups.”
He crossed the room, circled the mat with his dirty boots, and disappeared into what Javi assumed was a small kitchen. Glasses clinked, the tap turned on and off, and Matthew came back out with a sparkling glass of ice water and clean hands.
“He won’t be long,” he said as he sat a glass down in front of Javi. “You’ll see.”
Matthew set the glass down and slipped out the propped-open door, presumably to go and do some chores.
It was the head-scratching that clicked it into place for Javi. When his father turned fifty, he’d gone away for a week and come back with a tan, a new hairline, and a scar on the back of his head. It was a lot neater than Matthew’s, but then, his father had paid a very good plastic surgeon. Better than they had at Plenty General to repair a teenager whose scalp had been peeled off by a bottle.
By the time he put the pieces together, Javi had already drunk half the glass of water in an attempt to wash the dust out of his throat. He cursed, scrambled to his feet, and braced one hand on the back of the chair as he doubled over and shoved his finger down his throat.
Bile and water splattered his shoes, and his nose stung with sour-water puke.
“I don’t think that will help,” Matthew—or Hector—said.
Javi tried to straighten up and nearly tipped over instead. His head was thick, stuffed with wool, and it seemed to take a very long time for information to make its way along his nerves. Everything felt slow. The ground suddenly bounced up toward him, and it took far too long for him to register the crack of his knees on wood.
“What did you give me?” he asked. Or tried to. The words sounded odd.
“I think you know,” Matthew said. When he wasn’t pretending to be someone else, his voice was a husky tenor. He walked over—the sound of his boots on the floor was painfully loud in Javi’s ears—and crouched down. “A higher dose, though, and some GHB. I didn’t want anyone to get hurt.”
Fuck.
Javi tried to get to his feet, but Matthew caught him under the arms. His breath, up close, was sour, and now that he’d taken his sunglasses off, Javi could see his pupils were blown.
“You wanted to know where Drew was,” Matthew pointed out.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
THE PHONE rang twice, and someone picked up. The sound that came down the line was more of a grunt than a greeting, though. Cloister leaned against the door of the bull pen and kept one eye on the main entrance as he tucked the phone against his ear.
“Bo, you still owe me?” he asked the grunt.
“You know I do. Hold on,” she said.
Fabric rustled, and a woman’s voice said something querulous in the background. After a minute and the click of a door shutting, Bo came back on the line.
“What do you need? Please tell me it’s a wingman for another trip down to Mexico?”
Cloister snorted. Last time he went over the border with Bo was an experience he wasn’t in a hurry to repeat. A busload of college students had taken the wrong turn and rolled the bus on a back road. The ones who weren’t trapped or injured had decided to hike back to the road. Except it wasn’t in the direction they thought it was. The two of them—along with the border patrol agent with them—had the job of tracking down the hikers. And those kids managed to go surprisingly far in entirely the wrong direction.
“No. You ever work with a firefighter called Ben Scanlon?”
“Work with him, no. I’ve seen him around, though. He still drinks with us. Why?”
“He might know something that can help with this missing-kid case.”
“The Hartley boy.” It wasn’t a question.
A flint clicked and sparked, and Cloister heard the deep inhale against his ear. “In your line of work, don’t you need your lungs?”
“Not since they put me on desk duty.” The exhale was long and slow. It bought time for Bo to think too. “Is he a suspect? Because I won’t be able to back up anything I tell you on the stand.”
“He’s not a suspect. We’ve got a request in for his personnel file, but before it arrives, I just need to know if he’s a stand-up guy or—”
“Like I said, he still drinks with us,” Bo said. “Scanlon is old school, hard-nosed, but fair and all that. He still has friends out here. The guys he trained back in the day always buy him a drink. He’s made no bones about the fact he doesn’t like women firefighters, and I keep my distance, but he’s never gotten directly in my face about it.”
“Do you know why he quit?”
Instead of answering, Bo took another delaying puff on the cigarette. As Cloister waited, he saw the main door open and a wiry bald man with a lot of beard walk in. He said something to Andy on the desk, who pointed him to the bench. While the man sat down, Andy glanced back at Cloister and nodded.
There he was.
Cloister pushed himself off the door and turned the phone over on his shoulder for a second. He glanced back into the bull pen and caught Tancredi’s attention. “We’re up.”
She hopped to her feet and shuffled all the reports she’d been reading back into their file. Cloister put the phone back to his ear in time to catch Bo’s irritation as she realized she’d wasted words on a dead line.
“Sorry,” Cloister said. “Speak of the devil. What did you say?”
“He jumped before he was pushed,” Bo said. “Never did anything that put anyone’s life directly at risk. But he turned a blind eye. He did some favors. You know how it goes.”
“Okay. Thanks, Bo.”
She grunted and hung up. Cloister turned to Tancredi, who had just pulled the pen out of her hair. She raised an eyebrow at him expectantly.
“Looks like he was in someone’s pocket.” Cloister pushed himself off the door. “Not enough to be dirty, but—”
“Enough to explain why he made it onto Hector’s shit list with the other families,” Tancredi said. “Maybe he even got paid out of a Hartley pocket. Okay, I can work with that. Are you sure you don’t want to sit in?”
He shook his head. “I’m going to try to get in touch with the other possible victims again.”
Tancredi nodded and went out to talk to Scanlon. She shook the man’s hand as he stood up, and she gestured toward the interview room. Cloister tried Luna McBride’s number first, but it was busy. Again. He left the sam
e message as he had the last time. It probably wasn’t going to work. Leo had spent the last five years reliving his kidnapping, but from Luna’s sterling record and straight-arrow testimonials, she was dedicated to ignoring it.
He could hardly throw stones.
The absence of Bourneville’s heavy, warm body on his feet as he worked his way through the list was odd. The noise of her breathing was the usual background to his day, but they weren’t usually in here for that long or that often. She was happier down in the kennels with her favorite toy and her lunch until they could get back to work.
It wasn’t the only thing that had him on edge. He just had less justification for feeling on edge over Javi’s absence.
Five calls to the possible victims. Two of them went unanswered. One of them was picked up by the guy’s mother, who promised to pass on the message but said he’d moved out. Another was to a teenage girl who abashedly admitted she’d run away to Vegas with her best friend and ended up having to call their mom from a truck stop when they got scared.
“We were lucky,” her mother admitted when she took the phone back. “I guess you’re looking for someone who wasn’t.”
Cloister let her get back to probably reminding her daughter how lucky they’d been. He picked up her file and stretched over to add it to the pile of cleared cases. Just as he was about to let go of it, the phone rang. He jumped and sent the file skidding off the desk. It hit the floor and sprayed paper everywhere.”
“Shit.” He grabbed the phone and tucked it into his shoulder. “Deputy Witte.”
“Deputy,” Andy said. “There’s a Doctor Galloway here? She wanted to see Special Agent Merlo, but since he isn’t here….”
“I’ll be right out.” He hung up, gathered up the papers from the floor, stuffed them into a file on the desk, and headed out to the desk. Galloway stood in front of it with a padded computer bag hung crosswise over her chest and a wheeled Captain America suitcase at her feet.
“Doctor?”
She turned around and stuck out her hand for a brisk shake.