by TA Moore
“I was looking for Special Agent Merlo,” she said. “Apparently he’s not around?”
“Not at the moment,” Cloister said. “He’ll be back shortly. Can I help?”
“Probably,” Galloway said. A wry smile crossed her face, and she shrugged. “To be honest I could have just emailed it. I suppose I just wanted to show off a little. He asked me to find a case that matched certain parameters, and I think I have.”
“You have?”
She hitched the laptop back around so she could get into it and pull out two clipped-together pieces of paper.
“I couldn’t find a ‘Hector’ with a relevant case history. But this case comes close. A toddler died of hyperthermia in a car after her mother had been picked up for trespassing and spent the day in jail. The mother killed herself a few days later from an overdose, and there was one surviving son.” She extended the paper to him. “I’m going to be away tomorrow, but if Special Agent Merlo needs to get in touch, the morgue can forward my calls.”
Cloister took the pages from her. The details stripped some of the tragedy from the sad little record, but not all. He scanned down over the names, ages, and causes of death, and he stopped sharply at the location.
“Mallard Park?” he said.
Galloway pulled the handle up on her suitcase and used her elbow to swing the laptop bag around onto her back. “Yes,” she said. “It was, I think, back before they stopped work on it.”
She tilted her suitcase toward her. “Tell Special Agent Merlo that he owes me.”
“I will. Before you go, though, who found them?”
Galloway pursed her lips and shrugged. “I believe there was a call to emergency services,” she said. “So paramedics, firefighters. Why?”
“I think there’s someone else here who’ll remember it.” He nodded to Galloway, who raised her eyebrows at him. “Thank you, Doctor. Have a good trip.”
She sniffed. “My grandfather died.”
“Sorry.”
Her pale eyes went stony. “For him? Don’t be. He was evil,” she said. “It will just be a chore managing his estate, otherwise known as his last chance to hurt his nearest and dearest. Good luck with the case, Deputy. Try not to have more work for me when I come back.”
He nodded. “I’ll try.”
Galloway turned and left, and her luggage bounced over the tiles behind her as she walked.
“MY SON isn’t missing.” Ben Scanlon leaned forward and stabbed his finger against the table for emphasis as Cloister let himself into the interview room. “My son is dead. So I don’t see what the hell this has to do with me.”
Instead of answering him, Tancredi turned to Cloister. “Deputy Witte, can I help you?” Her voice was even and pleasant, but there was annoyance in the tightness around her eyes.
“Hettie Spence.” Cloister put the report down on the table in front of her. “She died of hyperthermia in Mallard Park fifteen years ago.”
Tancredi’s eyebrows shot up and she looked down at the page. She traced her finger over the ink as she read and stopped in the same places that had caught Cloister’s attention. On his side of the table, Scanlon sat back and crossed his arms.
“What’s that got to do with me?” he said.
Tancredi glanced up at him. “I think my question would have been ‘What does that have to do with my son?’” She rested her fingers on the paper and turned it around so Scanlon could see it. “You were a serving firefighter at this time, weren’t you, Mr. Scanlon? Do you remember this call?”
He glared at her sullenly, heavy lids hooded over brown eyes and the tendons in his neck tight under his loose, weathered skin. He worked his jaw from one side to the other, and the hinge clicked as it shifted back into place.
“It’s a big city.” He enunciated each word carefully and stripped them of emotion. “I don’t remember every call.”
“That’s not what I asked you.” Tancredi tapped her finger against the paper. “Do you remember this call? Do you remember Hettie Spence?”
He shrugged his wiry shoulders and looked away from the paper. There was a nerve just under his eye, and it fluttered in a steady pulse that would have been a gift to a poker player. “I was a firefighter for twenty years. I—”
Tancredi slapped the flat of her hand on the table. The hard jolt of noise made Scanlon jump, but despite the violent action, Tancredi’s voice was calm as she asked, “How many times in those twenty years did you pull a cooked baby out of a car, Mr. Scanlon? I mean, I have a child myself. I’d remember that. It’s the sort of thing that would stick with me.”
He cleared his throat. “Maybe I did? So what? There’s some cases I try not to think about. I still don’t see what it’s got to do with me now.” He glared at Tancredi and added, “Or my kid.”
Cloister pulled up a spare chair and sat down. He was too angry to pull off “approachable,” no matter what Javi thought, but aggressively neutral came naturally.
“Mr. Scanlon, we found Birdie Utkin’s body in Mallard Park yesterday,” he said. Under the ruddy outdoor tan, Scanlon blanched. “If we’re right, and we are, then Mr. Utkin is going to tell us everything we ask him. Believe me, once he sees what is left of his daughter, he’ll tell us exactly what you did. By then it might be too late to rescue Drew Hartley. We’ll just find him. And your old firefighting buddies aren’t going to stand you a round then, are they? So answer the fucking question.”
Scanlon blustered in his chair. “You can’t talk to me like that. I’m not under arrest. I can leave if I want.”
“You can,” Tancredi said. “Like Deputy Witte says, though, when my cousin—he’s an alderman—when he asks me why we didn’t find Drew Hartley in time, do you really want me to name you? Especially when we’re going to find out what you did anyhow.” She tapped her finger pointedly against the paper and repeated her question. “Do you remember Hettie Spence?”
Suddenly he did.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
SCANLON GULPED down a cone of water from the cooler. He crumpled it up in his hand when he was done, and then he unfolded it.
“It was an accident.” He watched his hands as though they were doing something interesting while he tore a chunk off the cup. “That’s the only reason I did it. The only reason I went along with it. It was an accident.”
“A little girl died,” Cloister pointed out. “A six-year-old boy was left with permanent damage.”
“Nobody wanted that to happen.” Scanlon looked up sharply. “Nobody had any reason to think that would happen. “Look, I wasn’t involved. I didn’t do anything. Okay? I just… moved the car in my report.”
“Why?”
Scanlon wiped his nose on the heel of his hand and looked down. He folded his lower lip between his teeth and chewed on it for a second.
“I don’t know the full story,” he said. “I didn’t need to know it to do my bit.”
Tancredi leaned forward and tilted her head until he had to meet her eyes. “Tell us what you do know.”
“Plenty was different back then,” he said. “The place was dying. The farms were derelict, the only job with any prospects was dealing drugs, and people who could afford it were just leaving. A couple more years and the town would have just dried up and blown away, but then people started moving in, and houses started going up. So when it started to slow down, when people wouldn’t sell… sometimes it got a bit nasty.”
“Is that what happened with the Spence family?”
Scanlon shrugged. “Look, it’s not inside knowledge or anything. Everyone in town saw it happen. The bank foreclosed on that whole block practically overnight, and the houses that didn’t have mortgages got condemned. Next thing you know, the fences went up, and Town Hall was handing out a construction permit to Utkin to put up Mallard Park. Maybe the foreclosure wasn’t entirely aboveboard. Maybe some people who didn’t deserve to lose their houses did. But no one was asking questions because Utkin was going to give work to over a hundred people, one way o
r another.” He stopped ripping up the cup and brushed the shreds off the table into his hand. “But yeah, the Spences were one of the families who lost their house. That was about four months before.”
Scanlon jabbed his finger against the paper hard enough to make it slide over the table toward Tancredi. He waited a second, as though he expected them to say something. When they didn’t he cleared his throat uncomfortably and started again.
“Anyhow, the mother had been kicking up a fuss about the foreclosure. She wrote letters, she’d turn up at Town Hall meetings with her kids in tow—the baby and the little boy—and ask questions, and she’d yell abuse at the crews on the construction site. Eventually they got sick of it. So when they found her on the site one night, they had her arrested. It was the weekend, so you know, they figured it would keep her out of their hair for a while.” He stopped and swallowed hard. The self-justification of it being an accident, of it being nobody’s fault, really was starting to flag. “They didn’t know that she’d been sleeping in the car, you see. Her and the kids. It was parked in the parking lot, and… she had the child lock on, so they couldn’t get out and wander off.”
“She didn’t tell anyone?” Tancredi asked. “Didn’t tell the cops to get her kids?”
Scanlon shook his head. “Not at first,” he said. “I guess she thought she’d get out in a couple of hours, enough time to get back to them, and she didn’t want to risk having the children taken away. I guess by the time she realized that they weren’t going to let her out… no one was listening.”
Or if they heard her, they didn’t believe her. People shoved in the cells overnight came out with a lot of reasons why they had to get out. Cloister had closed his ears to enough of them. If it had been his arrest, he couldn’t swear he wouldn’t have assumed Hettie’s children were as imaginary as the drunk’s Hollywood job interview. “How long?” Cloister asked.
“Saturday night. All day Sunday,” Scanlon said. “The foreman parked next to the car when he came in Monday and saw the boy in the car. He called it in.”
“Then you lied.”
“Yeah,” Scanlon said. “Look, it wasn’t Utkin’s fault. Who leaves their kids locked in a car in California? In the middle of Santa Ana season. They didn’t know. It’s not like they’d have left the little girl to die. She just did, so… they just asked me to move the car out into the street. So that when the news hit the press, the development wouldn’t be blamed. I mean, it wasn’t their fault. Not criminally. It was just a favor. What harm did it do?”
It was Tancredi who lunged to her feet. The chair skidded back and hit the wall. She grabbed the report, crumpled it in her hand, and shook it in his face. He cringed back from her.
“What harm?” she said. Her voice shook on the edge of a shout. “A little girl died. Her mother committed suicide because she got the blame, because she blamed herself, and what happened to that little boy?”
Scanlon looked affronted. “I got him out of that car,” he yelled back at her. “I got him to the hospital. If it weren’t for me, he’d have died as well.”
“If it weren’t for you? If—”
Cloister caught Tancredi’s arm before she could finish. “Can you give me a minute, Deputy?” he asked.
She irritably jerked her elbow free but nodded.
“If you’d just give me a moment, Mr. Scanlon,” she said.
He shrugged and wiped his hand over the back of his neck. There was sweat on his high forehead and drops of it caught in his receding gray hair. “I still don’t see what this has to do with my son,” he said.
Neither of them enlightened him before they left the room. Cloister, at least, was tempted. He closed the door behind him. Tancredi stalked down the hall with her hands clenched and her shoulders hunched. She got six paces away and turned to stalk back.
“Just kick a chair,” Cloister told her.
She snorted. “Is that what you do?”
He grinned at her. “I punch walls and tell Feds to go fuck themselves,” he said. “But you have ambitions and unbroken knuckles, so I’d stick to chairs.”
She glared at him but still turned and lashed a foot into one of the plastic chairs lined up against the wall. It went into the air and then dropped onto the other chairs. The metal legs tangled and scraped over the floor. Tancredi huffed out a sigh.
“That asshole,” she said. “That fucking asshole.” She sniffed and turned her back. “Goddammit,” she muttered with another sniff. “You tell anyone.”
He handed her a tissue. Some people cried, some people puked, and he punched things—the ones to worry about were the guys who didn’t feel anything. “Why do I know the name Spence?” he asked.
Tancredi scrubbed her eyes like she was punishing them and wiped her nose. “Fuck,” she muttered as she refolded the tissue to find a clean bit to wipe again. “Other than we were just talking about them?”
“I’ve heard it before,” he said. “I can’t place it, but it’s come up.”
She snorted ungracefully into the tissue and frowned. “You’ve gone through a lot of old case files,” she said. “Maybe it was in one of those? If this older boy is our ‘Hector,’ then maybe he got close to one of the other victims?”
Maybe. Cloister couldn’t refute the theory, but the context didn’t feel right. “I don’t think so. It was something else. Something….”
Tancredi blanched suddenly, and her mouth dropped open slightly. “Shit.”
“What?”
She tossed the tissue in the trash and took off at a jog back to her desk. Cloister followed on her heels. “He had an alibi,” she said over her shoulder. “It came up in the background check, but he had an alibi, so I didn’t think about it.”
“What are you talking about?” Cloister asked.
Tancredi scrabbled through the paperwork on her desk and dumped handfuls of it onto her chair as she looked for one particular file.
“This,” she said eventually. She shoved the file at Cloister. “He changed his name to Tranquil Reed years ago, legally and everything, but he was born a Spence. He’s our killer’s father. That’s the link to the Retreat.”
Dread caught in Cloister’s stomach like a stone. It was stupid. So it had been a while since Javi called in about heading to the Retreat. That didn’t mean anything. Javi could take care of himself. But the dread didn’t care about any of that. It stayed lodged in his gut.
“I’ll call Agent Merlo,” Cloister said. “You tell Frome.”
Tancredi took off at a run and Cloister grabbed his phone. The call rang through to voicemail.
It still didn’t mean anything. Except neither Cloister nor the dread in his gut believed that.
TRANQUIL REED hadn’t been happy to see the police turn up in force at the Retreat again. He was even less happy when he found out why they were there. The ex-hippy’s usual linen-pressed charm was frayed at the edges as he hunched behind his desk and fidgeted. It was the first time Cloister had ever seen Reed sweat, and he took a certain vicious enjoyment in it.
“You’re wrong.”
“We’re not,” Tancredi said. She dealt out the photos of the confirmed victims and laid down each photo to create a perfectly straight line. “The nephew of the bank president who foreclosed on your ex-wife’s house. The daughter of the property developer who pushed through the Mallard Park development. The son of the councillor who approved the construction permit. The daughter of the construction company’s owner. The son of the fireman who found your daughter. He kidnapped all of these people.”
“And now an FBI agent is missing,” Cloister said. The words caught in his throat as though they wouldn’t be true if he didn’t spit them out. “Special Agent Merlo arrived here to speak to you earlier today. Now he’s gone. Your son did this.”
“He’s not capable,” Tranquil insisted as he pushed himself up out of the chair in a burst of frustration. He grabbed at his hair with tense, bony fingers, as though he needed to shake the words out. “After what happe
ned to him and Hettie, he had PTSD and neurological deficits and all sorts of things. He struggles to do things. That’s why he works here, because he can’t hold down a job anywhere else.”
Cloister slammed the door to the office. The crack of noise made Tranquil jerk and sit back down hard.
“Tell that to the lawyer you’re going to need for your son,” he said. “They’ll care. We don’t. Right now your son is in trouble. If anything happens to Drew Hartley or Special Agent Merlo, then it’s going to be a lot worse. Where is he?”
Tranquil opened his mouth and then shut it again. He looked, all of a sudden, quite old. “I don’t know,” he said. Cloister made a frustrated noise of disbelief. “I don’t. I’m telling you the truth. My marriage broke up because I came here, when I became this. That caused enough problems, but after what happened to his mother and sister? To my wife and daughter. He never forgave me for that. We don’t talk. He doesn’t tell me about his life. I give him work when he’s sober and let him sleep here if he wants. Sometimes I don’t see him for weeks at a time. I don’t know what he does or where he goes.”
He stopped and looked at the hand of victims spread out in front of him. His face sagged with grief and the death of his denial. “Why would he do this? These children didn’t hurt Hettie or Jill. They’re just children.”
Cloister looked down at the photos. Loved ones had picked them out, so they showed the missing teens at their best. The glossy colors captured clear skin and innocence. Cloister had grown up in a pretty shit town, and he remembered how he resented the kids who hadn’t lost a sibling, whose dads weren’t useless assholes, who had moms who didn’t look at them with disappointment. The worst he’d ever done was start a fight with a football player out of frustration. But he still understood.
“They’re just children,” Cloister said. “They got to be just children because they didn’t have to watch their sister die in a locked car. I guess he doesn’t think that’s fair.”