by TA Moore
“Understood,” Javi said. “Is there anything you can tell me?”
She collected the bagged samples and turned to pack them into the cooler. The girl on the bed looked even smaller against the white sheets than she had against the wet tarmac. Other than her hair, tamed into a heavy braid over one shoulder, Janet didn’t look much like the girl on her driver’s license. Her face was bruised and swollen, eyes sunk deep in their sockets, and both her arms were in casts. A bank of machines clicked and ticked as they monitored her status.
“How is she?” he asked.
Galloway glanced from him to Javi and raised her eyebrows. It dislodged her glasses from their perch on her forehead, and they dropped back down onto her nose.
“There’s not a lot to tell either of you,” she said. “Ms. Morrow’s condition is precarious, the next few days will see if she recovers, declines, or simply… perseveres. My examination and the X-rays taken during intake suggest that her injuries were the result of an assault rather than misadventure or a hit-and-run. Although at this point, that’s just my informed opinion.”
She paused to give Cloister a brief disapproving look and then picked up her phone to flick back through her notes.
“Both her forearms have fractures consistent with a fall.” She raised one arm and marked the snap points out against her sleeve with her other finger. “Colles fracture on her left hand, fractures at the head of the radius on both arms and left clavicle.”
She tapped her wrist, elbow, and collarbone.
“However, there are also spiral fractures to her humerus and ulna on the right and left arms respectively.” She poked the meat of her upper arm and then tapped the underside of her lower arm. “In the absence of machinery or extreme sports, the most likely cause of that is someone twisting her arms during an argument or altercation.”
Cloister glanced at the bed. Even with her arms bundled up in casts, they looked as skinny as Bourneville’s when she got wet, just bone and skin. It couldn’t have been hard to break them.
“Did the spiral fractures come before or after the other breaks?” he asked.
Galloway held up both index fingers to make sure she had their attention. Her nails were cut down to the quick, the skin raw around them, and traces of powder clung to her fingertips. “It’s hard to be sure without going in to look directly at the muscle groups, but from the swelling and the signs of additional bone trauma to the spiral breaks, I’d say before.”
Javi narrowed his eyes. “So someone fought with her violently enough to break both her arms and then chased her into the road, where she fell down and hurt herself more trying to break the fall?” He raised both arms, hands braced for impact, to demonstrate. When Galloway nodded, he turned his attention to the bed and frowned. “Then how did she get the head injury on the back of her skull?”
A thin smile of approval curved Galloway’s mouth. “Exactly,” she said. “I don’t see any way the injury to the back of Ms. Morrow’s skull, once you take into account her other injuries, matches with an accident. There are two impact points—here and here.” She turned and pushed her fingers through her pale hair at the base of her skull and slightly to the side. Then she turned back to the bed and gestured at Janet’s face, her finger an inch or so over the skin. “There’s also distinct bruising on the patient’s cheekbones and behind her ears where someone would have gripped her head before it made contact with the ground. At least that’s my theory. I’ll be able to tell you some more once I get these samples back. Not much more, though.”
“What about the rape kit?” Javi asked.
Galloway hesitated. She gave the girl in the bed a quick look, grimaced, and then gestured for them to go outside. It was the first time Cloister had ever seen Galloway act squeamish about anything, and some of the bodies she dealt with had turned his stomach. They followed her out into the hall, and Javi closed the door behind him.
“Was she raped?” he repeated.
“No,” Galloway said. “Sorry, it seems stupid, but there’s evidence that some coma patients are aware of what’s going on around them. I doubt it in Ms. Morrow’s case, but… she’s had a bad enough weekend.”
“What do you mean?” Cloister asked. “I doubt she’d be disappointed to hear she wasn’t assaulted.”
“She probably would be to hear the status of her body discussed,” she said. “There’s no evidence of rape, but there is significant evidence of extensive surgical intervention in the area. Based on my examination, I suspect Ms. Morrow has had gender reassignment surgery. I don’t know if that had anything to do with the assault, but it could explain why it’s been so difficult to get in touch with her family. I’ve got blood samples and fingerprints here, so I can run them once I get back to the lab. See if she’s in the system.”
“Do that,” Javi said. “Let me know if anything comes up?”
Galloway sniffed at him. “You still owe me for last time, Agent Merlo, but I’ll keep you in the loop, at least until I’m told not to. Deputy Witte, you should go home and get some rest. We don’t need you to find anyone today.”
She nodded a brisk goodbye and strode away down the hall.
“Dr. Galloway is right,” Javi said. He put his hand on Cloister’s shoulder. “You found her. She’s safe. Maybe you don’t need to be responsible for this one.”
Cloister shrugged under the weight of Javi’s hand. “Except she’s still lost, isn’t she?” he said. “We know where she is, but nobody she cares about does. If you asked her, do you think she’d feel like we got her home?”
Javi tightened his hand on Cloister’s shoulder. “If you asked her, maybe home isn’t where she’d want to be.”
He didn’t get it. Javi had a family. From what little he’d said, they weren’t perfect—a bit demanding, a bit cold—but they were enough for his needs. Home was where he went at Christmas, where he escaped with relief in the New Year. When you hadn’t grown up with that… you still wanted your home, but you found it for yourself.
“I don’t think here is where she wants to be either, though,” he said.
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE CRIME-SCENE cleanup crew was already at Delacourt when they got there. The two men had the upper half of their boiler suits tied around their waists and grubby mops in hand, and the older of the two frowned at Javi when he rolled his car up to the loose strip of police tape that closed off the road. He tossed his mop to his companion and loped over to grab a clipboard from the van while Javi got out of the car.
“Road’s closed. Orders of the Sheriff’s Department,” he said as he ducked under the sagging yellow-and-black ribbon. He thrust the clipboard into Javi’s hands, and, out of habit, Javi checked it. Frome’s signature was right there at the bottom. The lieutenant really was doing his best to avoid this case. The cleaner crossed his arms and rocked on the balls of his steel-toed boots as he waited for Javi to read the authorization. “If you need to get into any of these buildings, you’ll have to wait until we’ve finished the cleanup. It shouldn’t be more than an hour.”
“Actually I need access to the scene,” Javi said. “Before you—”
Javi stopped midsentence as Cloister’s car, caked with dust from tires to side mirror, turned onto the road and pulled up next to them. Apparently when he told Cloister to “go home and rest,” Cloister heard “follow me to the crime scene.” Or, since Javi hadn’t seen the car in his rearview mirror, Cloister just decided to swing by on his own.
The flash of irritation at being ignored came and went. It was pointless to pretend Javi expected Cloister to ever make the smart choice when he could do something stupid and selfless instead. Besides, he was glad to see him.
That sharp, uncompromising thought hung in Javi’s head for a second, until he found a modifier to soften it. Cloister was good with people, and he obviously knew the cleanup crew. The stubborn expression on the cleaner’s narrow face turned into a smirk as he saw Cloister climb out of his car. “Deputy Witte,” the cleaner said as he slo
w-clapped his gloved hands. “You look like shit.”
The rhyme made the cleaner cackle and slap his thigh. Cloister rolled his eyes and held the door open for Bourneville to jump out after him.
“First time I’ve heard that today,” he said dryly as he walked over to them. “Hewitt, can you give us ten minutes on the scene?”
Hewitt scratched the end of his nose and looked dubious. “What for?” he asked. “Forensics have already gone over this, tagged and bagged every bit of crap they found. We wouldn’t have come if the Sheriff’s Department wasn’t through with the spot.”
Javi handed the clipboard back to him and flashed his badge. “Five minutes. I just want Deputy Witte to walk me through what happened last night.”
It was almost audible as Hewitt put the pieces together. His eyes flicked from the bright gold of Javi’s badge to Cloister’s wrist and then back down to the work order in his hands. It was sparse on detail—the cleanup crews weren’t part of the Sheriff’s Department—but it had the bare-bones details of the hit-and-run they had been sent to clean up. It wasn’t hard for Hewitt to put two and two together.
“Oh, right,” he said. His face creased up with confusion. “Sorry. I didn’t realize that was you, Witte. Give me a minute to lock the van up, and we’ll get out of your way for a bit.” Hewitt turned to go, hesitated, and turned back. “Glad you’re okay. I swear, some people shouldn’t be on the roads, right?”
He didn’t wait for them to agree. While he herded up his coworker and lugged the big jugs of chemicals back into the van, Javi took a look up and down the street. He’d never had reason to come down there before. From the looks of it, not many people did. There were cars parked on the street, so he assumed some of the buildings were still in use, but not in any functional sense of the word—boarded-up shopfronts, broken windows, and doors replaced with plywood sheets and secured with heavy-duty padlocks. The walls were smeared with graffiti that didn’t even pretend to be art, just crudely painted accusations that scrawled slut and dick in clumsy black letters.
“What business did Janet Morrow have around here?” he asked.
“Tancredi thought she was trying to cut around, back to the gas station on the main road where she was supposed to meet the AAA guy, and just got lost,” Cloister said. “What about you?”
Javi frowned as he mapped it out in his head. There were blank spots in his mental navigation, areas he’d never driven through or google-mapped, but it seemed a lot of lost to get. It had been raining and dark, but still….
“A smart girl from New York walks into this neighborhood?” he said. “She’s going to go back to her car and call AAA again, not keep going.”
“I meant you,” Cloister said. He leaned back against the hood of Javi’s car, long legs stretched out in front of him and battered old boots braced on the ground. Bourneville sat neatly next to him and watched the cleaners bustle like rabbits. She grumbled low in her chest, not quite a growl, until Cloister scruffed her. “Frome wants to brush this case under the rug, so he’s not going to want your help. And I told you already, I was collateral damage, not the target. This isn’t a federal case.”
“And you’re supposed to be on sick leave.”
Cloister grinned crookedly and crossed his arms. He idly kicked his heel against the asphalt. “We both knew I wouldn’t be able to let this go. Right now Janet’s got no one looking out for her, and I can’t resist an underdog. What’s your excuse?”
It would have been a harder question to answer before the hospital. He should have left the investigation to the sheriff’s department. Hit-and-runs weren’t the FBI’s business, and he didn’t want Cloister to be his. But Dr. Galloway had given him another reason to care, one that kept things simple.
“I don’t need one,” he told Cloister as Hewitt loped back to them. “In case you’ve forgotten that day at the police academy, hate crimes do come under federal jurisdiction.”
The grim expression on Cloister’s face betrayed that he’d thought the same thing about Janet’s assault.
“Poor kid,” he said as he pushed himself off the car.
Hewitt held up the tape for his mute coworker, a skinny kid with shifty eyes, to duck under ahead of him. Then he limbo’d under it himself.
“All yours,” he said to Javi. “We’ll keep out of your way. Just, um… don’t take too long? The boss is a real stickler for timekeeping.”
“We’ll do our best,” Javi said.
Hewitt nodded and gave Cloister a quick, snarky grin. “With you in this state, I bet I could take you.” He mimed a punch at Cloister’s jaw and then danced backward with a shriek as Bourneville lunged to her feet with a vicious snarl. She stood stiff-legged in front of Cloister, hackles raised like a mohawk, and barked furiously as Hewitt tripped over himself to get away from her. “Fuck. Jesus. Call her off, Witte.”
The noise made Javi step back—an atavistic flinch from anything that had that many sharp white teeth. He didn’t do anything else. Most of the time Bourneville remained as opaque to him as any other wild animal. He hadn’t grown up with dogs—his parents even sent the class guinea pig back when his sister brought it home one summer—but her leash still hung limply from Cloister’s hand. That suggested she wasn’t committed to eating Hewitt.
Cloister snorted. “She never touched you.” He pursed his lips and whistled quickly. The short, shrill note made Bourneville tilt her ears back toward him. “Bon. That’s enough. Quiet. Good girl.”
She shut up with a grumble and skulked back to Cloister’s side, but her attention stayed on Hewitt as he pulled himself back together and brushed off his boiler suit.
“No call for that,” Hewitt muttered as he sloped off to his coworker. “Crazy fuckin’ dog.”
“Idiot,” Cloister said under his breath. He nudged Bourneville with his knee when she growled again. “And you, behave.”
Bourneville huffed in resentment and gave herself a shake to settle her hackles.
“Is she okay?” Javi asked.
“Yeah.” Cloister studied Bourneville for a second. “I don’t like my dogs that protective, but she wasn’t out of line. Hewitt should have known better than to try that.”
“Not everyone spends as much time with dogs as you.” Javi went under the tape. His voice went dry as he added, “Actually nobody spends as much time with dogs as you do.”
“Most people aren’t ex-cops, though,” Cloister said as he caught up with Javi. “Hewitt was a deputy. He’s worked with K-9s before. He used to boast about it to me whenever he rolled up to clean a crime scene I was at. That was stupid.”
Javi turned to check out where Hewitt and his skinny friend had gotten to. The pair of them were seated on the curb with one cigarette between them. Smoke drifted from their fingers as they passed it back and forth.
“Well, he’s scrubbing up roads, not running Galloway’s tests for her,” he said. “Maybe stupid’s why.”
Cloister shrugged and let it go.
“I found her there,” he pointed to the middle of the road. “On her back. She was already unconscious.”
Javi walked over and crouched down. The chlorine-harsh smell of a public pool hit him as he breathed in. The cleaners had already started there, and most of the blood was gone, but there were a few bright red hairs matted into the tarmac.
“‘Walk me through it’ doesn’t mean say one thing and stop,” Javi said. “What way was she lying?”
“Her feet this way,” Cloister said behind him. “She looked like someone had tried to undress her. That’s why I was surprised when Galloway said she hadn’t been assaulted. We’d lost her trail in the rain, but then we heard her scream. If I’d gotten here a bit quicker, maybe….”
It was we for everything except the blame. Not that Javi would have respected him if he’d said it was the dog’s fault, but he still noticed it.
“So if they weren’t interrupted, why would they leave the job half-done and go get the car?”
Cloister walked
past, heavy boots with sand worked into the stitching and long legs in worn denim in the periphery of Javi’s line of sight. Bourneville followed a beat after, firmly attached to the spot where heel lived in her head.
“Janet looked dead,” he said as he paused at the curb. “I think whoever attacked her thought he killed her and went to get the car to move the body.”
“If that’s true, he’d have to have a good reason,” Javi said. He pushed himself up and fastidiously brushed his hands together. “He has to come back to the scene, contaminate his car, risk being stopped or witnessed at another location. If it was a random crime, there’s no reason to take that risk.”
“Psycho?” Cloister suggested. He’d stopped at the curb and frowned at something on the ground. Bourneville ranged to the end of her long leash as she sniffed at the cracks in the pavement and the weeds that poked grimy fronds up in front of the neglected buildings.
“Maybe. Some serial killers select their victims at what seems like random. The compulsive, ritual elements would come into play later,” Javi said reluctantly. “It makes them harder to track.”
He had taken the assigned classes in aberrant psychology and behavioral analysis at the FBI academy, but he hadn’t been one of the wannabe profilers eager to fast-track themselves into the Behavioral Analysis Unit. It looked good on TV—the serial-killer hunters—and it was a prestigious assignment, but it led to burnout as often as it did promotion. It seemed like BAU cases were scattershot evidence, opaque motivation unless you knew three specific things that happened over a twenty-year period, and even when you caught them, it was never clean. There was always collateral damage.
So he’d rather not take the same twisted route. If nothing else, he didn’t want Frome to have any more reasons to want to bury the case. One unsolved homicide looked bad, but multiple ones looked worse.