Skin and Bone

by TA Moore

  “I appreciate the view,” he said. “But I can tell you later. I don’t even know if it’ll…. It probably won’t help.”

  Javi found what he was looking for under his Bluetooth keyboard and tossed it to Cloister. He grabbed it out of the air just before it hit him in the chest.

  “Tell me later, when I’m actually awake,” Javi said as he headed back toward the bedroom. “I’m going to take a shower. Let yourself back in.”

  Cloister looked down at the key he’d just caught. It was a spare key on a nondescript fob, the sort of thing you handed to neighbors so they could water your orchids over a long weekend or tucked under a mat for the plumber when you had to go to work.

  It didn’t mean anything. Cloister knew that. That he wanted it to meant he was back to making a fool of himself over Javi Merlo.

  He heard the shower kick on in the bathroom, the splash of water and the click of the door. His brain filled in the visuals—wet skin and the trail of scented soapsuds that would coax Cloister’s mouth to follow them lower.

  “Like I ever really stopped being a fool,” he said to Bourneville. She tilted her head at him with polite interest and then looked back at the door. Cloister sighed and pushed himself off the coffee table. “You’re lucky you’re the best dog in the world, Bon, otherwise I’d make you hold it.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  AN HOUR later Cloister came out of the shower in a borrowed pair of Javi’s sweats as he clumsily scrubbed his hair dry with one hand. Bourneville was flaked out on her side in front of the window. She lifted her head when Cloister came in, but he gestured for her to stay where she was as he went into the kitchen.

  He stopped as he came face-to-face with… breakfast. Laid out on the kitchen table were a carafe of coffee, a massive pan of eggs, the yellow lumps still hot and steaming, and stacks of buttered toast on a plate. There was hot sauce for the eggs and a bottle of french vanilla creamer for the coffee. Javi, dressed down—for him—in a black silk shirt and gray jeans, flicked the stove off and turned around.

  “Help yourself,” he said as he pulled a chair out and sat down. “There’s apple juice in the fridge if you want any.”

  “Huh.” Cloister gave his hair one last pass with the towel and sat down. He felt oddly off balance. It wasn’t as though they’d never eaten before, but it had been takeout with plastic forks and rough napkins and never breakfast. Usually Cloister was either gone by then, or they were both on their way out the door to get to a crime scene. The table and the extra servings of food felt—intimate, domestic, nice—weird. “I, um…. Thanks.”

  “I eat,” Javi pointed out defensively. “All I did was get an extra plate out.”

  “And a fork.”

  The toast was underdone and just white. Cloister supposed it was odd that that made him feel better, but it did. A world where Javi didn’t pay attention to how Cloister liked his bread toasted just made sense. He reached for the serving spoon and piled eggs on his plate.

  “I don’t think Janet Morrow came to town to see someone,” he said as he dragged his brain back on target. “I think it was to see something.”

  Javi raised his eyebrows. “You think she was relocating here?”

  Cloister shook his head but then reconsidered and shrugged instead. “Maybe. It’s only Monday now. If she had a job or places to be, we’ll probably hear soon, but I think she’d been here before. When she called AAA, she told the driver that she’d meet him at the gas station down the road,” Cloister said. He poked at his eggs to reshape them into a map of the road. “How did she know it was there? There’s no way she’d have driven past it already. She only checked into town a few hours before, so she must have known the area… well enough to know that was a gas station nice enough to spend an hour waiting over coffee for someone.”

  Javi looked thoughtful as he picked up his coffee.

  “It is possible, I suppose,” he said with a shrug. “We already speculated she probably knew her attacker. He could be a disappointed realtor instead of a disappointed date. At the moment I don’t know if it matters. Until we find out more about Janet Morrow, she’s Schrödinger’s cat. Everything is possible.”

  Cloister shoved eggs onto a corner of his pallid toast. Now that food was in front of him, he suddenly wasn’t hungry. The pain pills had worn off, and he hurt with a dull, heavy ache that promised to get worse. But an empty stomach wouldn’t make him feel any better. “Maybe that she’s familiar with Plenty is where you should start.”

  His phone rang in the other room as he took a bite. The familiar twang of the “Ol’ Red” chorus was enough to make Javi pull a dismayed face. Cloister was never sure if it was the song or the reminder that Javi was sleeping with someone who listened to country.

  “Shit,” Cloister mumbled as he tried to swallow a mouthful of half-chewed breakfast.

  He dropped what was left of the toast on the plate and got up from the table. The manners his mom had clipped into the back of his head made him mutter a “’Scuze me” to Javi as he wiped his hands on the towel.

  The phone had managed to get kicked under the bed sometime the night before. Cloister swore to himself as got down on his knees and clumsily fished between Javi’s suitcases for the metal oblong. When he finally pulled it out, “Ol Red” had circled back to the first notes, and Tancredi’s name was on the screen.

  “Hey.”

  “Witte?” Tancredi said. Her voice was pitched to carry over the argument going on in the background, mostly in Spanish too rapid-fire for Cloister to pick out at a distance. The occasional loud interruption in English consisted of requests for everyone to calm down. “Did I wake you?”

  She didn’t bother to wait for an answer. Cloister couldn’t blame her for that. If she knew him well enough to remember his birthday, she knew he wasn’t going to be asleep at six thirty in the morning.

  “Could you come down to the impound yard?” There was a pause as she turned away from the phone and yelled, “Be quiet!” It made no difference, but she must have moved out of earshot, because the angry voices were muffled. “I want you to have a look at something.”

  Cloister sat down on the edge of the bed. “I’m still officially on sick leave,” he said.

  “You’re still officially a witness,” Tancredi fired back. “There’s a pickup here that I think might be the vehicle that hit you, but I need a good reason to refuse to release it. Five minutes.”

  She waited. Cloister ran through the logistics in his head. “I’ll be there in twenty minutes. Will that work?”

  “Well, it’s better than thirty,” she said resignedly. “Just get here before the owner follows through on calling her lawyer. See you soon.”

  She hung up on him. Cloister sat for a second as he tried to remember anything about the pickup other than how hard it was when it hit him. He had to have seen something. The street was dark, but his eyes had adjusted by then, and he had the flashlight. But his brain didn’t seem to have retained any of that. All it had was the size of the pickup and the shock of impact.

  Maybe once he saw the pickup, it would jar something loose.

  He dragged his shoes on and went back out. Javi had already tossed the toast and was about to throw the eggs in the trash. Bourneville took the scrape of a fork on china to mean the meal was over and she was allowed to look pointedly at the food again. She sat just outside the threshold of the kitchen and watched Javi intently as he worked.

  “I assumed breakfast was done,” Javi said. He glanced at Bon and raised his eyebrows. “Can I give her some? I know you don’t like other people feeding her.”

  “Strangers,” Cloister corrected him. “She’ll eat some eggs if you give them to her.”

  Javi gave Bourneville’s jaw a dubious look and spooned some eggs onto a plate. He put it down on the floor.

  “Bourneville?” Cloister nudged Bon’s shoulder with his knee to make sure she paid attention. “Take it.”

  She huffed happily and trotted over to wolf up the dollop o
f eggs. The plate rattled against the floor as she nosed it around in circles in case she missed any. Her tail thumped Javi’s legs, and he cautiously edged away.

  “I need to go into the station.”

  “Me too,” Javi said. “I’ll drop you off”

  Cloister gave Javi a surprised look. He didn’t care what people knew or didn’t know about him usually. He never had to. K-9 handlers didn’t tend to get promotions—he never really wanted one anyway—and assholes generally found easier prey than someone as big and mean-looking as Cloister. That didn’t hold true for Javi, and he preferred to keep his private life… private.

  “Someone could see us?” Cloister pointed out.

  Javi gave his hands a brisk scrub under the tap.

  “You were hit by a car a couple of days ago,” he said. “I might not be as popular around Plenty as Saul was, but I don’t think anyone will see me giving you a lift and jump to me sexually preying on invalids.”

  Cloister chuckled. “Is that what last night was?” he asked.

  “Last night? No.” Javi walked over and hooked his fingers into the waistband of Cloister’s borrowed sweats. His knuckles brushed chilly against Cloister’s stomach as Javi pulled him in for a quick, coffee-bitter kiss. “If I recall correctly, you preyed on me.”

  Cloister smiled against Javi’s mouth. “I like the sound of that.”

  Javi bit the curve of Cloister’s lower lip and then let it slip from between his teeth as he stepped back. “Or maybe you prayed. Something like that.”

  He walked out of the kitchen, and Cloister snorted and called after him, “Yeah, I used to get them confused when I was a kid too.”

  FOR SOME reason Cloister expected the pickup to be red, colored by the dream memory of a toy car he never had. Instead he stood on the impound lot, the stretch of uneven tarmac a heat sink as the temperature rose, and stared at a glossy coffee-bronze Chevy striped with polished silver chrome and streaks of dried mud.

  At least if it were red, there would have been something familiar about it.

  “Anything?” Tancredi asked hopefully as she looked up at him.

  “I don’t know,” Cloister said. He walked around the pickup as he tried to recognize any details that matched between the rich man’s work toy and his memory of a dark shape. “Give me a minute.”

  Tancredi fanned herself with a clipboard as she followed him, short curls fluffed around her ears. The heat had taken the starch out of the collar of her T-shirt, and it slouched limply over her collarbones. “It was towed in on Saturday morning. Someone left it parked illegally in the Heights, doors unlocked, keys in the ignition. They probably hoped that someone would get rid of it for them.”

  “Really?”

  That was the wrong part of Plenty to do that. The residents of the Heights weren’t criminals. They were just poor. The occasional meth dealer might try to set up production independent of the big boys on the drug scene, but most people didn’t have the time for crime between their job, their other job, and their children. Given the opportunity, they might pick a drunk—or dead—man’s pocket or jack the radio out of a busted Jeep. A car like this? That was too rich for their blood.

  If they took it, what would they do with it? They couldn’t keep it—even if it wasn’t obviously stolen, the Chevy probably got ten miles to the gallon—and most of the local chop shops would figure it was either a trap by the cops or a drug dealer’s ride.

  So the victim knew the town, but her assailant didn’t?

  It didn’t make sense.

  “What about the owner?” Cloister asked as he leaned sideways to squint along the hood. It was hard to see under the mud, but there was an arc of scratches etched into the expensive paint job and a dent that might have been caused when it cracked into a body.

  Tancredi checked her paperwork. “Cristina Lopez.” She nodded across the lot to the office where the back of a heavyset blonde woman could be seen through the window as she argued with the attendant on duty. Tancredi’s voice was dry as she went on, “Apparently Mrs. Lopez only uses this car for towing her boat, and the rest of the time, her housekeeper uses it to run errands. So she only reported it stolen this morning when the housekeeper came back from his weekend off and found it gone. Last time he saw it was Friday morning. We let her know it was here, and then I got called down when she kicked off about the fine and the condition the car is in. So could you identify this car as the one that hit you, Deputy Witte?”

  “Maybe.”

  Tancredi sighed. “Not good enough, Witte. In case you missed the fact that she has a boat to tow her car, Mrs. Lopez is a very wealthy woman, and Frome won’t be happy if we piss her off for no reason.”

  They both looked over at the office just in time to see Mrs. Lopez take a cup of coffee from the attendant and throw it on the floor.

  “Piss her off more,” Tancredi corrected herself.

  Cloister paused at the other side of the car and crouched down at the passenger door. His thigh ached dully as the injured muscle spasmed, and Cloister had to clench his jaw against a groan. He remembered his stepdad used to grunt whenever he got down on his knees to do something, his joints battered by a lifetime of bar brawls and wiped-out motorbikes. If this was what it felt like to get old, Cloister would have to stop running his body so hard.

  “What?” Tancred asked.

  Cloister ran his thumb over the pocks dented into the door handle, above and below, and then he brushed his hand down to knock some of the mud loose. Underneath it, long, evenly spaced gouges ran down the door where the paint was scraped away right down to the metal. Bourneville had really made a mess of it the other night.

  Cloister sat back on his heels and brushed dried dirt off his hand against his knee.

  “Tell Mrs. Lopez we’re sorry,” he said. Tancredi huffed out an aggrieved sigh and slapped the clipboard against her thigh. “But I think she’s going to have to find another car to tow her boat.”

  AMBROSE TWISTED her dull gray hair up off her neck and secured it with a stray pen. She’d already stripped off the top half of her oil-stained coveralls to bare wiry arms and the sharp points of the Batman tattoo worked into the scars on her chest. Behind her, the coffee-bronze pickup was jacked up over the pit so Ambrose could look it over.

  “I can strip her down once the techs have gone through, let them ferret out any trace evidence in the cushions,” she said as she wiped oily hands across her hips. “And I can pull down the data from the event recorder and onboard computer. I’ll need to send it off to get analyzed, though. It’ll take a while. The techs will need to hit up Chevy for access codes and data keys.”

  “How long?” Cloister asked.

  Behind Ambrose, one of the junior mechanics popped the hood to a Charger and stuck his head under it. From his muffled “Fuck sake,” it didn’t look good.

  “Could be weeks,” Ambrose said. She shrugged at Tancredi’s sigh. “My stuff I can rush, Deputy. Once it goes out of here? The techs don’t care about some grease monkey getting on their case for test results.”

  “If it’ll get Mrs. Lopez her car back sooner, Frome might be willing to put the pressure on,” Tancredi said.

  Ambrose raised her eyebrows. “Mrs. Lopez?”

  “She didn’t…. She wasn’t driving,” Tancredi said. “It’s just her car.”

  “No, I figured that,” Ambrose said. “It was just—”

  Cloister interrupted apologetically, “Can I have ten minutes?” he asked. “Let Bourneville give the car the once-over?”

  Ambrose scratched her nose and left a smudge of grease left of center on the bridge. Then she looked over to where Bourneville sprawled in the shadow of a worktable. Bourneville lifted her head off her paws when she realized they were looking at her.

  “Aren’t you the victim?” Tancredi asked.

  “I won’t touch anything,” Cloister promised, his hand raised as though he were about to swear on the Bible. “If Bon finds something, Tancredi can retrieve it. There’ll be n
o way for me to interfere.”

  Ambrose stared at him for a second and then shrugged and turned to Tancredi. “Up to you.”

  Tancredi chewed indecisively at her lower lip. She grimaced in the end and nodded.

  “Okay,” she said. Then she pointed a warning finger at his chest. “But you don’t go near the car, Witte. If Bourneville finds something? I retrieve it. I bag it.”

  Cloister nodded and whistled for his dog. She scrambled up off the concrete, shook herself in a ripple of heavy black-and-rust fur, and trotted over. The leash trailed through the dust behind her. She pushed her muzzle into Cloister’s hand when she reached him, her nose wet and cold, and panted between his fingers.

  “Okay, Bon, time to earn your eggs,” Cloister told her as he crouched down. He unclipped the leash—unlikely she’d get hurt in the controlled space of the garage, but he didn’t want to risk her getting hung on something—and wrapped it around his forearm. Ambrose took two long steps back out of the way and crossed her arms to watch. Cloister hooked his fingers through Bon’s collar and pointed her at the pickup. He could feel the quiver of eagerness under her skin as she waited for her command. “Bourneville? Do you smell RJ? We need to find RJ.”

  She whined at the coded command—no parent wanted to hear a dog commanded to look for a corpse, and no cop wanted the press to hear it—and leaned against the collar. Cloister let her go, and she bolted away from him.

  Her head was down, nose almost pressed against the rough concrete, and her tail flagged as she made a brisk circuit of the garage. Cloister shifted to the side to keep her in sight. One of the other mechanics yelped as she wriggled between his legs to sniff at the sidewall of a torn tire. Whatever had caught her nose made her pause for a second, but then she looped back to them.

  “Bourneville,” Cloister pointed at the Chevy. “Hupf!”

  She gave him a disgruntled look. The “up” command usually sent her up walls or got her boosted through second-story windows, not onto the running board of a pickup. But she did as she was told and leaped smoothly into the driver’s seat. Her feet dimpled the leather as she made a tight turn to sniff the seat and then the wheel. After one pass she lost interest and scrambled into the passenger side.