by TA Moore
“So what? There was nothing?” Tancredi asked dubiously. “Maybe there wasn’t enough trace?”
Ambrose cleared her throat. “The car smells like bleach. There wasn’t time to give it a full cleanup, but someone tried to cover their tracks.”
“That wouldn’t matter,” Cloister said.
If there was blood on the steering wheel, Bourneville should have found it, and after the driver finished with Janet, there should have been some trace on their hands and clothes. It didn’t make sense.
Bourneville lay down on the passenger seat and whined with her tail clamped tightly between her legs in her distinctive trace tell.
“Good girl,” Cloister said warmly. Bourneville relaxed and got back up. “Good dog. RJ. Find him.”
She snorted and wriggled between the seats into the wide back of the car. Her tail flashed in the window as she hopped up and down on the back seat. Then she flopped again, almost immediately, with her chin pressed against the seat belt buckle as she waited for her reward.
“The attacker could have had her in the car at some point,” Tancredi suggested as she stood on her toes to peer into the back. “She got away, and he chased her down? You said you lost her trail. That would make sense if she got in a car.”
“Maybe,” Cloister said. It didn’t sound right. She couldn’t have gotten far barefoot and injured in the rain, so why had the attacker left her there? He didn’t have an alternative to there being so much trace in the car.
He snapped his fingers and patted his thigh to call Bourneville out. She grumbled as she jumped down and paced his legs in a tight, nervous circle, her side pressed hard against his knee. Cloister crouched down to fuss over her. “Best dog in Plenty PD, Bourneville.” But she huffed and grumbled low in her chest instead of settling.
After a second, she pulled away from him and went back to the car, where she stood on her back legs, front paws braced against the running board, and barked at the back seat again.
Cloister raised a hand to stop Tancredi from approaching. “Bourneville, such,” he ordered. She huffed in relief and jumped back into the car. This time she pawed at the seat with one foot and barked at it.
“There’s something there, not just trace,” Cloister said. He leaned into the cab and grabbed Bourneville’s collar to pull her back out. “Tancredi? Would you check down the back of the seat?”
This time Bourneville was amenable to being fussed over for being such a good dog. She crawled half into his lap, paws dangling between his knees, while Tancredi and Ambrose folded up the long leather bench.
“There’s something back here,” Tancredi said. She was flat on her stomach, her flashlight aimed into the struts under the seat. “Like cards or something? They’re stuck in under the runners. Does anyone have a pair of tweezers or something?”
One of the mechanics who’d taken a break to watch Bourneville work jogged forward with a pair of black pliers so sharply pointed they could have passed as a needle. Tancredi muttered her thanks as she took them and went back to work.
“It’s a loyalty card for a beauty salon,” she said after a second. Someone cackled and then went uncomfortably silent as she finished, “It’s covered in blood. It’s dry, but it looks fresh.”
Ambrose held the evidence bag open so Tancredi could carefully drop the card in. She sealed it as Tancredi ducked back down again.
“There’s something else.” She went back in with a grunt, her arm stretched out as far as it would go. “Hold on. I… almost… um. I can hardly read it. It looks like a really old business card… for a lawyer? There’s something written on the back.”
The card went into another evidence bag, and Ambrose passed both to Cloister while they dropped the seat back into place. He carried them to the door and angled them so the sunlight hit the plastic.
The front of the card had once been coated, but now it was cracked and smudged with blood. There wasn’t much to obscure. The black words marched bluntly over the card, the few obscured letters easy to fill in. And ew Maci osh—Criminal aw.
He flipped it over. Someone had scored out the contact details on the back and scrawled their own number in blue ink instead. Their name was scribbled in messy looped letters above it.
Cloister grimaced in frustration as he deciphered the signature.
Sean Stokes, the divorced private investigator Javi went to dinner with when he blew off drinks with Cloister. Not someone Cloister particularly wanted to see, never mind pull in to accuse of attempted murder.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE ENVELOPE was already neatly centered on Javi’s desk when he arrived in the office. His rank was neatly bracketed under his name on the label—Acting Supervisory Special Agent. Even if Kincaid sent it by special courier, it was already on its way before last night’s conversation. And at the speed federal bureaucracy worked, the transfer must have been approved weeks before.
The empty buoyancy of the morning’s pretend domesticity with Cloister pricked, and Javi scowled. He picked up the envelope and felt the weight of it. There was a few hours’ work sealed into the manila envelope—forms to countersign and file, clearance and computer access to be set up….
The sharp rap of knuckle on glass interrupted him. He looked up as Sue Daly, the office administrator, leaned around the door. The slim, efficient woman, her hair in a ruthlessly flattering gray bob, had run the substation since it opened. He wouldn’t be the first agent she saw come and go, and she knew the signs. Her pale blue eyes touched on the envelope and then back up to him.
“I heard that they confirmed the new SSA,” she said.
“When?” Javi asked as he tossed the envelope onto the table.
Her eyes flickered, and she stepped into the office. The door swung shut behind her. “I don’t gossip,” she said. “Before this morning I would have assumed you’d get it. Saul thought very highly of you as an agent, and his reports reflected that.”
The urge to ask “why” scratched at Javi’s throat. He’d always appreciated Saul’s intervention but never entirely understood it. The good agent part was true, but there were good agents who hadn’t fucked up as comprehensively as Javi had in Phoenix.
Instead he sat down behind his desk and flicked a key to turn the monitor on. “SSA Joel will be the new senior agent,” he said. “Until she gets here, however, I’m still in charge of the Morrow case. Did you have a chance to get in touch with Lieutenant Frome this morning?”
He would have been surprised if she hadn’t. Sue was as efficient as a paper cut. True to his expectations, she plucked her phone from the pocket of her suit.
“That’s why I came in to see you, actually,” she said as she flicked her finger over the screen. “Lieutenant Frome sent this information over this morning. Janet Morrow’s professor got in touch with the sheriff’s department last night. She’s flying in this morning and should be at the airport in a couple of hours. The sheriff has sent someone to pick her up. I was about to email you, but since you were on your way in…?”
The just-booted-up computer pinged as Sue dropped the packet of flight information into his email.
“Saul would have cared about this case too,” she said as she paused on her way out the door. Her lips curled in a small, somehow unfriendly smile. “He’s not the only one who thinks you’re a good agent.”
Javi raised his eyebrows at her and asked dryly, “Just not a good person?”
The answer took a beat longer than Javi expected. Sue finally shrugged her neatly jacketed shoulders. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you be a person. So I’m not the one to ask about that.”
It wasn’t an insult, just a statement of fact. Sue let herself out of the office with a polite nod and an “SSA Merlo.” Javi slouched back in his chair, the leather cold through his shirt, and wondered if he should be offended. He wasn’t, but that didn’t mean he shouldn’t be.
Probably, he thought dryly, he should be flattered that she hadn’t just gone with “no.” He knew plenty of peo
ple, both in Plenty and outside it, who would have.
The email opened, and he dismissed that thought until later. Ruth Belford’s email was sparse and brusque, a flat retelling of facts that ended with the flight information of a red-eye she caught out of JFK this morning. She landed two hours ago.
It was something Frome could have sent to him directly. Javi grabbed his phone and pulled up the lieutenant’s contact details.
It rang twice, and then Frome snapped, “What?”
“I would have appreciated a heads-up about Professor Belford,” he said.
“You got the email five minutes after I did,” Frome said. “Belford got her partner to send us the details. By that point she was already on the plane. Would you rather I left her to take an Uber up from San Diego while I waited to check in with you?”
“If the attack on Janet Morrow was a hate crime, it’s in my jurisdiction,” Javi said calmly. “The field office in LA will back me up on that.”
Frome took a deep breath. “I want to be sheriff one day,” he said. Javi braced himself for the self-serving explanation of how politics worked, as though the local Sheriff’s Department had anything on the government. The sigh surprised him, as did Frome’s resigned voice as he continued, “Then something like this makes me wonder if I’m cut out for it. I shouldn’t have let political issues cloud my judgment, and it shouldn’t have made any difference that Janet Morrow being trans meant people suddenly cared about what happened. I should have cared.”
The flat admission caught Javi off guard. He sat back in the chair and frowned at the office door. There was a dartboard there once, a quirk of Saul’s that had him pin whomever they most wanted to catch to it. Maybe it was there to give him something to stare at during these conversations.
“You don’t sound happy,” he pointed out.
Frome sighed.
“Well, I’d be happier if I still thought I’d done the right thing,” he said. “Life would be easier too. Instead the council is posturing about an internal audit. I have to apologize to one of my deputies and draft a statement for the press about Morrow that will undoubtedly come back to bite us. You were right to push this investigation, SSA Merlo, but I doubt that will be much comfort to either of us when this hits the fan.”
“It never is,” Javi agreed. “But trust me, being in the wrong doesn’t help much either. Are you taking Professor Belford to the hospital or the police station first?”
There was a pause as Frome clicked noisily at a keyboard. “Here,” he said. “Deputy Collins is still en route, but he’ll be here in about twenty minutes. I’ll send someone for you when he arrives.”
Frome hung up unceremoniously.
Javi sat the phone down and reached for the unopened envelope on the table. He might as well get started. At least if the case did go to hell, he wouldn’t have to see out the aftermath.
THE RUTH Belford Javi vaguely expected—a woman who took long romantic breaks and red-eyes to the rescue on the same weekend—was not the woman Collins escorted into the station. She was shorter and less stern, with a grown-out bob and bitten-down fingernails. The sort of woman who one day woke up having gone from being “cute” to “kind” with no segue. For a teacher at a fashion school, her clothes were aggressively nondescript, from her rose-patterned T-shirt to her white trainers.
“Professor Belford.” Javi extended his hand as he stepped forward. “I’m SSA Javier Merlo from the FBI.”
“Ruth,” she corrected him. Her hand was soft and clammy as she gripped his. She gave him a quick once-over from head to boots with her bloodshot eyes, and she blurted out a nervous laugh. “The real FBI? Not some comedy acronym that we’ll laugh about later?”
“No, the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” Javi told her. He showed her his badge to prove it. It didn’t seem like Ruth thought he was lying, just that the whole situation seemed bizarre to her. “Thank you for taking the time to speak to me. I’m sure Janet will appreciate you flying down.”
“No, she won’t,” Ruth corrected him with a wry fold of her chapped lips. She finally realized she still had his hand and let it go with a muttered apology. “How is Janet? Can she have visitors yet?”
Javi touched his fingers to her elbow and gestured down the hall. “It’s probably best if we talk in the waiting room,” he said. “There’s a bit more privacy.”
She hesitated for a second but did as she was told. The room was a few doors down from Mel’s switchboard, and her voice was just audible—“Deputy Graves, we have a silver alert at the Green Isle.” “Deputy Jane, we have a 10-33 in progress on Able Road. What’s your 10-20?”—until Javi closed the door behind them.
“What happened?” Ruth asked as she gingerly sat down on the edge of a low, square seat. She picked nervously at a burr in the fabric of her jeans. “The lieutenant I spoke to said that Janet was in the hospital, that she’d been attacked. What happened?”
“That’s what we’re trying to find out,” Javi said as he sat down next to her and took out his phone. He tapped the Record app and set it down on the table between them. “We haven’t been able to find out much about Ms. Morrow. We can’t find her records anywhere. She barely has any social media presence, and the university says that she isn’t a student?”
Ruth rubbed her hands together. “She’s not.”
“When she named you as emergency contact, we assumed that she was your student.”
“We’re friends, that’s all.”
Javi considered her. “Yet you came all this way?”
She flicked her travel-red eyes away from his to take in the posters on the walls, as though the domestic violence helpline suddenly mattered. Color appeared on Ruth’s cheeks as she swallowed nervously.
“I don’t think she has anyone else,” Ruth said. She shifted her attention back to Javi’s face and then darted it away again, this time to the drunk driving poster. She worked her jaw. “I know she hasn’t got anyone else, and I felt… guilty.”
The careful tone of Ruth’s voice cracked into something painfully honest with the last word.
“Why?”
Ruth rubbed her eyes. Tears squeezed between her fingers. Maybe it wasn’t just the dry air on the plane that had reddened the whites. “Sorry. Because I’m lying. Because I’m a shit. I didn’t mean to. I’m sorry. It’s just habit.”
Javi waited. He didn’t have Cloister’s way with people—the easy, down-home earnestness that invited confidences. His cool reserve could work too. It made people want to fill the silence.
“We had an…. It wasn’t an affair.” Ruth rubbed her hand through her hair, and dark tufts stuck between her fingers. There was nothing amused about the strangled laugh that squeezed out of her throat. “I’m still lying. I don’t know why. I guess lies die hard.”
They did.
Javi ignored the backwash of sympathy in his throat and pulled the conversation back on track. “You had an affair.”
Ruth took a deep breath and nodded. She dropped her hands into her lap and twisted them together like a student about to get in trouble.
“Yes. We did.” She grimaced and corrected herself sharply. “I did. I’m the one who’s married, so… I did. It was only for a couple of months, though, and it’s over now. It’s been over for nearly six months.”
“Yet she still put your name down as her emergency contact.”
Ruth smiled ruefully. “She loved me,” she said. “And like I said, who else has she got?”
The affair was slotted into the back of Javi’s brain as an item of interest for later. It would put Ruth on the defensive to push at it now, and he wanted as much information from her as possible first.
“We haven’t been able to track down much information about Janet,” he said instead and left Ruth’s confession to grate on her conscience. “Do you know anything about her that we could use to track down her next of kin?”
“No,” Ruth said. She shrugged under Javi’s frown. “Janet never talked about the past—her f
amily, her old name, where she grew up? I asked her sometimes, but she said that was ‘BFNY,’ Before New York, and it didn’t matter. For her, life started when she became who she wanted to be, the person I met.”
“That was when she transitioned?”
Ruth pulled a sour face. “I suppose that’s public knowledge now,” she said. Her chin dipped in a sharp, resentful nod. “But yes. It was a year ago or a bit more now. Not long before we met. It was—and this is genuinely the one thing I know about her from before—after her mother died. Janet came into some money, enough for everything and a plane ticket to New York, and never looked back.”
“No idea where she lived before New York? She didn’t have an accent or a favorite food?”
“Educated,” Ruth said. “She’s better spoken than I am. And she…. New York was a fetish for her, Mr. Merlo. She didn’t love anything that wasn’t made in the city.”
The impression Janet Morrow had left on the world remained translucent. All they knew was that someone had brutalized her. It didn’t seem fair. Whoever tried to kill her shouldn’t get to define her.
“Do you have any idea why she came to Plenty?”
“We hadn’t spoken for a while,” Ruth said. Before Javi could feel more than an itch of disappointment, Ruth went on. “She came to talk to me two weeks ago, though. Not about Plenty—she never mentioned that—but… about the future?”
“With you?”
A wistful look softened Ruth’s face. She looked down at her hands, which were still laced together between her knees as though she couldn’t trust them.
“No,” she said. “She loved me, but Janet was her one true love. It was her idea, her plan, for what her life would be like once she could be Janet. She wasn’t going to pine over me when she still had ambitions. That’s what she wanted to talk about—her future as a designer. It was always something that she wanted to do—we met at a fashion show my wife had put on—but now she just seemed to want it tomorrow.”