Skin and Bone

by TA Moore

  “Don’t tell me the farm boy turned dog cop is more sexually advanced than he lets on. What was it, Witte?” Sean leaned forward, still anchored by one arm, and dropped his voice to a suggestive drawl. “A dirty weekend in Sin City? A threesome with an accommodating couple? Some dirty little secret?”

  The table was covered in polished copper and a thin layer of perspex etched with stylized cards. It was a bad hand, from what Cloister could see, much like the one he’d just been dealt. There were more ways to get the conversation wrong than there were to get it right.

  “You just caught me off guard, Stokes,” Cloister said after a moment. “I can assure you, there’s nothing personal in us wanting to talk to you right now. And I don’t have any secrets, not even grubby ones.”

  The smug was back on Sean’s face. “I think I’ll be the judge of that.”

  Cloister didn’t realize he’d reacted at all until he felt Bourneville tense against his leg. He reached down automatically to scruff her, dug his fingers into the thick fur, and felt the tightness in his shoulders and jaw. On the other side of the table, Sean had retreated back into his own space. It was one advantage of resting thug face.

  “I know that Javi didn’t fuck you,” Cloister said quietly as he petted Bourneville calm. He sounded like his dad—pleasant and soft-spoken and clearly willing to hurt someone. That wasn’t something he was proud of. “If he did, that’s his business, not mine. Just like my past isn’t yours.”

  There were no secrets to mine out of Cloister’s life, just pain and the shadowy monsters of the night he couldn’t remember. He didn’t want Sean to poke at that, to pull up the old newspaper clippings of Cloister’s sad little trauma. He didn’t want his mom to get a call from a smooth-talking stranger about the things that broke her life.

  Sean glanced down at Bourneville and licked his lips.

  “A bit hypocritical,” he said. His voice was more careful than it had been before, but not cowed. Cloister guessed he didn’t sound exactly like his stepdad after all. “Since we’re here so you can pry into my life.”

  He had a point.

  “I can live with that,” Cloister said.

  Sean raised his eyebrows again and, for the first time, looked mildly intrigued. A thoughtful smile played over his mouth.

  “You’re just a bit interesting, aren’t you,” he said. “I’d missed that last time.”

  “Not really.”

  “And a liar too,” Sean mocked lightly. “Is that Plenty’s influence, or all you?”

  Javi arrived, tailed by the waiter with a tray of beer, and saved Cloister from an attempt to answer that question. The bartender had apparently decided on a beer with a suave ferret on it for Sean and an anonymous frosted glass for Cloister’s Bud.

  “Agent,” Sean said as he gestured to the chair beside Cloister. “Just in time. We’ve been talking about you.”

  “We weren’t,” Cloister corrected him as Javi sat down.

  “True.” Sean took the beer from the waiter and took a drink. He smiled around the lip of the bottle, dark brown eyes sharp and hot as he looked at Cloister. “We were talking about you.”

  “Sounds fascinating,” Javi said. He glanced at the hovering waiter. “That’s all. Thank you.”

  Disappointment crawled over the young man’s face as he quite slowly mumbled his apologies and let himself out of the room. Javi waited until the door latch clicked, sighed in exasperation, and turned back to Sean.

  “Do you know a Janet Morrow?” he asked.

  Sean tipped the bottle back and took a deep drink. “Niceties over, then?” he asked sarcastically as he lowered the bottle back to the table. When Javi just waited, Sean shrugged. “Janet Morrow? I’ve heard the name, but only in the last few days. She’s the trans woman who was assaulted? People aren’t entirely impressed with your investigation so far.”

  “What about Macintosh?” Cloister asked. “Do you know anyone by that name?”

  Sean’s eyes flicked between them. “I know an Andrew Macintosh,” he said slowly, the words carefully chosen. “He was an asshole, but a good lawyer if you were on that side of the fence. Or he used to be.”

  “Do you know where he is now?”

  “The gutter,” Sean said. He sounded almost satisfied as he said it. Cloister went to comment on that, but Javi slid in before he could.

  “You don’t sound too sad about that,” he said.

  “I wasn’t on that side of the fence,” Sean said. He took another drink and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. “Look, things were different in Plenty back then. Even if you weren’t crooked, sometimes the rules got bent. I moonlighted a bit for Macintosh, did some background checks and tailed a couple of mistresses. That’s all. But like I said, he was an asshole. The only good quality he had was that he paid his bills on time. No one who knew him is going to be too sad about his… abrupt reversal in fortune.”

  “Including his family?” Cloister said.

  “Well, he killed them,” Sean said. “Or that’s what everyone believed. If he hadn’t? Well, first time I worked for him was when he had me tail his first wife to her gym. Know why? Because she got fat, and he thought it was funny. Even the crooks that Macintosh worked for thought he was an asshole. What’s this about? It’s been nearly a decade since I worked for Macintosh. Nearly as long since I thought about him.”

  Javi took out his phone and tapped the screen to pull up and maximize a photo of the scrawled-on business card. He slid it over the table toward Sean.

  “We believe this card was in Janet’s possession the night of the attack,” he said. “She was also found in Delacourt, near Macintosh’s old office. That’s your number.”

  Sean gave the card a brief glance and nodded. “Yes,” he said. “But not like I had business cards back then. I was still a cop. So if I needed to, I’d just write my number on one of Macintosh’s cards. I handed out dozens of these.”

  “Ten years ago,” Javi pointed out. “Why would someone keep it that long?”

  “I don’t know,” Sean said. He took another drink of his beer. “That’s your job, isn’t it?”

  Bourneville yawned and rested her chin on Cloister’s knee. He absently rubbed under her jaw, whiskers rough against his fingers. There was a stack of business cards in his desk at work. Every now and again, he’d restock his wallet. Most of the time he knew the cards would end up lost in a drawer, tossed in the first clear-out of the year, and the people he hoped would call never would. Then there were the ones he knew would call.

  “Did you ever regret giving someone one?” he asked. “Hand it to someone and just know it would come back to bite you in the ass?”

  It was the first time Sean didn’t have a pat answer ready. He hesitated, beer halfway to his mouth as he thought about it.

  “A few,” he admitted. “There was an Irish guy that Mac worked for sometimes—lots of money and a thing for pretty boys. He said he had some work he wanted to put my way, but I knew that was a lie even as I handed my number over. Not my best decision. I took his calls too, a couple of times. That was a worse call.”

  He finally took the paused drink and grimaced as he swallowed. It looked as though the memory of the Irish guy still left a bad taste in his mouth.

  “Can you get me his name?” Javi asked.

  Sean licked his lips and nodded. “Yeah. The others too. There’s maybe four that stand out, with that guy. Oh, and the one I gave to Tommy.”

  The name didn’t sound familiar to Cloister—not in connection with this case, anyway—but it made Javi frown.

  “Macintosh’s son?” he said. “The youngest one.”

  Sean snorted. “Yeah. I knew it was stupid the minute I did it. It was the way he took it, like I’d given him the key to his cell. I could hardly snatch it back from him, though, so…. That one nearly got me fired. Macintosh thought I was making advances on the boy.”

  “Were you?” Javi asked.

  “No,” Sean said with contempt and a bit of d
isgust. “Tommy couldn’t have been more than fourteen or fifteen, and he looked maybe twelve. I’m far from perfect, but I’m not into that. I just felt… sorry for him.”

  He sounded almost ashamed of that.

  “Why?” Cloister asked.

  When he was that age, a lot of adults felt sorry for him. Most of them knew why, but even the few who missed the local paper’s sporadic “still missing” updates on his brother could tell there was something wrong. In Tommy’s case, maybe whatever was wrong was bad enough that it still had an impact.

  Sean sighed and picked absently at the label on his beer with his thumbnail.

  “He was a kid, he was gay—probably gay, I mean, I didn’t ask—and his parents didn’t get who he was or what he wanted. I still remembered what that was like, to feel you’d been dropped into the wrong life,” Sean said. He peeled a long, crinkled strip of paper away from the glass and flicked it off the table. A frown pinched his eyebrows together as he spoke, so maybe he still remembered what that wrong life felt like. “I gave him the card because… Macintosh was a tough man. He wore nice suits and drank Starbucks, but he was hard as nails, and he expected his sons to live up to his example. His eldest, with his first wife, did.”

  “But Tommy needed, what?” Javi asked. “The occasional backhand to keep him in line?”

  That story was familiar enough. At least twice a week, Cloister had to arrest someone who protested they had no choice but to slap something into their kid. Cloister was actually surprised when Sean promptly shook his head.

  “No. Not as far as I know. It was nothing like that. He was going to send Tommy to some survivalist summer camp to toughen him up, make a man of him. Tommy didn’t want to go, and I told him that, if it was that bad, call me. I’d do what I could.” Sean paused and shook his head as he lifted his beer for another swig. “Thankfully he never did. I have no idea what I planned to do. Save the—”

  Javi interrupted him. “Do you think Macintosh expected his son to become straight from that camp?”

  Sean thought about that as he drank his beer. He swallowed and wiped foam off his upper lip with the pad of his thumb. This time his denial was a lot less confident.

  “I don’t think so,” he said. “If it was, Tommy didn’t know about it. He was worried it would be full of jocks like his brother and that he wouldn’t be allowed to use his phone. He never mentioned anything about religion or girls or anything like that. It could have been. I had no idea. Why?”

  Cloister wanted to know that too. He’d have to wait. Instead of an answer, Javi pulled his phone back over the table and shook his head.

  “I just want to be sure we have the full story,” he said as he flicked away the picture of the business card. Cloister glanced over and saw Janet’s face fill the screen instead. It was the one from her driver’s license—all glossy curls and smile. Javi showed it to Sean. “Are you sure you don’t recognize her?”

  Sean glanced at the phone and away quickly. “No idea.”

  “Look properly, please,” Cloister said. “She deserves that.”

  “You were more interesting as a liar,” Sean said. He heaved a put-upon sigh but took the phone from Javi to study the image. “I don’t know her, but….”

  “What?”

  “The reports said she was from New York, that she was a tourist.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I missed a call about two weeks ago. It was from a New York number. They left a message on my voice service that said they were coming to Plenty and they needed to see me. It was a woman. It might been her.”

  “You could have told us that before.” Javi held his hand out for his phone.

  Sean deposited it neatly in his palm. “I could have not cheated on my husband too and saved myself the alimony,” he said. “Hindsight’s twenty-twenty. To be honest I didn’t think anything of it. If everyone who called the office actually went through with hiring me, I’d… have to pay a lot more alimony. Most people call me and then talk themselves out of it—that perfume on his collar was just from the waitress, the boobs on her phone were a misdial, the lawyers’ fees will bankrupt us. They just don’t want to know. This call didn’t stand out from the rest, and whoever it was never called back. It might not even have been your Janet. Just because she had my number doesn’t mean she called it.”

  “Doesn’t mean she didn’t,” Javi countered. “Could you—”

  “Get you access to my service? No,” Sean said. “I can have a copy of that particular message forwarded to you, though. And next time I need a favor—”

  “I assume you’ll also forward the names of anyone else you might have given this card to, anyone you remember,” Javi said.

  Sean rolled his eyes and stood up. “Like I said, not many of them stand out. I’ll see what I can do. If there’s nothing else…?”

  There wasn’t.

  Javi waited until Sean had left and then cursed quietly to himself. He frowned at Janet’s face on his phone for a moment, then banished her back to the home screen with an impatient jab of his thumb.

  “What?” Cloister asked.

  “I don’t know,” Javi said. He tucked the phone back into his pocket and frowned. “Probably nothing. It makes no sense.”

  Cloister nudged Bourneville’s head off his knee. There was a wet patch on his jeans where she’d drooled on him. She yawned, sneezed, and scrambled to her feet. He pushed his chair back and followed suit.

  “I told you that fried chicken place was open again,” he pointed out.

  Javi leaned back in his chair and looked up at Cloister. The lazy trawl of his gaze as it lingered on Cloister’s chest and shoulders curled heat under his skin. He didn’t bother to pretend it didn’t.

  “How will that help?” Javi asked dryly.

  “You can tell me your theory over dinner. Two birds with one stone,” Cloister said. He grinned with a slow curve of his mouth when Javi raised a skeptical eyebrow at him. “You were the one who thought I couldn’t fend for myself.”

  Something guarded slid through Javi’s eyes as he got up from the table. He straightened the cuffs of his jacket.

  “That kind of sounds like what passes for a date in Montana,” he said.

  “If it were a date, you’d talk about how nice my ass is,” Cloister said as he headed to the door and held it for Bourneville to trot out first. “Not murder and missing lawyers.”

  Javi came up behind him, close enough that Cloister could feel the heat of him, and skimmed his hand over the curve of Cloister’s backside. The muscle twitched under the brush of long fingers, as though it were a slap instead of barely a touch. “I compliment your ass all the time.”

  “I know,” Cloister said as he glanced back over his shoulder at Javi. “You kind of make it weird with how clingy you are, but I didn’t know how to bring it up.”

  Javi squeezed the handful of Cloister’s ass roughly. “Just for that, I get to pick where we eat.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  DID CHINESE takeout and the couch at Javi’s apartment make it more or less of a date? Javi wasn’t sure, although the wine he’d just uncorked didn’t really help with the “less” side. He poured two glasses and carried them into the main room.

  Cloister had started on the couch, but now he was on the floor with the stack of files, and Bourneville was stretched out on the cushions. She opened one eye—bright amber against the frame of black fur—to squint at Javi, and then she closed it again.

  “Is she… pretending… to be asleep?” Javi asked dubiously.

  “Yeah,” Cloister said. He reached absently and scratched under one of Bourneville’s legs. It made her paw twitch, but she didn’t open her eyes again. “She doesn’t want to move.”

  Javi wasn’t sure he liked that idea. He’d admit that Bourneville was smart for a dog and well trained—he’d seen her train with the other K-9s, and she was better than most of them—but the capacity for deception seemed more than that.

  People always claimed their
pets were clever, that they understood grief and being dressed up for Halloween. Javi found the idea somewhat off-putting. Half the time he didn’t like himself much. If he had a pet, he wouldn’t want it to be intelligent enough to understand his failings.

  “I thought she was obedient,” Javi said as he handed the wine to Cloister.

  “She’d get down if I told her to,” Cloister said. He took a sip of wine and didn’t make a face, which was more than Javi had expected. “But she gets to be a dog sometimes too. Do you want me to move her?”

  Javi looked at the dog as she steadfastly ignored him.

  “No,” he said. “Let her have it.”

  A dog that could try to fool you was a dog that was smart enough to hold a grudge. If Bourneville took a dislike to him, Javi wouldn’t have to worry about whether or not this was a date, because the whole thing would be over. Cloister… maybe… cared about Javi more than they’d agreed, but not more than he loved Bourneville.

  Javi folded himself down onto the ground next to Cloister. He grabbed a carton of orange chicken and folded the lid back neatly to let the steam out.

  “Well?” He stirred rice into the sauce with his chopsticks as he looked at Cloister, who had started his second, slower look through the files on the Macintosh murder investigation. “What do you think?”

  “That you’ve got forks?”

  Javi ignored that as he fished out a mouthful of chicken and rice and transferred it smoothly to his mouth. He chewed and swallowed and then looked over Cloister’s shoulder.

  “The attack on the Macintosh family happened just outside the Plenty city limits,” Javi said. “That might have been a mistake on the killer’s part, because it meant that it was under the sheriff’s department’s jurisdiction. Someone actually did a good job on the investigation.”

  “It doesn’t seem to have helped,” Cloister said. He scanned down the report. It was interesting to see where his attention stopped and lingered, mostly on the same things that had made Javi pause. “The investigation might have been thorough, but it didn’t get them anywhere. Between the fire and the responders’ attempts to get to the family, there wasn’t a lot of evidence left to collect.”