Skin and Bone

by TA Moore

  “Fuck,” he said. “What happened to him?”

  “Did you see him?”

  “I don’t know.” The man licked his dry lips and craned his head to peer at the picture from a distance. “Maybe. He wasn’t a regular, but I’ve seen him before when the weather was really bad. Over the summer when we had that heatwave, he stayed here. Maybe he was here recently.”

  That was good enough. Cloister let the disturbed man go back inside, the tail end of his “You won’t believe the shit I just seen” cut off as the door slammed shut, and called the find in to Mel. Then he kicked in the cracked blue door.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  AFTER A week of being relegated to coverage on special interest blogs, the violence at the hospital finally propelled Janet Morrow’s case into a headliner.

  A news anchor positioned outside the police station stared earnestly into the lens of a camera as he confirmed for viewers that “The assault today at the hospital may have been related to the attack on a transgender tourist earlier this week.” His shirt was dark with sweat under the arms, but the camera was angled high enough that all the viewers would see was the crisp collar and styled hair.

  Cloister limped past him, bagged evidence dangling from one hand and Bourneville’s lead looped around his wrist. It had felt good to run Bourneville, his muscles loose and the dark itch in the back of his brain outpaced as his boots hit the pavement, but once he stopped, his hip stiffened and creaked. Last time he hurt himself that badly, he was still in the army. He was too close to an explosion and wound up with a collapsed lung, but it barely slowed him down.

  Someone pointed Cloister out to the reporter, and he called out from behind him, “Deputy Witte. Was your injury last week connected to the attack at the hospital? Was Galloway there to talk to—”

  Cloister ignored the questions that peppered his back as he jogged up the steps and dodged into the station. He held the door for Bon to trot in ahead of him, her nails noisy on the tiled floor.

  The reporter’s voice filtered through the door as he turned back to the camera. “Deputy Witte played a prominent role in the Hartley kidnapping. He doesn’t appear interested in answering questions today.”

  The deputy at reception looked up from the paperwork he’d red-penned his way halfway through. “You keep being so high profile,” he said, “the lieutenant is going to make you start talking to the press.”

  Cloister shrugged and pointed at Bourneville. “Not my fault, Calhoun. It’s her. She’s a crime-fighting machine.”

  Calhoun stood up and leaned over the desk to look down at Bourneville. Aware she was the subject of conversation, Bourneville grinned a wide dog grin and wagged her tail happily. It had been a good day for her. Calhoun snorted and sat back down again.

  “Well, let’s be fair. She’s prettier than you too,” he said. “Maybe we should stick her in front of a camera. By the way, the cleanup crew sent in a complaint about you.”

  That wasn’t a surprise.

  Cloister shrugged. “Hewitt rubs me the wrong way,” he admitted. “And Bon doesn’t like him either.”

  “Frome does, though, so stay on his good side.” Calhoun chewed absently on the broken cap of his pen. “Oh, and if you’re looking for Agent Merlo? He’s still at the hospital with Galloway.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Typical Fed. Get shot a little bit and has to take the whole afternoon off to make us look bad.” Calhoun looked up, his lower lip folded down behind the wet plastic of the pen. “Wait and see, he’ll end up in front of the cameras when this is over. Do half the work, take all the credit. I’d steer clear of him if I were you, Witte.”

  He went back to work. Cloister eyed the faint pink tonsure just visible through Calhoun’s failing hairline and wondered if that had been a veiled comment on the earlier kiss or if Calhoun just wasn’t keen on Javi. There were plenty of people who weren’t. Cloister rubbed the back of his neck and realized that he kind of wanted it to be a jab. Not that he cared, had ever cared, what anyone thought of his sex life, but he wanted the kiss to be a thing. If it were, then… he could think it was important too, without it being weird.

  “Thanks,” he repeated, his voice a bit drier.

  He left Calhoun to the paperwork and went to log the bag as evidence before he headed… home, he decided at the last minute. Bourneville needed her reward for a good job, and her dinner. If his invitation to stay at Javi’s still stood, he supposed Javi would let him know when he got back.

  THE METRONOME thump of Bourneville’s tail on the floor of the trailer provided a soundtrack as Cloister made dinner. Her food was stored in an airtight container, weighed out to the gram, and enriched with 20 percent of warm, boiled-and-diced chicken breast. His dinner came in a plastic compartmented dish, and he blasted it in the microwave for five minutes.

  While his dinner went around on the turntable, Cloister picked up Bon’s dish and carried it to the door. She beat him there, and he had to step over her to get the door open, dish balanced precariously on his cast.

  He let her scramble down the steps and do a quick check of the perimeter of the small yard to make sure it had been respected. A few plots down, a handful of colored balloons bobbed listlessly from the steps of a trailer. The foil banner over the door announced Happy Birthday in bright-pink letters. Bourneville sniffed thoroughly at any gap and, finally satisfied, came back to sit down in front of him.

  “You know what a good job you did today?” Cloister asked as he set the dish down. “Even with me laid up, we’re still the best team in the department.”

  She wagged her tail for him, but her attention was focused on the dish as she waited for permission.

  “Go on,” Cloister said. “Dinner.”

  She lunged forward and buried her face in the bowl and wolfed down half the food in two hungry, messy bites. Once her immediate appetite was sated, Bon slowed down and went back to fastidiously eating one biscuit at a time.

  “I put worming powder in your dinner once,” Cloister said dryly. “Now you act like I’m going to poison you with every meal.”

  One biscuit didn’t meet Bourneville’s standards, and she spat it out.

  Cloister affectionately patted her bony hip and looked up just in time to see Javi stalk down the path toward him.

  “What did I do?” Javi asked as he reached the gate. He leaned on it, long fingers flexed around the wood until his knuckles pushed tight against the skin. His hair was matted and tangled, raked back roughly from his face, and at some point, he’d bitten his lip hard enough to bruise. “I thought we were okay, on the same page. Is this because I kissed you? You don’t want anyone in the station to think it actually matters?”

  Guilt pricked at Cloister. “I… checked on you,” he said. It sounded like a weak defense, even to him. “But you were being questioned, and I didn’t know what to say. Then Frome asked me to sit with Tancredi until the doctor could get to her, and….”

  It still sounded weak. Cloister knew he could have done better. He’d stood in the hall that smelled of bleach and blood and let the black shadow of his past seep up into his conscious mind. It was as though his brain needed to silt up the gap in his memory, and any emotion similar enough to the original trauma was close enough to throw in—lost children, injured lovers, a friend who might never be able to draw a possum on a cast again—they’d all do as a tithe to his nightmares.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  Javi made an exasperated noise. “I didn’t need my hand held,” he said. “I was grazed. Tancredi might have lost the use of her hand. I have some sense of proportion, Cloister. This isn’t about why you weren’t there then. It’s about why you aren’t here now. I gave you a spare key. I said you could stay. What more do you want?”

  The microwave beeped a piercing alert that the five minutes were up. Javi glanced over Cloister’s shoulder and sighed.

  “Should I consider that an answer?” he asked. “A microwave dinner is better company than me?”
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br />   “Sometimes,” Cloister said. He didn’t mean it, but—like the microwave dinner—the words filled a gap, even if not entirely satisfactorily. He rubbed his hand over his face and tried again. “I thought you might not want company. We got you shot.”

  A wry smile curved Javi’s mouth. “What can you expect from local law enforcement? Competency?”

  Cloister narrowed his eyes. “Don’t push it.”

  “I was already shot,” Javi said. He leaned on the gate. The sunset gilded his skin, the cool brown shade warmed with a sheen of gold. “I’m not thrilled that some trigger-happy deputy caused the commotion that let Andrew Macintosh kill himself, but you didn’t shoot anyone. And trust me, I fuck you because you’re cute, but I work with you because you’re good at what you do. So shut up and invite me in.”

  “And people say romance is dead,” Cloister said. He unlatched the gate and waved Javi in past Bourneville, who looked up from her food long enough to wag her tail in greeting. Down the row, behind the pink Happy Birthday, there was the hollow smack of a slammed fridge and the sound of raised voices. “I was going to call… later.”

  “Liar.”

  Maybe. Cloister certainly wasn’t sure enough one way or the other to argue about it. He cupped his hand around the nape of Javi’s neck and pulled him in for a slow, easy, sun-warmed kiss instead.

  “I’m glad you’re here.”

  “That makes one of us,” Javi said. As he walked past him, Javi grazed the back of his fingers up Cloister’s arm in a lazy, almost possessive gesture, like a cat who wanted to mark its territory. “I like you, Cloister, but at some point, you need to get used to the idea of a roof that isn’t made of tin.”

  “It’s just a place to keep my stuff,” Cloister said to Javi’s back. It was just walls and a roof. He didn’t really attach any importance to it. The last time he lived someplace he cared about… it might have felt permanent, but it turned out not to be. “One place is as good as another.”

  The smell of microwaved BBQ beef and heated plastic hung in the air inside the trailer. Cloister popped open the door and fumbled the plate out, the plastic hot against his fingers.

  “Do you want—”

  “No,” Javi said firmly as he shrugged off his jacket. The padded gauze of the dressing was obvious under the thin white cotton of his borrowed shirt. He hung the jacket over the back of a chair and slouched down, his head tilted back and his eyes closed. “I’d rather starve. Although I could do with a drink.”

  “Beer?” Cloister offered as he slid his dinner onto the side and opened the fridge. Cold washed out around his calves as he leaned over—a bag of Javi’s coffee shoved into the back of the fridge, a tin of fancy dog food for Bon when she got moody, two sacks of leftover takeout that he should really chuck out, and two beers… beer and a half.

  “If it’s all you have,” Javi said. He held out his hand and waited.

  Cloister hesitated. There was a bottle of wine in the fridge too, but Cloister had gotten used to not seeing that for the last few months. The vintage was expensive and Spanish and, according to the person who gave it to him, Javi’s favorite. Date wine. Of course they didn’t date, and Cloister was never going to drink the bottle himself.

  He snagged the unopened beer and passed it to Javi.

  Cloister had waited this long to open the wine. It seemed a shame not to save it for a special occasion. Maybe someone would get a promotion.

  “Frome thinks that Macintosh tried to kill Janet,” Javi said. He opened his eyes, frowned at the unopened beer bottle, and then peeled himself off the couch to get the bottle opener from the drawer. “After all, as far as he’s concerned, Macintosh was already a murderer.”

  Javi popped the cap on the bottle. Foam frothed up and spilled over the sides, slick against the glass and white against his knuckles. He licked it away with a long swipe of his tongue that caught Cloister’s attention and dried out his mouth.

  “He might be right,” Cloister said as he leaned back against the counter. The sun was still high enough that he could feel the warmth of it against his back through the window, and he took a drink of his beer. It was flat, but it was cold and wet, and that was good enough. He wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. “Macintosh was there, he was unstable, and if Janet approached him, he might have reacted badly.”

  The tilt of Javi’s head acknowledged that possibility. “Except he couldn’t bring himself to kill Galloway, even though he seemed to feel compelled to do so,” he pointed out. The sun was behind Cloister, and Javi squinted as he looked at him, a faint spray of lines creased around his eyes. “And how’d he get the car?”

  It was usually Javi’s job to play devil’s advocate. Cloister ran on instinct and gut feelings, and half the time, he couldn’t even pinpoint what bits and pieces had informed his decision. But he’d chewed over this train of thought for hours as he tried to work it out.

  “Lopez and Macintosh would have run in the same social circles,” Cloister offered. “And people don’t change the codes on their security system as often as they should. It’s possible.”

  “It also makes it premeditated,” Javi said. He rubbed the damp side of the bottle against his cheek and headed back to the bench. The lean sprawl of his body as he settled in took up space that Cloister was used to having to himself. It felt—almost—more intimate than sex to watch Javi tuck a shoulder into the divot Cloister’s hip had left in the cushions. Cloister licked his lips and looked down at his beer as he tried to shove the distraction of lust away for later and focus on the case. “And raises the question of how that’s possible. Janet arrived in town that day. Do you think she called ahead to Macintosh’s office? Left a message on the answering machine?”

  “Well, when you put it like that,” Cloister said with dry humor. He paused for a second and then added as an aside, “He did have a phone.”

  Javi raised his head off the cushions and tucked his arm behind his head. The borrowed shirt didn’t fit as well as his usual tailored ones, and there was something oddly appealing about the crease and fold of the loose fabric. Cloister imagined it tugged tight under his hands, or just hanging open off Javi’s shoulders.

  “That’s right. Frome said you found a stash of items you thought were Macintosh’s,” Javi said. “What made you look?”

  “Macintosh was homeless,” he said. “At best he’s getting around on the bus. He couldn’t leave his stuff at home or lock it in his car. He had to have been in the area a while before he went to the hospital. It seemed worth a shot.”

  “And?”

  Cloister glanced at his dinner. It had already started to cool, the edges of the beef curled up and dry where the sauce had slid off. He left it to dry up the rest of the way and grabbed the envelope he’d brought home with him from the station.

  He sat down next to Javi and emptied the photos onto the table. A swipe of his hand spread the slick sheets over the scuffed Formica. His quick snapshots of Macintosh’s den in the abandoned building didn’t reveal much—a bed of old torn sleeping bags, a flashlight propped in the corner, and a few water-swollen law books parked defiantly on the window sill.

  “The waiter in the restaurant next door said he’d seen Macintosh there before,” Cloister said. “He said there were a lot of homeless who crashed there, off and on, but he’d seen Macintosh often enough to know his face.”

  Javi sat forward.

  “I’ll check the deeds tomorrow,” he said. “Frome said that Macintosh owned a lot of property. That might have been one of them.”

  He pushed them aside to look at the contents of the bag Cloister had carried back to the station. It didn’t look like much, laid out in flat, garish colors under the evidence room fluorescents, but the contents of the satchel were important enough to Andrew Macintosh that he held on to them even after he didn’t have a bed to sleep in. There was the satchel itself, a monogram half scraped off the front, a handful of pictures, a worn, cigarette-burned teddy, and a second-gen iPhone with a sm
ashed screen and an old, frayed cable plugged into it. It still worked. Sort of.

  “Look at this,” Javi said as he pulled one photo out of the spread to examine. A red car was parked on the road, the Macintosh family stunned and blank faced as they stared into the camera. A man’s shadow lay elongated over the hood of the car. “This looks like the before of the crime scene where his family died. There was no mention of it in the file. Why not?”

  “Maybe Macintosh thought it wouldn’t look good?” Cloister suggested. “He knew he had no friends in the Sheriff’s Department, he knew Plenty PD was dirty, and he knew this looked like either a trophy or an… invoice.”

  “Maybe,” Javi said. He tapped his finger against the face of the kid in the back seat of the car, his face bony and afraid under a flop of carefully styled hair. “Until I get confirmation from Galloway one way or another, I’m going to assume this is Janet. So whatever this was, it wasn’t a homicide. Or at least not at this stage. Macintosh said that someone called him and demanded a ransom on the day his family disappeared. He sounded genuinely devastated when he talked about it, but back then, he was still Mac the Knife. He’d have wanted proof of life.”

  “If Macintosh told the truth,” Cloister pointed out. He sounded thoughtful, though, as though Javi had halfway convinced him. “So what? The kidnappers call Macintosh, demand money, and then something goes wrong?”

  “Or right,” Javi said. “We know that Macintosh and his wife weren’t happy. We strongly suspect that the family wasn’t killed here. Maybe she was the one who didn’t want to go through the hassle of a divorce? It would be easier to disappear, especially with a wad of ransom money and the satisfaction of your ex being on trial for your murder.”

  “Except the bodies were identified,” Cloister pointed out. “Macintosh said it was his wife and kids.”

  “After they were shot in the head and burned in a fire,” Javi pointed out. He rubbed his hand over his jaw as he said that, as though there might still be blood splattered over the skin. “Plus Macintosh said that the man who called him to demand money shot them while Macintosh was on the line. He was primed to believe that the bodies were who expected them to be.”