by TA Moore
“She’s fine. This is fun for her.” Cloister tugged the heavy jerkin straight over Collins’s shoulders. “Thanks for volunteering. Bon’s been bored with me on desk duty.”
Collins exhaled through tight lips. “I don’t like dogs,” he said, his words clipped as he caught his breath. “Last month I lost a suspect because he cut through a yard with some fuck-off junkyard monster in it. Gotta get over it.”
The story, when Tancredi told it, involved a midsized terrier mongrel, but Cloister let that pass unremarked. It wasn’t easy to face something that scared you. Cloister knew that better than most. He’d spent most of his life not facing a couple of hours.
“Anytime you want to play chew toy, just let me know,” he said. “I want to go and check on Tancredi to see how she’s doing. Do you want to do some work with Kit and Jenks?”
Collins looked over. “Looks like a nice dog?” he said as he pulled off the hood. His hair was sweat soaked underneath and matted down to his scalp. “But I was joking about shitting myself. I’d like to keep it that way.”
He limped off the field, and one of the other padded-up deputies loped in to take his place. While Kit got a boost over the fence, Cloister went over to clip Bon’s lead back on.
“You look like the nicer dog,” he told her. “Collins was raving.”
She sneezed and dropped the drool-sticky T-shirt rope on his foot. He picked it up and shoved it back into his belt as he headed toward his truck, and Bourneville waited at the passenger side until it opened so she could jump up and get clipped in. She yawned and flopped down for a nap while he circled around to get in his side.
He checked the clock as the dash flickered to life and the radio static spat out for a second and then tuned back into the local station. Denis down in Records had said he’d search out the files Javi requested, after a complaint about the lack of detail, but it would be another hour at least. Two was what Denis claimed, but he always padded his estimates so people didn’t start to expect too much.
Plenty of time for a flying visit with Tancredi.
“I know you want to go in too,” he told Bourneville as he reversed out of the spot. “But it’s not work, so I’ll tell Tancredi that you send your best.”
Bourneville tilted her head to the side until her ears were at a ninety-degree angle, as though she couldn’t believe that.
“I know,” Cloister told her. “It isn’t fair. You’re probably cleaner than most of the people there, but those are the rules.”
She sighed and put her chin on her feet. She watched him with her bright amber eyes from under her shaggy bangs as he drove. Cloister made a mental note to take her for a trim soon. His phone rang twice as he drove, the noisy siren rattle of it loud in the back. When it rang a third time, he stopped on Main Street and twisted around to grab it from where it had slid down the back of the seat.
“Wi—”
“What the hell do you think you’re doing, Witte?” Frome snapped down the phone. “I will admit that you were right about Janet Morrow’s case being more than it looked, but that does not give you leave to overstep your bounds or misuse—”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Cloister said.
He heard Frome inhale and then exhale sharply on the other end of the call.
“You just had Denis pull my old case files,” Frome said. “So either you’re trying to undermine me in regard to the Macintosh case, which I don’t appreciate, or you’re trying to find out dirt on your competition. I’m not a fool, nor am I blind. I know that you have a relationship with Agent Merlo.”
Cloister blanked on how to deal with that. He’d never particularly hid that he was gay or whom he dated… when he dated… but had he ever actually talked about a relationship before? The closest would have been the revised birds-and-bees talk he had with his stepdad after he came out as gay, and he couldn’t remember actually saying anything then either.
He bypassed the comment about his relationship entirely and focused on the files.
“It was a follow-up on the Macintosh case,” Cloister said. “Stokes hadn’t mentioned this fight to us in the previous interview. It was your arrest?”
“No one got arrested,” Frome said. “It was two drunks who got in a brawl, and there was no need to take it further. If you think I treated that call any differently because it was Andrew Macintosh’s son—”
“Sir, I don’t,” Cloister said.
“Maybe you’d be right.”
The flat confession shut both of them up for a second. Then Cloister coughed and scratched his head.
“Lieutenant, I don’t know, that sounds like a good call. The Toast has a brawl three times a night. We don’t run them all in.”
“But that’s not why I made the call,” Frome said. His voice was still tight with frustration, the words clipped between his teeth. “I made it because I didn’t want to have to face Macintosh in court again, not when it was Hewitt’s first month back on desk duty. Macintosh would have said it was harassment—”
“Hewitt?” Cloister interrupted, and Bourneville lifted her chin.
“My old partner, Deputy Hewitt,” Frome said, “the one who got shot by Macintosh’s client and was made to look incompetent in court. The last thing he needed was to be accused of harassing the guy’s family over the case. So yeah, maybe I was too eager to go along when Stokes wanted to drop it. Maybe I told myself I was doing the guy a solid by keeping the rest of the cops from knowing he got his ass handed to him by a kid who was only a year out of high school. I could have screwed up that call, but that was then. It had nothing to do with my approach to this case.”
“Hewitt, the same guy who works for the crime cleanup guys? I thought you said he retired.”
He could sense Frome’s confused irritation down the line. “He did after the Macintosh case. The fact that he couldn’t put the guy away just finished him, but yeah, he works crime-scene cleanup now. He pissed his retirement away in Vegas, so when he came back to town, a couple of us put in a good word for him—me, his ex, hell, even his new wife.”
“His wife.”
“Yes, his wife. She kept her maiden name—Deputy Ergobah up in Kearney Mesa,” he said. “What the hell, Cloister? If you want to make Merlo jealous, ask out Stokes. I like Hewitt, but he’s not a catch.”
“You might be wrong about that,” Cloister said quietly. He reached over and rubbed Bourneville’s ears as he remembered the way she growled at Hewitt. At the time he thought it was just tension and the smell of death, but she’d always been a good judge of character. “Bet he’s kept his gun too.”
Frome’s brain finally caught up with his temper. “Most do. Deputy Witte, what are you implying?”
“I don’t know,” Cloister said. “But he was the first one to point a finger at Macintosh when Jessie and the kids disappeared, right?”
“If his car got a flat, he pointed the finger at Macintosh,” Frome said. “He hated him. I admit that, but he didn’t do anything about it, Witte. He was a good cop.”
“So was everyone in Plenty PD,” Cloister said. “Until they weren’t. Lieutenant, would you bring Hewitt in for questioning?”
Silence. “He’s my friend, Witte. He was my partner.”
“Better you than some random deputy, then,” Cloister said. “Tell him we want to follow up on the tip he gave us. Make sure Macintosh was the one who hurt Janet. If it’s nothing, he never has to know any different.”
“If it’s nothing,” Frome said quietly, “you should look for another job, because you will be done in my station. Understood?”
“Lieutenant.”
Funnily enough, it was actually a good threat. It was the first time since Cloister moved to Plenty that he’d actually care if he had to leave. It wasn’t much of a root—one man, two places—but it was more than Cloister had had in a long time.
He hung up on Frome and dialed the station one-handed, his cast braced against the steering wheel as he pulled out from the curb.
“Put me through to Armstrong,” he said briskly.
While the phone rang, he wracked his brain over the photos he’d looked through the day before. Crime scene after crime scene, his attention was on the crime, the sheet-covered bodies and blood splatter. But had Hewitt been in any of those shots? He was sure the crime-scene cleaning vans were in a few shots, their familiar overalls in the background, and it could have been Hewitt.
Finally Armstrong took the call. “What is it, Witte?” she asked. “Your dog want to come in and sniff what hard work smells like again?”
“Is that a crack because I’m on desk duty?”
“That it is,” Armstrong said genially. “Hey, are you on your way to see Tancredi? I meant to drop in, bring some flowers or something, but… hospitals. Would you—”
“You were weird about the Lopez car when we brought it in? Why?”
“The Lopez car? No, that was nothing. Stupid notion. Why?”
“Tell me.”
“It’s a nice car,” Armstrong said. “That’s why I remembered it. You don’t see many of them. I guess Mrs. Lopez liked it anyhow.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well.” Armstrong hesitated. The sound of the garage in the background dimmed as she must have closed the office door. “Mr. Lopez killed himself. In his car. Same car.”
Cloister braked hard at the light and waved an absent apology out the window as a car behind him honked.
“Maybe she got the same car?” he said.
“That’s what I thought,” Armstrong said. “But I checked. It’s the same VIN.”
“Do you have her address?” Cloister asked. He knew the area she lived in—a gated community in what passed for the hills on the north side of town—but not the house number. “Text it to me?”
“I heard she lawyered up.”
“I don’t plan to arrest her. She has the right to change her mind.”
Armstrong sighed. “I’ll send it,” she said. “If you get to the hospital, tell Tancredi I’m thinking of her.”
The line went dead, but Cloister hung on to the phone as he drove until the text from Armstrong pinged onto the screen—430 Ginger Blvd. Cloister knew how to get there. He tossed the phone over his shoulder into the back seat and got his good hand back on the wheel.
Bourneville whined as the car sped up.
“You’re right,” Cloister said. “In future I’ll trust your instincts.”
CLOISTER FLASHED his badge to the guard at the gate. The man leaned out to check the shield and pushed his hat back on his head. His face had an ombre tan that started at his stark-white forehead and darkened down to his sunburned chin.
“Police business?” he asked.
“Police badge,” Cloister pointed out. “Deputy Cloister Witte. I need to speak to Mrs. Lopez.”
“Cristina Lopez?” The man tutted. “Hope she’s not in trouble. Lovely woman. Generous.”
He opened the gates for Cloister. A quick glance in the mirror as he drove on through the entry confirmed Cloister’s suspicion. The guard was already on the phone to give the generous tenant a heads-up.
Ginger Grove was as far away from the shore as it was possible to get and still be part of the town. Yet for some reason, it had been built to mimic the shore, with long, low dunes of sea grass to delineate the roads and scooped white houses that looked like shells behind sea blue fences.
It looked sterile to Cloister, like an eerily swanky holiday camp, with expensive cars nudged up to the gates like caged dogs. Of course it probably wasn’t meant for the sort of man who happily lived in a trailer.
He drove through the dune-lined lanes until he reached the Lopez manor at the dead end of a cul de sac. A teenager in cutoff jeans and a football shirt drove into view around the corner of the house on a riding tractor. He stopped and wiped his face on his forearm as though it were manual labor.
“Yeah?” he yelled over through the fence as Cloister got out of the car and held the door for Bourneville.
“I need to talk to Cristina Lopez,” Cloister said. He held up his badge. “Sheriff’s Department.”
The boy snorted and twisted around on the lawnmower’s saddle. “Hey, Cristina! Mom’s called the cops on you again!”
A splutter of curse words drifted from around the side of the house. Mrs. Lopez stomped into view, poured into a black-and-white and slightly inadequate swimsuit and with sunglasses propped on her nose.
“Go home, call her, and tell her your dad gave you permission to be here,” she said as she flapped her hands at the teenager. The teen killed the lawn mower and hopped off to head toward a gate into the garden next door. Mrs. Lopez yelled after him, “Tell her you asked him.”
She swung around to Cloister, mouth open to rant, and then she recognized him. She pressed her lips together in an annoyed line.
“I told you,” she said. “I’m not speaking to you without a lawyer.”
“It’s not about the Janet Morrow case,” Cloister said. “It’s about your husband.”
She looked startled and then curious. After a second she stepped forward and pushed the gate open.
“Don’t think I’m a pushover,” she warned him. She flicked her eyes to his forehead, and she reached up to tap the same spot on her own temple. “That looks better.”
“Yeah, well,” Cloister said mildly as he stepped through onto the driveway. He scratched the cut and felt the stitch scabs under his nails. Bourneville roamed past him and swung wide to give the lawnmower a sniff. Then she glued herself back to Cloister’s legs. “At least it doesn’t look worse.”
She led the way around the side of the house. A large pool glittered in the sun, and a duct-taped unicorn floated in the middle of it.
“My stepson loves it,” she said. “He always did, but since his dad died, he’s determined to keep that thing afloat as long as possible. Drink?”
She sat down under the wide, fringed umbrella and didn’t wait for his answer. She just poured him a glass of pale-green cordial. The ice cubes rattled as they spun around the tall, narrow glass.
He sat down opposite her and lifted the glass to gingerly sniff the liquid. It smelled of sugar and something fruity and inoffensive.
“I’m not that much of a stereotype,” Mrs. Lopez drawled. She pushed her sunglasses up onto the top of her head, and her blonde hair curled around the frames as she frowned at him. “If you ask anything about the children? I’ll have my lawyer here before you can tell your dog to sit.”
Bourneville huffed and leaned against Cloister’s legs. She rested her chin on his knee, and he could tell she was having what passed for a rest while she was working.
“When your husband killed himself,” he said. “What happened to the SUV?”
Mrs. Lopez shrugged and flicked the sunglasses back down onto her nose. “It got messy,” she said in an airy voice that didn’t hide any of the pain. She stirred her drink with her straw and shrugged. “That’s what happens when someone would rather shoot himself than talk to his family. Things get messy.”
“Did you get rid of it?”
“Well, I’m not going to keep it, am I?” she scoffed and stirred to make the ice cubes rattle. Her attention seemed to be aimed at the pool as the wind skiffed the unicorn float about. “That would be morbid.”
“Our mechanic checked the VIN when she took the car apart,” Cloister said “It’s the same car, Mrs. Lopez.”
“Then why ask?” she said. She took a drink, and he waited. Mrs. Lopez set her glass down and rubbed her wet hands against each other. “He loved that stupid thing. We were going to get some sort of luxury Airstream and travel the country in the summer. Well, the good parts. We were going to actually use the boat ourselves, not just pay people who knew what they were doing. He was going to retire, and we were going to do so many things in that stupid ugly car.”
“Instead he killed himself.”
“He left a note. He was sorry.” Mrs. Lopez sighed and slouched back. It was only w
hen she wasn’t anymore that Cloister realized she’d been posed. “I thought he lost all our money, but we’re fine. Or a scandal, but nothing has happened. I live in fear that it will turn out he did something to the kids, and I missed it. I mean, you think that, and it’s horrible. I loved him. But there had to be something.”
“So you kept the car? After he was found, what….”
Mrs. Lopez wiped under her glasses with a brisk swipe of her fingers. “I wasn’t going to keep it. Of course I wasn’t. He’d shot himself. There was blood all over the… all over.”
Cloister glanced down at Bourneville. She’d detected blood all over the car. He should have paid better attention.
“And it smelled. I was going to just have them—” She paused and mimed a crushing gesture in one hand. “Just get rid of it, but I couldn’t bring myself to sign the forms. It was like it would be letting go of his dreams, of the last bits of him. So one of the deputies gave me a card to some specialist cleaner who cleaned up that sort of mess. I brought it back here, and I never drive it. To be honest, as much of a fuss as I made, I was relieved—”
“Do you remember his name? The cleaner?”
“I don’t.” She propped her shades on the top of her head again and frowned at him. “I can go and look. I should still have the card, with my husband’s effects.”
“Please.”
She shook her head in bafflement but got up and disappeared into the house. Cloister scratched behind Bourneville’s ear as he checked his phone. There was nothing from Frome about Hewitt, and he had a few missed calls from Javi. He’d have to call back once he was done here.
After a few minutes, Mrs. Lopez came back out. She’d put on a robe and replaced her sunglasses with reading ones. The sun made her squint as she stepped back onto the patio.
“Here.” She handed the card, dog-eared and smeared, to Cloister. Once he had it, she tightened her belt around her waist and twisted the silk tightly around her fingers. “What’s this about?”