Skin and Bone

by TA Moore

  It wasn’t much of a business card. Cloister could feel the tabs where it had been popped out of a sheet. The contact details had been printed on a home printer, probably laid out in Word.

  Tim Hewitt. When Cloister turned it over, he saw Ellie Smith’s name written on the back in her looping, dramatic script. He could almost hear her voice in his head. “Just tell him I sent you. He’ll take care of you.”

  She probably thought she was doing the sad widow a favor.

  “Did the cleaner have access to the car’s keys?” he asked. Still confused but now looking worried as well, Mrs. Lopez nodded. “The house?”

  Then she went straight to afraid. “I…. Yes,” she said. “I had gone to talk to Marie, the kids’ mother, to sort out what we’d do with them. She lives in Vegas. I gave him the keys to leave the car here. Is that who took my car? Did he… did that man hurt that poor little girl?”

  Cloister tucked the card into his pocket. “We don’t know that, Mrs. Lopez,” he said soothingly. “We don’t know anything yet. Even if it was him, there’s no reason to think that you’re in danger.”

  “Well, I think there is,” she objected. “He can get into my house. We live in a gated community. How did he get past the guard? That’s why he’s there.”

  “Did you give Hewitt a workman’s pass?”

  Mrs. Lopez blanched. “Oh God.”

  “I promise you,” Cloister said, “there’s no indication that this person—even if it was Hewitt—will come after you. If you’re worried, maybe there’s somewhere else you can stay tonight. A friend’s? Family?”

  “How about an out-of-town hotel?”

  Cloister nodded. “That sounds like a plan.”

  While Mrs. Lopez packed for the hotel, Cloister tried to call Frome, but the call went straight to voicemail. When he checked in at the station, they didn’t know where Frome was either.

  “He left half an hour ago,” Mel said. “How’s Sara?”

  It was so rare to hear anyone called Tancredi anything but Tancredi that it took Cloister a minute to realize who she meant.

  “I haven’t gotten there yet,” he said. “I hit a bit of a roadblock. Let me know when you hear from the lieutenant?”

  “I will,” Mel said. She hesitated for a second and then said briskly, “Witte, I don’t know what’s going on, but remember what happened last time you pushed it too far. You got hit by a car.”

  His next call would have been to Javi, but Javi called him first.

  “Hewitt has Janet.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  THERE WAS still no sign of Frome. In his absence Javi was in charge. It made sense. At least half the deputies had worked with him on the cartel raids in the hills. Yet there was still a small, selfish part of Cloister that wanted someone else to take point. If this went wrong, it would definitely be a black mark on Javi’s record.

  Cloister growled at the thought. So make sure it doesn’t go wrong.

  He kept pace with Javi as they stalked down the long hospital corridor, past grim-faced deputies trying to interview two and three people at once.

  “We didn’t see anything.”

  “What’s going on? We just brought a patient up from the ER….”

  “Did someone die?”

  “Please just stay in your rooms,” Ellie said as she stood in front of a pair of worried parents, their little curly haired daughter in a hospital gown between them. She looked excited, and they looked scared. “It’s safe here, but just stay in your room.”

  The kid leaned forward between her parents’ legs. “Look! They let that doggie in. You said I couldn’t bring Patchy.”

  Bourneville wagged her tail at the little girl as she trotted past, her toenails loud on the linoleum. She always seemed to particularly enjoy it when the job took her someplace dogs weren’t usually allowed. Cloister paused his curt recounting of his morning as they passed the door. Then he started again once they a few steps away.

  “Hewitt had motive to hurt Macintosh,” he said. “But he wasn’t a killer. If he had been, the murders on that road would have been real. What changed?”

  “Janet Morrow,” Javi said. “She told everyone in New York that her family was dead, but we know they are alive… at least until recently. Something happened between them—maybe they could tolerate a gay family member, but not a trans one—and she had to go her own way. That makes more sense now that we know Jessie faked her death because of an affair, not because she wanted to protect her kid from a homophobic dad. Once she was out on her own, not stuck with the guilt of being the reason they had to do this, parts of their story stopped adding up.”

  “So she came back to what? Explain to her dad? Confess?”

  Javi gave him a wry, sidelong look. “You’re a forgiving soul,” he said. “I think she just wanted money. Macintosh hadn’t been dad of the year before they faked their own deaths. I don’t imagine she thought he’d changed—not until she got here.”

  “I don’t know,” Cloister said. “I think maybe she just wanted her family back. The parts of it that might not be toxic.”

  “Either way, it was a problem that Hewitt couldn’t clean up.”

  Collins was stationed in front of the door. He gave Javi an apologetic look as they reached him. “We pulled the guards off her room last night, Agent Merlo,” he said. “After Macintosh killed himself, we thought the threat was over and….”

  “And you were wrong,” Javi said in cool, clipped tones. It made Collins wilt. Javi took pity on him. “It happens. Just don’t make the same mistake again.”

  Collins stiffened his spine. “We won’t,” he said. “I won’t. Thank you, Agent.” He got out of the way to let them into the now-empty hospital room.

  The sheets were folded back neatly, as though a nurse had done it, and the suggestion of Janet’s body was still imprinted in the mattress and pillows. A length of crayon red hair was caught around the tube of the unplugged canula that curled on the pillow.

  “That’s all, Collins,” Javi said. “Go and see if Tancredi saw anything, would you? Patient or not, she’s the only deputy we know was on-site when this happened.”

  “Sir.” The door closed, and Collins’s footsteps retreated down the hall.

  “Why didn’t he just kill her here?” Javi asked. He walked around the bed and frowned at the disconnected wires. “Whatever hesitation he might have had the night he ran you down, he’s over that now. Jessie Macintosh and Andrew Junior could well be dead by now. He commissioned the murder of the county pathologist. Yet he couldn’t finish the job on an injured woman in a coma? Why move her?”

  The flowers had wilted and smelled a little of decay. It was a bad perfume for a hospital room. Cloister went over to the window to let some air in. He wrestled it open to let a draft whistle in and then stopped as a realization hit.

  “Hewitt’s spent years cleaning up crime scenes,” he said. “Deputy. Cleaner. He’s seen hundreds of crimes, hundreds of ways to get caught. He’s going to do the same thing he did ten years ago and stage the crime scene to say what he wants. Hewitt still thinks there’s a chance he’ll get away from this clean.”

  Bourneville stood up and put her front paws on the window to look out, her black nose pressed wet against the glass.

  “What do you mean?” Javi asked. Cloister pointed out the window.

  “That’s Lieutenant Frome’s car,” he said.

  It didn’t take long for Javi to catch up. Cloister might have an edge in following his gut, but Javi put all the pieces together quicker than he did.

  “Everything that counts against Hewitt would count against Frome too,” he said as he turned abruptly and stalked to the door. He yanked it open and yelled for a deputy. “Frome had the same the motive, the same—or better—access to weapons and records, and the same opportunities. And now that Hewitt’s over his qualms about murder, Frome isn’t going to get a chance to defend himself.”

  While Javi barked orders to the deputies outside to go out and
check Frome’s car, Cloister pointed at the bed.

  “Up,” he said, and Bourneville dropped down from the window, padded over to the bed, and jumped on it. Her feet left dirty prints on the pristine sheets, but the hospital could change it before Janet got back. Cloister patted the pillow. Bourneville dropped her nose and sniffed the rich sweat-and-oil scent that had worked into the cotton and feathers over the last few weeks. “Such, Bourneville. Such. Find Janet.”

  Every time they had a case like this, where someone went missing again, he thought that Bourneville looked particularly disappointed in him. She’d already found this person once. Why had Cloister let them wander off again?

  She didn’t let it stop her. Her ears pricked forward sharply as she gave the pillow one last sniff. Once she had the scent stored in her nose, she jumped off the bed and put her nose to the floor as she trotted around the bed.

  The scent was more diffuse than if Janet had walked under her own steam, but after a second’s search, Bourneville had the trail. She barked once and took off, her head down and tail up as she wove through trolleys and uniformed legs.

  “What the—!” a startled nurse yelped as Bourneville went low between her knees.

  Cloister jogged after his dog. “Sorry,” he told the nurse on the way by.

  She gave him a baffled look and a daunted “Okay?”

  The trail took Bourneville down the hall to the heavy swinging doors. She barreled through them and raced down the stairs at top speed. Her feet skidded as she hit the landings, and Cloister took the stairs three at a time as he followed her. The dull ache that had finally abandoned his hip flared up again as he hit the concrete hard with both feet.

  “Cloister,” Javi yelled. “Wait! Pendejo estúpido!”

  The curse echoed down the stairwell. Cloister registered the frustration in Javi’s voice—he only resorted to Spanish when he was pissed off enough that only his grandmother’s curses would do—but the habit of a lifetime was hard to break. He followed the flag of Bourneville’s tail down the stairs as she followed Janet’s track.

  Cloister slipped on the second-to-last landing and fell into the wall. The impact jarred his shoulder down to his cracked ribs, and he grunted in pain. It took him a second to get his feet under him again, and by then he’d lost sight of Bourneville.

  “Shit.”

  He swallowed the blood from his bitten tongue and scrambled down the last set of stairs. Above him a door slammed, but he ignored it as he pulled his gun from the holster. A set of fire doors hung open a crack, the makeshift lock of a looped chain not enough to keep it closed, and three different corridors led into the maze of lower-level rooms and halls.

  They’d wheeled Cloister down here to get his wrist scanned before they plastered it. He remembered an endless series of turns and the flickering strobe of nearly defunct fluorescent lights. Some of that confusion had probably been down to his head injury, but not all of it.

  “Bourneville,” he yelled, and his voice bounced off the walls. “Gib Laut. Make a noise, Bon.”

  She sounded in response with a gruff series of snarled barks from the left.

  Cloister held his gun low against his thigh and jogged after her. The walls were painted a cold industrial gray, and the walls were cracked and scabbed with blown plaster. Cloister’s footsteps sounded so loud that he doubted he’d sneak up on anyone.

  He caught up with Bon at another set of fire doors. She paced back and forth in front of them as she growled and grumbled under her breath in frustration. When she saw Cloister, she stood up on her back legs and pawed at the heavy, metal handle. Her weight was enough to rattle it but not budge it.

  Sex and a fight—two occasions when it would be nice to have both hands.

  Cloister used his knees to crowd Bourneville away from the door and slammed his cast clumsily against the handle to push it down enough to open. Once it did, he kicked it the rest of the way open, and Bourneville shot through the gap with a wet, rattling snarl that rumbled all the way up from her gut.

  “Call the fucking dog off,” Hewitt rasped.

  It was the same parking lot that Macintosh had killed himself in, Cloister realized as he shouldered his way through the door. The police tape still hung lax and still from the pillars, and a scrubbed patch of suspiciously clean concrete betrayed where the dead had been.

  Hewitt stood in the middle of it with his gun pressed to Janet’s temple as she slumped unconscious in the hospital chair. Her plastered arms were folded into her lap and gave her an oddly demure appearance.

  “Call the dog off,” he repeated as he turned, Janet’s lax body a moving shield between him and Bon’s bared teeth. “Or I’ll blow another Macintosh’s brains all over the floor.”

  Cloister whistled between his teeth, a short, sharp noise that made Bourneville crouch down and back off Hewitt three short steps before she decided enough was enough.

  “She didn’t do anything to you,” Cloister said as he skirted the edge of the imaginary perimeter he’d put around Hewitt. “Poor kid just wanted to know the truth.”

  Hewitt laughed a harsh, joyless bark of noise. “Since when does a Macintosh care about the truth?” he demanded. His mouth twisted down in an exhausted scowl. Cloister couldn’t tell if it was regret or just fear. “Her dad was a liar. Her mom was a liar. Her brother was liar. Corrupt bastards, all of them.”

  Cloister took another step to the side. The bumper of a parked Merc caught against the backs of his knees, and the thought briefly skated through his head that the impatient doctor would be furious he’d lost his car for another day. On the other side of the mental line Cloister had drawn, Bourneville mirrored his movements. Now Hewitt had to split his attention, with Janet positioned to block the dog while Hewitt kept his watery attention on Cloister.

  “You helped Jessie and Andrew get away,” Cloister pointed out. He’d been filled in on the affair Stokes had withheld from his employer. “They were in love. They—”

  Hewitt snorted. “They weren’t in love,” he said. Despite the harsh note to his voice, Hewitt’s anger was cold and controlled. He shifted the gun to aim at Cloister and then back at Janet’s head. “It was lust. It was pathetic. They weren’t afraid of him. They just didn’t want to give up his money.”

  “So why help?” Cloister asked. He slid his foot along the concrete, but before he could put his weight on it, Hewitt snapped the gun around to point steadily at him. Despite the wet, nervous sheen to Hewitt’s eyes, the muzzle of the gun was steady. “It was your idea, wasn’t it?”

  It had been ten years since Hewitt had done it, ten years of not being able to talk about the most audacious, brilliant thing he’d ever done.

  Cloister was fairly confident that Hewitt would walk over coals to be able to boast about what he’d done, and he was right.

  “The minute I saw them,” Hewitt said. A sharp, painful smile twisted his mouth as he took his hand off the wheelchair and rapped his finger hard against his temple. He returned the gun to the back of Janet’s head. “It just came to me. Macintosh ruined my life. Two years in and out of the hospital. The pills. The shakes. And even though the brass knew that story he spun in court was crap, they still shuffled me around on desk duty. No one trusted me on the street anymore.”

  “Frome did.”

  Hewitt opened and closed his mouth with a wet click as he tried to swerve the guilt of that statement. In the end he pretended he hadn’t heard it and pushed on.

  “It was only what I was due,” Hewitt said calmly. “Revenge and compensation. It wasn’t enough, mind you, but it was the least I was owed.”

  “And the plan?”

  “That took longer,” Hewitt admitted. “We had to wait until there were three approximate corpses in the morgue, make sure that Macintosh had the money in his bank to pay the ransom. He didn’t even try to haggle. He paid up right away. He was supposed to go down for murder, you know, but he snaked out from under that too. I thought someone would come forward about the affair, but
they were all cowards. No one even looked at me… until she came back.”

  He shook the wheelchair, and Janet slumped to the side. She groaned as her body folded awkwardly over the padded arm. Her bare foot slipped off the padded rest and dragged along the ground.

  “She blamed me, you know, for all this. Like I made anyone do anything, like I told them to lie to her that her dad was going to send her to some sort of prison camp. That was on them. They told her that. I didn’t make them.” There was a note of genuine offense in Hewitt’s voice, as though he were the wronged party. “She called me that night from Macintosh’s old office on the emergency number I’d given Jessie, drunk and raging because she’d run across her dad under a bridge. Blamed me for what he’d turned into, called me all the names in the book, threatened to tell everyone the truth. She didn’t even care that she’d ruin her own life and her mom’s life by doing it.”

  “That’s when you decided to kill her, cover your tracks.”

  Hewitt laughed, a harsh crack of sound. “No! That’s the funny fucking thing, Deputy, I didn’t want to hurt her. I only ever wanted to hurt him. I just wanted to tell her the truth, because they never needed to lie about what a monster Macintosh was. He was a monster. But she wouldn’t listen to me. She said Macintosh was a better man than me. Him! As if what I did hadn’t made everyone’s life better. I’ll tell you something, Witte, the corruption in Plenty would never have been cleared out if Macintosh had still been around. Yet she said he was better than me? I didn’t mean to hurt her, but I grabbed her, and we struggled, and… she finally shut up.”

  “And then what?” Cloister asked. “You were just going to leave her there to die?”

  “It would have been simpler,” Hewitt said calmly. “Just another mugging, no reason to look closer. It’s not as if she didn’t have a decent burial years ago. But then you turned up, and things got out of control. Really, everything that happened is on you. If you’d just given up when anyone else would have, I would never have had to do any of this. God knows I didn’t want to.”