Bone to Pick

by TA Moore

  A muscle tightened in Nemac’s cheek. It squirmed under the coarse, drink-veined skin. “Fuck you, Merlo.”

  That particular invective was a lot hotter when Cloister growled it. Javi ignored his brief mental digression and studied Nemac’s face. He wasn’t expecting guilt. Nemac once took his ex-wife, the mother of his son, to Nevada and left her in the desert in her underwear and bare feet. Or at least that’s what they believed happened. Afterward, from her hospital bed, the woman insisted it was a tragic accident. She dropped the custody case against Nemac too.

  The expression Nemac had in that second was what Javi was looking for—a repulsive sort of smug satisfaction that his entitled view of what he deserved was what he was getting—just the dead-shark blank of a man who didn’t care about anything beyond his own skin.

  “I imagine making good on that promise would impress your old associates,” Javi pointed out. “It might convince them that you’re not a has-been.”

  Nemac turned his head and spat contemptuously on the cheap tiles. “Who the fuck do you think killing a ten-year-old impresses, Merlo?” He leaned forward, and his shackles rattled as he braced his hands flat against the table. His breath was sour. Javi glanced at the door and, with a slightly raised finger, dismissed the hovering guard’s instinct to help. “If I’d done this, and I’m not saying I did, it’d make me look weak—like I was scared to do anything when Lee was alive—or mental. Neither makes me look good, does it? Taking the kid wouldn’t profit me, and in case you haven’t noticed, I’m not exactly in a position to go sneaking around some bitch’s house at night.”

  He sat back, looked away from Javi, and stared at the wall as he sucked his cheeks in. After a second spent studying Nemac’s pallid face over the beard, Javi gestured for the guards to take him away.

  If it was Nemac, he wasn’t going to admit or negotiate. But Javi didn’t think it was.

  The guards unshackled Nemac and hauled him to his feet. He leaned back against them, braced his feet against the floor, and smirked at Javi.

  “Still,” he said. “I hope the kid’s still alive… and that someone real bad got him. I hope he dies hard.”

  BACK IN Plenty, Javi looked at the yellowed case file and wondered if Bridget “Birdie” Utkin had died hard. The picture in the file showed her wearing the height of fashion from ten years before, the gently dated image faintly sorrowful despite her grin. There were no updated pictures for the pretty blonde girl with the squint and the, according to the identifying features section of the old missing-person report, butterfly tattoo on her hip.

  “I remember that case,” the plump young woman who brought him the file said. After a second of drawing a blank, he remembered her fumbling a plastic bag and the wind taking it while she cursed. She’d had to get him another one. Tancredi.

  She lingered in the doorway with her arms crossed and a frown pleating her faded red eyebrows together.

  “I didn’t know you were one of the PD’s officers who stayed after the Bureau took over this office.”

  She shook her head. “I’m not. I lived in town for a while, though, when I was a teenager. My mom did some work for Mr. Utkin. She was a realtor. Do you think what happened to Birdie has something to do with the Hartley boy?”

  Javi lifted his shoulder in a pleasant but unresponsive shrug. He had set up shop in the relatives’ room with its tape-patched pleather seats, drinking coffee that hadn’t got any better since the last time. The box file sat on the floor next to him, the cardboard dry and faded in patches.

  “Do you have a minute to talk about it?” he asked and pointed at a chair opposite.

  Tancredi glanced over her shoulder for a second and then nodded and stepped inside. She closed the door, sat down opposite him, and rested the heels of her hands on her knees. “I didn’t know her that well,” she said. “She was younger than me…. I didn’t really think about her at all until she disappeared.”

  “I have the case files.” Javi tapped a finger against the manila folder that rested on his knee. “I know the details of the case. Tell me what the town was like at the time.”

  “Tense,” Tancredi said, exaggerating the shape of her mouth around the word. “It was meant to be safe in Plenty, you know? Open space for kids to play, no crime, friendly neighborhood police….”

  She trailed off with a sardonic twist of her mouth. That last expectation, at least, had ended with disillusionment and scandal.

  “I remember that my mom wouldn’t let me do anything for the rest of the year,” Tancredi went on. “She thought she’d been snatched. Some people thought Birdie ran away. Nobody ever knew, though. Not for sure. I always figured she ran away. A lot of those kids did, you know.”

  “What did you mean about her family wanting to keep her out of trouble?”

  “Oh, she’d been hanging out with some local kids,” Tancredi said. “Looking back, they were just petty crooks. They did drugs in derelict houses, and they vandalized the new builds and got into fights. Back then, though, we thought they were gangsters. I heard that Birdie was hanging out with them, but her parents put a stop to that.”

  “What about the boyfriend?” Javi asked.

  Tancredi pursed her lips. “Umm, I didn’t know him. He was….” She blinked as her memory finally caught up with her. “He was a Hartley, wasn’t he? John Hartley. I’d forgotten that. It probably doesn’t mean anything. I mean, there’s a lot of them in town.”

  There were. Javi had done his research at a roadside stop with his phone hooked into a McDonald’s Wi-Fi connection after he accepted that Cloister’s hunch had moved into his brain. Plenty of Hartleys, but there were only a few degrees of separation between John and Drew Hartley. They were cousins. It would have been enough to tag the man as a suspect, if John hadn’t moved to Australia to go to college and not been back since.

  “How did Birdie and her boyfriend know each other?”

  Tancredi shook her head slowly. “I don’t know,” she said. “I mean, Kelly Hartley—Ken Hartley’s aunt, the bank president? She was friends with the Utkins. My mom said she was always up at the house in those days. Maybe that’s how.”

  She paused with the tip of her tongue caught between her teeth and her nose scrunched up.

  “What?”

  “Mom used to say a lot. She thought Mr. Utkin and Kelly were having an affair,” she said almost apologetically. “Mom was a bit of a gossip.”

  “In our line of work, gossips can be useful,” Javi said. “Thanks for the background, Deputy.”

  She took the hint, stood up, and headed for the door.

  “Look,” she said as she hesitated at the doorway. “I don’t know if this has anything to do with it, but Witte’s right.”

  “He is?” Javi said, irritation sharpening his voice more than the helpful Deputy Tancredi probably deserved. It made her wince, and she hunched her shoulders as though she were weathering a blow, but she forged on.

  “There’s no way we missed that phone,” she said. “People underestimate Witte all the time, but he’s damn good at his job. We all are. Even if one of us, somehow, missed an iPhone right in the middle of our search area? No way we all did.”

  She looked earnest and intent, determined to defend the integrity of her department. She probably knew Cloister better than he did. Fucking a man didn’t give you a shortcut to his inner self.

  “I’ll bear that in mind, Deputy,” he said.

  She grimaced an awkward smile and closed the door behind her as she left. Javi went back to the files and shuffled through the stacks of reports and crime-scene photos as though they were a stack of cards. That two members of the same family were involved in similar disappearances a decade apart was… thin.

  On the other hand, it wasn’t nothing.

  That was the status quo for the next half hour as he hunted through the old investigation for anything he could use. He found nothing that actually demonstrated a link, but just enough to sustain that bit of suspicion that there might be so
mething to Cloister’s hunch. The memory of the night before sidled through his brain to remind him Cloister had said he’d still owe him. The thought hung around his brain, all sticky, sly temptation as he hefted the box in his arms and headed out. He had no intention of indulging it. The fallout from their one-night stand was still to come, and he didn’t need to pencil in new fuckups, but his libido didn’t seem to care.

  The silent shudder of the phone in his pocket dragged him out of the mire of distracting lust and badly written notebooks. Javi straightened up, craned his neck from one side to the other to make his vertebrae crackle, and tugged the phone out.

  A quick glance at the screen confirmed it was the lab calling. He quickly swiped Accept on the call and lifted the phone to his ear.

  “Merlo,” he said. “Do you have the results on the bottle?”

  “Yes. Yes, we do,” the voice on the other end said. The remnants of an old stutter caught between the words. All the syllables got out, but with odd gaps between. It was worse in person. If Fletcher could see your eyes, he could hardly get the words out. “Whoever blended this together was not looking for a good trip. It’s a blend of Red Bull, dipt… diisopropyltryptamine—an hallucinogen—and, in a blast from the past, mephedrone.”

  “Foxy has been on the rise in Southern California,” Javi pointed out absently as he tucked an evidence bag back into the box.

  “I know,” Fletcher said. “I’ve seen it coming through the lab a couple of times this year, although Plenty is still predominantly meth. I’ve never heard of it being mixed like this, though. Besides, this mephedrone is an old chemical composition that used to turn up in Bath Salts.”

  Javi paused and tapped the top of the box absently with his fingers. “How old?”

  There was a pause and the sound of keys clacking quickly in the background. “Like I said, it’s an old composition. Most of the drugs in the US used MPDV. Mephedrone was used mostly in Europe. I guess 2004 to 2008?”

  “Has it ever turned up in Plenty before?”

  “Possibly, but like I said, Plenty’s always been a meth town,” Fletcher said. “And not always great with keeping records. Sorry.”

  “No,” Javi said. “That’s really useful. Thank you.”

  More than useful. Fletcher’s call had finally tipped Cloister’s hunch enough toward likely to warrant further investigation. Not that Javi was going to acquit Billy Hartley just yet—the boy was clearly hiding something, and he was the last person to see his brother—but if a thirteen-year-old were going to drug someone, he’d use his mother’s valium or take a drug dealer’s free meth sample, not a drug that was popular back when the missing Birdie was hanging around with drug dealers.

  He forced the lid back onto the box, stood up, and tucked it under his arm as he headed down to the back office. Mel looked up from the computer as Javi set the archive box on her desk. A flick of sharp blue eyes behind cat-eye glasses acknowledged he was there, and an uplifted finger told him to wait. She gave clipped orders in a brisk voice and then pulled her headphones down to hang around her neck.

  “What?”

  Either Mel had been on dispatch long enough to adopt the staccato rhythm of police radio in her everyday speech, or she just didn’t care for being disturbed.

  “Detective Sean Stokes,” Javi said. “You remember him?”

  She arched her straight, peppery brows curiously. “I do. Good detective. Bad taste in friends.”

  That meant he’d only been passively corrupt—blind eyes instead of kickbacks.

  “Is he still in town?”

  Mel nodded. She click-tapped her fingers over the keyboard of her computer, and a frown pinched the line between her eyebrows deeper. She grabbed a pen and scribbled an address down with writing that ran diagonally over the Post-it.

  “Here,” she said and held it out.

  She hung on to the corner as Javi tried to take it. “He never liked the Feds. It would have driven him to the brink having a resident agency here.”

  Her piece said, she pulled her headphones back on and went back to work.

  Javi checked the address and mentally revised his opinion of Stokes—blind eyes and some kickbacks. A local cop didn’t buy a house in Spruce Groves on his salary alone.

  Chapter Twelve

  THE RETREAT had opened its rec hall to the search effort and piled up hi-vis vests and hastily laminated maps on trestle tables along one wall. Groups of people clutched whistles in sweaty hands and listened to quick and dirty instructions on good search protocol while news cameras filmed from the sidelines and, with the Hartleys leaving their lawyer to talk to the public, pulled out random people for heartrending interviews.

  Cloister grabbed a bottle of water from one of the ice chests. There was plenty to go around. The Retreat’s lanky groundskeeper had been hauling in buckets of ice and crates of water once or twice an hour. Cloister didn’t know if Reed had approved it or not, but Matt gave him an awkward, crooked smile when he asked.

  “I know what it is to be thirsty,” he said as he wiped a condensation-wet hand over the sun-scorched back of his neck.

  One of the reporters had come over to ask him questions then, and Matt made himself scarce. So it wasn’t just handsome FBI agents who made him uncomfortable.

  Cloister twisted the lid off the bottle, poured it into a bowl for Bourneville, and presented it firmly under her nose. She sneezed into it, turned in a fretful circle, and stepped over the leash like it was a jump rope. Given the option, she’d rather run herself into heat exhaustion than get pulled from a hunt with nothing to show for it.

  It was a good trait when they were actually tracking, but they weren’t even sure Drew was still in the area. Most of the deputies had been pulled away, leaving SAR volunteers to beat the bushes and canvas neighboring farms and businesses. Cloister wanted to bring the boy home too, but he wouldn’t run himself or his dog to death to do it. He caught Bourneville’s collar and showed her the water again.

  “Drink,” he ordered.

  She sighed, and her ribs heaved under her dusty coat. She stuck her nose into the water.

  “Here,” a teenager said as she handed Cloister a bottle. She was wearing a badge with Drew’s face on it. Most of the new volunteers were. Cloister had no idea who organized that or when. “You look nearly as thirsty as she does.”

  “Thanks.” Cloister nodded at her. She smiled back and then looked guilty about it.

  While she handed out more bottles around the room, Cloister took a drink, and the cold hit his sternum like a heart attack. It made him grimace, but he kept drinking. The dull headache that had been dogging him for the last hour eased off, and the scratch in his throat disappeared. Maybe Bourneville wasn’t the only idiot with a tendency to overcommit.

  He squatted against the wall with his head tilted back and the water bottle dangling between his knees. The back of his neck felt hot and itchy with sunburn, and sweat and dust had turned the morning’s pleasant ache into a chafed itching. None of which he’d care about if it weren’t for the heavy feeling of futility lodged in the pit of his stomach.

  The pitch of the room changed abruptly, and the soft murmur of emotional interviews was replaced with sharp, overlapping questions.

  “…questioned the family….”

  “Is there any chance of finding Drew Hartley alive after….”

  “…respond to theories that Drew’s disappearance is linked to the recent arrival of immigrants….”

  Cloister knew who’d arrived even before he heard Javi’s low, measured tones responding to the questions with reassuring but uninformative sound bites. His voice reached under Cloister’s skin and tweaked at the nerve bundles.

  It had always done that, of course. The difference was that, instead of thinking Javi was a dickhead, Cloister was thinking about Javi’s dick.

  He lifted his head off the wall and watched Javi deal with the press. It was “too soon to know anything” and “irresponsible and inaccurate to jump to those conclus
ions,” and a promise to update them the minute they knew anything. He looked around as he talked, and he scanned the room until he finally caught slight of Cloister. When he did, he narrowed his eyes slightly and inclined his chin in brusque acknowledgment.

  It was hardly the warmest greeting, but Cloister’s cock still twitched with the memory of Javi’s hand on him and the rasp of that controlling voice in his ear. He mentally told it to behave, which worked about as well as it usually did, and he pushed himself up the wall. Bourneville looked up at him, and water dripped from her chin as she cocked her head.

  “Not yet,” he told her.

  Javi extracted himself from the journalists and strode over to Cloister. “I need a local officer to take point on an interview.”

  “You’d be better off with Tancredi,” Cloister said. “She’s sharp.”

  “I don’t need sharp. I need…” Javi paused and chewed over the word choice. “…approachable. I’ve already cleared it with Frome.”

  Approachable? Cloister wasn’t sure he appreciated that description. For most of his life, looking like the guy most likely to throw a punch had helped him avoid having to throw any punches. He caught himself scowling and pulling his eyebrows down in his best off-putting brood. Javi looked unimpressed.

  “I guess I don’t have a choice, then,” he said.

  “It was your hunch,” Javi said. He glanced down at Bourneville and frowned. “We can take your car too. It already smells of dog.”

  The dull, guilty feeling that had been gnawing at Cloister since he rolled off Javi’s couch took its teeth out of him. He pushed himself off the wall and held his tongue on the questions he wanted to ask. The media already had too many theories about the case. They didn’t need any more.

  “SO YOU’RE not straight,” Javi said. He’d rolled the window down and laid his arm along the edge of the door. Black-lensed sunglasses hid his eyes. Glancing over at him, Cloister wasn’t sure that being able to see his eyes would help. Fucking Javi hadn’t made him any easier to read.