by TA Moore
“It might work in his favor,” he said. “If this guy wanted Billy for some specific reason, then maybe hurting Drew won’t do what he needs it to.”
The sudden stillness of Javi’s hands was oddly jarring. He spun the chair to the side and looked up at Cloister with pursed lips and narrowed, thoughtful eyes. You could practically see his brain working behind the shield of short, thick lashes.
“Maybe,” Javi said slowly, drawing the word over his tongue. “And if you’re right, and you didn’t miss the phone during the initial search—”
“I am. We didn’t,” Cloister said.
“I can accept that,” Javi said. “That means that our kidnapper planted the phone. He didn’t need to do that, and he knew it. This isn’t the first time he’s done this. So that means he wanted to frame Billy, and that means he might not be able to let go of his initial plan. He might not be done with Billy yet.”
The speculation was clear. It was Cloister’s turn to narrow his eyes and clench his jaw until he could feel his teeth shift. He wanted to get Drew home. Needed to, if he wanted to sleep anytime soon. Yet he could still see Billy’s pinched face and the fear that stripped the adolescence away to leave the kid underneath exposed. He could see himself there too.
That was what decided it for him. He’d never had much sympathy for himself.
“We’re going to use him as bait,” he said.
The slow smile that crawled over Javi’s face was hard, with sharp edges under the prettiness of his mouth. “Yes,” he said. “We are. Do you think it will work?”
“Maybe,” Cloister admitted. “Will the family agree to let him?”
Javi didn’t hesitate. “They will,” he said. “Billy isn’t exactly in their good books right now, is he? Besides, he won’t be in any real danger. We’ll be there.”
The careless tone put Cloister’s teeth on edge. It was like Javi only saw the solution to a problem, not the boy who’d already taken on too much blame. Was Cloister any better, though? He saw the boy, and he was still willing to go ahead with it.
“And since you already have a connection with Billy,” Javi added, “it will be even easier to convince them to go along with it.”
That was right. Javi was the asshole. Cloister really needed to keep that in mind. Maybe it would stop him worrying about Diggs and his expensive suits.
Chapter Eighteen
DOCTOR GALLOWAY smelled of carbolic soap and lavender hand cream. She pushed her glasses up onto the top of her head, where her pale hair tangled around the funky pink arms of her glasses, and rubbed her eyes. The small office was dim. The only light came through a narrow window high on the wall, and the light from her computer made her look even paler than usual.
“There’s only so much I can tell you,” she warned. “The poor girl’s been dead a long time.”
Javi nodded. Pathology was always presented as though it were as linear as mathematics, but anyone who’d had to decipher conflicting autopsy reports knew it was half formula and half flair. Mistakes could be made, assumptions influenced decisions, and experience varied. Give a corpse a couple of days in a body of water, and a stab wound and animal predation could be hard to tell apart. A ten-year-old corpse meant things were even more complicated.
“What do you have?” he asked.
She sat back in her chair, which made it creak under her shifting weight, and reached for the mug on top of an anatomy book.
“There’s no evidence of any gross trauma to Bridget Utkin’s body,” Galloway said. She took a drink of coffee, tipped the mug right back for a swig, and grimaced at the taste as it hit her taste buds. “Cold,” she explained as she put it back down in the existing coffee ring. “She had some superficial injuries to her wrists, indicating some form of restraint, and I have sent the trace evidence extracted to the lab. The staining to the occipital bone of the skull also indicates a superficial injury, probably a blow to the head, prior to death. None of those were likely to be the cause of death, though.”
“So what was?”
Galloway folded her lips together and pressed them into a thin, pale line. For a second Javi thought it was uncertainty or an unwillingness to commit to an idea, but it was more like… distaste for what she was about to say.
“I can’t, at this stage, make a definitive statement on the cause of death.” She reeled off the ass-covering disclaimer without bothering to give him time to respond. “However, based on the evidence of autolysis to the organs, discoloration to the lower extremities, and the fact that I found strands of Utkin’s own hair under her nails… I suspect she died of a combination of dehydration and hyperthermia. It’s possible the tissue samples I’ve sent to the lab will contradict that, but… I know the signs.”
She did. There’d been three infant deaths from hyperthermia in Plenty in the last year. Javi had been called in on one of the cases when the evidence mounted that it hadn’t been a mistake. Mostly it was just tragic.
“How long would it have taken?” Javi asked. “Birdie Utkin was a teenager, so her ability to regulate her own temperature would have been established.”
Galloway nodded, picked up her mug again, and grimaced around another gulp of cold coffee. “It depends on where she was being kept. It could have been a couple of hours, or a couple of days.”
With babies it was always cars. Javi didn’t believe in hunches, but he remembered a burnt-out car and the desiccated leather-and-rag remains of a raccoon in the backseat. If their suspect was Birdie’s boyfriend Hector, he’d been living in his car. It would have been the only place he had control of.
“If she were in the trunk of a car?”
Galloway pulled that unhappy face again, got up from the desk, and squeezed around it to get to the coffee machine on the filing cabinet. She topped up her mug with the dregs sizzling in the bottom of the stained glass carafe.
“Under an hour,” she said. “It would have been like being in a crockpot.”
It was the mundanity of the image that made it so macabre, Javi thought. His brain queasily revisited the slow-broiled tilapia he had made last week—the curled edges and wet, slipping flesh. He blocked his imagination from developing the idea any further, not that it needed to, and swallowed the sour acid taste on the back of his tongue.
“After this period of time,” he said. “Would it be still be possible to detect drug residue in her system?”
Galloway raised her pale eyebrows at him, wrinkling her forehead. The gesture seemed to remind her she was still wearing her glasses on her forehead, and she tugged them down. Her fingers left more smudges on the lenses as she settled them on the bridge of her nose.
“Assuming she ingested the substance shortly before death, there might not have been time to metabolize it,” she said. “In that case, for some chemicals, we might be able to find traces. Why? What should I be looking for?”
“Psychotropics,” Javi said. It was possible the killer used the same cocktail in every murder, but if he was also a drug dealer, then it was possible drugs were just a weapon of opportunity. “Mephedrone.”
Galloway gave him a curious look. When he didn’t explain any further, she nodded and squeezed back behind her desk. She drank her coffee absently as she typed one-handed on the computer.
“I can do that,” she said. “I already sent tissue samples, so I can just append these tests for the lab. Anything else?”
Javi shook his head and got up, ready to take his leave. He changed his mind as something occurred to him. It was possible that losing a house and ending up homeless when your family left the area was enough of a trigger for a fragile personality. It removed the constraints of socially encultured behavior and gave a direction for their anger and delusions.
It didn’t feel like the focal point of the crimes, however. The drugs in the bottle Cloister had found weren’t just to disable Drew—or Billy, as the initial target. There was a reason behind them.
“Could you check back in the records ten or twelve years?” he
asked. “Any death involving cars, drugs, and a teen male survivor or next of kin.”
Galloway snorted at him. “You don’t want much,” she said. “Lucky for you it’s a slow day.”
“Really?”
She laughed. It was a big, braying sound from a woman who usually looked like she should be on a vitamin drip.
“No,” she said. “I’ll see what I can do, though.”
Javi nodded his thanks. “Forward anything that you find to my office,” he said. “I appreciate it, Doctor Galloway.”
“My birthday’s in a couple of weeks,” she said. “I like Amazon gift cards and coffee.”
He quirked a dry smile. “We’ll see what your search turns up,” he said. “Coffee is for winners.”
That earned him another snorting laugh and a toast with the coffee cup. He left her to it.
“WELL?” JAVI asked without preamble. He flicked the radio down as the Bluetooth kicked in. He was sitting on the road back into Plenty, stationary in a sea of tired commuters on the way home from San Diego. The rows of cars crawled when they moved at all. Javi was already irritated when he got in the car—Reed had begged off his interview at the station due to “unavoidable business commitments”—and the smell of gasoline and hot tarmac wasn’t improving his mood.
“They’ve agreed to make contact online,” Cloister said. There was a roughness to his voice, a rasp hiding under the easygoing drawl. It got stronger when he was turned on. When Javi’s hand had been wrapped around his cock, Cloister’s voice was hoarse and ragged. “Parents draw the line at an actual physical meeting.”
“We can work on that,” Javi said.
Even without seeing Cloister’s face, Javi could tell he wasn’t completely comfortable with that idea. It was probably good that he was on the dog squad instead of homicide. He was soft.
Not all the time, his brain took the opportunity to remind him. He flexed his fingers around the steering wheel, and the tips of his fingers prickled with the memory of hard flesh and silky skin. Javi grimaced. It would be a lot easier to stick to his rule about keeping Cloister a one-night stand if his cock and his libido would play along. Or if thinking about the naked, growling Cloister weren’t a lot more pleasant than the image of Birdie Utkin baking to death in a car.
With Galloway’s crockpot analogy back in the forefront of his mind, the distraction of Cloister’s whiskey-and-sex voice in his ear faded. A bit. Javi nudged the car forward and gained speed as the cars ahead of him started to move.
“According to Galloway, Birdie’s COD was hyperthermia,” he said. “Probably from being locked in a car. I’m having samples tested to see if Birdie was dosed with the same drugs that we found in the desert.”
There was a snort in his ear. “We?”
Javi ignored that. “I’ll get one of the computer techs to head over to the Hartleys’. They can set up everything we need to monitor any contact Billy makes. We aren’t going to put him in danger.”
“Yeah, usually people don’t mean to let the shit hit the fan,” Cloister said. “It does anyhow.”
“Well, that’s… homespun.”
The sun hit the canted window of the sports car ahead of Javi, making him squint even through his sunglasses. The driver kept veering in and out of his lane with abortive attempts to nudge between the cars.
“I just don’t want that family to lose two kids,” Cloister said. He sounded tired suddenly, like a truckload of lost sleep had just settled on his shoulders. “Two days in a car trunk, hot as it’s been….”
It didn’t matter. They both knew what he’d been going to say. There came a point when hoping for the best was more delusional than optimistic.
“Doesn’t change our job,” Javi said. “We’ll catch who did this.”
“That’s your job. Mine is to bring Drew home.”
“I hate to be the one to disillusion you,” Javi said dryly, “but you’re still a police officer. Arresting criminals is part of your job description.”
The douche in the sports car nearly clipped a battered pickup in his latest attempt to change lanes. Javi flinched back between the lines at the near miss while the driver of the pickup rolled down a window to give sports douche the finger. In the back of the car, a big white dog scrambled to its feet and swayed with the motion of the vehicle as it barked furiously. Slobber dripped from its jowls and matted the fur on its chest in wet, white strings.
At least Cloister’s dog was better behaved than that.
“Are you still at the Hartleys’?” Javi asked. There was an exit coming up five miles ahead. If he took it, he could get to the Hartleys’ address in about forty minutes by the back roads.
“Yeah,” Cloister said. “But I’m going to head back to the station. Unless you need me for something?”
“Not so far.” Javi put more bite into the dig than was entirely fair. It had just thrown him, the pinch of disappointment he felt when he realized he wasn’t going to see Cloister. It wasn’t devastating. He’d seen the man a few hours before, for God’s sake, but it stung enough to make it impossible to deny he wanted to see Cloister. “More vet bills?”
“Something like that,” Cloister said. “There’s some stuff I want to follow up.”
“What?”
“Stuff.”
He sounded obdurate, like the dumb, drawling hick Javi judged him for originally. Now that he knew him better, well, Cloister was still a drawling hick—which was apparently Javi’s type these days—but he wasn’t stupid. Inarticulate but not stupid.
“You’ve got another hunch.”
There was a pause and then a reluctantly muttered “Maybe.”
“Okay,” Javi said. He wanted to know the details, to control the threads of the investigation, but pushing Cloister in that sort of mood just ended with fuck-offs and disciplinary action.
Or fucking, Javi supposed. Sometimes it ended in fucking.
He took a deep breath, tasted dust and exhaust fumes, and tried to judge where his professional responsibility to manage the investigation ended and his personal need to control his environment began.
“I’m going to go to the Hartleys’, get the tracking software installed on their computer, and make sure they understand the limitations of what they can communicate,” he said. “Once I’m done, you get to fill me in on where this hunch is going. Understood?”
“I’m not an agent,” Cloister growled. “I don’t answer to you.”
“Really?” Javi said. “Last night you did exactly what you were told.”
Heat licked the edges of the voice, sweet and fizzing against Javi’s lips. It didn’t matter. It was still flirting, however the words came out. The silence on the other end of the phone managed to sound somehow strangled. Javi assumed Cloister was trying to decide if he was furious or just embarrassed.
Before he could decide, Javi continued. “I’ll see you in about two hours, Cloister. I expect words by then.”
He tapped the earpiece, and the connection went dead. Ahead of him the sports car had finally managed to squeeze between lanes and was trying to change again. Javi leaned back in the soft leather seat and wondered idly what Cloister looked like when he blushed. It passed the time until he reached the cutoff and peeled off the main road onto the narrow, cracked tarmac.
Chapter Nineteen
“WHEN WAS the last time you slept?” Tancredi leaned on Cloister’s desk. Her sleeves were rolled up, and the skin on her forearms was freckled and pocked with old scars. He’d never asked about them, and she never talked about them. But they were old, so whatever it was, she’d dealt with it.
Cloister snorted and sat back in his chair. It creaked under his weight and wobbled as the loose castor clacked and slid against the linoleum.
“I got a couple of hours sleep last night.” It wasn’t exactly true—not quite a lie either, more of an exaggeration—but he didn’t think anyone had ever given an honest answer to that sort of question.
Tancredi wrinkled her nose at him. “Y
ou need to learn how to lie better.”
“What I need is to find Drew Hartley.”
The mention of the boy made her wince, and the teasing slid off her face to leave her looking somber and regretful. She pushed herself off the desk and folded her arms tightly over her chest.
“Don’t remind me,” she said, and she pursed her lips unhappily. “A serial killer in Plenty. That’s all we needed to round out the hand of drug dealers and wife beaters. Did Merlo tell you?”
His blank look was enough answer.
“You know I knew Birdie.” Tancredi hesitated and folded her mouth down at one corner in a self-mocking grimace. “That sounds like we were best friends. I saw her in town. I remember her face in the paper and on posters. I thought she’d run away. I never thought she was dead. God. And how many other people has this guy killed? Children.”
Cloister glanced at his computer screen. A dozen missing-person reports were lined up in overlapping windows—a dozen different names and a dozen outcomes that announced whomever it was had been found. All of them stamped as No Further Action Required.
The crime lab had techs analyzing the packets of clothing they’d found and hunting through cold-case files for missing-person reports that matched. Thing was, once a person was found, they weren’t a cold case anymore.
“Maybe he didn’t kill them all,” he said slowly.
“He killed Birdie.”
“I know. She was the only body we found, though.”
Tancredi looked skeptical but tried to play along. “So what is he doing, then?”
“I don’t know,” Cloister admitted.
“You know I’m joining the FBI,” Tancredi said. “Well, that I want to. I’ve read a lot of textbooks about aberrant psychology, and that isn’t how they work. They don’t retreat after the first kill. They embrace it.”
She was right. Not that Cloister had read the books, but he knew how violence worked. Even for normal people—if you could find one—it got easier. Just like anything else. The kid who puked his ring up after his first fight might not fight again, but if he did, he wouldn’t puke. Eventually even the weird pop-yield of a broken nose under knuckles wouldn’t bother him much.
