by TA Moore
Javi grimaced, twisted his hand in Cloister’s hair, and pulled him in for a hard kiss. He wanted to see if idiot had a taste. It didn’t.
“That’s not reassuring,” Javi said as he pushed Cloister back onto his side of the bed. The frustration ached in his thighs as Cloister sprawled out across from him, but Javi ignored it. His cock didn’t always know what was good for it. There was too much clutter in his brain tonight, and unlike Cloister, he couldn’t get by on two hours of sleep and a cup of coffee. “Just don’t get hit by any more cars, Witte. I’ve got enough on my conscience.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“THE NAME the patient used was Clyde Granfeld,” Inspector Yuen said down the phone to Javi. “According to the nurse I spoke to, the bill was paid in cash. The procedure—although she declined to tell me what it was—went well, and the patient was satisfied. They did provide the name of a medical practitioner in….”
There was a pause as Yuen flipped through papers. Finally he cleared his throat and read the name out. “Santa Rosa, New Mexico.”
“Thank you,” Javi said as he turned to the window behind him and watched the tech lay out Janet Morrow’s effects for him. “I owe you one.”
Yuen snorted. “I’ll see how long you remember that,” he said and hung up.
Javi raised a finger to the tech to beg “one more minute” as he lowered the phone and dialed his office.
“I need you to get a background check run for me,” he told Sue when she picked up.
There was a pause, and then he heard the click of her fingers on the keyboard.
“Who?” she asked.
“Clyde Granfeld or Granfield,” Javi said. “In New Mexico. They might have lived in, or more likely around, Santa Rosa.”
“I’ll get an analyst on it,” she promised and then cautiously added, “SSA Kincaid called. He didn’t leave a message, but he asked how the case was going.”
Of course he did. “What did you tell him?” Javi asked, his jaw stiff as he forced the words out.
Sue’s voice was dry as she replied. “That I don’t gossip about cases, or my job,” she said. He could imagine her usual little smile. “I do my job, Agent Merlo, and I don’t take sides. I’ll let you know when I find out any information on Granfeld.”
“Thank you,” he said without specifying for what exactly. He let her go and headed into the lab.
From what Professor Belford had shared about Janet Morrow’s life in New York, her whole existence was probably in the suitcase she stashed in the hotel. There wasn’t much. Just enough to be packed into neatly labeled plastic bags and laid out on a metal table in the lab. The tech set down the last bag—a pair of carefully folded jeans—and raised his eyebrows at Javi.
“If you don’t mind me asking,” he said, “what exactly are you looking for, Agent Merlo? You already went through all of Morrow’s effects the other day.”
Javi had. None of it had stood out as relevant to the investigation. It was just some old mended clothes, a fat envelope with a thin sheaf of fifties in it—crisp from the bank, but with folded, sweaty corners as though Janet had counted them more than once—and an old folder of what paperwork had mattered enough to take with her into her car. That was when he thought they were Janet’s effects. Now he was looking to see if there were any ties to the Macintosh family.
“Something,” he told the tech. “I’ll let you know if I find it.”
The tech looked at him, shrugged, and went back to his computer in the other room. Every now and again he would twist around in his chair to peer at Javi through the glass wall and check on what he was doing.
Javi snapped on a pair of gloves and opened the bag containing the yellowed bits of paper, clipped-out newspaper cartoons, and a small rubber-cased flash drive that had a copy of a university application, a badly lit picture of Janet as she stared grimly into the camera at a birthday party she didn’t seem to want to be at, and a low-res screenshot of a Plenty blog article about the rise in women farmers on a collective.
Important enough to Janet to store and bring with her, presumably something to do with why she came to Plenty, but not much help in finding out why she was here. Maybe one of the women mentioned in the article, or the author, was the person she had come to talk to. But that didn’t give him any better idea about who Janet really was.
He set the USB to the side with a mental note to get Tancredi to see if there was any connection between Janet and the collective, and went through the papers. It was a quick read. A birth certificate or passport would have been too useful. Instead there was a printout of a scanned newspaper page, a page cut out from a glossy magazine about a midrange country music star, his rancher charity-worker wife, and their hipster-rustic rural cabin, and an embossed In Memoriam card for “Kitty” with the scrawled message on the back—No more.
That was suggestive, but with no details other than a first name and a generic Bible verse—Corinthians 1, and his grandmother would be disappointed that Javi had to google that—it wasn’t helpful.
Javi had gotten used to the creak of the tech’s chair and the feeling of eyes on the back of his neck. He ignored it until an unexpectedly familiar voice asked, “Anything?” from just behind him. The jolt of awareness—of the warmth of Cloister’s body, of what that mouth felt like on him, of the low rasp of that voice in the dark—sliced through Javi’s focus with ease.
It was lust. He could feel the weight of it in his groin and the tight tug of muscle in the back of his thighs. That was nothing new. He’d wanted Cloister ever since he managed to needle the not-quite-handsome, usually laid-back deputy into a scowl. It was inconvenient, but he’d gotten used to it.
The fact that he wanted to lean back against Cloister, to casually use his shoulder as a prop, was different. So was the discovery that he couldn’t see any reason why he shouldn’t.
His private life was still his own business, but after he dropped Cloister off at the station in borrowed sweats, only the deliberately clueless wouldn’t assume they’d fucked. As for his distance…. Well, once you begged someone not to die on you, it was hard to convince yourself you didn’t care at least a bit. It was dark, but that didn’t mean he could pretend Bourneville had learned to talk and throw her voice.
“Not yet,” Javi said stiffly as he moved around the table and away from Cloister. Just because Javi couldn’t see why he shouldn’t do something, it didn’t follow that it was necessarily a good idea. It wasn’t as though he hadn’t made bad decisions in the past. “If I’m right, then there must be something here. Janet Morrow had a plan that brought her to Plenty. There must be something here that she was going to use as evidence… or leverage… or something.”
Cloister grabbed a glove and picked up the card. He read the red Sharpie’d inscription and then turned it over to look at the back.
“There’s often an address,” he said. “Somewhere to send flowers or a condolence card.”
“They usually use a full name too,” Javi pointed out. “Whereas ‘Kitty’ might not even be related to the dead woman’s legal name. Let’s be honest. If it weren’t for the picture, it could have been for a cat.”
Cloister turned the card over. He gave a rueful twist of his mouth as he saw the oval portrait printed on the front. It was definitely a woman, not a cat, but that was as far as it narrowed anything down. “Kitty” was a dark-haired woman with blue eyes. It could have been Jessie Macintosh with a dye job and ten years under her belt since the party photo with her family, or it could have been a prop from an Ashley Judd movie. The generous blur the designer had applied to brighten and scour away laugh lines made it difficult to tell.
While Cloister tried to pick out an identifying feature under the digital improvements, Javi went back to his scan of the newspaper. It was an inventory of all the police activity in the paper’s area over a week. It didn’t paint Chant, California in a particularly salubrious light, with overdosed teenagers, sheep theft, car fires, and an unidentified woman found dead i
n an abandoned house.
“What was done?” Cloister wondered aloud.
“She could have been sick for a long time,” Javi theorized as he traded the stapled printouts for the clipped magazine articles. “Or maybe, if I’m right, the pressure got to be too much, and she killed herself.”
He tilted the glossy sheet toward the strip light in the ceiling. Janet had been a tactile person. She counted the money repeatedly, folded and unfolded her printout of the newspaper, and the plastic on the USB was rubbed shiny and picked at where she’d fiddled with it.
The light picked out smudges on the glossy page where someone had run their finger along specific lines of text.
“… most recently Heather hosted her brother-in-law Austin Lossy’s wedding to vlogger boyfriend Ken Maguire. ‘We couldn’t risk Ken getting cold feet,’ Heather jokes over tea. ‘He was such a flight risk!’”
“Pictures of the couple’s adopted children are everywhere in the house. Along with them, however, are group shots taken at the Wilderness Camp that Heather has run at the family ranch in Northern California for the last twenty years.”
“Jarod admits that he was caught off guard when his wife, a second-generation atheist, took an interest in Buddhism….”
It was possible Janet was just a fan, but the mention of the camp caught Javi’s attention. A camp in Northern California, run by a protocelebrity—outdoors, wilderness, probably lots of sports and hiking. Just the sort of place that a father like Macintosh, equally fond of looking tough and being celebrated, would want to send his son.
From the write-up it sounded like the sort of camp the kid Javi described would have hated, but not the sort Janet would have been scared of.
More hints, but nothing that proved anything one way or the other. Javi set the page back down and picked up the USB. He turned and crooked a finger at the tech, whom he caught sneaking a look at him.
The man slid back from his computer and came back in. He pushed his glasses onto his forehead so he could look at Javi.
“Did you have any luck enhancing the picture we found on this?” Javi asked.
The man pursed his lips and rubbed the dent the glasses had left in the side of his nose. “Some,” he said. “Unfortunately not much. It’s a low-res copy of a photo taken in low light, and even with enhancement, there’s not a lot of detail. I’ve sent it through to the regional computer forensics lab in San Diego. They have specialists who might be able to stitch some faces together from it for us. Is there anyone in particular we want to identify?”
He sounded sort of eager. Odd questions, old case files, the reputation that still hung around from the Hartley kidnapping. People around the station had started to get the idea that Janet Morrow might be another “interesting” case, the kind that got the good sort of attention.
“Anyone we can,” Javi said. “If—”
The slap of a hand on the glass doors interrupted Javi midsentence. He twisted around and saw Tancredi on the other side. She was half into her vest, and her face was so pale her freckles stood out like they’d been made with a Sharpie.
Cloister got to the door first.
“Hostage situation!” Tancredi blurted as she buckled down her vest and yanked her ponytail free from the neck. “At the hospital.”
“Janet?” Cloister asked.
Tancredi shook her head. “No. Galloway. Someone took Galloway hostage at the hospital. We don’t know what they want yet, but we need to get there.”
Cloister lurched forward. “I’ll get my vest—”
Tancredi shoved him back. “Not you. You’re still on desk duty, Witte.” She looked past him to Javi. “Agent Merlo? We don’t have any deputies with negotiation experience. Frome wants you to take point.”
“I have it,” Javi said.
Tancredi gave Cloister an apologetic shrug and then ran back down the hall. With the door open, Javi could hear the clatter of boots on tiles and snapped orders as the station mobilized. Adrenaline pricked the back of his brain and itched along his nerves. He turned to Cloister, but he couldn’t think of anything to say. Usually he could just snap at Cloister to stay out of trouble or stick to the sitrep.
Without that to hide behind and only seconds before he had to go, he didn’t know what to say.
“Same goes for you,” Cloister said.
Javi frowned. “What?”
“Don’t die,” Cloister said, the corner of his mouth hitched up in a crooked grin.
Javi kissed him.
He’d lie to himself later, and he’d probably blame it on adrenaline and habit. It had been a while since anyone he was used to kissing was around on a daily basis. But the truth was that, for a disorienting second, it was either say something stupid or do something stupid.
Javi went with do something stupid, his fist twisted in Cloister’s shirt and his tongue in Cloister’s mouth. Surprise tasted like an indrawn breath and a sugar-glazed donut. Regret would probably, when Javi had time, sound like the clatter as the tech guy fumbled the USB and dropped it.
After too long for prudence, Javi pushed Cloister away and headed through the station at a loping run to find Frome. They’d need to settle on a strategy before they got to the hospital. He could regret things later. There was always time for regret later.
GALLOWAY HAD parked in the hospital’s underground garage. Her black state-issued SUV was parked near the front, next to one of the concrete pillars, door open and the engine still running and pumping cold air into the damp, cool space. A cardboard box lay on the ground next to the car, a dark, wet stain on the lid.
Sweat itched against the back of Javi’s neck and caught under his collar as he walked slowly down the oil-stained ramp. He held his flashlight crooked up to his shoulder and his gun down by his thigh. Behind him he could hear the eager mutter of the local press as they pushed up right to the edge of the police perimeter. The presenters with their eyes squinted against the sun murmured earnestly about tragic attacks, and the crews with their cameras held high over their heads tried to get a shot of something in the dimly lit garage.
“The witness says that the lights were broken when he got here. He was going to complain,” Frome said through the earpiece. “The man arrived shortly after Galloway. He was tall, scruffy, and agitated. He said something to Galloway. They had a brief conversation, and she seemed to be trying to extricate herself and get in the car. Then they scuffled, there was a muffled bang, and the man dragged her away from the car.”
“The witness didn’t try to stop him?”
“He saw blood,” Frome said. There was parched humor in his voice. “It threw him more than you’d expect, considering he’s a surgeon.”
It wouldn’t have helped if the witness had tried to intervene. It might have actually goaded the attacker into doing something worse. Javi couldn’t help his brief, razor-sharp flicker of judgment.
At the bottom of the ramp, Javi paused. He heard someone pant raggedly, a wet, choked sound, and the faint rustle of cloth on cloth as bodies moved in the dark. There were only a few cars in a space made for fifty. The garage was reserved for hospital staff, but apparently most people used the parking lot above ground.
He skimmed the flashlight over the nearby cars—Javi assumed the BMW with a cigarette still smoldering on the roof belonged to their squeamish witness—and then dipped it to the dropped evidence box.
The stain on the cover showed up red as the light hit it. Definitely blood. Javi flicked it over onto the ground and found a bright-red smear on the concrete. It dragged backward, likely caught under a sensible heel as they were pulled away, and then trailed off.
Galloway wasn’t too badly injured… not then.
“Catherine,” Javi said. His voice sounded loud as it bounced back off the concrete walls, and while he knew it was meant to humanize her to the attacker, it made him feel odd to use Galloway’s given name. “Are you all right?”
“Fine,” Galloway said. Her voice was clear but strung tight along the edges.
She gasped softly after the first word, and her voice was careful when she tried again. “He has a knife, Agent Merlo. You should listen to him.”
In his ear Frome said he had deputies in place on the stairwell. All Javi had to do was give the word. Javi ignored him as he wove carefully between the parked cars toward the sound of Galloway’s voice.
“I can do that,” Javi said. “Whatever he wants to say, I’ll hear him out.”
He flicked the flashlight to the side and caught the wet glitter of someone’s eyes through the windows of an old rust-and-orange Toyota. The attacker had dragged Galloway between two parked cars, braced his back against a pillar, and locked his arm around her throat. A cheap, battered-looking gun was pressed up under Galloway’s jaw, a deep dimple grooved into the soft flesh where the metal dug in.
“Get back,” the attacker slurred. He dug the gun deeper into Galloway’s throat until the skin split and a trickle of blood ran down to stain the crumbled white collar of her suit. Galloway pressed her lips together and lifted her chin as far as she could. “I’ll kill her. If you make me, I’ll do it!”
Javi put his gun up. “Do you want me to put this away?” he asked.
The attacker licked cracked lips and looked around nervously. “Yeah,” he muttered. Then he repeated himself with more confidence. “Yes. Put it away. And… and tell the rest of them. Tell them to stay away.”
Javi holstered his gun at his hip. “It’s just me,” he said. “I just want to talk.”
“There’s deputies in the stairwell, right? Snipers outside? I’m not stupid. Tell them to back off.”
Spittle flecked Galloway’s cheek as he screamed. It made her wince, and a ripple of distaste spread from her eyes to her mouth, but she held still. The attacker actually didn’t sound stupid. His voice was rough—ruined by white whiskey and chest infections, no doubt—but there was a precision to his words. He was confused and definitely drunk, but not stupid.
