KEN FOLDEDlike a man who’d lost his breath and deflated onto the huge creamy sofa. Grief and worry had worn the luxe off the glossy cabin. Dust and dirty footprints covered the polished wood floors, and torn-open boxes of freshly printedMISSINGposters were stacked against the walls. The smell of hot paper and ink nearly hid the sourness of food that no one had the appetite to eat.
“We just need to talk to Bill,” Javi said. It was always a lie, but it felt like more of one than usual right then. “There’s some things about what happened that night, when Drew went missing, that we want to clarify.”
Lara’s face was taut, and dark circles bruised under her eyes, but the look of contempt she gave him was robust. She was hugging Billy, one arm wrapped around his shoulders to block the deputy who was trying to take custody of the boy.
“Who do you think you’re talking to?” she asked. “You can talk to him here or you can get out of my house.”
“Lara….”
Her lips trembled for a second, and then she grimly pressed them into a firm line and blinked the tears from her eyes. She shook her head, curls flying. “You don’t get to call me that. We aren’t friends right now. If you take my son away, we won’t be friends again.”
That caught in Javi’s throat like a pebble. It surprised him. He had friends—if you definedfriendas someone you could ask for a favor in a pinch. Lara had invited him to Thanksgiving. He hadn’t gone, but it had still been kind.
“It’s my job,” he said. “If you want to get Drew back, I have to follow every lead. Even if you don’t like it.”
“No. No.” Lara said. “Youdo notget my baby back by taking my son. That is not how this works. No.”
“I’m afraid it is,” Javi said. He nodded to the deputy and gave a grim little dip of his chin to give permission to a grim little task. The man pried Billy out of Lara’s grip and walked him outside, one hand firmly around his elbow. Ken finally dragged himself up, caught her, and tried to embrace her while she shoved his comfort away.
“It’ll be alright, Lara,” Ken said. “We need to trust the police. They want to find Drew too.”
Lara clenched her hands so tightly that it had to hurt. Tendons stood out in her bony wrists, stark under her skin. She closed her eyes, swallowed hard, and wobbled in place for a second. Javi thought she was going to faint, but then she breathed in, and her spine went rigid.
“My son is missing. Someone took him. You should be looking for him, not trying to blame Billy. He loves his brother.”
“And I’m not saying he doesn’t, or that he’s done anything,” Javi said. “Right now I just need to talk to him, and for everyone’s sake, it’s best if it’s official.”
Lara sniffed stickily and pulled away from Ken. She twisted her arms up to yank her hair back from her face and snapped a band around the heavy mass of it. “You know what my dad would tell me if he were here?” she said. “Trust the police but get an expensive lawyer.”
She grabbed a set of keys and a handful of posters from the table. Then she gave Ken a sharp look. Even standing up he still looked somehow deflated, like something he needed to buoy him up had leaked.
“Don’t be useless,” Lara told him. It wasn’t an insult. She didn’t sound angry. It was just a flat directive. Then she gave Javi a hard look. “I will meet you at the station. If you talk to my son before I get there, I will ruin you. And fuck you for doing this.”
She stalked out of the cabin.
Ken swallowed, wiped his hand over his face, and rubbed his puffy lids with his thumb and forefinger.
“This is just protocol, right?” he asked. Ken was an orthopedic surgeon. This wasn’t the sort of tension he could deal with. “You know Billy didn’t do this? He wouldn’t do this?”
He probably didn’t mean to sound that doubtful. Javi gripped his shoulder for a second.
“You should go with Lara,” he said. There should have been a rider, a “she needs you.” It was disingenuous enough to catch in his throat. The only person Ken would help by being there was Javi. Ken had a good middle-class boy’s respect for the authorities.
Ken hesitated for a second, as though he were expecting something, and then he nodded and went after Lara. Neither of them bothered locking the doors. Javi supposed there wasn’t anything else they were worried about losing.
On the way out, he saw Matthew, the groundskeeper, loitering around a withered patch of grass as he watched Billy getting escorted to the patrol car. He was the first rubbernecker, but he wouldn’t be the last. By the next day, Billy would be famous in his own right.
JAVI RODEthe bronze-and-glass elevator up from the garage and frowned over his phone as he checked his emails. Authorization to fund the sheriff’s task force against the new meth dealers in town, requests for “clarifications” on three of his reports, five letters from Saul’s old friends in the bureau asking him for updates on the case.
“Fuck,” he muttered as he shoved them into a Deal With Later folder.
At this rate, next time he needed a favor, he’d have to take Cloister Witte to dinner. He side-eyed that thought as the elevator jolted to a halt at his floor, but he decided it was harmless enough. So he wouldn’t mind taking Cloister to dinner—and all the things they could do afterward in a nice rented hotel bed. That didn’t mean he had any intention of breaking his “never fuck where you live” rule.
Even if it would probably be a cheap date. Cloister looked like the type who’d prefer McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish to Truluck’s sesame-seared ahi.
He let the brief notion fade away as the doors slid open to let him step out. At the end of the short hall, the office admin glanced up from her computer and nodded briefly as she recognized him. She pulled her desk together and filled her hands with information in order of importance for when he actually entered the office. He walked briskly over and pushed the door open to let her get started.
“Agent Merlo.” She stood up from behind the desk and tucked her stack of paperwork into the crook of her arm. Under her neat bob of fashionably graying hair, there was a disapproving cant to her jaw. “The sheriff called. The Hartleys are at the station. He’s waiting for you to arrive before he interrogates their son.”
