“No,” Ken said flatly. “You will not finish that sentence. Our son did not do this.”
“Doctor Hartley,” Javi said as he stood up. “You need to calm down.”
“No I don’t,” Ken said. “My lawyer says we should leave. That’s what we’re going to do.”
He bullied Lara to her feet and out of the room, muttering in her ear with every step. Javi grimaced. Five more minutes and he might have gotten some answers.
“I did not expect him to find his balls,” he muttered.
Cloister rocked onto the back legs of the chair and braced his long legs against the floor. His face was closed off again with a layer of sullenness that masked whatever else he was feeling.
“What?” Javi asked.
“Nothin’,” Cloister said. He hesitated and then added slowly, “Just something feels off.”
“A boy might have murdered his little brother,” Javi said. Frustration bled into his voice and turned into sarcasm somewhere along the way. “We have to prove it for his parents. Is there anything there, Deputy Witte, thatisn’toff?”
Cloister scratched his jaw, and his nails scraped in the fuzz of almost-invisible gold stubble. He changed the subject. “Ken has a new script, but Lara’s still the one with the spine. If she hadn’t budged.”
“I know,” Javi said, and annoyance pleated his lips. “Five more minutes and we could have gotten something useful from her. It doesn’t matter. We’ll get another chance. The seed’s planted now. Every time she looks at Billy, she’ll wonder if maybe we’re right.”
“Yeah.” Cloister pushed himself up from the chair. He hooked his thumbs in the pockets of his jeans and stared out the door for a second. “And if we aren’t right?”
“Then we’ve wasted time on the wrong avenue of investigation,” Javi said, “and helped keep a family therapist in business. Our job is finding out who took Drew Hartley, not worrying about his family.”
The muscles in Cloister’s jaw flexed. “Your job,” he said. “My job’s finding Drew. I should get back to that, if there’s nothing else?”
There wasn’t. Nothing appropriate for the workplace, anyhow. Javi let him go, and if he lingered at the door to watch his long, rangy body cross the floor, it was only partly for the view. It was mostly because he wondered if Cloister had seen something he hadn’t or because he didn’t want another kid to grow up thinking his mother hated him.
Maybe it was both.
Chapter Eight
IT WASa nightmare. Cloister knew that. The fear of it was familiar as an old pair of sweats, but it didn’t help. He was still afraid.
It was dry and hot. Cloister was thirsty—that wringing thirst that almost choked you—and the sand scratched his legs as he ran. He didn’t know what he was running from or where he was going. Just that he didn’t want to be there. There was something bad ahead and worse behind.
So he ran, mouth dry and eyes stinging as the wind flicked dust under his lashes.
It was only as he stumbled and hit a rock that he wondered why he was sosmall.He didn’t have time to make sense of it. First he heard the whistling, and then he heard the dogs. That was always the order. Whistle, then dogs.
A wet nose in the heart of Cloister’s hand jolted him awake. For a second he wasn’t sure he actually was awake. His mouth was still dry, and sweat itched in the folds of his body. But when he swung his legs out of the cot, they were longer than his entire body had been in the dream. The scar on his knee—where a fall and a bottle had left him looking at his kneecap in more detail than he ever wanted—was there too, and he never dreamed about that.
Maybe because the memory of dirty bone and the wrinkled flap of degloved knee skin was too gross for his subconscious to touch.
Bourneville shoved her way between his legs and demanded attention. Cloister wasn’t sure if it was the fear stink of his nightmare that annoyed her or the fruitless afternoon they’d spent quartering the ground between oak trees in search of something belonging to Drew Hartley.
Something else they’d missed.
He let the thought sit for a second and tried it out for size, but it still didn’t feel right. Everyone made mistakes, but he couldn’t see how this one had happened. There was enough of Drew’s scent on the phone that Bon picked it up two hot days after the boy disappeared, but not when it was fresh? And it might have been dark that night, but Cloister had crawled under that fence on his belly. The phone would have been right under his elbow.
Except what then? If someone planted it, how had they gotten hold of it if Billy wasn’t out there that night? And what was Billy doing that night that he was lying about?
Bourneville butted his chin with her head and clicked his teeth together with enough force to make his eyes water. Apparently he’d gotten distracted enough to stop paying attention to her. He scratched her ears, shoved her away, and checked his watch.
Two hours’ sleep. He scrubbed the heel of his hand over his eyes and felt the grit of sand. It was probably more like an hour and a half. He was still tired—his brain felt the way your mouth did after the dentist stuffed it with cotton—but if he went back to sleep, he’d just tip back into the nightmare. He always did, and it was never better the second time around. So he got up instead, swung his leg over Bourneville, and grabbed some clothes.
“Want to go for a run?” he asked. She thumped the ground with her tail in answer and cocked her head to the side. He grinned at her. “C’mon, then.”
