“Deputy?”
Cloister glanced at Khaled. “Is there a builder in town called Atkins?”
Khaled frowned and shook his head. “I don’t think so.” He shrugged and hazarded uncertainly, “There’s Utkin, the property developer?”
That was it. Birdie Utkin.
Cloister clapped his hand on Khaled’s shoulder. “Thanks,” he said. “That’s been bothering me all day.”
Cloister left a confused Khaled to finish tying down the equipment in the back of the pickup and loped back to his trailer. Any thought of sleep was gone. Now that he’d worked out what had been bothering him about the case, he needed to work out what it meant.
That’sifit meant anything. It had been ten years since Birdie Utkin disappeared.
Chapter Nine
THERE WASa half-empty bottle of whiskey sitting on the desk, doing double duty as a paperweight for a stack of photocopied driver’s licenses. The one on top belonged to the Retreat’s owner, Tranquil Reed. Either the removal of his granny-framed glasses or the smudgy ink had taken the genteel sheen off him. He looked ratty and pinched in the photo.
“What do you want?” Javi asked impatiently as he shoved the office doors shut behind Cloister. “I don’t have the time to coddle you through this investigation. If the evidence is so hard for you to stomach, get taken off the case. You can’t be the only dog cop in town.”
He stalked back to the desk and sat down in the heavy leather chair. Whoever had downed the shots of whiskey, it wasn’t him. He looked tired, not drunk. His collar was undone, the tie pulled loose, and the crisp sleeves of his fancy shirt were rolled back over his lean, hard forearms. An expensive watch—gears and crystal face expensive, not chips and scratch-resistant expensive—hung heavily around one wrist. Faint white scars ran up the insides of his forearms in neat, parallel lines, but if he wasn’t going to bring that up, neither was Cloister.
It really didn’t seem fair that assholes were allowed to be that hot.
“The clerk downstairs said you were still working,” Cloister said. “Have you got anything?”
Javi leaned back in his chair. The leather sighed under his weight, and he waved his hand irritably at the desk. “I’ve got fire alerts for the hills tomorrow, excuses from the lab techs, and averycarefully worded memo from San Diego regarding the thin ice my career is on. And now I’ve got the smell of dog in my office.”
“She had a bath,” Cloister said. He glanced down at Bourneville, who’d made herself at home on the floor. “The smell lingers for a bit. Look, remember I said something was off?”
“And I said you should leave investigations to people who knew what they were doing,” Javi said. He pointed to the room’s other chair at the same time, though. “Sit. What is it?”
Cloister took a seat and immediately regretted it. Sitting on the other side of the desk from Javi made him feel as though it were a job interview or as though he were asking his boss for a raise. He could feel his hackles trying to rise, all raw edges and resentment over the expectation that someone would say something. Because they always did.
He dropped his hand over the arm of the chair and brushed his fingers over the coarse ruff on Bourneville’s shoulders.
“Ten years ago a girl went missing,” Cloister said. “Her name was Birdie Utkin. She was fifteen years old.”
Javi rolled his sleeves down over his arms and buttoned the cuffs without looking. “Different gender, different age group, large time gap,” he said. “I’m not seeing the connection.”
The “fuck it” felt like a lump in Cloister’s throat. He had to clench his jaw to keep it in, and he shifted uncomfortably. Across the desk Javi waited with his head tilted back against the headrest of the chair.
He wanted to get up, storm out, and slam the door so hard he could imagine glass shattering. The muscles in his thighs were tight with it, ready to move. It would be a stupid, childish thing to do it, but satisfying.
“What you’re supposed to do now,” Javi said, “is explain your theory. Did she disappear from the Retreat?”
Cloister stood up. He talked better on his feet. Bourneville lifted her head from the floor, her ears pricked as she watched him. He gave her the hand signal to stay, and she dropped her chin back to her paws.
“No. The Retreat was still a group of hippies then.” He shoved his hands into his pockets. “It wasn’t even Reed in charge. There was someone before him. Real old anarchist type, by all accounts. Birdie Utkin was a good girl—rich family, good grades, boyfriend that her dad liked.”
A frown line creased the skin between Javi’s eyebrows. “Still in the dark,” he said. “And how do you know so much about the case? It would have been before your time.”
“I looked into some old case files when I was assigned here,” Cloister said. There was a stack of them at his trailer, next to his bed, to fill the hours when he couldn’t sleep and Bourneville was too tired to run. Missing kids, lost mothers, dads who never came home—it really didn’t take a shrink to work out his issues. “This one stuck with me. Thing is, there was a Hartley mentioned in the original investigation. The boyfriend.”
Javi looked skeptical. “Ken Hartley is thirty-four. Unless the Utkins were very open-minded, they wouldn’t have approved of him dating their daughter ten years ago.”
“Not him. The boyfriend was John Hartley. Still, the name turning up in two missing-child cases?”
Javi looked dubious. “It’s not that uncommon a name, Cloister.”
