“True, but most people don’t spend as much time boasting about being untouchable as you did,” Javi pointed out. “What was it you said when you were sentenced? He’d regret it, that you’d take everything away from him…?”
Nemac sat back in the chair with his arms stretched out in front of him. The cuffs of his shirt slid back, flashing the heavy black iconography worked into the skin of his arms.
“And like I said, he’s dead. I’m not.”
“Agent Lee’s grandson has gone missing,” Javi said. “Eighteen-year-old waitresses and ten-year-old little boys—sounds like your speed, doesn’t it?”
A muscle tightened in Nemac’s cheek. It squirmed under the coarse, drink-veined skin. “Fuck you, Merlo.”
That particular invective was a lot hotter when Cloister growled it. Javi ignored his brief mental digression and studied Nemac’s face. He wasn’t expecting guilt. Nemac once took his ex-wife, the mother of his son, to Nevada and left her in the desert in her underwear and bare feet. Or at least that’s what they believed happened. Afterward, from her hospital bed, the woman insisted it was a tragic accident. She dropped the custody case against Nemac too.
The expression Nemac had in that second was what Javi was looking for—a repulsive sort of smug satisfaction that his entitled view of what he deserved was what he was getting—just the dead-shark blank of a man who didn’t care about anything beyond his own skin.
“I imagine making good on that promise would impress your old associates,” Javi pointed out. “It might convince them that you’re not a has-been.”
Nemac turned his head and spat contemptuously on the cheap tiles. “Who the fuck do you think killing a ten-year-old impresses, Merlo?” He leaned forward, and his shackles rattled as he braced his hands flat against the table. His breath was sour. Javi glanced at the door and, with a slightly raised finger, dismissed the hovering guard’s instinct to help. “If I’d done this, and I’m not saying I did, it’d make me look weak—like I was scared to do anything when Lee was alive—or mental. Neither makes me look good, does it? Taking the kid wouldn’t profit me, and in case you haven’t noticed, I’m not exactly in a position to go sneaking around some bitch’s house at night.”
He sat back, looked away from Javi, and stared at the wall as he sucked his cheeks in. After a second spent studying Nemac’s pallid face over the beard, Javi gestured for the guards to take him away.
If it was Nemac, he wasn’t going to admit or negotiate. But Javi didn’t think it was.
The guards unshackled Nemac and hauled him to his feet. He leaned back against them, braced his feet against the floor, and smirked at Javi.
“Still,” he said. “I hope the kid’s still alive… and that someone real bad got him. I hope he dies hard.”
BACK INPlenty, Javi looked at the yellowed case file and wondered if Bridget “Birdie” Utkin had died hard. The picture in the file showed her wearing the height of fashion from ten years before, the gently dated image faintly sorrowful despite her grin. There were no updated pictures for the pretty blonde girl with the squint and the, according to the identifying features section of the old missing-person report, butterfly tattoo on her hip.
“I remember that case,” the plump young woman who brought him the file said. After a second of drawing a blank, he remembered her fumbling a plastic bag and the wind taking it while she cursed. She’d had to get him another one. Tancredi.
She lingered in the doorway with her arms crossed and a frown pleating her faded red eyebrows together.
“I didn’t know you were one of the PD’s officers who stayed after the Bureau took over this office.”
She shook her head. “I’m not. I lived in town for a while, though, when I was a teenager. My mom did some work for Mr. Utkin. She was a realtor. Do you think what happened to Birdie has something to do with the Hartley boy?”
Javi lifted his shoulder in a pleasant but unresponsive shrug. He had set up shop in the relatives’ room with its tape-patched pleather seats, drinking coffee that hadn’t got any better since the last time. The box file sat on the floor next to him, the cardboard dry and faded in patches.
“Do you have a minute to talk about it?” he asked and pointed at a chair opposite.
Tancredi glanced over her shoulder for a second and then nodded and stepped inside. She closed the door, sat down opposite him, and rested the heels of her hands on her knees. “I didn’t know her that well,” she said. “She was younger than me…. I didn’t really think about her at all until she disappeared.”
“I have the case files.” Javi tapped a finger against the manila folder that rested on his knee. “I know the details of the case. Tell me what the town was like at the time.”
“Tense,”Tancredi said, exaggerating the shape of her mouth around the word. “It was meant to be safe in Plenty, you know? Open space for kids to play, no crime, friendly neighborhood police….”
She trailed off with a sardonic twist of her mouth. That last expectation, at least, had ended with disillusionment and scandal.
“I remember that my mom wouldn’t let me do anything for the rest of the year,” Tancredi went on. “She thought she’d been snatched. Some people thought Birdie ran away. Nobody ever knew, though. Not for sure. I always figured she ran away. A lot of those kids did, you know.”
“What did you mean about her family wanting to keep her out of trouble?”
“Oh, she’d been hanging out with some local kids,” Tancredi said. “Looking back, they were just petty crooks. They did drugs in derelict houses, and they vandalized the new builds and got into fights. Back then, though, we thought they were gangsters. I heard that Birdie was hanging out with them, but her parents put a stop to that.”
“What about the boyfriend?” Javi asked.
Tancredi pursed her lips. “Umm, I didn’t know him. He was….” She blinked as her memory finally caught up with her. “He was a Hartley, wasn’t he? John Hartley. I’d forgotten that. It probably doesn’t mean anything. I mean, there’s a lot of them in town.”
There were. Javi had done his research at a roadside stop with his phone hooked into a McDonald’s Wi-Fi connection after he accepted that Cloister’s hunch had moved into his brain. Plenty of Hartleys, but there were only a few degrees of separation between John and Drew Hartley. They were cousins. It would have been enough to tag the man as a suspect, if John hadn’t moved to Australia to go to college and not been back since.
