“How did Birdie and her boyfriend know each other?”
Tancredi shook her head slowly. “I don’t know,” she said. “I mean, Kelly Hartley—Ken Hartley’s aunt, the bank president? She was friends with the Utkins. My mom said she was always up at the house in those days. Maybe that’s how.”
She paused with the tip of her tongue caught between her teeth and her nose scrunched up.
“What?”
“Mom used to say a lot. She thought Mr. Utkin and Kelly were having an affair,” she said almost apologetically. “Mom was a bit of a gossip.”
“In our line of work, gossips can be useful,” Javi said. “Thanks for the background, Deputy.”
She took the hint, stood up, and headed for the door.
“Look,” she said as she hesitated at the doorway. “I don’t know if this has anything to do with it, but Witte’s right.”
“He is?” Javi said, irritation sharpening his voice more than the helpful Deputy Tancredi probably deserved. It made her wince, and she hunched her shoulders as though she were weathering a blow, but she forged on.
“There’s no way we missed that phone,” she said. “People underestimate Witte all the time, but he’s damn good at his job. We all are. Even if one of us,somehow,missed an iPhone right in the middle of our search area? No way we all did.”
She looked earnest and intent, determined to defend the integrity of her department. She probably knew Cloister better than he did. Fucking a man didn’t give you a shortcut to his inner self.
“I’ll bear that in mind, Deputy,” he said.
She grimaced an awkward smile and closed the door behind her as she left. Javi went back to the files and shuffled through the stacks of reports and crime-scene photos as though they were a stack of cards. That two members of the same family were involved in similar disappearances a decade apart was… thin.
On the other hand, it wasn’t nothing.
That was the status quo for the next half hour as he hunted through the old investigation for anything he could use. He found nothing that actually demonstrated a link, but just enough to sustain that bit of suspicion that there might besomethingto Cloister’s hunch. The memory of the night before sidled through his brain to remind him Cloisterhadsaid he’d still owe him. The thought hung around his brain, all sticky, sly temptation as he hefted the box in his arms and headed out. He had no intention of indulging it. The fallout from their one-night stand was still to come, and he didn’t need to pencil in new fuckups, but his libido didn’t seem to care.
The silent shudder of the phone in his pocket dragged him out of the mire of distracting lust and badly written notebooks. Javi straightened up, craned his neck from one side to the other to make his vertebrae crackle, and tugged the phone out.
A quick glance at the screen confirmed it was the lab calling. He quickly swiped Accept on the call and lifted the phone to his ear.
“Merlo,” he said. “Do you have the results on the bottle?”
“Yes. Yes, we do,” the voice on the other end said. The remnants of an old stutter caught between the words. All the syllables got out, but with odd gaps between. It was worse in person. If Fletcher could see your eyes, he could hardly get the words out. “Whoever blended this together wasnotlooking for a good trip. It’s a blend of Red Bull, dipt… diisopropyltryptamine—an hallucinogen—and, in a blast from the past, mephedrone.”
“Foxy has been on the rise in Southern California,” Javi pointed out absently as he tucked an evidence bag back into the box.
“I know,” Fletcher said. “I’ve seen it coming through the lab a couple of times this year, although Plenty is still predominantly meth. I’ve never heard of it being mixed like this, though. Besides, this mephedrone is an old chemical composition that used to turn up in Bath Salts.”
Javi paused and tapped the top of the box absently with his fingers. “How old?”
There was a pause and the sound of keys clacking quickly in the background. “Like I said, it’s an old composition. Most of the drugs in the US used MPDV. Mephedrone was used mostly in Europe. I guess 2004 to 2008?”
“Has it ever turned up in Plenty before?”
“Possibly, but like I said, Plenty’s always been a meth town,” Fletcher said. “And not always great with keeping records. Sorry.”
“No,” Javi said. “That’s really useful. Thank you.”
More than useful. Fletcher’s call had finally tipped Cloister’s hunch enough toward likely to warrant further investigation. Not that Javi was going to acquit Billy Hartley just yet—the boy was clearly hiding something, and he was the last person to see his brother—but if a thirteen-year-old were going to drug someone, he’d use his mother’s valium or take a drug dealer’s free meth sample, not a drug that was popular back when the missing Birdie was hanging around with drug dealers.
He forced the lid back onto the box, stood up, and tucked it under his arm as he headed down to the back office. Mel looked up from the computer as Javi set the archive box on her desk. A flick of sharp blue eyes behind cat-eye glasses acknowledged he was there, and an uplifted finger told him to wait. She gave clipped orders in a brisk voice and then pulled her headphones down to hang around her neck.
“What?”
Either Mel had been on dispatch long enough to adopt the staccato rhythm of police radio in her everyday speech, or she just didn’t care for being disturbed.
