He rapped his knuckles against door.
The soft murmur of voices inside faltered, and then a tall, dark man with a good haircut and a better suit stepped into the hall. The tension lines that bracketed his mouth deepened when he saw Cloister. Apparently Agent Javier Merlo hadn’t forgotten their last meeting either.
“Deputy.”
Asshole.
“Special Agent.”
Merlo glanced at the girl. “You can go. Let me know if anyone else arrives.”
She hesitated for a second and then nodded and hurried into the dark. Merlo swung his attention back to Cloister. The shame of it was that he was the best-looking dickhead in town, with the sharp, chiseled features you usually only saw in fashion magazines and on Greek statues.
“I asked for three K-9 teams.”
“I’m the only one available right now,” Cloister said. “The others are occupied. They’ll be here as soon as they can. What happened?”
The corner of Merlo’s mouth curled, and he adjusted the cuffs of his shirt. It was the first sign of emotion other than impatience and smugness that Cloister could remember seeing from their resident special agent.
“Twelve-year-old boy,” Merlo told him in a tight voice, pitched low so the wind couldn’t carry it away. “Drew Hartley. He went missing sometime today. Parents were at a workshop. His brother, William, was with him until three and then went to see a friend. His parents were due back, but they were delayed. They all assumed Drew was with someone else.”
Cloister checked his watch. It was closer to 1:00 a.m. than midnight. Drew had potentially been missing for over nine hours. Not impossible to catch a scent after that long, but it wasn’t ideal—especially not on a hot dry day in an area that had a lot of bodies moving through it.
Not impossible, though.
He nodded at the cabin. “This is the last place he was seen?”
Merlo nodded. “Deputy Witte, I’ve sent in a request for a helicopter with thermal imaging capability, but until that arrives, I have to depend on you. So whatever issues we might have had last time we worked together—”
“No issues,” Cloister said.
Not exactly true. He didn’t like Merlo, mostly because Merlo made it clear he thought K-9 officers were a fond anachronism who should put their faith in technology instead of good dogs and sharp noises, but a little because he looked at Cloister like he’d found something nasty in his shoe. And that was a bad way for a crush to die.
None of that mattered right now. They both had a job to do.
“Introduce us to the family?” Cloister asked.
Merlo looked like he wasn’t happy about something but inclined his head and led the way back inside. There was an old chip on Cloister’s shoulder that wanted him to sneer at the family inside—absentee yuppie parents who hadn’t even known their child was missing—but the Hartleys didn’t look that different from any other parents in the same situation. Nicer clothes on their backs and better furniture to sit on, maybe, but the same sour-salt smell of fear and the hollow slump of pretrained grief. Deputy Tancredi was sitting with them, giving her best line of reassuring, noncommittal platitudes.
“Ken, Lara.” Merlo dropped his voice to an awkwardly gentle tone. It was obviously not something he was good at.
The parents looked up with eyes desperate to believe that Cloister was going to help. The father was short and dark—the undiluted Slavic lines of his face not quite matched with the unexceptional Hartley surname. His wife was thin and angular, with deep-set, bruised-looking eyes and a puff of dark curls that defied her fear. Perched behind them in the window seat like he wasn’t entirely sure of his place in the room, their son was an unfinished sketch of them both.
William. Probably Bill or Billy to anyone without a stick up their ass. Cloister didn’t have any urge to poke at the miserable kid.
Merlo reached up to tap Cloister’s shoulder. “This is Deputy Witte, one of the sheriff’s department’s dog handlers.” He left it at that.
Cloister freed his hand from the collar and reached down to slap Bourneville’s side. “And this is my partner, Bourneville,” he said. “She’s one of our best trackers.”
She panted at them with her ears up and her jaw open in a dog smile. Cloister could feel Merlo’s irritated impatience with him, but he didn’t get it. The Hartleys didn’t need to have faith in Cloister. They needed to believe the dog was a lot more capable than the pets they saw in everyday life.
The wife—Lara—twisted her hands together in bony, knuckly knots. “He’s a good boy,” she said. Her voice was thin and taut. She was barely holding on over the panic. “Drew wouldn’t just go off with his friends or something without leaving us a note. He’d know we’d worry.”
“They know that, Mom,” Billy said.
Something ugly hit Lara’s face. She grimaced it away and rubbed her hand over her mouth. She took a deep breath, and lifted her narrow shoulders toward her ears before she could speak again.
“No, they don’t,” she said. Billy winced and squeezed himself back into the window. “They come up here, and they look at us, and they think Drew’s just another neglected little rich boy. Well, he’s not. He’s a good boy.”
