“You can wait in the car if you want,” he said.
“I’ve come this far,” Javi said. “I might as well see it through.”
Cloister smirked and stooped over to unclip Bourneville’s leash. He could feel her quivering with pent-up energy as she waited for the command.
“Bourneville, find RJ,” he barked. “Where’s RJ?”
It was kinder thancorpseif the family was there, or the press, and Cloister was the only one who knew what it really meant. Besides, it worked. The minute he let go of Bourneville’s collar, she was away.
She trotted the first couple of yards, sniffed around, and doubled back on herself. The burned-out car pulled her over, and she circled in twice on big, gloved feet.
“She smells the raccoon,” Javi said impatiently.
“No,” Cloister says. “She can tell the difference.”
Something had happened in the car, but between the weather, the years, and the fire, it wasn’t enough to hold Bourneville’s nose. She snorted, abandoned the car, and made a beeline for the splintered front door of one of the nearby houses. Like the car, someone had put a match to it at some point. The roof was caved in, and the windows were smoke-stained shards of glass.
There was enough of a gap at the bottom of the door for her to squirm through. Cloister loped after her and caught up just as her tail disappeared into the dark. The door had been broken up previously. Twisted metal popped out of the charred wood of the door. Cloister shoved it open. A drift of trash behind it scraped over the floor, and he found a room that looked like somewhere you’d find a dead body.
Profanity was scraped into the walls, stained bedding was shoved into a corner, and discarded balls of tinfoil threaded the vinegary bite of heroin through the piss-and-smoke stink of the place. Bourneville was already gone, though, and the indistinct smudge of gloved paw prints were left in the sooty residue on the ground.
There was someone dead nearby, and the scent had to be strong.
Cloister broke into a run. All those late-night sprints down the beach weren’t just to wear himself out until he could sleep without dreaming. Dogs that had gotten the scent rarely remembered their handlers were stuck on slow human legs. He spent a lot of time trying to keep up with her.
He went through the kitchen, scrambled over the cracked beam that had come down and crushed the sink, and ran across the alley at the back. A disgruntled, scrawny tabby cat, still arched and bristly from an unexpected encounter with a big dog, hissed at him from the top of a broken wall.
Bourneville wove through rubble and unfinished buildings. She went in one door and came out another, doubled back on herself, and crisscrossed over her own path. Occasionally she’d stop and look around to check that she knew where Cloister was.
“Has she lost the scent?” Javi asked when he caught up with Cloister. They were both sweating, Cloister’s T-shirt was stuck to him, and the stiff collar of Javi’s shirt was damp and out of shape. Javi wasn’t quite as out of breath as Cloister might have expected, but then—Cloister hitched in a quick breath—hehadseen the hard lines of muscle hidden under the sharp tailoring.
“No,” Cloister said. He pulled the neck of his T-shirt up and wiped his face. “She’s… triangulating.”
A sniff at the base of a pallet of bricks, and Bourneville took off again. She arrowed in a mostly straight line down the sketched-out street and into the shell of a building that never got beyond the ground floor. At one point the walls had been plastered and the roof intact, but years of sand and the elements had worn both paper-thin and pocked. The windows were intact, and the protective film still clung on in shreds.
Bourneville flopped down on the floor, chin on her paws, and whined. Her eyes were flat and her tail clamped in around her haunches. It was her tell, but Cloister could never shake the feeling that she felt bad about not finding the corpse while it was still alive.
“Good girl,” he said as he took a knee next to her. He fussed over her until she relaxed, uncoiled from her tell posture, and sat up. Cloister pulled the T-shirt bone from his pocket and tossed it across the room for her. She skidded after it, nearly went headlong into the wall, and flopped down to slobber on it. While she was occupied, Cloister tapped his knuckles against the sheet of chipboard flooring. It was dry enough to rattle under his knuckles.
There was no smell. No stain.
“Did you see a crowbar outside?” he asked. When Javi just snorted at him, he shrugged and fished in his pocket for the chunky rectangle of his old Swiss Army Knife. The cover was chipped and battered, and grime was worked into the hinges, but it was the closest the Wittes had to a family heirloom—three generations, two sets of initials, and taken apart at least twice to get the blood out before it rusted.
He hooked his finger in the groove and pulled the knife blade out.
“Maybe it’s not her,” Javi said. He had his phone in his hands, and the flash blinked as he snapped a picture of the floor.
“It’s still someone.”
Cloister supposed they could call it in and wait for the CSI team to excavate the area properly. Except he wasn’t keen on swallowing the jeers if it turned out to be a bag of pork ribs a builder had dumped in the foundations instead of the garbage can. Besides, if this was Birdie Utkin, she’d been in this sad, sour place long enough.
He dug the knife into the chipboard, which cracked and broke under the digging point. He wriggled the blade around until there was a hole big enough to get his fingers in. The sharp edges dug into his skin as he wrenched at it, and the sheet of wood bowed up under the pressure. Two nails popped out of the floor, screeching out of the wood, and a chunk of the chipboard snapped off.
“Shit,” Javi said. “You were right.”
The flash went again, the bright light harsh on the plastic covering the dry, wizened face of a girl who’d been too young to end up lost under a floor. She was curled up on her side, hugging herself with wiry, jerky-tanned arms. Her hair was a brittle, wispy halo, more dust colored than anything else. But it had probably been blonde.
“It’s her,” Cloister said.
