“She’ll be angry at you,” Cloister told him and squeezed his shoulder gently. “Maybe she’ll be angry at you for a real long time. She won’t hate you.”
A sigh, another sniff, and then Billy nodded. “Okay,” he almost mouthed, his voice was so low. “Okay, but I don’t even know if it’ll help.”
Cloister didn’t lie often. Dogs and the bereaved didn’t understand the idea of a white lie, or best efforts, or optimism. They just saw that you’d promised something and then not given it to them.
“It will,” he said, and he hoped it was true.
The search party, a shrunken version of the one that was still looking for Drew, was just about to head out when Cloister dragged Billy back into the Retreat. When Lara saw her son, her face lit up with relief that spread down from her eyes to the corners of her lips. It took her three long steps to remember that she thought he might be a murderer. Her face closed over and turned cold, and her outstretched hands trembled and then dropped back to her side.
“Where was he?” she asked and swallowed hard. It was obvious she half expected the answer to be something horrible, something incriminating.
“He just lost track of time,” Cloister said. He nudged Billy forward a step. “He’s all right now.”
A half-hearted mutter of relief spread through the crowd of searchers. The fact that Billy was—had been—a suspect obviously wasn’t a secret anymore. One of the women stepped forward to put an arm around Lara. Her “you must be so relieved” wasn’t any more convincing than Lara’s delayed agreement.
“Of course,” she said.
Three men pushed their way through the crowd. Ken ignored his son and went straight to his wife and tried to pull her into his arms. She shoved at him impatiently and thumped the heels of her hands against his chest as she tried to keep him at arm’s length. When that didn’t work, she hissed something angry enough to make the woman trying to comfort her go round mouthed and round eyed—scandalized, delighted, and guilty all at once. It made Ken back up. He dropped his empty arms to his side as though he didn’t know what else to do with them.
The other two headed straight for Cloister, and he braced himself for a scolding.
“Where the hell have you been?” Javi gritted out, anger smeared like two lines of red paint across his cheekbones. The man with him stepped in front of Javi, ignored his low snarl of irritation, and asked sharply, “More importantly, what the hell are you doing with my client?”
That let Cloister put his finger on his name, or at least his profession—the lawyer Lara had called in when they brought Billy in for questioning. Diggs. He was dark and pretty, with expensive hair and a suit that made it look like he shopped in the same store as Javi. It was stupid to be jealous, but Cloister felt the emotion latch on anyhow. It sank its teeth into the back of his tongue, and reminding himself that he had no fucking claim on Javi or any reason to think the lawyer did have a claim didn’t do anything to dissuade it. Cloister rolled his shoulders back and tried to work the tension out of the muscles.
“You’d mislaid him,” Cloister reminded Diggs flatly. The edge to his voice could probably pass for a cop’s easy dislike of a defense lawyer. “Maybe you should be more careful.”
Diggs took another step forward. He pulled himself up to his full height, chin up and black eyes snapping. He was nearly half a foot shorter than Cloister, but that didn’t seem to bother him.
“You were told that any future contact with my clients had to be done through me,” he said. “If you ignored that and interrogated myunderageclient, then I’ll get anything said thrown out of court.”
He lifted a finger and poked Cloister in the chest to underline his point. Maybe Javi had been telling the man that Cloister was approachable. Down by his knee, Bourneville picked up the bleed of tension through Cloister’s muscles. She growled, and the sound was low and nasty in her chest.
To his credit Diggs had the good sense to take that as a sign he should step back. Cloister dropped a hand to Bourneville’s head to reassure her he wasn’t in danger.
“Don’t poke me,” he said bluntly.
“Then don’t try to do a side run around me to get to my clients,” Diggs snapped back. “Billy’s parents and I have made our position perfectly clear, and we expect—”
“We talked, that’s all,” Billy said. His voice cracked with nerves, or puberty, as he glanced over at his parents. “I want to talk to them. Okay?”
It started as a statement, but by the end of the sentence, it was a question. He desperately wanted them to make the decision for him.
“Maybe that’s a good idea, as long as—” Ken started to say. His attempt at conviction faltered and dropped away the minute his wife interrupted him.
“What if we don’t want him to?” Lara asked. She glanced at Billy and then away, and the line of her jaw pulled sharply under stress-dull skin. Her voice was very small as she quietly added. “What if I don’t want to know?”
This time when Ken reached for her, she let him pull her into a hug. It didn’t look like affection to Cloister, just that she didn’t have the energy to keep fighting him. Families fractured over lesser things than a missing child, but maybe he was wrong.
Healthy emotional relationships weren’t his area of expertise.
“You need to know,” he told her. “One way or another, you need to know. Trust me.”
She’d trusted him once, and he told her her son had been taken. Cloister didn’t know if she had it in her to do it again. But after a second, she nodded against her husband’s shoulder.
“Okay,” she said. She extracted herself more gently from Ken and held her hand out to Billy. He stared at it as though he expected a slap but finally shuffled forward and let her grab his fingers. She squeezed tightly and left white divots on the back of his hand as she dragged her chin down in a sharp nod. “You can talk to them if you want, Billy. No matter what, Idolove you.”
Cloister’s mom had said that too. He really wanted to make sure that, for Billy, it didn’t have to be a lie.
