“Hold on,” Cloister told her. He scratched the back of his neck where a scrape stung with sweat, and he knelt down next to her. The grass on the side of the road was flattened and creased, and there was an indentation in the dirt where something had recently been pried up.
The stains on the grass weren’t soda this time.
Cloister rocked back onto his heels and felt the pull in his thighs. It could just have been a tumble, but Bourneville had stopped sniffing around. The trail was cold, and there was blood on the ground.
He quickly praised Bourneville, scrubbed his hand down her back, told her she was a good dog, and radioed in. There was a cold weight in the pit of his stomach.
No one would say “snatched.” Not yet. It wouldn’t do to cause panic, and for an ex-hippie, the owner of the Retreat was very good at greasing palms to make bad press go away. But maybe it wasn’t that. Drew might turn up in an hour, next to a gopher hole with a swollen ankle or in a hospital after some Good Samaritan picked up an injured kid on the road.
Except that wasn’t going to happen. The kid wasn’t lost. He’d been taken.
Cloister was still going to find him. That was what hedid, but… that was as far as he’d let himself get. After thebutwas where hope started to fade, and Cloister wouldn’t go there. Until he knew better, there was going to be a happy ending.
Eventually one of the endings had to be happy.
Chapter Three
THE COFFEEwas road-stop shit, bought from a gas station that also sold deep-fried chicken gizzards and wilted, wrinkled french fries. It tasted like grease and gas. Javi drank it anyhow. The sun had just risen on the second day of Drew Hartley’s disappearance, and Javi needed all the fuzzy-edged clarity he could pull together.
“Learn to nap. In this job forty winks is better than nothing.”It was Drew’s grandfather, Saul Lee, who gave Javi that advice. Not that Javi had ever seen the man heed his own counsel. It had been three in the morning when Saul died, and he was still at the office—facedown in that day’s caseload, a cup of coffee going cold on the desk.
Javi still owed him. It was Saul’s intervention after Phoenix that got Javi posted here instead of moldering away somewhere quiet and unobtrusive. Plenty wasn’t much of a tourist destination, but it was a solid, professional stepping stone. Even though half the reason his supervisors approved him was for the good optics of having a Mexican-American agent in San Diego.
Probably not so much, though, if the case that made your name was the unsolved mystery around a decorated FBI officer’s missing grandson.
The vinegary cynicism made Javi flinch with guilt, mostly because it wasn’t the first time it had happened, although he’d never let it get as far as a full thought before.
“Results, not intentions, are all that matter in the write-up.”That was Saul too.
KEEPING ONEhand on the steering wheel, Javi drained the coffee to the unappetizing dregs as he drove down Plenty’s Main Street. It was quaint in a way that towns rarely evolved naturally, with leaded glass in the storefronts and no trash on the sidewalks. The shops sold yogurt-and-kale smoothies, designer shoes, and Native jewelry at three times the price they paid the artists. Antique shops sold upcycled furniture and relics retrieved from abandoned farms and houses.
The uglier side of Plenty—the drug cartels and trafficking that were the reason the FBI had a resident agency there—was kept out of sight. Out of mind, for those who could afford it.
He turned left at the bus station and then pulled into the police station’s horseshoe-shaped parking lot. The building was a factory once—iron machinery, scarred wood floors, and red brick walls. These days it was home to the police station, the Plenty Records Office, the town morgue, and on the top floor, where the executive offices used to be, the FBI’s resident agency—their version of a regional office. Thankfully they didn’t all have to share an entrance.
Patrol cars were lined up in neat rows, waiting for the morning shift to roll out. A tired-looking woman in jogging pants and aBatman needs naps tooT-shirt leaned against the wall, smoking with the intensity of someone who needed more than just a nicotine fix. Her hair, a flat shade of home-bleached brass, was dragged back into a tight ponytail, and her eyes were puffy and dark ringed.
As Javi got out of the car, she ground the cigarette out against the wall. It left an ashy comma smudged into the brick.
“Fucker,” she said flatly.
Her lack of affect made it hard to tell if she was talking to Javi about her situation or condemning the world at large. She went back inside and left the shredded butt on the ground.
The woman on duty at the front desk glanced up when he came in.
“Special Agent Merlo,” she said. She covered the mouthpiece of the phone with her hand to muffle it. “The lieutenant is waiting for you.”
POLICE STATIONcoffee didn’t taste any better than gas station coffee, but it was served hot enough that, after the first mouthful, your taste buds were too stunned to register it. Javi nursed a mug as he stood and stared at the search parameters scratched out on the wall-mounted map. Red pins marked the locations of nearby sex and violent offenders. There was a constellation of them.
Up in the foothills, it seemed like the fear and panic over the lost little boy was an intrusion into an idyll. The sort of thing that didn’t happen in a place like that. Except it did, apparently.
“I’ve got deputies checking in with all registered pervs,” Lieutenant Frome said from behind his desk. He licked his thumb and scrubbed at a blotch of coffee stain on his cuff. “That only covers the ones we’ve caught and who do keep up with signing in.”
He shrugged off the last statement tiredly. Javi already knew the issues.
“I want to pull in Mr. Reed for a chat,” Javi said, naming the affable, ethical-clothing-wearing reptile who owned the Retreat.
Frome frowned. “You think he’s involved?” He shook his head dubiously. “We’ve never had much problem with him. Even when he was dealing pot, he kept it quiet and polite. Threw a few ‘pigs’ and ‘filths’ at us when we went up, but that was for show as much as anything.”
