“Mr. Park,” Javi said. “Your client has information that could be relevant to an ongoing investigation. If he would cooperate with us, it could make his current situation significantly easier.”
“His situation, as you call it, is about to go away,” Park said briskly. “It was a ‘bad bust.’ You had no warrant.”
Cloister shifted in the chair and leaned forward to put his elbows on the table. He ignored the lawyer, his attention on Leo.
“There’s a little boymissing,” he said in a rough, frustrated voice. “His brother is blaming himself, his mom’s devastated, and that little boy is scared out of his mind. How can younotwant to help him?”
It was vicious because it wasn’t. The anger in Cloister’s voice, in between the cracking honesty of it, just sounded confused. Like he didn’t understand how someone could turn their back. It made Javi feel a pinch of guilt for every ass-covering, career-oriented thought he’d had since Drew Hartley first slipped out of sight.
Tancredi was an able interviewer. A little stiff—she’d obviously read more books than she had experience—but with solid technique. She made a good cop. Cloister was like being punched by six foot one of principled redneck.
Park rapped his finger on the table. “That’s enough, I think,” he said firmly. “My client is not responsible—”
“No one helped me,” Leo muttered, barely moving his lips.
“Someone should have,” Cloister said.
Leo hesitated. For a second the hard shell of smarmy, entitled bad boy hung by a thread, and something raw and terrified was underneath. Then he pulled the mask back on and shrugged irritably.
“Even if I wanted to help, and like I said, it’s nothing to fucking do with me, I can’t,” he said. “So just charge me and let me get on with my life, okay?”
His voice was careless, but he had moved on to chewing the skin around his nails. He’d worried them raw, and beads of blood oozed from the quicks. Javi caught Park’s gaze across the table and raised his eyebrows.
It was enough. Park leaned into Leo’s side and whispered intently into his ear. Javi idly tried to read his lips.Demonstrate good faith. If you know anything.
“He’sten,”Cloister interrupted impatiently.
Javi grimaced but resisted the urge to kick him under the table. He opened his mouth, ready to smooth things over, but Leo had flinched. He blinked hard and swallowed.
“Ten?” he said.
“You didn’t see the news?” Javi asked.
A bitter, self-mocking smile stretched Leo’s mouth. “I don’t really keep up with the news. I knew a kid had gone missing. I didn’t….” He stopped and worked his jaw from side to side as though he needed to loosen up the muscles before he spoke. “Even if I wanted to help, I don’t think I can. It was….”
He stopped and blinked again.
“Anything you can do,” Javi said. “Anythingyou can tell us.”
Leo took a deep breath and wiped his nose. “And you’ll let this drugs thing slide?”
“We can discuss it,” Javi said.
“It was her,” he said as he eyes flicked toward Cloister. “Birdie. No one believes me, but it was.”
They hadn’t released the name of the dead girl they’d found in the construction site. Not yet. Javi paused and felt the case shift in his brain like a puzzle.
“You knew Birdie?”
“We weren’t friends. I talked to her a couple of times,” Leo said. He bit his lip and chewed at the rough skin. “Everyone thought I was making it up, that I was mad or a dick or something. Mom said I was hallucinating, but it was her. That’s why I went to meet her. She emailed me, said that she’d run away—we all knew she’d run away—but that she was worried about her mom. I tried to talk her into coming home, but I was a kid. What did I know about shit, right? She told me about all the bad things her dad had done, like stealing from people and beating them up? She said he used to come into her room at night and, you know.”
The words shuddered out of Leo, spat out one after the other with no pause to catch his breath. There was a brittle defiance to them, as though he were daring them not to believe him. It wasn’t a story that gelled with any other version of the Utkin family’s dynamic. The case files portrayed Utkin as a demanding but doting father, and Javi hadn’t detected any false notes in his grief over the dead girl. That didn’t necessarily mean anything, of course, but the fact that Birdie was dead when she told Leo cast the story into doubt.
“You became friends?”
“We talked on AIM. She texted me sometimes, but—” Leo paused to shrug. “—she was scared of people finding her, her dad finding her.”
He stopped and pressed a finger between his eyebrows and rubbed the skin in tense circles. His lawyer touched his arm and leaned in to murmur something in his ear. Leo shrugged him off and nodded.
