“Okay. I was really dehydrated, high as a kite, and I was sunburned really badly—but I wasn’t dead, and I didn’t have sexually transmitted diseases, which my mom kept going on about. So I was in peak physical form.” He sniffed and snorted the breath out in a dry little laugh. “Hell, couple of years later, and it would have been a normal weekend for me. So I suppose it can’t have been that bad.”
It fit. The pieces were twisted and stained, but they fit. Javi pushed a pad of paper over the table to Leo.
“Write down anything you can remember. Times, people, locations,anything,” he said. Leo looked daunted and wiped his hand over his face. “You’ve already been very helpful, Mr. Szerdo, and we appreciate it. Just a few minutes more. If there’s anything you can think of that can help. Anything at all.”
Leo pulled his lower lip between his teeth and chewed on the skin. “There’s nothing,” he said, but he pulled the pad toward him. The lawyer gave him a pen.
“You know, you didn’t actually do anything wrong,” Cloister said as he stood up. He hovered with his fingertips braced against the table as Leo looked up at him.
“What?” Leo asked, squinting uncertainly up at him. The nib of the pen scrawled to a stop on the page and left a line of text unfinished.
Cloister shrugged and pushed himself up straight. “It’s just that I’m not sure why you’re still punishing yourself.”
The pen didn’t start moving again between Cloister’s statement and him joining Javi outside the interview room. Javi waited until the door swung shut.
“You were right,” he said. “We don’t have a serial killer. Birdie’s death was an unintentional consequence. Probably an accident.”
Cloister gave him a guarded look, his light eyes unreadable. “Well, at least I saved my one good idea for the second half of the year,” he said lazily.
Ah, yes. That. The taunt had felt satisfying, if petty, in the moment—a passing slice at a familiar target. It had slipped Javi’s mind that it wasn’t an entirely appropriate way to talk to someone you’d fucked. Not if you wanted to fuck them again.
He probablyshouldn’tfuck Cloister again, of course, but that didn’t mean he wanted to take the option off the table.
“Well, if you’ve been good, maybe Santa will bring you one for Christmas,” he said. It was meant to be disarmingly flirtatious. Even to Javi’s ears, it sounded more condescending. He shrugged mentally. What else was he going to do? Apologize? Hardly. He left the awkward moment hanging, swung back to the case, and talked briskly as he walked down the hall. Cloister couldn’t have been that offended because he strode along with him. “Tancredi said you had a list of the other possible victims. Send it to her so we can get to work on finding our actual victims.”
“I can—”
“You can go and get some sleep,” Javi said. A sidelong glance showed a sullen expression on Cloister’s face, or it might have been sullen. It mildly peeved Javi that he could already guess at how to get Cloister to do what he wanted, and that itwasn’tseduction. “How many hours should a dog’s shift be?”
He took Cloister’s guilty frown as a surrender.
“I’m not sure what good finding Leo did, though,” Cloister said. He rubbed his eye and ground the heel of his hand into the socket while he dug his fingers into his hair. “We didn’t learn anything useful.”
Javi pressed his lips together. A better man probably wouldn’t have been tempted to leave Cloister with that conclusion. He wasn’t a better man, though, and finding Leo had been a nice bit of detective work he knew Cloister would never capitalize on. After a brief battle, his conscience won out.
“That’s not entirely true,” he said. “We know that the point of our suspect’s crimes isn’t murder. We know where he’s been operating, and we know that six years ago, he was working with an addict who got a dose of whatever he used on poor Leo. Which meanssheprobably ended up in the hospital.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
OR THEpen. That would have been Javi’s second choice. It was Tancredi who brought him the file, but she didn’t know the subject of it. So that meant a call to the other ex-cop in town.
“Alice Murney?” Sean said through the phone’s speaker. There was a blur to his voice. He was at least a couple of beers to the wind. “That’s a blast from the past. What does a hot-shit special agent like you, Agent Merlo, want with a sad little crack whore like Alice?”
Javi took a swig of an energy drink. The liquid was cold from the vending machine and tasted like artificial blueberry and the bitter, flat aftertaste of taurine. He was using Frome’s office since the lieutenant had gone home for a couple of hours. So far he’d approved a press release on the search’s progress, which underlined their continued faith in Drew’s well-being, gotten an email about their suspect from Doctor Galloway—they were still waiting on the lab for the breakdown of the chemicals in Birdie’s corpse—and left an urgent message for Luna McBride to call him back from her university in Philly. She was one of the lost-and-found children. The other boy, the firefighter’s son, had committed suicide a year and a half earlier. Javi was tired, and his tolerance for bad coffee had worn out two hours ago. So taurine aftertaste was the go-to drink.
“Six years ago she was pretending to be Birdie Utkin,” Javi said.
There was a pause. When Sean’s voice came back, the blur was almost gone. He sounded sharp. “She wasn’t your snatcher, Merlo. Alice would have stabbed her own mother for a fix, but once she came down, she’d have turned herself in. Half the things we collared her on, she confessed to. She was a nice kid with a bitch of an addiction.”
Javi picked up his suit jacket from Frome’s chair and pulled it on. “We think she was working for our suspect,” he said. “Do you know where I could find her?”
“Now?” Sean said. “Probably in the ground. Like I said, bitch of an addiction. If she’s not dead, ask her mom? Not sure where Betsy’s living these days, but I could find out, if you want.”
“I do,” Javi said. “Do you remember Alice being pulled in six years ago? She was picked up down around the Mercado on a disorderly conduct.”
“I was a detective,” Sean said, putting the emphasis on the last word.
“So you say.” Javi ignored the “asshole” that Sean snorted at him. “She’d have been tripping, hallucinating, and hearing things.”
