“Since the Retreat opened, there’ve been twelve complaints of sexual misconduct and harassment.”
Frome shrugged. “A couple of girls from town who thought they’d get a settlement from a wealthy guest. Or teenagers who got a bit out of hand. It was nothing serious, and no one’s ever made any suggestion that Reed was involved.”
It was an effort for Javi to keep the grimace off his mouth. Frome wasn’t a bad cop, but he was a political one. Sometimes that made for ugly things coming out of his mouth, but calling him on it wasn’t going to help.
“Still,” he said. “He’s king of the castle up there. I’d like to talk to him where he’s less comfortable.”
Frome gave in with a nod, and his pen scratched over the pad as he made a note. “I’ll ask him to come down, tell him we just want to discuss the area?”
“And make sure that we have an officer up there to stay with the family,” Javi added. “Two if you can manage it. Use my authorization. I want to know everything they do when they’re together and when they aren’t.”
“You sure?” Frome asked doubtfully. “We all know them. They’re good people. Lara’s worked in the ER for years. She’s saved people’s lives. Deputies’ lives.”
“Until we have something, I’d rather maintain a nonconfrontational relationship with the family,” he said. “But the parents and the brother are the ones who saw the boy last. If we don’t look at them, you know that would be negligence.”
It wasn’t nice, but the truth behind all those asshole detectives harassing desperate parents in crime dramas was that, more often than not—say seven times out of ten—it wasn’t the creepy neighbor or the predatory store clerk. It was someone in the family—one of the people who had unquestioned access to and control over the child.
“I can’t imagine Lara doing something like that. Not to her own son.” Frome shook his head.
The image of the beaten-down woman who was smoking outside a police station like it was a work break flicked through Javi’s mind.
“Every deviant and pervert in jail had people in their life who just couldn’t believe it of them,” he said. “I don’t think they’ve done anything to their son. I hope they haven’t. But if they have, I don’t want them to get away with it.”
Frome sat back, and the chair creaked under him. His uniform shirt strained gently over the gut that made itself known in that position. He tapped his pen against the pad hard enough to leave dents in the paper.
“You should talk to Witte.”
Even from inside it, the expression on Javi’s face felt supercilious. He couldn’t help it. Deputy Witte rubbed him the wrong way.
“About what?” he asked. “Dogs or country music.”
Frome gave him a smile that was amused but not entirely approving. “Don’t underestimate him,” he said. “He’s good at what he does.”
“Chase dogs?”
“Find people,” Frome said. “He volunteers with San Diego’s mountain rescue. He’s trained for Structural Collapse Urban Search and Rescue, and the only reason he’s not up on that mountain right now is that I pulled him off so his dog could get some sleep. He’s dealt with more missing and lost people than either of us have, or probably ever will, and he was the first deputy up there that night. Maybe he noticed something. If anyone was in a position to, it was him. Talk to Witte.”
He ripped the top page off the pad and held it out. Javi took it from him and glanced at the scrawled writing. It was a phone number and address. Javi raised an eyebrow. Not how he usually got a man’s number, but….
“I’ll talk to him,” he said and tucked the page into his pocket. “You can let me know when you’re bringing Reed down for an interview.”
When he left, the woman in the Batman sleep shirt was outside again. This time she was crying in her car, a beat-up old Ford with bags of clothes and a sleeping bag shoved into the backseat. Homeless. Part of the growing population in Plenty, where there was a lot of work to be had but nowhere to live unless you had enough for a two-story house with a pool and solar panels.
Javi knew that ifshe’dcalled in a missing child, there would have been no kid gloves for her. Life wasn’t fair, but he supposed she already knew that.
Chapter Four
JAVI HEADEDout of town. The candy store had closed, he noticed on his way by, and a Starbucks had moved into the space like a hermit crab. Javi ran his tongue over the back of his teeth and tasted burned coffee and the fuzz of cheap creamer. About time they got a good coffee shop in town.
Maybe he’d grab a cup later. For the moment, he followed the signs that pointed the way out to Plenty’s unprepossessing shoreline—more shale than sand—and the trailer park where Deputy Witte was living the stereotype.
To think Javi believed he was being insulting when he called the big blond deputy trailer trash after their last argument.
The Sunnyside Trailer Park played host to tourists during the summer. There wasn’t a whole lot to see in Plenty—the quaint Main Street, a winery that did tours up in the foothills near the Retreat, and a cave system on the beach that was mostly underwater and never had seals in it—but it was close enough to actual tourist destinations to serve as a stopover.
At this time of year, rows of lots stood empty. The rest of the lots were filled with the longtimers’ trailers, complete with low fences and summer-bleached garden furniture. Most of them were construction workers or field hands, seasonal labor at the farms and building sites that surrounded the town. There were a few drifters too—people who rolled aimlessly into town and hung around doing odd jobs and petty crime until they had a reason to leave.
Javi pulled in under the peeling wooden sign and parked in the half-moon lot next to a pickup that stank of old fruit pulp. A couple of kids chased each other around the trailers, stripped to swimwear and with the dark, year-round tans of beach dwellers. Skinny, shaved-down dogs barked at their heels and twisted between their legs.
