“Your boys get to be babies,” the suspect said. “Spoilt, stupid, greedy babies. I show them.”
“Show them what, Hector?” Javi asked, testing the name.
Silence. He glanced at the tech who was still typing away frantically, his glasses barely clinging to the tip of his nose.
“Hector,” Javi pressed—confident that it was Birdie’s ex, “we just want Drew back. If you give him back, you won’t be in trouble. Not if you haven’t hurt him.”
There was a dry little puff of air as Hector cleared his throat. “I wouldn’t hurt anyone,” he said. “I just show them.”
“What about Birdie?” Javi asked. “What happened to her?”
The throat clearing turned into a dry cough, and Javi heard Hector spit in the background. “I didn’t hurt her. I loved her, but when I tried to show her, she couldn’t see it. She stayed spoiled. She stayed rotten. That was her choice.”
“I don’t think she had a choice.”
“I should go,” Hector said abruptly. “I’m keeping the boy. I’ll stop him being spoiled.”
He hung up.
A low, breathless groan burst out of Lara as though someone had punched her in the stomach. She went limp in Cloister’s arms, and he set her back on her feet and helped her over to a chair. The dog stopped her nervous, pacing patrol—looking for the threat she could sense from the atmosphere but not find—and went over to check on her.
“I’m sorry,” Billy blurted. He shot Lara guilty, terrified look. “I tried. I’m sorry.”
He bolted out of the room. The sound of his feet hammering on the stairs echoed through the still house, and then a door slammed. Lara looked up, and her nostrils flared as she breathed in.
“It’s not his fault,” she said. It sounded as though she were trying out the idea for size. She winced at the sound of it and tried again. “It’s not his fault.”
Cloister squeezed her elbow gently. “You should go and check on him.”
She smiled slightly with a rueful fold of her mouth. “I know. Could you get me a bottle of water first, please?”
Javi left Cloister to calm Lara down and turned to the tech instead. The man continued to jab at the keyboard.
“Did you get a location?” he asked.
The tech looked up. “I’ve got his IP address and general location,” he said. “Give me a couple of hours, and I’ll be able to chase down the ISP and address.”
“Anything to work with on the general location?”
The tech shrugged and scratched his head, and his nails slid through his short-cropped hair. “It was in Plenty.” He lifted his fingers off his skull in a half-hearted approach to a shrug. “North of the city. For anything else you’ll need to wait until I finish.”
It was frustrating, but Javi nodded brusquely. “Fast as you can.”
The tech flicked his eyes to Lara, and sympathy puckered his mouth. “Of course.”
He got back to work, and Javi turned toward Lara.
“I’m going to leave an officer here,” he told her. She held a bottle of water in her hand as though she’d forgotten it was there and absently picked at the plastic label with her nail. “However, I don’t want Billy getting in contact with the suspect again. It’s too much of a risk. So if you could make sure—”
“Who did he kill?” Lara looked to Javi. Her eyebrows pinched together over her nose. “How many did he kill?”
“He didn’t say—”
“I work in the ER. Drug addicts, child abusers, victims. They all think they can lie by misdirection. ‘It was my fault,’ when what they mean is ‘He got angry and hit me. Again.’ So don’t. Who did he kill?”
Javi traded a quick glance with Cloister. “Lara, it won’t make this any easier if you—”
“There’s nothing easy about this,” she said. “I asked for the truth.”
