Cloister hooked the leash onto Bourneville’s harness and gave one tightly folded ear a quick tug. He didn’t know what Tancredi thought was going on between him and Javi—anything from secret marriage to unrequited crush—but it was probably better than the truth.
“Tancredi.”
“You look at him like the way I looked at sushi when I was pregnant,” she pointed out. “Can’t miss it.”
Cloister ignored her remark. “Hector—Matthew—knows that he’s in the weeds.” He kicked the door shut and clicked his fingers at Bourneville. She stuck to his heels as he headed for Javi’s car. The fact that there’d been no attempt to move the car wasn’t a good sign. The techs had already popped the doors.
“Do you even have anything with Merlo’s scent on it to follow?” Tancredi asked.
“I will in a minute.” Cloister told Bourneville to sit, and he opened the car. The discarded shirt would be on the passenger seat or tossed into the footwell behind the driver’s seat. But Javi had folded it, bagged it, and stashed it in the glove compartment. Even better. The scent would be preserved. “If I don’t find them, the helicopters will.”
Even Tancredi’s freckles looked disapproving, but she let him get on with it. Cloister crouched down and called Bourneville to heel with a snap of his fingers. He bent over and pressed his face in her rough, sweaty coat for a second. She smelled of dust and the Cheeto reek of sweaty dog, and her sides heaved against his face as she panted. For once it didn’t make him feel better.
It was his fault. Just like last time. The guilt was an oppressive, smug stain in the back of his brain. It smothered all the justifications he tried to field. It didn’t matter to the guilt that Javi didn’t want to be anything to Cloister—neither his lover nor his responsibility. It still knew he’d let Javi down and lost him. Just like last time.
“Good girl, Bourneville,” he said as he leaned back. The plastic bag was folded instead of sealed, hot and stretchy under Cloister’s fingers. He pulled it apart and presented it to Bourneville. She eagerly pushed her nose into the ball of cotton, sneezed, and rooted around at it until she found a rich fold of sweat and skin cells. Her tail came up and wagged enthusiastically against the wind as she caught the scent. “Find Javi. Suuch.”
Bourneville barked sharply and lowered her nose to the ground. She leaned into the leash as she followed the scent from one tuft of grass to the other where the scent was caught in the dirt. The track led in a straight line from the car to the reception desk.
Her nails clicked on the wood as she padded through the door and worked her way around the room. Cloister wound up the slack of the lead and balled the strap around his fist like a gauntlet to keep her out of the marked-off evidence areas.
“Witte,” Frome said. He put enough snap in his voice that Cloister couldn’t ignore it without being obvious.
“Sir?” He braced himself to argue that Bourneville would give them a head start—that any advantage was better than nothing.
“Take Tancredi. I don’t want to end up with another officer missing.”
One strand of the tension that was tangled through Cloister’s shoulders relaxed. He nodded to Frome and turned his attention back to Bourneville. She had her feet up on the couch—there were dusty paw prints all over the pale cushions—as she stuck her nose under the cushions. The puke got an interested sniff, but Cloister pulled her back before her black nose could knock over one of the yellow tags.
“Pfui,” he snapped. “Back to work, Bourneville. Suuch.”
She grunted at the insult, shook her head to make her ears flap, and got back to work. The scent trail took her back out of the reception area and down the porch steps. She dragged him between a storage shed and the laundry and through the short alley, which was a wind tunnel as the gust whistled through it. A sharp right took them behind the big hall where the ATVs were parked up, and then she course corrected back onto the narrow, foot-worn path.
This time she was sure of where she was going. Her tongue flapped out of the corner of her mouth as she made a beeline down a hill toward a scrubby stand of trees that bent in the wind. As Cloister got closer, he picked out a flatter sheet of green flapping between the branches. It was a loose tarp, tangled up in ropes.
“What is it?” Tancredi asked as she slid to a stop next to him. Her hair was twisted into dusty knots, and she had to stop to bat a wad of leaves—freshly torn from the tree—away from her face. “Or what was it?”
Cloister crouched down and grabbed the edge of the tarp. He flapped it up and peered underneath. There were heavy-duty tire tracks in the dirt and oily, irregular stains. The tarp had the sweet, sickly smell of gas.
“Matthew had an ATV hidden out here,” he said.
Tancredi puffed out her cheeks in a frustrated sigh. “By now he could have gone thirty miles? Forty.”
“More, maybe,” Cloister said. “I don’t think he cares too much about safety right now.”
He clenched his fist around the tarp and felt his stomach sink with dismay. If the foot trail was interrupted, their chances of tracking—
Bourneville suddenly barked and threw herself against the leash. She paced back and forth at the end of the two meters of braided nylon. There was something there. Cloister loped over to her, and she took advantage of the sudden slack against her collar to dart forward a few inches. Then she stopped, dropped her nose, and huffed at the patch of ground.
“What’s that?” Cloister asked as he reached her. “Good girl. What have you found?”
He bent down and saw the irregular puddle of blood dried into the dirt. Fear—that old, whistling shadow in the back of his brain—was his first reaction. His second was almost heady relief.
“Maybe Merlo was able to injure his kidnapper,” Tancredi suggested hopefully. But she didn’t sound convinced.
“Whoever it is, I hope they keep bleeding,” Cloister said. He caught Bourneville’s collar and tugged her over to his side so he could unhook it. Eagerness trembled through her muscles as she waited. “She can track this.”
“You hope,” Tancredi said.
