The only one who might be able to tell them that was Janet… if she made it.
Cloister had been hit by a car and walked—rolled—away with a broken wrist and enough cuts and bruises to piss his sort-of-ex into talking to him again. It would have been worse if he hadn’t had his bulletproof vest on, but he was still lucky. Janet had come off worse. The doctors weren’t willing to tell him anything but platitudes—she was stable, she was in the best place, it was too soon to tell—but he overheard them talking about bleeding on the brain and internal injuries. They used words likeextensiveandunresponsive.
Bon had noticed the cat. She whined and stood on her back legs to look over the fence, her front paws hooked through the slats. She wagged her tail frantically as the pale cat looked up and over, and her back feet did an excited dance in the sandy mud. The cat stood up, stretched thoroughly from tail to ears, and slunk away back under the trailer. Disappointment made Bon’s tail droop, and she looked around at Cloister as though he could do something about it.
“The cat doesn’t want to be friends, Bon,” he said. “Accept it.”
Bon gave him a dismissive flick of her ear and went back to staring at the spot where the cat had been. She loved cats, and it was a source of constant disappointment that most didn’t feel the same way toward her. The stray had a special place in her affections, but it wouldn’t have any of it. Domestication had burned Fluffer once, and now it knew it was better off on its own.
At least they found Janet. If they’d turned back when it made sense to do so, whoever was behind the wheel of that pickup would probably have taken her out into the desert. People went missing out there on their own, just out hiking without a good plan, and weren’t found for years. If someone wanted to hide a body, it was a close place to do it. This way, at least if Janet was going to die, she wouldn’t be alone, and her family would have a body to bury.
Him and the cat…. Bon was the only one who’d miss them.
Cloister shook his head in annoyance and pushed himself off the door to get dressed. That was enough of that. He gave himself some slack to be a difficult bastard this time of year, but he drew the line at wallowing. People would miss him. He wasn’t a hermit, and he wouldn’t be left for the gulls to pick clean.
Maybe no one’s life would be ruined if he died, but he didn’t want that, anyway. It was too much responsibility to be loved that much.
THE TIPof Tancredi’s tongue stuck out of the corner of her mouth as she put the last touches to the rat-possum-racoon she’d drawn on his cast under her name. The Sharpie scraped over the plaster as she colored in the pink hearts that floated wonkily around its head.
“I should be glad the station doesn’t have glitter gel pens, shouldn’t I?” Cloister said dryly.
“Oh yeah,” Tancredi said as she capped the pen. She stepped forward and cocked her head to the side as she studied her work for a moment and then gave a satisfied nod that bounced a stray curl over her forehead. “I would have gone hog wild with a glitter pen.”
Cloister twisted his arm around to look at the scribble right side up. “Is that supposed to be Bon or some sort of get-well racoon?”
“Rude.” Tancredi tossed her pen back on the desk and looked down at Bon, who was sprawled on the ground across Cloister’s feet. “It’s a perfect likeness.”
“I’m not sure if I should be offended on her behalf or suggest you go get your eyes checked,” Cloister said. He excavated his boots from under Bon’s stomach and propped his hip on the edge of Tancredi’s desk. There was a chair, but he didn’t want to take the risk. Even with the strongest over-the-counter pain pills he’d been able to grab, he ached dully from his eyebrow to his ass. “Any news from the hospital?”
“Only that you walked out last night.” Tancredi flopped down in her chair and nervously picked at her nails as she looked up at him. “I was the one who told SA Merlo about what happened. I know you two were… something, but I hope it was okay.”
Cloister ran his tongue over the inside of his mouth as though he could still taste Javi’s fierce, angry kiss under toothpaste, ibuprofen, and a bottle of acid-green sports drink that boasted it was full of electrolytes. He didn’t know if it had changed anything—Javi might have stayed the night, but he was gone when Cloister woke up—but it had meant something.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said. Tancredi bit her lip and raised her eyebrows at him suggestively. He frowned at her. He was friendly with most people at the station—not all, not the guy who shot his kid’s dog or the one whose wife always had some yellow-brown bruise on her—but Tancredi had apparently decided they were actually friends. Cloister had fended off the barbecue invites and after-work beers, but then she made him cupcakes for his birthday, and he gave up. But that didn’t mean he wanted to talk about his sex life with her, certainly not against the backdrop of noise—keyboard clacks, yawns, the mutter of conversation—from the rest of the bullpen. “Don’t make anything of it either. So we still don’t know what happened to Janet?”
Tancredi accepted the rebuff with good grace. She slouched back in her chair and shook her head. “Not much.” Then she reached out and rifled through the paperwork on the desk in frustration. “Car was a rental. She hired it two days ago in San Diego. No sign of where she went after that, but she put six hundred miles on the car and had a room booked at the Hampton Inn for the next two weeks. No idea why she was in town, though. Maybe her next of kin will be able to help when we find them.”
“You haven’t found them?”
Bourneville wriggled over until she could put her head on Cloister’s boot.
“No. The emergency contact on her paperwork at the car rental gave a Ruth Belford as her emergency contact, but it’s her office number at the—” Tancredi ferreted through her papers for a folded, bright yellow Post-it and consulted it. “—Parsons School of Design. They’re going to get in contact with her. Or try. The secretary said she thought Dr. Belford was on a no-contact weekend with her partner.”
“Is Janet a student?”
“That would be too easy. No student called Janet Morrow, and he said the description matched about twenty students he could see through the window. So….”
She trailed off with a dispirited shrug and unfolded the Post-it to slap it onto the folder. As she looked back up, her attention shifted to a spot behind Cloister, and she sat up straight in her chair. She opened her mouth, lips shaped around the first syllable of a word that never made it out.
“What the hell are you doing here, Witte?” Frome growled as he stalked over to Tancredi’s desk. He stopped and frowned at them from under the glasses propped up over his eyebrows. “You’re on sick leave. After that stunt you pulled last night, you’re lucky it’s not disciplinary leave.”
“I don’t like hospitals.”
Frome curled his lip. “I don’t like bad coffee and stale donuts,” he said, “but I’m a cop, so I deal with it. Go home, Witte. Get some sleep. You look like hell.”
He tossed some files on Tancredi’s desk. “We’ve had complaints about protesters at the bank getting out of hand. Go check it out. Make sure they know where the line is. Take Ellie.”
“A woman’s touch?” Tancredi asked, an edge to her voice.
