“And you’re supposed to be on sick leave.”
Cloister grinned crookedly and crossed his arms. He idly kicked his heel against the asphalt. “We both knew I wouldn’t be able to let this go. Right now Janet’s got no one looking out for her, and I can’t resist an underdog. What’s your excuse?”
It would have been a harder question to answer before the hospital. He should have left the investigation to the sheriff’s department. Hit-and-runs weren’t the FBI’s business, and he didn’t want Cloister to be his. But Dr. Galloway had given him another reason to care, one that kept things simple.
“I don’t need one,” he told Cloister as Hewitt loped back to them. “In case you’ve forgotten that day at the police academy, hate crimes do come under federal jurisdiction.”
The grim expression on Cloister’s face betrayed that he’d thought the same thing about Janet’s assault.
“Poor kid,” he said as he pushed himself off the car.
Hewitt held up the tape for his mute coworker, a skinny kid with shifty eyes, to duck under ahead of him. Then he limbo’d under it himself.
“All yours,” he said to Javi. “We’ll keep out of your way. Just, um… don’t take too long? The boss is a real stickler for timekeeping.”
“We’ll do our best,” Javi said.
Hewitt nodded and gave Cloister a quick, snarky grin. “With you in this state, I bet I could take you.” He mimed a punch at Cloister’s jaw and then danced backward with a shriek as Bourneville lunged to her feet with a vicious snarl. She stood stiff-legged in front of Cloister, hackles raised like a mohawk, and barked furiously as Hewitt tripped over himself to get away from her. “Fuck. Jesus. Call her off, Witte.”
The noise made Javi step back—an atavistic flinch from anything that had that many sharp white teeth. He didn’t do anything else. Most of the time Bourneville remained as opaque to him as any other wild animal. He hadn’t grown up with dogs—his parents even sent the class guinea pig back when his sister brought it home one summer—but her leash still hung limply from Cloister’s hand. That suggested she wasn’t committed to eating Hewitt.
Cloister snorted. “She never touched you.” He pursed his lips and whistled quickly. The short, shrill note made Bourneville tilt her ears back toward him. “Bon. That’s enough. Quiet. Good girl.”
She shut up with a grumble and skulked back to Cloister’s side, but her attention stayed on Hewitt as he pulled himself back together and brushed off his boiler suit.
“No call for that,” Hewitt muttered as he sloped off to his coworker. “Crazy fuckin’ dog.”
“Idiot,” Cloister said under his breath. He nudged Bourneville with his knee when she growled again. “And you, behave.”
Bourneville huffed in resentment and gave herself a shake to settle her hackles.
“Is she okay?” Javi asked.
“Yeah.” Cloister studied Bourneville for a second. “I don’t like my dogs that protective, but she wasn’t out of line. Hewitt should have known better than to try that.”
“Not everyone spends as much time with dogs as you.” Javi went under the tape. His voice went dry as he added, “Actually nobody spends as much time with dogs as you do.”
“Most people aren’t ex-cops, though,” Cloister said as he caught up with Javi. “Hewitt was a deputy. He’s worked with K-9s before. He used to boast about it to me whenever he rolled up to clean a crime scene I was at. That was stupid.”
Javi turned to check out where Hewitt and his skinny friend had gotten to. The pair of them were seated on the curb with one cigarette between them. Smoke drifted from their fingers as they passed it back and forth.
“Well, he’s scrubbing up roads, not running Galloway’s tests for her,” he said. “Maybe stupid’s why.”
Cloister shrugged and let it go.
“I found her there,” he pointed to the middle of the road. “On her back. She was already unconscious.”
Javi walked over and crouched down. The chlorine-harsh smell of a public pool hit him as he breathed in. The cleaners had already started there, and most of the blood was gone, but there were a few bright red hairs matted into the tarmac.
“‘Walk me through it’ doesn’t mean say one thing and stop,” Javi said. “What way was she lying?”
“Her feet this way,” Cloister said behind him. “She looked like someone had tried to undress her. That’s why I was surprised when Galloway said she hadn’t been assaulted. We’d lost her trail in the rain, but then we heard her scream. If I’d gotten here a bit quicker, maybe….”
It waswefor everything except the blame. Not that Javi would have respected him if he’d said it was the dog’s fault, but he still noticed it.
“So if they weren’t interrupted, why would they leave the job half-done and go get the car?”
Cloister walked past, heavy boots with sand worked into the stitching and long legs in worn denim in the periphery of Javi’s line of sight. Bourneville followed a beat after, firmly attached to the spot whereheellived in her head.
