“Janet looked dead,” he said as he paused at the curb. “I think whoever attacked her thought he killed her and went to get the car to move the body.”
“If that’s true, he’d have to have a good reason,” Javi said. He pushed himself up and fastidiously brushed his hands together. “He has to come back to the scene, contaminate his car, risk being stopped or witnessed at another location. If it was a random crime, there’s no reason to take that risk.”
“Psycho?” Cloister suggested. He’d stopped at the curb and frowned at something on the ground. Bourneville ranged to the end of her long leash as she sniffed at the cracks in the pavement and the weeds that poked grimy fronds up in front of the neglected buildings.
“Maybe. Some serial killers select their victims at what seems like random. The compulsive, ritual elements would come into play later,” Javi said reluctantly. “It makes them harder to track.”
He had taken the assigned classes in aberrant psychology and behavioral analysis at the FBI academy, but he hadn’t been one of the wannabe profilers eager to fast-track themselves into the Behavioral Analysis Unit. It looked good on TV—the serial-killer hunters—and it was a prestigious assignment, but it led to burnout as often as it did promotion. It seemed like BAU cases were scattershot evidence, opaque motivation unless you knew three specific things that happened over a twenty-year period, and even when you caught them, it was never clean. There was always collateral damage.
So he’d rather not take the same twisted route. If nothing else, he didn’t want Frome to have any more reasons to want to bury the case. One unsolved homicide looked bad, but multiple ones looked worse.
“We can’t rule it out,” Javi said reluctantly as he walked over to join Cloister. “I don’t think it fits, though. If it were a serial killer, unless it were their first kill, I don’t see why they would have left after they hit you with the car. Even if you didn’t fit whatever they wanted”—a darkly inappropriate part of Javi’s brain took the opportunity to remind him how unlikely that was, with a flicked memory slideshow of Cloister’s taut abs, the freckled curve of his ass, and the heavy rise of his cock under Javi’s hand. He ignored it—“they could have taken Janet while you were out of action.”
“So if it wasn’t a serial killer, and it wasn’t a random attack,” Cloister said, “it was someone she knew somehow?”
“It usually is.”
They both knew that, Javi supposed. Not that Cloister ever talked about his missing brother—he just didn’t remember and didn’t sleep—but then Javi hadn’t told him about the bloody ER or why he left Phoenix. And he never intended to, so he supposed he had no right to push. He didn’t even have a right to want to.
Annoyed, Javi dragged his mind back to the things he did get to push for answers about.
“What about the car—
“It was a pickup truck,” Cloister corrected him.
Javi paused to give him an exasperated look. For a man who usually seemed to exist without any ego, Cloister occasionally picked odd things to posture over. That he’d been knocked by a pickup truck instead of Prius was one of them.
“Do you remember anything about it?” Javi asked. “Color, plates, any stickers or dents?”
Cloister absently rubbed his forehead as he thought about it, careful to give the stitched stripe of purple that dipped into his eyebrow a wide berth.
“It was a pickup truck, it was darkish….” Cloister strained to remember anything else. Eventually he shook his head and shrugged his failure. “I think I took out the side mirror when I bounced off it, maybe, but nothing else stuck.”
“I can talk to the main office in LA,” Javi offered. “They have a profiler there. He could come out and do a cognitive interview with you. It might—”
Cloister shook his head. “No.”
“It can help you recall details that you don’t realize you noticed at the time. I’ve done—”
“I said no.”
Javi had heard the flat finality in Cloister’s voice before, whenever Cloister reached the line where his easygoing nature gave up. It was rare, but there were a couple of times when Cloister had been pushed far enough to dig his heels in. Sometimes it was aimed at the dog, but more often it was for Frome, or sometimes one of his coworkers who thought the station’s only openly gay deputy would take their jeers.
This was the first time Cloister had turned it on Javi. It should have pissed him off. Javi liked to be in control. He liked compliance and the obedient sprawl of Cloister’s stupidly beautiful body under him. It did irritate him on a professional level—he’d extended himself here, and Cloister could at least meet him halfway. But something about that harsh jolt of refusal, the line reached and reinforced, made the dark, hot parts of Javi’s mind stretch and growl like a cat. It was still inappropriate.
“Fine,” Javi said after a pause that was only half to calculate his options. He could broach the idea of the cognitive interview again later, once he worked out whether Cloister needed to be less or more guilty to agree. “What about another witness? Has Frome sent anyone down to canvass the area?”
Cloister gave him a suspicious look. Then he shrugged and waved a hand at the shabby row of buildings.
“There’s a laundromat on the corner. The owner was in the back office to sleep off a bottle of whiskey. Heard nothing, saw nothing, probably wouldn’t say if he had,” he said. “One of the apartments still has a family in it—no water, spotty electricity, and a family of eight—and they heard something. But they didn’t go to look until the ambulance got here. Apparently they hear a lot of noises around here at night.”
Other than the fact that they hadn’t managed to kill Janet, whoever attacked her had either had a very good plan or was very lucky.
Cloister pointed toward the underpass, which managed to look dank and unwelcoming even in the bright afternoon light. “If anyone saw anything, it would have been the homeless people who were riding out the storm in there,” he said. “They were transients, though, on their way through to a better place, and after the ambulance and cop cars turned up last night, they scattered. It won’t be easy to track them down.”
Of course not. Javi grimaced as he looked around the barren stretch of dead commerce. Across the road, in the Galleria, a naked mannequin, nipples and genitals painted on in garish pink, stared back at him with her one remaining eye. From the looks of it, she was probably his best witness, and she was muzzled with the melted plastic from the rest of her face.
“What did you think you’d find down here?” Javi asked as he turned back to Cloister. “Why bother?”
