“Thanks.” He spat water off his lips and raked his wet hair back from his face. He could see the nose of the Prius was half-sunk in the rising puddle. The cracked headlights were filled with mud, and the front wheels were buried up to the axles. “What happened?”
Tancredi held out her hand. He grabbed it and helped her squelch up out of the puddle. She kicked her boots against a rock to dislodge the heavy clods of mud welded to them.
“It looks like she just went off the road,” Tancredi said. She blinked water off her lashes and reached into her pocket to pull out a bagged driver’s license. It took her a second to wipe the water off the plastic and check the ID again. “Janet Morrow from Ithaca, New York. Cute kid.”
She handed the wallet to Cloister.
The leather had obviously been in the water, but the laminated picture on the ID was still clear enough as Tancredi pointed her flashlight at it. Cute was an understatement. Photo Janet had a mass of loosely braided red hair, a smooth oval face, and big eyes that were, according to the New York DMV, gray. She was beautiful and nineteen years old—good for selfies, not so much for a girl lost in the dark in an unfamiliar town.
“Did someone call it in?” he asked.
“AAA,” Tancredi said. She took the wallet back and tucked it into her jacket. “She called them to come and get her, but when they asked her where to pick her up, she said at the gas station on down the road. She probably wanted a coffee before she had to speak to someone.”
Cloister raised his eyebrows.
Tancredi pinched her lips together in disapproval. “There’s an empty hip flask on the passenger’s seat, and she did drive off the road. But when the tow truck got to McGuire’s, she wasn’t waiting for them. After a while they drove back down the road to look for her, and they found the car, but no sign of Janet.”
“Her parents?”
Tancredi shrugged the extent of her knowledge on that. Thunder growled overhead in a long, drawn-out groan like an unhappy stomach. Tancredi grimaced, waited until it stopped, and then went on. “I figure she couldn’t get back up to the road here,” she said, “so she tried to find a shortcut. Only in the dark and with the rain, if she got turned around, she could end up going miles in the wrong direction.”
That was an exaggeration. Even if she walked in circles, she’d eventually find herself somewhere. The danger wasn’t that Janet would walk into the desert and her bones would disappear into the sand. It was that she’d break her ankle in a pothole and spend the night out in the cold.
Or she’d run into someone who’d take her out into the desert and leave her there.
Delacourt used to be a quiet enough area, but then new neighborhoods and roads rewrote the map. Cut off from the lifeblood of the town and bypassed by the incomers, the businesses closed and people moved. It was a dying neighborhood, and that attracted trouble.
Cloister glanced down at Bon, who was pressed against his leg, her ribs sharp on his calf as she snorted the occasional pointed sneeze. He nudged her with his knee.
“Bourneville,” he said. Her ears pricked, and she looked up at him, all keen nose and alertness. “Ready to do some work.”
That was the magic word. She scrambled up onto her paws and eagerly wagged her tail, her misery at the rain forgotten. The heavy whip of it slapped against Cloister’s legs as he reached down to grab her harness just in case she caught a scent and hared off without him. She leaned her weight against his arm, eager to go.
“Did Janet leave anything else in the car?” he asked Tancredi. “Jacket? Sunglasses? You know the drill.”
She nodded and splashed back into the puddle. The light of her flashlight bounced around in the dark as she slogged back to the Prius.
“Can she even track in this?” Tancredi asked over her shoulder as she wrestled open the dented back door. She stuck the flashlight into her mouth to free up her hands, her words half-garbled as she finished. “It’s godawful.”
Cloister shrugged. “It could have been better conditions.” He caught the jacket that Tancredi tossed to him. It was already wet, the cheap faux fur that covered it matted and sticky under his fingers. The cuffs were stiff with half-dried mud. “Bon’s tracked in worse, though.”
The scent would be strongest on the inside of the coat, at the neck and sleeves where sweat and skin had rubbed into the lining. Cloister bundled the coat up in his hands and crouched down so Bourneville could stick her nose into it. She huffed and snorted at it for a second and then sat down to look at him attentively. Her haunches were already bunched, the muscles tight under the thick coat as she waited.
Cloister kept his hand on her harness as he scrambled back to his feet. He tossed the coat to Tancredi.
“We’ll do our best,” he said. Then he let go of Bourneville’s harness and barked out the track command. “Such!”
Bourneville lurched to her feet and cast around in the mud and trodden-down mat of grass around Cloister’s feet. She circled him twice, wider each time, and whined in frustration when she didn’t find anything. Either Janet hadn’t tried to scale the muddy slope at all, or her scent had already washed away.
When she didn’t find anything after her final sweep, Bourneville stopped and looked expectantly at Cloister.
He snapped his fingers and gestured across the muddy pool that had half drowned the Prius.
“Voraus,” he ordered briskly. “Go round.”
Bourneville whuffed eagerly and lunged into the pool of water. It was almost to her stomach as she forged through it and splashed up the other side, her leash drenched as it dragged behind her. Cloister followed her with considerably less ease as he slogged through the mud at the bottom.
While he waded across, Bourneville gave Tancredi’s feet a quick sniff. She barked once as she caught the heavy whiff of the coat Tancredi held bundled up in her arms, her tail up in a tentative wag.
