“No.” Cloister lowered his foot back to the ground and rested his elbows on his knees. He picked absently at a chip in the edge of the cast and wondered if what he’d just said was entirely true. Guilt pinched at him easily, and he could be distracted, but he was used to that. It didn’t help—not him, not Janet—so he did his best to ignore it. He cleared his throat and admitted, “Notjustan excuse, anyhow. I was going to call you about it later. I didn’t want to wake you up.”
Javi rubbed his hand over his eyes and blinked owlishly. “Too late for that.” He glanced at Bourneville, still patiently waiting in front of the door, and sighed. “Hold on.”
He pushed himself off the door and padded across the room to the narrow desk set up against the back wall. Cloister turned to watch him, mostly for the curve of his ass and the lean line of his back.
“I appreciate the view,” he said. “But I can tell you later. I don’t even know if it’ll…. It probably won’t help.”
Javi found what he was looking for under his Bluetooth keyboard and tossed it to Cloister. He grabbed it out of the air just before it hit him in the chest.
“Tell me later, when I’m actually awake,” Javi said as he headed back toward the bedroom. “I’m going to take a shower. Let yourself back in.”
Cloister looked down at the key he’d just caught. It was a spare key on a nondescript fob, the sort of thing you handed to neighbors so they could water your orchids over a long weekend or tucked under a mat for the plumber when you had to go to work.
It didn’t mean anything. Cloister knew that. That hewantedit to meant he was back to making a fool of himself over Javi Merlo.
He heard the shower kick on in the bathroom, the splash of water and the click of the door. His brain filled in the visuals—wet skin and the trail of scented soapsuds that would coax Cloister’s mouth to follow them lower.
“Like I ever really stopped being a fool,” he said to Bourneville. She tilted her head at him with polite interest and then looked back at the door. Cloister sighed and pushed himself off the coffee table. “You’re lucky you’re the best dog in the world, Bon, otherwise I’d make you hold it.”
CHAPTER TEN
AN HOURlater Cloister came out of the shower in a borrowed pair of Javi’s sweats as he clumsily scrubbed his hair dry with one hand. Bourneville was flaked out on her side in front of the window. She lifted her head when Cloister came in, but he gestured for her to stay where she was as he went into the kitchen.
He stopped as he came face-to-face with… breakfast. Laid out on the kitchen table were a carafe of coffee, a massive pan of eggs, the yellow lumps still hot and steaming, and stacks of buttered toast on a plate. There was hot sauce for the eggs and a bottle of french vanilla creamer for the coffee. Javi, dressed down—for him—in a black silk shirt and gray jeans, flicked the stove off and turned around.
“Help yourself,” he said as he pulled a chair out and sat down. “There’s apple juice in the fridge if you want any.”
“Huh.” Cloister gave his hair one last pass with the towel and sat down. He felt oddly off balance. It wasn’t as though they’d never eaten before, but it had been takeout with plastic forks and rough napkins and never breakfast. Usually Cloister was either gone by then, or they were both on their way out the door to get to a crime scene. The table and the extra servings of food felt—intimate, domestic, nice—weird. “I, um…. Thanks.”
“I eat,” Javi pointed out defensively. “All I did was get an extra plate out.”
“And a fork.”
The toast was underdone and just white. Cloister supposed it was odd that that made him feel better, but it did. A world where Javi didn’t pay attention to how Cloister liked his bread toasted just made sense. He reached for the serving spoon and piled eggs on his plate.
“I don’t think Janet Morrow came to town to see someone,” he said as he dragged his brain back on target. “I think it was to see something.”
Javi raised his eyebrows. “You think she was relocating here?”
Cloister shook his head but then reconsidered and shrugged instead. “Maybe. It’s only Monday now. If she had a job or places to be, we’ll probably hear soon, but I think she’d been here before. When she called AAA, she told the driver that she’d meet him at the gas station down the road,” Cloister said. He poked at his eggs to reshape them into a map of the road. “How did she know it was there? There’s no way she’d have driven past it already. She only checked into town a few hours before, so she must have known the area… well enough to know that was a gas station nice enough to spend an hour waiting over coffee for someone.”
Javi looked thoughtful as he picked up his coffee.
“It is possible, I suppose,” he said with a shrug. “We already speculated she probably knew her attacker. He could be a disappointed realtor instead of a disappointed date. At the moment I don’t know if it matters. Until we find out more about Janet Morrow, she’s Schrödinger’s cat. Everything is possible.”
Cloister shoved eggs onto a corner of his pallid toast. Now that food was in front of him, he suddenly wasn’t hungry. The pain pills had worn off, and he hurt with a dull, heavy ache that promised to get worse. But an empty stomach wouldn’t make him feel any better. “Maybe that she’s familiar with Plenty is where you should start.”
His phone rang in the other room as he took a bite. The familiar twang of the “Ol’ Red” chorus was enough to make Javi pull a dismayed face. Cloister was never sure if it was the song or the reminder that Javi was sleeping with someone who listened to country.
“Shit,” Cloister mumbled as he tried to swallow a mouthful of half-chewed breakfast.
He dropped what was left of the toast on the plate and got up from the table. The manners his mom had clipped into the back of his head made him mutter a “’Scuze me” to Javi as he wiped his hands on the towel.
The phone had managed to get kicked under the bed sometime the night before. Cloister swore to himself as got down on his knees and clumsily fished between Javi’s suitcases for the metal oblong. When he finally pulled it out, “Ol Red” had circled back to the first notes, and Tancredi’s name was on the screen.
“Hey.”
“Witte?” Tancredi said. Her voice was pitched to carry over the argument going on in the background, mostly in Spanish too rapid-fire for Cloister to pick out at a distance. The occasional loud interruption in English consisted of requests for everyone to calm down. “Did I wake you?”
