Tancredi chewed indecisively at her lower lip. She grimaced in the end and nodded.
“Okay,” she said. Then she pointed a warning finger at his chest. “But you don’t go near the car, Witte. If Bourneville finds something? I retrieve it. I bag it.”
Cloister nodded and whistled for his dog. She scrambled up off the concrete, shook herself in a ripple of heavy black-and-rust fur, and trotted over. The leash trailed through the dust behind her. She pushed her muzzle into Cloister’s hand when she reached him, her nose wet and cold, and panted between his fingers.
“Okay, Bon, time to earn your eggs,” Cloister told her as he crouched down. He unclipped the leash—unlikely she’d get hurt in the controlled space of the garage, but he didn’t want to risk her getting hung on something—and wrapped it around his forearm. Ambrose took two long steps back out of the way and crossed her arms to watch. Cloister hooked his fingers through Bon’s collar and pointed her at the pickup. He could feel the quiver of eagerness under her skin as she waited for her command. “Bourneville? Do you smell RJ? We need to find RJ.”
She whined at the coded command—no parent wanted to hear a dog commanded to look for a corpse, and no cop wanted the press to hear it—and leaned against the collar. Cloister let her go, and she bolted away from him.
Her head was down, nose almost pressed against the rough concrete, and her tail flagged as she made a brisk circuit of the garage. Cloister shifted to the side to keep her in sight. One of the other mechanics yelped as she wriggled between his legs to sniff at the sidewall of a torn tire. Whatever had caught her nose made her pause for a second, but then she looped back to them.
“Bourneville,” Cloister pointed at the Chevy. “Hupf!”
She gave him a disgruntled look. The “up” command usually sent her up walls or got her boosted through second-story windows, not onto the running board of a pickup. But she did as she was told and leaped smoothly into the driver’s seat. Her feet dimpled the leather as she made a tight turn to sniff the seat and then the wheel. After one pass she lost interest and scrambled into the passenger side.
“So what? There was nothing?” Tancredi asked dubiously. “Maybe there wasn’t enough trace?”
Ambrose cleared her throat. “The car smells like bleach. There wasn’t time to give it a full cleanup, but someone tried to cover their tracks.”
“That wouldn’t matter,” Cloister said.
If there was blood on the steering wheel, Bourneville should have found it, and after the driver finished with Janet, there should have been some trace on their hands and clothes. It didn’t make sense.
Bourneville lay down on the passenger seat and whined with her tail clamped tightly between her legs in her distinctive trace tell.
“Good girl,” Cloister said warmly. Bourneville relaxed and got back up. “Good dog. RJ. Find him.”
She snorted and wriggled between the seats into the wide back of the car. Her tail flashed in the window as she hopped up and down on the back seat. Then she flopped again, almost immediately, with her chin pressed against the seat belt buckle as she waited for her reward.
“The attacker could have had her in the car at some point,” Tancredi suggested as she stood on her toes to peer into the back. “She got away, and he chased her down? You said you lost her trail. That would make sense if she got in a car.”
“Maybe,” Cloister said. It didn’t sound right. She couldn’t have gotten far barefoot and injured in the rain, so why had the attacker left her there? He didn’t have an alternative to there being so much trace in the car.
He snapped his fingers and patted his thigh to call Bourneville out. She grumbled as she jumped down and paced his legs in a tight, nervous circle, her side pressed hard against his knee. Cloister crouched down to fuss over her. “Best dog in Plenty PD, Bourneville.” But she huffed and grumbled low in her chest instead of settling.
After a second, she pulled away from him and went back to the car, where she stood on her back legs, front paws braced against the running board, and barked at the back seat again.
Cloister raised a hand to stop Tancredi from approaching. “Bourneville, such,” he ordered. She huffed in relief and jumped back into the car. This time she pawed at the seat with one foot and barked at it.
“There’s something there, not just trace,” Cloister said. He leaned into the cab and grabbed Bourneville’s collar to pull her back out. “Tancredi? Would you check down the back of the seat?”
This time Bourneville was amenable to being fussed over for being such a good dog. She crawled half into his lap, paws dangling between his knees, while Tancredi and Ambrose folded up the long leather bench.
“There’s something back here,” Tancredi said. She was flat on her stomach, her flashlight aimed into the struts under the seat. “Like cards or something? They’re stuck in under the runners. Does anyone have a pair of tweezers or something?”
One of the mechanics who’d taken a break to watch Bourneville work jogged forward with a pair of black pliers so sharply pointed they could have passed as a needle. Tancredi muttered her thanks as she took them and went back to work.
“It’s a loyalty card for a beauty salon,” she said after a second. Someone cackled and then went uncomfortably silent as she finished, “It’s covered in blood. It’s dry, but it looks fresh.”
Ambrose held the evidence bag open so Tancredi could carefully drop the card in. She sealed it as Tancredi ducked back down again.
“There’s something else.” She went back in with a grunt, her arm stretched out as far as it would go. “Hold on. I… almost… um. I can hardly read it. It looks like a really old business card… for a lawyer? There’s something written on the back.”
The card went into another evidence bag, and Ambrose passed both to Cloister while they dropped the seat back into place. He carried them to the door and angled them so the sunlight hit the plastic.
The front of the card had once been coated, but now it was cracked and smudged with blood. There wasn’t much to obscure. The black words marched bluntly over the card, the few obscured letters easy to fill in.And ew Maci osh—Criminal aw.
He flipped it over. Someone had scored out the contact details on the back and scrawled their own number in blue ink instead. Their name was scribbled in messy looped letters above it.
