Cloister grimaced in frustration as he deciphered the signature.
Sean Stokes, the divorced private investigator Javi went to dinner with when he blew off drinks with Cloister. Not someone Cloister particularly wanted to see, never mind pull in to accuse of attempted murder.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE ENVELOPEwas already neatly centered on Javi’s desk when he arrived in the office. His rank was neatly bracketed under his name on the label—ActingSupervisory Special Agent. Even if Kincaid sent it by special courier, it was already on its way before last night’s conversation. And at the speed federal bureaucracy worked, the transfer must have been approved weeks before.
The empty buoyancy of the morning’s pretend domesticity with Cloister pricked, and Javi scowled. He picked up the envelope and felt the weight of it. There was a few hours’ work sealed into the manila envelope—forms to countersign and file, clearance and computer access to be set up….
The sharp rap of knuckle on glass interrupted him. He looked up as Sue Daly, the office administrator, leaned around the door. The slim, efficient woman, her hair in a ruthlessly flattering gray bob, had run the substation since it opened. He wouldn’t be the first agent she saw come and go, and she knew the signs. Her pale blue eyes touched on the envelope and then back up to him.
“I heard that they confirmed the new SSA,” she said.
“When?” Javi asked as he tossed the envelope onto the table.
Her eyes flickered, and she stepped into the office. The door swung shut behind her. “I don’t gossip,” she said. “Before this morning I would have assumed you’d get it. Saul thought very highly of you as an agent, and his reports reflected that.”
The urge to ask “why” scratched at Javi’s throat. He’d always appreciated Saul’s intervention but never entirely understood it. The good agent part was true, but there were good agents who hadn’t fucked up as comprehensively as Javi had in Phoenix.
Instead he sat down behind his desk and flicked a key to turn the monitor on. “SSA Joel will be the new senior agent,” he said. “Until she gets here, however, I’m still in charge of the Morrow case. Did you have a chance to get in touch with Lieutenant Frome this morning?”
He would have been surprised if she hadn’t. Sue was as efficient as a paper cut. True to his expectations, she plucked her phone from the pocket of her suit.
“That’s why I came in to see you, actually,” she said as she flicked her finger over the screen. “Lieutenant Frome sent this information over this morning. Janet Morrow’s professor got in touch with the sheriff’s department last night. She’s flying in this morning and should be at the airport in a couple of hours. The sheriff has sent someone to pick her up. I was about to email you, but since you were on your way in…?”
The just-booted-up computer pinged as Sue dropped the packet of flight information into his email.
“Saul would have cared about this case too,” she said as she paused on her way out the door. Her lips curled in a small, somehow unfriendly smile. “He’s not the only one who thinks you’re a good agent.”
Javi raised his eyebrows at her and asked dryly, “Just not a good person?”
The answer took a beat longer than Javi expected. Sue finally shrugged her neatly jacketed shoulders. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen youbea person. So I’m not the one to ask about that.”
It wasn’t an insult, just a statement of fact. Sue let herself out of the office with a polite nod and an “SSA Merlo.” Javi slouched back in his chair, the leather cold through his shirt, and wondered if he should be offended. He wasn’t, but that didn’t mean he shouldn’t be.
Probably, he thought dryly, he should be flattered that she hadn’t just gone with “no.” He knew plenty of people, both in Plenty and outside it, who would have.
The email opened, and he dismissed that thought until later. Ruth Belford’s email was sparse and brusque, a flat retelling of facts that ended with the flight information of a red-eye she caught out of JFK this morning. She landed two hours ago.
It was something Frome could have sent to him directly. Javi grabbed his phone and pulled up the lieutenant’s contact details.
It rang twice, and then Frome snapped, “What?”
“I would have appreciated a heads-up about Professor Belford,” he said.
“You got the email five minutes after I did,” Frome said. “Belford got her partner to send us the details. By that point she was already on the plane. Would you rather I left her to take an Uber up from San Diego while I waited to check in with you?”
“If the attack on Janet Morrow was a hate crime, it’s in my jurisdiction,” Javi said calmly. “The field office in LA will back me up on that.”
Frome took a deep breath. “I want to be sheriff one day,” he said. Javi braced himself for the self-serving explanation of how politics worked, as though the local Sheriff’s Department had anything on the government. The sigh surprised him, as did Frome’s resigned voice as he continued, “Then something like this makes me wonder if I’m cut out for it. I shouldn’t have let political issues cloud my judgment, and it shouldn’t have made any difference that Janet Morrow being trans meant people suddenly cared about what happened. I should have cared.”
The flat admission caught Javi off guard. He sat back in the chair and frowned at the office door. There was a dartboard there once, a quirk of Saul’s that had him pin whomever they most wanted to catch to it. Maybe it was there to give him something to stare at during these conversations.
“You don’t sound happy,” he pointed out.
Frome sighed.
“Well, I’d be happier if I still thought I’d done the right thing,” he said. “Life would be easier too. Instead the council is posturing about an internal audit. I have to apologize to one of my deputies and draft a statement for the press about Morrow that will undoubtedly come back to bite us. You were right to push this investigation, SSA Merlo, but I doubt that will be much comfort to either of us when this hits the fan.”
