“If you could just be patient, Mrs. Lopez,” he said, “someone will be out to see you soon.”
Mrs. Lopez snorted. “You said thatalready.”She gestured behind her to the tall blond man on the bench behind her. He looked embarrassed. “My housekeeper needs to pick up the children from school. If they’re kidnapped or run away because they think I don’t love them, that’s on you.”
“People know you’re here, Mrs. Lopez.”
She huffed and stomped back to her housekeeper’s side. He patted her knee as she sat down next to him and murmured something to her. It made Mrs. Lopez roll her eyes.
“That’s not the point, Jim,” she snapped.
Javi turned to Cloister and handed him the file. “Take Mrs. Lopez into one of the interview rooms and calm her down. I need to make a couple of calls first, but I don’t want her to lose patience and storm out.”
“Why me?” Cloister asked.
“Because people like you, Witte.”
“Dogs and small children like me,” Cloister corrected. “Irritated wealthy women, not so much.”
Javi gave Cloister a brisk once-over. His black T-shirt stretched over his broad shoulders, and his trousers hung low around his lean hips. Despite the scratch of irritation Javi hadn’t been able to shake, he felt an appreciative tug of lust in his stomach. Even the scrawled-on cast and the bruises that smudged up from Cloister’s eyebrow had a certain vulnerable quality that appealed.
Most of the time, Cloister looked like the bad boy you’d pick up in a dive bar and hope wouldn’t break your jaw for asking. Right now he looked like a bit of rough who needed a cookie and a place to crash. It had its appeal.
“Well, if she doesn’t warm to you,” Javi said, “take your shirt off. It worked on me.”
He left Cloister to wrangle the irritated widow while he headed out to the parking lot. The door swung open just as he reached for it, and a vaguely familiar middle-aged man stepped inside.
“Agent Merlo,” he said and thrust his hand out. “I hoped to speak to you on something to do with the case.”
Definitely familiar. Javi wasn’t proud to admit it, but it was the smell of bleach and sour cigarette smoke that triggered his memory.
“Mr. Hewitt,” he said. “How are you?”
Hewitt frowned and scratched his neck. The skin was welted from the chemicals. “Bit on edge,” he said. “Look, that case you and Witte were on the other day. The cleanup? After you left, this homeless man came up out of nowhere. He asked questions, and just the way he asked… it wasn’t right.”
“How?” Javi asked.
“Just off,” Hewitt said. “Smug, like he thought it was funny. And he had this. He waved it around for a bit, but I took it from him.”
He produced a stained pink scarf from his pocket. At some point he’d folded it up and put it in a sealed bag. An ex-deputy, Javi remembered.
“Okay,” Javi said. He turned and gestured for Collins to come over. “Tell the deputy here everything that happened. He’ll get it logged into evidence. I appreciate you coming in, Mr. Hewitt.”
“Tim,” he offered. “Or Hewitt. I was a deputy long enough to get used to both. I hope it helps. If that guy hurt that poor kid and tried to kill Witte, he deserves what’s coming to him.”
Javi went outside and left Collins to get the details. He moved away from the smell of secondhand smoke and the distinct, unappealing mix of teenage body odor and huffed solvent. Sometimes it was hard to get the overnight guests to fly the nest once they were let out of the cells in the morning. He pulled Sean’s number up on his phone and hit the Call button.
The phone rang long enough that he was about to hang up and try again. Then the line opened abruptly to the sounds of squealed laughter and Sean halfway through a sentence.
“… need to take this. I promise you, though, I know what I’m doing.”
Someone growled something back, and then Sean’s low, whiskey-rough voice poured down the line into Javi’s ear.
“Special Agent Merlo, what an unexpected pleasure. Don’t tell me you’ve reconsidered my client’s offer?”
“No,” Javi said. “Your client has information on who murdered threefederalesand their families. I’m not paying him for it. He can just go to jail with the killer when we find them.”
He could hear the shrug in Sean’s voice. “Your choice,” he said. “So what do I owe the pleasure of this conversation? Which is, by the way, cutting into my billable hours here. Is this about your pet cop getting hit by a car? Because really, it’s your responsibility to keep him on a shorter leash.”
As annoyed as Javi was with Cloister, the casual jab in Sean’s Cali-born drawl made him bite his tongue in irritation. He wondered idly if other people thought he sounded like that much of a privileged asshole when he snapped at Cloister.
