Sean tipped the bottle back and took a deep drink. “Niceties over, then?” he asked sarcastically as he lowered the bottle back to the table. When Javi just waited, Sean shrugged. “Janet Morrow? I’ve heard the name, but only in the last few days. She’s the trans woman who was assaulted? People aren’t entirely impressed with your investigation so far.”
“What about Macintosh?” Cloister asked. “Do you know anyone by that name?”
Sean’s eyes flicked between them. “I know an Andrew Macintosh,” he said slowly, the words carefully chosen. “He was an asshole, but a good lawyer if you were on that side of the fence. Or he used to be.”
“Do you know where he is now?”
“The gutter,” Sean said. He sounded almost satisfied as he said it. Cloister went to comment on that, but Javi slid in before he could.
“You don’t sound too sad about that,” he said.
“I wasn’t on that side of the fence,” Sean said. He took another drink and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. “Look, things were different in Plenty back then. Even if you weren’t crooked, sometimes the rules got bent. I moonlighted a bit for Macintosh, did some background checks and tailed a couple of mistresses. That’s all. But like I said, he was an asshole. The only good quality he had was that he paid his bills on time. No one who knew him is going to be too sad about his… abrupt reversal in fortune.”
“Including his family?” Cloister said.
“Well, he killed them,” Sean said. “Or that’s what everyone believed. If he hadn’t? Well, first time I worked for him was when he had me tail his first wife to her gym. Know why? Because she got fat, and he thought it was funny. Even the crooks that Macintosh worked for thought he was an asshole. What’s this about? It’s been nearly a decade since I worked for Macintosh. Nearly as long since I thought about him.”
Javi took out his phone and tapped the screen to pull up and maximize a photo of the scrawled-on business card. He slid it over the table toward Sean.
“We believe this card was in Janet’s possession the night of the attack,” he said. “She was also found in Delacourt, near Macintosh’s old office. That’s your number.”
Sean gave the card a brief glance and nodded. “Yes,” he said. “But not like I had business cards back then. I was still a cop. So if I needed to, I’d just write my number on one of Macintosh’s cards. I handed out dozens of these.”
“Ten years ago,” Javi pointed out. “Why would someone keep it that long?”
“I don’t know,” Sean said. He took another drink of his beer. “That’s your job, isn’t it?”
Bourneville yawned and rested her chin on Cloister’s knee. He absently rubbed under her jaw, whiskers rough against his fingers. There was a stack of business cards in his desk at work. Every now and again, he’d restock his wallet. Most of the time he knew the cards would end up lost in a drawer, tossed in the first clear-out of the year, and the people he hoped would call never would. Then there were the ones heknewwould call.
“Did you ever regret giving someone one?” he asked. “Hand it to someone and just know it would come back to bite you in the ass?”
It was the first time Sean didn’t have a pat answer ready. He hesitated, beer halfway to his mouth as he thought about it.
“A few,” he admitted. “There was an Irish guy that Mac worked for sometimes—lots of money and a thing for pretty boys. He said he had some work he wanted to put my way, but I knew that was a lie even as I handed my number over. Not my best decision. I took his calls too, a couple of times. That was a worse call.”
He finally took the paused drink and grimaced as he swallowed. It looked as though the memory of the Irish guy still left a bad taste in his mouth.
“Can you get me his name?” Javi asked.
Sean licked his lips and nodded. “Yeah. The others too. There’s maybe four that stand out, with that guy. Oh, and the one I gave to Tommy.”
The name didn’t sound familiar to Cloister—not in connection with this case, anyway—but it made Javi frown.
“Macintosh’s son?” he said. “The youngest one.”
Sean snorted. “Yeah. I knew it was stupid the minute I did it. It was the way he took it, like I’d given him the key to his cell. I could hardly snatch it back from him, though, so…. That one nearly got me fired. Macintosh thought I was making advances on the boy.”
“Were you?” Javi asked.
“No,” Sean said with contempt and a bit of disgust. “Tommy couldn’t have been more than fourteen or fifteen, and he looked maybe twelve. I’m far from perfect, but I’m not into that. I just felt… sorry for him.”
He sounded almost ashamed of that.
“Why?” Cloister asked.
When he was that age, a lot of adults felt sorry for him. Most of them knew why, but even the few who missed the local paper’s sporadic “still missing” updates on his brother could tell there was something wrong. In Tommy’s case, maybe whatever was wrong was bad enough that it still had an impact.
Sean sighed and picked absently at the label on his beer with his thumbnail.
