“You can tell me your theory over dinner. Two birds with one stone,” Cloister said. He grinned with a slow curve of his mouth when Javi raised a skeptical eyebrow at him. “You were the one who thought I couldn’t fend for myself.”
Something guarded slid through Javi’s eyes as he got up from the table. He straightened the cuffs of his jacket.
“That kind of sounds like what passes for a date in Montana,” he said.
“If it were a date, you’d talk about how nice my ass is,” Cloister said as he headed to the door and held it for Bourneville to trot out first. “Not murder and missing lawyers.”
Javi came up behind him, close enough that Cloister could feel the heat of him, and skimmed his hand over the curve of Cloister’s backside. The muscle twitched under the brush of long fingers, as though it were a slap instead of barely a touch. “I compliment your ass all the time.”
“I know,” Cloister said as he glanced back over his shoulder at Javi. “You kind of make it weird with how clingy you are, but I didn’t know how to bring it up.”
Javi squeezed the handful of Cloister’s ass roughly. “Just for that, I get to pick where we eat.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
DID CHINESEtakeout and the couch at Javi’s apartment make it more or less of a date? Javi wasn’t sure, although the wine he’d just uncorked didn’t really help with the “less” side. He poured two glasses and carried them into the main room.
Cloister had started on the couch, but now he was on the floor with the stack of files, and Bourneville was stretched out on the cushions. She opened one eye—bright amber against the frame of black fur—to squint at Javi, and then she closed it again.
“Is she… pretending… to be asleep?” Javi asked dubiously.
“Yeah,” Cloister said. He reached absently and scratched under one of Bourneville’s legs. It made her paw twitch, but she didn’t open her eyes again. “She doesn’t want to move.”
Javi wasn’t sure he liked that idea. He’d admit that Bourneville was smart for a dog and well trained—he’d seen her train with the other K-9s, and she was better than most of them—but the capacity for deception seemed more than that.
People always claimed their pets were clever, that they understood grief and being dressed up for Halloween. Javi found the idea somewhat off-putting. Half the time he didn’t like himself much. If he had a pet, he wouldn’t want it to be intelligent enough to understand his failings.
“I thought she was obedient,” Javi said as he handed the wine to Cloister.
“She’d get down if I told her to,” Cloister said. He took a sip of wine and didn’t make a face, which was more than Javi had expected. “But she gets to be a dog sometimes too. Do you want me to move her?”
Javi looked at the dog as she steadfastly ignored him.
“No,” he said. “Let her have it.”
A dog that could try to fool you was a dog that was smart enough to hold a grudge. If Bourneville took a dislike to him, Javi wouldn’t have to worry about whether or not this was a date, because the whole thing would be over. Cloister… maybe… cared about Javi more than they’d agreed, but not more than he loved Bourneville.
Javi folded himself down onto the ground next to Cloister. He grabbed a carton of orange chicken and folded the lid back neatly to let the steam out.
“Well?” He stirred rice into the sauce with his chopsticks as he looked at Cloister, who had started his second, slower look through the files on the Macintosh murder investigation. “What do you think?”
“That you’ve got forks?”
Javi ignored that as he fished out a mouthful of chicken and rice and transferred it smoothly to his mouth. He chewed and swallowed and then looked over Cloister’s shoulder.
“The attack on the Macintosh family happened just outside the Plenty city limits,” Javi said. “That might have been a mistake on the killer’s part, because it meant that it was under the sheriff’s department’s jurisdiction. Someone actually did a good job on the investigation.”
“It doesn’t seem to have helped,” Cloister said. He scanned down the report. It was interesting to see where his attention stopped and lingered, mostly on the same things that had made Javi pause. “The investigation might have been thorough, but it didn’t get them anywhere. Between the fire and the responders’ attempts to get to the family, there wasn’t a lot of evidence left to collect.”
“Did the sheriff’s department miss anything?” Javi asked.
Cloister glanced up. “That’s not a question that will make you popular,” he said.
“With you?”
Cloister leaned over and kissed him, a lazy brush of soy-salted lips that didn’t seem planned to go anywhere. It wasn’t seduction or an invitation, just a kiss. Javi didn’t know why that caught in his chest the way it did. Maybe because the fact that he didn’t want to hurt Cloister wouldn’t make him feel any better when he did.
“I’ve put up with worse from you,” Cloister said as he drew back. His attention was back on the files as he traded the report for photos of the scene. The family had been booked into an executive suite in a Disney resort for a long weekend. Jessica Macintosh was headed to LA with her son and stepson, and Andrew planned to follow the day after. He had a trial that afternoon—he won, actually, before he got the news—and preferred to ride his bike rather than be driven in a car. It was a habit that turned out to be very convenient for him.
