For some reason Jessica decided not to take the freeway to LA. She got onto the Pacific Coast Highway instead. Just a mile out of Plenty, her killer somehow waved her down, shot her and the two boys, and then set the car on fire. It had burned itself out by the time anyone found them. He’d probably never risk that again.
The road was pocked and blackened, with bits of metal embedded in the surface, and the bodies were too. Galloway’s predecessor had examined them, and he had to use DNA samples from intact teeth. “I don’t know what you want me to find,” Cloister said.
“Anything.” Javi cleared his dry throat and reached for his wine. He took a quick drink to wet his lips. It was sweeter than he cared for, with an almost syrupy aftertaste, and, although he’d only just realized it, the sort of wine he thought Cloister would probably prefer.Pathetic.“Just one thing that looks out of place. If there’s nothing, I’m wrong. Or I would be, if I’d told you my theory.”
Cloister gave a sidelong look. “Last time I had an idea, you made me convince you. Now you have one, and I have to convince you?”
“Just find something,” Javi said. “Or nothing. Either will be useful.”
Cloister coasted as a deputy. His colleagues liked him, Frome valued his contribution to K-9, but none of them expected more from him.
Javi was the only one who knew about the stack of cold-case folders Cloister used to pass the nights he couldn’t sleep. He had a knack for the gaps in an investigation, the blind spots and skipped protocols that could mean someone never came home. Maybe it was just obsession and training.
It didn’t matter. He was still good at it.
Javi finished his chicken and wine while Cloister pored over the files. He kept coming back to one photo—a close-up of the interior of the car—and the first couple of pages of the report.
“It certainly made the investigating officer’s life easier when they settled on Macintosh as their suspect,” Cloister said. “If they had to look at people with a grudge against the man, well, that’s a long list.”
That was true. There were pages of them—the victims Macintosh had denied justice in court, his ex-wife, lawyers whose reputations he blackened when he couldn’t beat them, and even his own clients, who feared Macintosh would sell them out one day. Somewhere in the stack was a collection of photocopied death threats, four to a page.
“Anything else?”
“I don’t know,” Cloister said. “I don’t know if it’s what you wanted me to find. It’s definitely not much. You said anything, though.”
“What is it?”
Cloister reached for the plate of cold salt-and-pepper chicken he’d started nearly an hour before. He jabbed his fork into the cold strips and took a bite.
“There was a big payment that came out of Macintosh’s account after his family was killed?” he said. “The prosecution argued that was the payment for the hit, except Macintosh worked for the sort of people who did that. He knew better than to make the payment from his own bank account. Then there’s the fire. You take someone out to an isolated place like that to kill them and then send up a flare? If it was a hired killer, that’s messy. If it was someone who wanted to get at Macintosh, wouldn’t they have wanted him to see their faces?”
“Maybe he wanted to get rid of evidence?”
“What evidence? He was never in the car. He shot through the windows.”
Cloister was right. That wasn’t much. “Is there anything else?”
“Neither boy tried to get out of the car.” Cloister wiped his fingers on a napkin and handed Javi the photo he’d studied. He pointed to the seat belts in the back seat. The fabric had melted, and the plastic was warped and twisted, but they were still clearly fastened. “Sean said that the older son was a jock, and that Macintosh had raised them both to act tough. Yet they sat there while someone shot their mother, or stepmother, and didn’t try to defend her or get out of the car or even hide? All three of them still had their seat belts on when the car was set on fire. Either there was more than one attacker—which seems unlikely since only one gun was used in all three murders—or the killer was someone they knew. Even then, once they shot Jessica, it should have panicked them. It’s… odd.”
Odd wasn’t exactly the smoking gun Javi had hoped for. It would have to do, though. Javi grabbed the half of the file he hadn’t given to Cloister and searched through it for the picture of his family Andrew Macintosh gave to the police. It had been taken at a party somewhere, where Macintosh looked smarmy in an expensive suit and his family looked faintly uncomfortable around him.
Javi tapped his finger against the youngest Macintosh’s face. The kid stood stiffly under his dad’s arm, his face tight and miserable over the starched collar of his shirt.
“This is Tommy Macintosh,” Javi said, “whose dad was going to send him to a camp that would ‘toughen him up.’ When I spoke to Ruth Belford, she intimated that Janet’s family tried to send her to a camp that would ‘straighten her out.’ Could Janet and Tommy be the same person?”
“I don’t know,” Cloister said as he reached for the photo. He touched his finger to the fat showy knot under Andrew Macintosh’s chin. “But I’ve seenhimbefore. He was there that night. He was one of the homeless men under the bridge.”
CLOISTER PACEDin front of the long glass wall as he argued with the station on the phone. The streetlights had turned off outside, so it was just Cloister’s reflection caught in the black glass, barefoot and lean in his uniform. Javi had spent enough time the last few months with that image that it made his cock twitch in Pavlovian response.
He dragged his attention away and focused on his call as he waited for the Kearny Mesa property and evidence officer to finish a list of excuses about why she might not find the evidence box Javi had requested. It was a cold case, someone had requested it three years ago, it could have been misfiled in transit from the old records facility.
“Deputy Ergobah, just find the Macintosh evidence,” Javi told her in a clipped voice. “Save the excuses for if you can’t. Not that I’ll want to hear them then either.”
Ergobah coughed to cut off the stream of excuses, cleared her throat, and tried again. “When do you need it?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Agent,” Ergobah protested. “These are old files. With the best will in the world, it will take me time to hunt it down. Then I have to arrange for transport up to Plenty, and….”
