CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“THE NAMEthe patient used was Clyde Granfeld,” Inspector Yuen said down the phone to Javi. “According to the nurse I spoke to, the bill was paid in cash. The procedure—although she declined to tell me what it was—went well, and the patient was satisfied. They did provide the name of a medical practitioner in….”
There was a pause as Yuen flipped through papers. Finally he cleared his throat and read the name out. “Santa Rosa, New Mexico.”
“Thank you,” Javi said as he turned to the window behind him and watched the tech lay out Janet Morrow’s effects for him. “I owe you one.”
Yuen snorted. “I’ll see how long you remember that,” he said and hung up.
Javi raised a finger to the tech to beg “one more minute” as he lowered the phone and dialed his office.
“I need you to get a background check run for me,” he told Sue when she picked up.
There was a pause, and then he heard the click of her fingers on the keyboard.
“Who?” she asked.
“Clyde Granfeld or Granfield,” Javi said. “In New Mexico. They might have lived in, or more likely around, Santa Rosa.”
“I’ll get an analyst on it,” she promised and then cautiously added, “SSA Kincaid called. He didn’t leave a message, but he asked how the case was going.”
Of course he did. “What did you tell him?” Javi asked, his jaw stiff as he forced the words out.
Sue’s voice was dry as she replied. “That I don’t gossip about cases, or my job,” she said. He could imagine her usual little smile. “I do my job, Agent Merlo, and I don’t take sides. I’ll let you know when I find out any information on Granfeld.”
“Thank you,” he said without specifying for what exactly. He let her go and headed into the lab.
From what Professor Belford had shared about Janet Morrow’s life in New York, her whole existence was probably in the suitcase she stashed in the hotel. There wasn’t much. Just enough to be packed into neatly labeled plastic bags and laid out on a metal table in the lab. The tech set down the last bag—a pair of carefully folded jeans—and raised his eyebrows at Javi.
“If you don’t mind me asking,” he said, “what exactly are you looking for, Agent Merlo? You already went through all of Morrow’s effects the other day.”
Javi had. None of it had stood out as relevant to the investigation. It was just some old mended clothes, a fat envelope with a thin sheaf of fifties in it—crisp from the bank, but with folded, sweaty corners as though Janet had counted them more than once—and an old folder of what paperwork had mattered enough to take with her into her car. That was when he thought they were Janet’s effects. Now he was looking to see if there were any ties to the Macintosh family.
“Something,” he told the tech. “I’ll let you know if I find it.”
The tech looked at him, shrugged, and went back to his computer in the other room. Every now and again he would twist around in his chair to peer at Javi through the glass wall and check on what he was doing.
Javi snapped on a pair of gloves and opened the bag containing the yellowed bits of paper, clipped-out newspaper cartoons, and a small rubber-cased flash drive that had a copy of a university application, a badly lit picture of Janet as she stared grimly into the camera at a birthday party she didn’t seem to want to be at, and a low-res screenshot of a Plenty blog article about the rise in women farmers on a collective.
Important enough to Janet to store and bring with her, presumably something to do with why she came to Plenty, but not much help in finding out why she was here. Maybe one of the women mentioned in the article, or the author, was the person she had come to talk to. But that didn’t give him any better idea about who Janet really was.
He set the USB to the side with a mental note to get Tancredi to see if there was any connection between Janet and the collective, and went through the papers. It was a quick read. A birth certificate or passport would have been too useful. Instead there was a printout of a scanned newspaper page, a page cut out from a glossy magazine about a midrange country music star, his rancher charity-worker wife, and their hipster-rustic rural cabin, and an embossed In Memoriam card for “Kitty” with the scrawled message on the back—No more.
That was suggestive, but with no details other than a first name and a generic Bible verse—Corinthians 1, and his grandmother would be disappointed that Javi had to google that—it wasn’t helpful.
Javi had gotten used to the creak of the tech’s chair and the feeling of eyes on the back of his neck. He ignored it until an unexpectedly familiar voice asked, “Anything?” from just behind him. The jolt of awareness—of the warmth of Cloister’s body, of what that mouth felt like on him, of the low rasp of that voice in the dark—sliced through Javi’s focus with ease.
It was lust. He could feel the weight of it in his groin and the tight tug of muscle in the back of his thighs. That was nothing new. He’d wanted Cloister ever since he managed to needle the not-quite-handsome, usually laid-back deputy into a scowl. It was inconvenient, but he’d gotten used to it.
The fact that he wanted to lean back against Cloister, to casually use his shoulder as a prop, was different. So was the discovery that he couldn’t see any reason why he shouldn’t.
His private life was still his own business, but after he dropped Cloister off at the station in borrowed sweats, only the deliberately clueless wouldn’t assume they’d fucked. As for his distance…. Well, once you begged someone not to die on you, it was hard to convince yourself you didn’t care at least a bit. It was dark, but that didn’t mean he could pretend Bourneville had learned to talkandthrow her voice.
“Not yet,” Javi said stiffly as he moved around the table and away from Cloister. Just because Javi couldn’t see why he shouldn’t do something, it didn’t follow that it was necessarily a good idea. It wasn’t as though he hadn’t made bad decisions in the past. “If I’m right, then there must be something here. Janet Morrow had a plan that brought her to Plenty. There must be something here that she was going to use as evidence… or leverage… or something.”
Cloister grabbed a glove and picked up the card. He read the red Sharpie’d inscription and then turned it over to look at the back.
“There’s often an address,” he said. “Somewhere to send flowers or a condolence card.”
