She cast around on the floor until she found the trace of Macintosh left where—based on the scene Cloister had drawn from the reports—he’d scuffled with Javi. A whine squeezed out of Bourneville’s throat as she caught Javi’s scent, and she glanced up at Cloister for reassurance.
“It’s okay, Bourneville,” Cloister said as he gave her some play on the lead. “Find him. Where’d he go?”
She dropped her nose to the pavement and followed the scent trail up to the wide puddle of blood where Tancredi had been injured. That made Bourneville whine and pin her ears unhappily as she recognized the scent. She sniffed around the edges of the blood stain and then caught the puddle of Macintosh’s scent next to her.
It led back down into the garage. This time Cloister blocked her with his knees and pulled her around by the collar. She huffed a deep, frustrated sigh and gave him a reproachful look. What, that look asked, did he even want from her?
“Your dog looks lost,” Hewitt said. “She need Waze?”
Ellie laughed and shook her head. “Give it a rest, Tim. You’ve got your cleanup site back. Right, Witte?”
Cloister almost said no. It would have been petty, but Hewitt had the sort of face you wanted to thwart. Always had.
“We’re done with it,” he said. “Do what you like. Come on, Bourneville, such.”
This time it clicked with Bourneville that he wanted to backtrack the trail. She padded up the ramp with purpose, head down so her nose grazed along the concrete. On the way past Hewitt, she lifted her head and turned it to stare at him with suspicious amber eyes. No growl. She knew when she had pushed her luck, but her distrust of him was obvious.
Cloister wanted to think it was proof that his dog was a good judge of character, but more likely she had picked up on his irritation. That wasn’t good behavior.
“He was the one I told you about, right?” Hewitt said as Cloister stooped under the tape. There was a smug note in his voice that said he already knew the answer or was pretty sure he did. “The guy who came around the last cleanup, where that woman hurt herself. The one who wanted to know all about her. Bet it was. If you’d listened to me, Deputy, maybe one of our own wouldn’t be in the hospital.”
This time Ellie didn’t laugh. “Tim,” she warned. “Enough. You were right about Macintosh. We all know that already.”
“I heard you retired,” Cloister said as he straightened up. He gave Hewitt the same unfriendly, sidelong look Bourneville had. “You’re not a Marine, Tancredi doesn’t moonlight for a cleaning service, and Galloway’s a sheriff’s department employee too. So two of ours are in the hospital, and neither of them have anything to do with you.”
“Just sayin’,” Hewitt said. He had a weasel’s grin, smug that he got a rise from Witte. “Good old-fashioned police work is what the sheriff’s department needs, not the FBI sticking their nose in. Back in my day, we had some pride.”
People made assumptions from Cloister based on his face, from the heavy bone structure and saddle-broken slouch of his nose. The truth was he was born with both those things. “Came out of your mom ass backwards, fists up, and nose broken,” his stepdad used to say. “If you weren’t a Witte, we’d have had to adopt you.” The fact that he looked like a man who liked to fight usually meant he didn’t have to. But it didn’t mean he couldn’t, and Hewitt’s smirk made his fists itch.
But Bourneville had finally picked up that he wanted to backtrack the trail and leaned her weight into the taut lead as she sniffed the ground. He didn’t want her to lose interest. Besides, the only hand he had free was in a cast, and he didn’t want to have to replace it.
“Don’t you have work to do?” he said instead.
“Yeah,” Ellie said as she gave Hewitt a shove and Cloister a wary look. “Get on with it. I’m supposed to be working, remember?”
Cloister let the lead play out through his hand and stuck to Bourneville’s heels as she followed Macintosh’s scent around the side of the building. The trail stayed close to the wall until it reached a scrubby stand of bushes, a hideout with an empty bottle of cheap booze and a scent pool soaked into the impacted dirt.
It was a spot that gave Macintosh a good view of the garage. He would have seen Galloway drive in, but he had to know when she would arrive.
Bourneville sniffed the bottle of liquor, wrinkled her nose, and recoiled with a snort and her ears laid flat. She sniffed around the perimeter of the circle and finally barked again as she scraped her foot against a patch of concrete.
It was a cigarette butt, smoked down to the filter and tossed to smolder itself out on the ground.
“That’s a clever girl,” Cloister said. He gave her shoulder a congratulatory thump. “Come on, Bourneville, let’s find where else he was. Such.”
Fifteen minutes later and two attempts to turn back on the trail going the “right” way that Cloister had to correct, the trail ended at a grimy doorway in a grimier alley. It was painted with cracked blue paint and locked with a heavy rusted padlock.
Bourneville pawed at the door and looked around expectantly at Cloister. Doors were his responsibility.
“Nobody’s there.” Behind Cloister a door creaked, and someone with an English accent spoke.
Cloister looked around. A skinny dark man stood in the doorway behind him, the heavy metal door braced open with one foot and two oversized garbage bags held in his hands. He pointed with his chin at the door.
“Some bigwig bought it years back, was going to turn into a fancy club or something,” he said. “Never happened. Now it’s just full of rats and junkies.”
He set one bag down at his feet and swung the other twice before he tossed it at the dumpster parked next to the building. The bag picked out a perfectly judged arc and dropped down into the dumpster with a clatter and a thump. As the man stooped for the second bag, heavy ponytail of dreads fallen over his shoulder, Cloister walked toward him.
“You seen anyone around here the last day or so?” he asked.
