Cloister had waited this long to open the wine. It seemed a shame not to save it for a special occasion. Maybe someone would get a promotion.
“Frome thinks that Macintosh tried to kill Janet,” Javi said. He opened his eyes, frowned at the unopened beer bottle, and then peeled himself off the couch to get the bottle opener from the drawer. “After all, as far as he’s concerned, Macintosh was already a murderer.”
Javi popped the cap on the bottle. Foam frothed up and spilled over the sides, slick against the glass and white against his knuckles. He licked it away with a long swipe of his tongue that caught Cloister’s attention and dried out his mouth.
“He might be right,” Cloister said as he leaned back against the counter. The sun was still high enough that he could feel the warmth of it against his back through the window, and he took a drink of his beer. It was flat, but it was cold and wet, and that was good enough. He wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. “Macintosh was there, he was unstable, and if Janet approached him, he might have reacted badly.”
The tilt of Javi’s head acknowledged that possibility. “Except he couldn’t bring himself to kill Galloway, even though he seemed to feel compelled to do so,” he pointed out. The sun was behind Cloister, and Javi squinted as he looked at him, a faint spray of lines creased around his eyes. “And how’d he get the car?”
It was usually Javi’s job to play devil’s advocate. Cloister ran on instinct and gut feelings, and half the time, he couldn’t even pinpoint what bits and pieces had informed his decision. But he’d chewed over this train of thought for hours as he tried to work it out.
“Lopez and Macintosh would have run in the same social circles,” Cloister offered. “And people don’t change the codes on their security system as often as they should. It’s possible.”
“It also makes it premeditated,” Javi said. He rubbed the damp side of the bottle against his cheek and headed back to the bench. The lean sprawl of his body as he settled in took up space that Cloister was used to having to himself. It felt—almost—more intimate than sex to watch Javi tuck a shoulder into the divot Cloister’s hip had left in the cushions. Cloister licked his lips and looked down at his beer as he tried to shove the distraction of lust away for later and focus on the case. “And raises the question of how that’s possible. Janet arrived in town that day. Do you think she called ahead to Macintosh’s office? Left a message on the answering machine?”
“Well, when you put it like that,” Cloister said with dry humor. He paused for a second and then added as an aside, “He did have a phone.”
Javi raised his head off the cushions and tucked his arm behind his head. The borrowed shirt didn’t fit as well as his usual tailored ones, and there was something oddly appealing about the crease and fold of the loose fabric. Cloister imagined it tugged tight under his hands, or just hanging open off Javi’s shoulders.
“That’s right. Frome said you found a stash of items you thought were Macintosh’s,” Javi said. “What made you look?”
“Macintosh was homeless,” he said. “At best he’s getting around on the bus. He couldn’t leave his stuff at home or lock it in his car. He had to have been in the area a while before he went to the hospital. It seemed worth a shot.”
“And?”
Cloister glanced at his dinner. It had already started to cool, the edges of the beef curled up and dry where the sauce had slid off. He left it to dry up the rest of the way and grabbed the envelope he’d brought home with him from the station.
He sat down next to Javi and emptied the photos onto the table. A swipe of his hand spread the slick sheets over the scuffed Formica. His quick snapshots of Macintosh’s den in the abandoned building didn’t reveal much—a bed of old torn sleeping bags, a flashlight propped in the corner, and a few water-swollen law books parked defiantly on the window sill.
“The waiter in the restaurant next door said he’d seen Macintosh there before,” Cloister said. “He said there were a lot of homeless who crashed there, off and on, but he’d seen Macintosh often enough to know his face.”
Javi sat forward.
“I’ll check the deeds tomorrow,” he said. “Frome said that Macintosh owned a lot of property. That might have been one of them.”
He pushed them aside to look at the contents of the bag Cloister had carried back to the station. It didn’t look like much, laid out in flat, garish colors under the evidence room fluorescents, but the contents of the satchel were important enough to Andrew Macintosh that he held on to them even after he didn’t have a bed to sleep in. There was the satchel itself, a monogram half scraped off the front, a handful of pictures, a worn, cigarette-burned teddy, and a second-gen iPhone with a smashed screen and an old, frayed cable plugged into it. It still worked. Sort of.
“Look at this,” Javi said as he pulled one photo out of the spread to examine. A red car was parked on the road, the Macintosh family stunned and blank faced as they stared into the camera. A man’s shadow lay elongated over the hood of the car. “This looks like the before of the crime scene where his family died. There was no mention of it in the file. Why not?”
“Maybe Macintosh thought it wouldn’t look good?” Cloister suggested. “He knew he had no friends in the Sheriff’s Department, he knew Plenty PD was dirty, and he knew this looked like either a trophy or an… invoice.”
“Maybe,” Javi said. He tapped his finger against the face of the kid in the back seat of the car, his face bony and afraid under a flop of carefully styled hair. “Until I get confirmation from Galloway one way or another, I’m going to assume this is Janet. So whatever this was, it wasn’t a homicide. Or at least not at this stage. Macintosh said that someone called him and demanded a ransom on the day his family disappeared. He sounded genuinely devastated when he talked about it, but back then, he was still Mac the Knife. He’d have wanted proof of life.”
“If Macintosh told the truth,” Cloister pointed out. He sounded thoughtful, though, as though Javi had halfway convinced him. “So what? The kidnappers call Macintosh, demand money, and then something goes wrong?”
“Or right,” Javi said. “We know that Macintosh and his wife weren’t happy. We strongly suspect that the family wasn’t killed here. Maybe she was the one who didn’t want to go through the hassle of a divorce? It would be easier to disappear, especially with a wad of ransom money and the satisfaction of your ex being on trial for your murder.”
“Except the bodies were identified,” Cloister pointed out. “Macintosh said it was his wife and kids.”
“After they were shot in the head and burned in a fire,” Javi pointed out. He rubbed his hand over his jaw as he said that, as though there might still be blood splattered over the skin. “Plus Macintosh said that the man who called him to demand money shot them while Macintosh was on the line. He was primed to believe that the bodies were who expected them to be.”
“And the pathologist?” Cloister asked. “The fire made it difficult, but he got DNA to make the comparison. It went into the system.”
Javi acknowledged that with a grunt and flicked through the rest of the pictures. They were all old surveillance photos and badly worn from a lifetime spent in a damp, old bag, but they looked as though they were professionally taken. There didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to them—crime-scene aftermaths with bored deputies standing guard, one of a woman at home, another of the same woman in a deputy’s uniform, and a few of what Cloister assumed were Macintosh’s old clients at court.
Sean was in one of them, surprisingly young and cocky as ever in a neatly pressed uniform as he headed up the stairs of the courthouse.
“And there were these,” Cloister said. He sorted through the photos until he found the one of a folded, legal-size sheet. The edges were torn, and the image was distorted with damp and mildew, but it was still easy to pick out the subject—a body on a steel gurney, green surgical sheet drawn up over her nipples and the two nicks of the upperYincision just visible, and at the bottom of the page, faded and scraped thought it was, the morgue ID and case number. “This is from a medical report at the morgue. It doesn’t look like a connected case, so I don’t know why he had it.”
