Javi grabbed a Post-it and scrawled down the number for the morgue photo Andrew Macintosh had carried around with him all these years. He pushed it across the desk to Galloway. Galloway pushed her glasses onto her forehead to squint at the number. A quick check brought up nothing from the digital records.
“Give me twenty minutes,” she said as she got up. “This means that the body was logged into the system, an autopsy was done, transcriptions were generated. It will probably be in storage at Kearny Mesa, but there will be some record of this corpse.”
She left to start the hunt. Javi waited at least fifteen of the requested minutes in the cramped office before impatience drove him to his feet and out into the hall in search of an update.
A deputy he didn’t recognize—not from Plenty—gave him a curious look as she escorted a dull-eyed woman down the hall toward the viewing room. Javi paused midstride and turned to watch the uniformed back disappear down the hall.
That would have been the sheriff’s department, he heard in Cloister’s drawl again. In Plenty you heard “corruption” and thought about the police, but maybe that sold the deputies short?
His phone rang. He expected it to be Cloister with an update, but it was the FBI office number on the screen.
“Sue?”
“Clyde Granfeld disappeared off the face of the earth three years ago,” she told him. “His parents, however, popped up on law enforcement radar two days ago.”
“Why?”
“They disappeared,” Sue said. “They were reported missing by their neighbors two weeks ago, after the mother’s birthday party. It looks like they just got up and left, but the police were concerned that there might have been foul play. The neighbors told them that there had been a ‘scene’ at the party after a young woman gatecrashed. She had to be removed, and on her way out, yelled, I quote, ‘You told me she was dead!’”
The memorial card in Janet’s effects suddenly made sense to Javi, especially when he factored in Sean’s testimony. Jessie Macintosh hadn’t disappeared to protect her child. That was just what she told Janet. She did it to protect her lover. When Tommy, or more likely Janet—who was confident, stubborn, and wanted their help to become who she really was—caused problems, the two lovers just did it again. A one-off payment to sop their conscience, the inheritance the professor had mentioned, and a postdated death notice from Janet’s half brother and stepfather.
Except this time they didn’t have professional help to pull off the disappearing act. They hadn’t moved far enough, or maybe at all, and Janet found out they lied to her. And once you realized someone has lied to you, you start to wonder if they’ve lied to you about everything.
Javi knew that from Kincaid. One lie was all it took to cast doubt on everything else. He dragged his attention back to the call as Sue paused to cough.
“Sorry, where was I…. The Granfelds dismissed it at the time as just some homeless woman ranting, but later they had a vicious fight that the neighbors could hear through the walls. They assumed he’d had an affair and she’d blown up about it, so the local police want to find Clyde and make sure Mrs. Grenfeld left of her own volition. So far no luck. So do you want me to keep looking for Clyde?”
“Hold on,” Javi said as he saw Galloway limp urgently down the hall toward him. A harried man with a stack of files pinned precariously under his chin stumbled along behind her.
“I was right,” Galloway said triumphantly. She waved a file under his nose. “Whatever happened, they deleted the digital record without destroying the actual evidence. And since these records didn’t show up in our files, they have just been shuffled around down in the archive instead of being sent over to the new storage facility. A young woman was found dead from what looked like an overdose. Her body was never claimed. There’s a note in here from the deputy that says the father was incapable. And it was cremated accordingly. The DNA on file here is the same as what we have in our records for Jessie Macintosh. Someone swapped the files.”
Her voice was sharp with indignation at the idea. Javi regretted that he had to make it worse.
“I don’t think so,” he said. Galloway wrinkled her nose at him. “I think they swapped the bodies.”
Galloway blanched slightly as she caught up with him. “Son of a bitch,” she muttered. “That’s why the bodies were burned.”
The one thing everyone said about Macintosh was that he wasn’t a man to let things go. If his family had just disappeared, he would never have stopped searching for them. He had the resources, the favors owed, to do a good job of it too. So someone gave Macintosh the closure he needed to let it go—bodies to bury and the blame for it. At another time Macintosh might have asked more questions, demanded they recheck the DNA, but he was primed to accept the bodies as his family, even if they were burned beyond recognition.
Javi plucked the folder out of her hand as she absorbed that information. He folded it open and flicked through the pages until he found the deputy’s report. It could have been Galloway’s predecessor who swapped out the bodies, but Javi thought he’d have gotten rid of the paper trail. More likely it was someone who knew about the bodies but didn’t have access to the records—like the deputy in charge of the cases who knew there was no next of kin.
The name was printed in too-deep, careful block letters on the last page. Javi hadn’t expected to recognize it.
“Agent Merlo?” Sue said in his ear. “Did you hear me? Do you need me to—”
He hung up on her and called Cloister on his way out the door. It rang through to voicemail.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
“FASS!” CLOISTERbarked as he let go of Bourneville’s collar. She took off, and dirt scattered from under her paws as Collins took off at a run across the training field. The bite suit made him waddle and swear as he ran.
The last dog to do the run was Kit, a heavy black lab who compensated for being a six-year-old’s Kitty Kat in his civilian life by being aggressively alpha on the job—or maybe that was his handler, who’d made a dramatic leap to spin the runner around. Bourneville didn’t bother with showmanship. She raced up on Collins, cut between his legs, and latched on to his arm as he stumbled.
She snarled as her teeth ripped into the padding and then shook her body viciously until her weight dragged Collins’s arm down. He staggered and tried to swing his arm back into the air. Bourneville bit down harder, the snarl that rattled out of her chest furious and almost metallic sounding, and muscled him to the ground.
Collins howled and rolled around gracelessly while she snarled over him and shook his arm like a terrier shook a rat. Her ears were pinned flat, and frothy drool splattered the ground and bite suit as Collins struggled.
“Bourneville,” Cloister snapped as he jogged over. He grabbed her harness and felt the vibration of her growl up his arm. “Aus! Let him up.”
