“Sir, I don’t,” Cloister said.
“Maybe you’d be right.”
The flat confession shut both of them up for a second. Then Cloister coughed and scratched his head.
“Lieutenant, I don’t know, that sounds like a good call. The Toast has a brawl three times a night. We don’t run them all in.”
“But that’s not why I made the call,” Frome said. His voice was still tight with frustration, the words clipped between his teeth. “I made it because I didn’t want to have to face Macintosh in court again, not when it was Hewitt’s first month back on desk duty. Macintosh would have said it was harassment—”
“Hewitt?” Cloister interrupted, and Bourneville lifted her chin.
“My old partner, Deputy Hewitt,” Frome said, “the one who got shot by Macintosh’s client and was made to look incompetent in court. The last thing he needed was to be accused of harassing the guy’s family over the case. So yeah, maybe I was too eager to go along when Stokes wanted to drop it. Maybe I told myself I was doing the guy a solid by keeping the rest of the cops from knowing he got his ass handed to him by a kid who was only a year out of high school. I could have screwed up that call, but that was then. It had nothing to do with my approach to this case.”
“Hewitt, the same guy who works for the crime cleanup guys? I thought you said he retired.”
He could sense Frome’s confused irritation down the line. “He did after the Macintosh case. The fact that he couldn’t put the guy away just finished him, but yeah, he works crime-scene cleanup now. He pissed his retirement away in Vegas, so when he came back to town, a couple of us put in a good word for him—me, his ex, hell, even his new wife.”
“His wife.”
“Yes, his wife. She kept her maiden name—Deputy Ergobah up in Kearney Mesa,” he said. “What the hell, Cloister? If you want to make Merlo jealous, ask out Stokes. I like Hewitt, but he’s not a catch.”
“You might be wrong about that,” Cloister said quietly. He reached over and rubbed Bourneville’s ears as he remembered the way she growled at Hewitt. At the time he thought it was just tension and the smell of death, but she’d always been a good judge of character. “Bet he’s kept his gun too.”
Frome’s brain finally caught up with his temper. “Most do. Deputy Witte, what are you implying?”
“I don’t know,” Cloister said. “But he was the first one to point a finger at Macintosh when Jessie and the kids disappeared, right?”
“If his car got a flat, he pointed the finger at Macintosh,” Frome said. “He hated him. I admit that, but he didn’t do anything about it, Witte. He was a good cop.”
“So was everyone in Plenty PD,” Cloister said. “Until they weren’t. Lieutenant, would you bring Hewitt in for questioning?”
Silence. “He’s my friend, Witte. He was my partner.”
“Better you than some random deputy, then,” Cloister said. “Tell him we want to follow up on the tip he gave us. Make sure Macintosh was the one who hurt Janet. If it’s nothing, he never has to know any different.”
“If it’s nothing,” Frome said quietly, “you should look for another job, because you will be done in my station. Understood?”
“Lieutenant.”
Funnily enough, it was actually a good threat. It was the first time since Cloister moved to Plenty that he’d actually care if he had to leave. It wasn’t much of a root—one man, two places—but it was more than Cloister had had in a long time.
He hung up on Frome and dialed the station one-handed, his cast braced against the steering wheel as he pulled out from the curb.
“Put me through to Armstrong,” he said briskly.
While the phone rang, he wracked his brain over the photos he’d looked through the day before. Crime scene after crime scene, his attention was on the crime, the sheet-covered bodies and blood splatter. But had Hewitt been in any of those shots? He was sure the crime-scene cleaning vans were in a few shots, their familiar overalls in the background, and it could have been Hewitt.
Finally Armstrong took the call. “What is it, Witte?” she asked. “Your dog want to come in and sniff what hard work smells like again?”
“Is that a crack because I’m on desk duty?”
“That it is,” Armstrong said genially. “Hey, are you on your way to see Tancredi? I meant to drop in, bring some flowers or something, but… hospitals. Would you—”
“You were weird about the Lopez car when we brought it in? Why?”
“The Lopez car? No, that was nothing. Stupid notion. Why?”
“Tell me.”
