“Either way, it was a problem that Hewitt couldn’t clean up.”
Collins was stationed in front of the door. He gave Javi an apologetic look as they reached him. “We pulled the guards off her room last night, Agent Merlo,” he said. “After Macintosh killed himself, we thought the threat was over and….”
“And you were wrong,” Javi said in cool, clipped tones. It made Collins wilt. Javi took pity on him. “It happens. Just don’t make the same mistake again.”
Collins stiffened his spine. “We won’t,” he said. “I won’t. Thank you, Agent.” He got out of the way to let them into the now-empty hospital room.
The sheets were folded back neatly, as though a nurse had done it, and the suggestion of Janet’s body was still imprinted in the mattress and pillows. A length of crayon red hair was caught around the tube of the unplugged canula that curled on the pillow.
“That’s all, Collins,” Javi said. “Go and see if Tancredi saw anything, would you? Patient or not, she’s the only deputy we know was on-site when this happened.”
“Sir.” The door closed, and Collins’s footsteps retreated down the hall.
“Why didn’t he just kill her here?” Javi asked. He walked around the bed and frowned at the disconnected wires. “Whatever hesitation he might have had the night he ran you down, he’s over that now. Jessie Macintosh and Andrew Junior could well be dead by now. He commissioned the murder of the county pathologist. Yet he couldn’t finish the job on an injured woman in a coma? Why move her?”
The flowers had wilted and smelled a little of decay. It was a bad perfume for a hospital room. Cloister went over to the window to let some air in. He wrestled it open to let a draft whistle in and then stopped as a realization hit.
“Hewitt’s spent years cleaning up crime scenes,” he said. “Deputy. Cleaner. He’s seen hundreds of crimes, hundreds of ways to get caught. He’s going to do the same thing he did ten years ago and stage the crime scene to say what he wants. Hewitt still thinks there’s a chance he’ll get away from this clean.”
Bourneville stood up and put her front paws on the window to look out, her black nose pressed wet against the glass.
“What do you mean?” Javi asked. Cloister pointed out the window.
“That’s Lieutenant Frome’s car,” he said.
It didn’t take long for Javi to catch up. Cloister might have an edge in following his gut, but Javi put all the pieces together quicker than he did.
“Everything that counts against Hewitt would count against Frome too,” he said as he turned abruptly and stalked to the door. He yanked it open and yelled for a deputy. “Frome had the same the motive, the same—or better—access to weapons and records, and the same opportunities. And now that Hewitt’s over his qualms about murder, Frome isn’t going to get a chance to defend himself.”
While Javi barked orders to the deputies outside to go out and check Frome’s car, Cloister pointed at the bed.
“Up,” he said, and Bourneville dropped down from the window, padded over to the bed, and jumped on it. Her feet left dirty prints on the pristine sheets, but the hospital could change it before Janet got back. Cloister patted the pillow. Bourneville dropped her nose and sniffed the rich sweat-and-oil scent that had worked into the cotton and feathers over the last few weeks. “Such, Bourneville. Such. Find Janet.”
Every time they had a case like this, where someone went missing again, he thought that Bourneville looked particularly disappointed in him. She’d already found this person once. Why had Cloister let them wander off again?
She didn’t let it stop her. Her ears pricked forward sharply as she gave the pillow one last sniff. Once she had the scent stored in her nose, she jumped off the bed and put her nose to the floor as she trotted around the bed.
The scent was more diffuse than if Janet had walked under her own steam, but after a second’s search, Bourneville had the trail. She barked once and took off, her head down and tail up as she wove through trolleys and uniformed legs.
“What the—!” a startled nurse yelped as Bourneville went low between her knees.
Cloister jogged after his dog. “Sorry,” he told the nurse on the way by.
She gave him a baffled look and a daunted “Okay?”
The trail took Bourneville down the hall to the heavy swinging doors. She barreled through them and raced down the stairs at top speed. Her feet skidded as she hit the landings, and Cloister took the stairs three at a time as he followed her. The dull ache that had finally abandoned his hip flared up again as he hit the concrete hard with both feet.
“Cloister,” Javi yelled. “Wait!Pendejo estúpido!”
The curse echoed down the stairwell. Cloister registered the frustration in Javi’s voice—he only resorted to Spanish when he was pissed off enough that only his grandmother’s curses would do—but the habit of a lifetime was hard to break. He followed the flag of Bourneville’s tail down the stairs as she followed Janet’s track.
Cloister slipped on the second-to-last landing and fell into the wall. The impact jarred his shoulder down to his cracked ribs, and he grunted in pain. It took him a second to get his feet under him again, and by then he’d lost sight of Bourneville.
“Shit.”
He swallowed the blood from his bitten tongue and scrambled down the last set of stairs. Above him a door slammed, but he ignored it as he pulled his gun from the holster. A set of fire doors hung open a crack, the makeshift lock of a looped chain not enough to keep it closed, and three different corridors led into the maze of lower-level rooms and halls.
They’d wheeled Cloister down here to get his wrist scanned before they plastered it. He remembered an endless series of turns and the flickering strobe of nearly defunct fluorescent lights. Some of that confusion had probably been down to his head injury, but not all of it.
