Chapter Ten
“Tired, Deputy?” Kincaid asked, his voice dry.
Cloister opened his eyes to the sound of a chair being scraped over the floor. He watched the neat sandy-haired man fold himself into the chair opposite.
“Most of the time,” Cloister said. “I don’t sleep much.”
Kincaid raised a sandy brow as he set a bottle of water on the table in front of Cloister. Condensation beaded on the outside of the bottle, and Kincaid fastidiously wiped his fingers as he pulled his hand back.
“Guilty conscience?” he asked.
Cloister paused, one hand on the top of the bottle, as he thought about that. The fractured, scattershot memories of the night his brother had disappeared—a man whistling, a dog barking, a dented red truck that he’d clutched so tightly the edges had left bruises on his three-year old hand.
“Maybe,” he said.
For a second, Kincaid looked genuinely amused as he sat back.
“That’s something most people don’t admit to me,” he said.
Cloister shrugged as he finished twisting the top off the bottle. “Everyone feels guilty about something,” he said. “It doesn’t mean they broke the law.”
Kincaid looked around the small yellow-cream box of a room they were in. His gaze lingered briefly on the mirrored glass panel in one wall and then flicked back to Cloister.
“Admitting to guilt in here?” he said. “Little different to telling your Weight Watchers meeting that you ate all the pies, don’t you think?”
The way he trailed off expectantly made it clear that he expected a reaction. Cloister didn’t give it to him. It wasn’t self-control, more confusion. If Kincaid had wanted to poke at Cloister’s insecurities, then the places to aim were his education and his mental health, not his weight.
They looked at each other.
Kincaid pursed his lips and clicked his pen. “Your mother runs a Weight Watchers class, doesn’t she?” he said pointedly.
“Does she?”
Kincaid blinked sandy lashes and clicked the pen again. He tucked the corners of his mouth up in a thin grimace of not-a-smile and snapped his fingers, a sharp crack of sound.
“Of course,” he said. “You’re estranged from your family, aren’t you. Sorry to bring that up.”
“Really?”
“Hmmm,” Kincaid made the non-committal humming sound from behind his lips as he looked down at the papers he’d brought in. “It is interesting, you coming from a family with a…significant…criminal element and ending up in law enforcement, of all places. Did you want to make up for their crimes?”
Cloister took a drink from his bottle of water. “No,” he said. “I wanted to live somewhere warm and work with dogs.”
Kincaid’s mouth twitched. “You’re smarter than you look, Deputy Witte.”
“To be fair, that’s not hard.”
Kincaid could have taken aim at Cloister’s looks as well. They might have been useful over the years, but Cloister was aware that he wasn’t pretty. Now, so was Kincaid. Fair enough, Cloister supposed, he’d handed that one over.
“This could be a lot easier,” Kincaid pointed out. He glanced down at his wrist, his eyes flickering as he read something off his watch. “Or maybe not. Your lawyer is here.”
“You mean my rep?” Cloister corrected him.
Kincaid got up from the table. “No,” he said, “I don’t.”
He left the folder he’d brought in with him on the table as he walked out of the room. Cloister craned around in the chair to watch as Kincaid let himself out the door. Then he glanced at the easily accessible stack of files.
He wouldn’t have to stretch to reach them.
Cloister took another drink of water as he weighed his options.
He didn’t think that looking would do him any harm, but it was also obviously what Kincaid wanted.
Cloister couldn’t see any benefit in playing along—Kincaid would tell him what he had, if anything, eventually—so he rocked onto the back legs of the chair and waited.
It took a couple of minutes, and then the door opened and Kincaid came back in, followed by a shark in a very nice suit.
“Deputy Witte doesn’t have to answer any of your questions,” the shark said as he pulled out the chair next to Cloister. He smelled like cashmere. That could be the suit or his cologne. “And, in fact, I advise him not to.”
The skin between Cloister’s shoulder blades tightened. Partially, it was habit. He was used to sitting on the other side of the table from JJ Diggs, one of Plenty’s top defense attorneys. It felt unnatural to be sitting shoulder to shoulder with the man.
It also brought home the stakes. This wasn’t some dick-measuring contest with his boyfriend’s ex, and Cloister wasn’t fourteen with the worst thing that could happen to him a stint in the system. This was the sort of conversation that had consequences.
He’d known that. He wasn’t stupid. It was just that now he felt it.
Kincaid leaned on his side of the table. He looked at Cloister and lifted one finger off the scratched surface to indicate JJ.
“You really think you need him to represent you?” he asked. “Because most people might be guilty of something, but his clients are usually guilty of what they’re accused of.”
Cloister straightened up in the chair. “One lawyer's as good as another,” he said.
“That is not true,” JJ said crisply. He sat back in the chair and slung one arm, long and expensively sleeved, along the back of Cloister’s seat.
It was an old trick. Cloister had seen him use it with a dozen Cartel clients over the years.
It looked relaxed, but it let him tell his client to shut up without having to say it.
The casual familiarity of it made Cloister want to squirm, though.
JJ ignored any tension he noticed in Cloister’s posture as he smirked at Kincaid. “And we all know it.”
Kincaid pulled the chair out on his side, turned it around, and sat down. He pushed his sleeves back from wiry, sandy-haired forearms and leaned on the thin, curved back.
“Let’s get started, then,” he said, with a smile that went nowhere near his eyes.
Cloister was an even-tempered man.
It wasn’t necessarily in his nature to be. He’d just learned that when people were already going to have preconceptions about you—from the broken nose, the height, the name—it was a good idea not to live down to them.
He couldn’t remember the last time he’d really lost his temper. The next time, though—as heat crawled up the back of Cloister’s neck and he could feel the restlessness in his fingers—was looking like it was going to be today.
Kincaid turned a page in his file, scratched the end of his nose, and said, “OK, so can we just circle back to…Milorad Zvicer?”
He got the pronunciation wrong. It was the fifth time he’d “circled back,” and he’d gotten it wrong in a different way every time. The fact that he’d not stumbled on the right way to say it once made it obvious he was doing it on purpose. Somehow, that only made it more irritating.
“Why?” Cloister snapped. “I already told you that, while I am sure I did arrest him, I don’t remember him personally. That if the file is right and he was transporting drugs, that’s probably why I arrested him. And that if he had any connection to my dad, I’d no idea.”
“Your dad?” Kincaid repeated, as if he’d missed something. He licked his thumb and turned a page. “Do you mean your biological father, Paul, or his brother, who’s your uncle and your stepfather, Jacob?”
Cloister’s jaw felt stiff as he said. “Either.”
“Hmm,” Kincaid said. “So you still claim that you weren’t aware that your stepfather, aka your uncle, and Zvicer were associates?”
“No.”
“And yet,” Kincaid said, “after that relationship with your stepfather and his MC soured, you did end up arresting Zvicer?”
From the chair beside Cloister, JJ looked up from his notes and made a sound of reproof in the back of his throat. Kincaid just held both his hands up in a “no harm, no foul” gesture. He had ink stains on the sides of his fingers.
“Just establishing the facts,” he said. “For example, the Corpse Brothers MC. You were involved in shutting them down last year.”
Cloister nodded. “That was an undercover operation,” he said. “I was involved at the end, but that was it. If my dad had any connection to them—”
“Oh no, he didn’t,” Kincaid said. He flicked his attention up to Cloister and winked.
“Not that we’ve found yet, anyhow. No. What’s interesting there is that since the Corpse Brothers disbanded, we’ve had a few new players move in on their territory.
Including the Black Vultures, a mostly Mexican MC that operates along the border. ”
That sounded accurate.
“I wouldn’t know,” Cloister said. He rubbed his wrist absently. It didn’t hurt, exactly, but he could feel where it would under the skin. “I’ve been on medical leave for a couple of months.”
“Oh, I’m sure you’ll get caught up once we clear this up,” Kincaid said. “The funny thing is that you and Angel Gallardo, the leader of the Vultures, seem to share the same taste in restaurants.”
He pulled two photos out of the file with a flourish, set them down on the table, and pushed them over toward Cloister.
They were A4 reproductions on cheap photo paper.
At a push, Cloister could probably ID which printer in the building had been used to print them—the one on the third floor, from the way the image was crooked just slightly to the left.
The images were blurry, but the details were clear enough.
In the first one, Cloister stood on the doorstep of a restaurant, one arm extended to hold the bright blue door open.
The next one had a tall, dark-haired man with a nose that could do double-duty as a can opener and a goatee nearly as sharp as he stepped through the same door.
“The Old Town Taco Shop,” Kincaid identified the restaurant. He started to pull the photos back. “And yet you two…you don’t know each other?”
JJ cleared his throat. “I eat there too,” he said. “For the record, they do a Chiles en Nogada like my third step-grandma used to make. Delicious. They blew up on TikTok last year. Half of San Diego ate there.”