Chapter Eleven
“Idon’t think Limehouse was doing anything clever, if that’s any consolation,” Sean offered.
He took a drink from the milkshake on the table, sucking up the Pepto-Bismol pink mixture while keeping one eye on the hotel opposite.
“I mean, there’s a pretty good selection of private investigators in Plenty—all those commuting spouses who only come home on the weekend need someone to keep an eye on their partners—but I’m pretty much the only old-school one. ”
He paused and then waved his finger in the general vicinity of his nose before nodding at Javi’s face.
“Does that hurt?”
It did. Javi didn’t want to go into it.
He was sitting opposite Sean, in the shade of the awning rolled out from the bougie cafe on the sea front.
He lifted an eyebrow as he looked the private investigator over.
He wasn’t one to throw stones about dressing well, and Sean’s new look was an improvement over their first meeting, when he was fresh off a divorce and in a not-so-fresh pair of boxers, but cuffed black jeans and a self-consciously cool, uncreased graphic tee didn’t exactly have the old-school cred of a crumpled trench coat.
“Old school?”
Sean looked away from the hotel for a second and down at himself. He plucked the T-shirt away from his chest and then smoothed it back down.
“Your boyfriend wears band T-shirts.”
That was true. Cloister didn’t wear them to be cool. He bought them by the bag from the thrift store, wore them out, and threw them out. It saved on laundry. Sean had clearly gotten his from an expensive rack somewhere.
“I just don’t see the Continental Op wearing a Hendrix T-shirt.”
Sean had to give him that one. “Yeah, well, one of my competitors calls herself Cathy Catfish and has a YouTube channel. She’s…
pretty good, to be fair, but Limehouse wasn’t after outing his wife on social media.
He wanted a more traditional shoe leather and Polaroids approach.
That, along with the impression I’m willing to go a bit seedy, is what I offer. ”
He didn’t sound proud of that, but it didn’t seem to bother him much either. Sometimes Javi envied that, not often, but Sean had been a good cop…until he wasn’t. He’d lost his job and his reputation, and somehow he’d found a way to come out the other side at peace with that.
If Saul hadn’t, for whatever reason, taken a risk on Javi after Phoenix, could Javi have found the same equilibrium?
Probably not. His parents might be old money, but they were still visible minorities, and Javi had always had the pressure of that. But sometimes he wondered.
“And?” Javi prodded to get himself and Sean back on track. “Did you need to get seedy on Limehouse’s account?”
Sean grabbed a nacho from the plate left to get cold on the table in front of him. It was past being crisp, but he ate it anyhow and wiped his fingers on a handy napkin. The corner of his mouth tilted up with resigned humor as he shook his head.
“I wish,” he said. “I feel like I robbed the guy. SSA Joel makes you look like someone with a life outside his job.”
Javi wasn’t sure what part of that comment he should take offense to. He was sure he should, but it was where to start that gave him pause. Sean didn’t give him a chance to craft his objection as he leaned back in the cafe’s cheap plastic chair and ticked his points off on his fingers.
“She went to work early, she stayed late, and she went home,” he said. “Once a week, she’d break that streak to take Limehouse’s kid to therapy. The closest thing to a friend she had in town was your dead boss.”
Javi blinked. He'd not expected to hear his own name—Joel's opinion of him had been made clear with a dozen burn runs and background checks since she’d been assigned to Plenty—but at least he was alive.
“Saul?” he asked. There was no one else he knew who’d match the description. Kincaid would have fit, but he was also, unfortunately, among the living.
Unless he’d pushed Cloister too hard, in which case Javi was going to be aggrieved that Sean got that news before he did.
“Who else?” Sean asked.
One of the coral-pink doors that lined the front of the motel opened.
Sean caught the motion out of the corner of his eye and reached for his camera.
His fingers closed around the hard plastic case, and then relaxed as he saw one of the cleaners in her blue scrubs come out with an armful of laundry.
“Swear to God,” Sean grumbled. “I get punched more on the infidelity cases, but there’s more waiting with skip traces. People can only fuck for so long.”
Javi was briefly derailed by a flicker-hot memory of his interrupted morning.
The muscles in his thighs twitched, and he felt the phantom ache of frustration curl along his taint again.
He thought Sean might be wrong about that.
If he ever had Cloister to himself for an extended period of time, without interruptions or misunderstandings or missing people, he’d not be coming up for air much.
Of course, some ruthlessly pragmatic part of him pointed out, Cloister would have to take the dog for a walk and to do her business. Other than that—
Javi supposed that the fact he did, actually, kind of find that endearing was as close to romantic as he was going to get.
“Words to live by,” he told Sean. “But to get back on topic…what do you mean about Saul? They knew each other? I didn’t even think they’d worked together.”
Sean shrugged and finished his milkshake.
He pinched the end of the straw between his fingers as he moved it around the bottom of the glass to suck up the dregs.
“FBI personnel files are a bit beyond my pay grade, Merlo,” he told Javi.
“All I know is that the only time she broke her routine was for that dead man. She went to his old house, she pulled a bunch of his old case files, she even visited his daughter a couple of times.”
“Lara?”
The pinch of resentment in the back of Javi’s throat caught him by surprise.
He’d not realized that Saul’s daughter was a friend—or that she would have been if Javi had been willing to unbend enough to acknowledge he’d be in Plenty long enough for the occasional dinner plan.
By the time he’d worked it out, it was too late.
The fact that it wasn’t his fault, that he’d just been doing his job and that had helped him save Saul’s grandson, should have made him feel better about it. It didn’t.
Sean snapped his fingers and aimed a finger gun at Javi to confirm that was who he’d meant.
“That’s the one,” he said. “Lara Hartley, these days. I guess Joel found some of Saul’s belongings in the office and boxed them up to take back to her.”
“Personally?”
Sean snorted as he fished the straw out of his finished drink. He chewed on the end idly as he gave Javi a wry look.
“What else is she going to do?” he asked. “Drop the dead dad’s treasured possessions off in the mailroom to get shipped back?”
Yes.
Javi narrowed his eyes as he considered the word that had popped into his head.
That’s exactly what Joel would have done.
She wasn’t unsympathetic; she was regimented.
Javi had known that before Sean confirmed it.
Joel scheduled her work day in five-minute increments.
There wasn’t room for an impulsive, compassionate trip to deliver a dead man’s effects to his child.
Especially when the effects, which Javi assumed included the half-empty bottle of drawer whiskey he’d inherited when Saul died, weren’t anything particularly sentimental.
If she’d gone to see Lara, it was because she’d had a reason beyond cleaning out a dusty drawer.
“If you’re thinking they were hooking up,” Sean interrupted Javi’s train of thought. “They weren’t.”
It hadn’t been what Javi was thinking. If Joel had been going to cheat with anyone, it would have been Kincaid, but that had never been what kept her on his hook. Nevertheless, he wanted to know Sean’s reasons.
“Are you sure?”
Sean folded the well-chewed straw between his fingers. “Pretty sure,” he said. “Hartley had her kids there when they talked, not exactly Tinder one-night stand etiquette. Plus…Joel knew I was there. She made me early on.”
Javi raised an eyebrow.
Sean shrugged. “She didn’t buttonhole me in the Whole Foods parking lot or anything,” he said.
“But you know what it’s like, the mark makes eye contact through the windshield?
You see them looking for something, and it turns out to be your car?
They know, and you know they know. But you’ve still got to pay this month’s rent on the office, so…
Anyhow, if she was hooking up with Hartley, I don’t think she’d have been doing it while I was outside with a telephoto lens. ”
That made Javi glower at him. Between what he owed to Saul and the family’s independent status as victims of a violent crime, he couldn’t help the flicker of protectiveness. Sean leaned back in reaction and held both hands up.
“I didn’t,” he said. “But I could have. Why would she risk it?”
Javi snorted his opinion of that. “And I don’t suppose you have any idea where she’d have gone at four a.m. in her husband’s car yesterday?” he asked.
Sean looked apologetic as he shook his head. “Limehouse ended our contract last week,” he said. “She—”
He broke off as a car pulled into the front of the motel.
It parked outside the reception, and a man got out with a plastic bag of takeout in one hand and his phone in the other.
Sean grabbed his camera and lifted it, thumbing the button to zoom in.
As the focus closed in around the delivery man, Sean absently finished his explanation.
“She was usually up at that time,” he said. “But that’s about all I have for you. If that’s all, that looks like my skip-trace’s carne asada is on the way up.”
Javi stood up. He adjusted his cuffs, ready to go, and then thought of one last question.
“Was Limehouse projecting?” he asked.