Chapter 12
Chapter Twelve
Reid Lassiter was a man who responded well to a suit. He was still agitated, but the bristle he’d greeted Cloister with had dulled. He stood on the doorstep of his house with his arms tightly folded, fingers pinched around his elbows.
“Miles is very private,” he explained. “He hates people in his space. Even me. It’s why we moved here. So it was our space. The other night really freaked him out, and if…when he comes home…I don’t want him to realize that I’d let it happen again.”
Cloister wadded the suit he’d been handed—cashmere, cobalt blue, silk-lined—inside out in his hands. The man-handling made Javi wince a little internally, but he understood the reasoning.
“It’s not a problem,” Cloister said. “This hasn’t been washed since it was last worn?”
Reid gave a chuckle that didn’t last long and shook his head. “It’s dry-clean only,” he said. “One of his favorites. He was going to take them to his man this week, but…”
He trailed off.
Cloister stepped away and crouched down to offer the coat to Bourneville. As the clipped “such” set her to sniffing at the armpits and collar, Javi looked back at Reid.
“So the prowler broke into your house, but he was released without charge?” he asked dubiously.
Reid’s mouth twisted into a grimace. “Apparently, he’s not well or something,” he said.
“His sister called them and got angry and…apparently, he used to live here, and he’s not been well.
So he was just ‘confused,’ but I shouldn’t worry because he’s been ‘given a good talking-to’ and he knows not to come back. ”
He let go of his elbows in order to pointedly hook his fingers around the phrases that irritated him the most, although the way he spat them out was emphasis enough.
“Did he?” Javi asked. “Live here?”
Reid started to answer, stopped, and tapped the toe of his foot on the porch nervously.
“I don’t know,” he said. “It was a foreclosure. I heard about it through work. Miles thinks we bought off the heirs of a little old lady who passed, but I’m not sure who actually lived here before.
It was the perfect house, and it just fell into my lap.
I just…I didn’t want to know anything that might put me off.
Maybe that was a mistake if it was a crazy peeping tom or something, but… ”
He gave an expressively fatalistic shrug to finish off the “too late now” sentiment. Javi nodded his acknowledgement. He could follow up with the sheriff’s department if it came to that, but odds were a sympathetic deputy had cut the prowler some slack.
Plenty was a town in the process of a painful demographic shift from rural farming community to commuter town.
It wasn’t hard to find people who resented the banks and who knew someone who’d been displaced to make way for a blow-in from the city with disposable income and a dry cleaner they preferred.
Like Reid.
Like Javi, he supposed.
Bourneville gave the collar of the jacket one last snuffle and then gave a shrill yip as she shuffled back down the path, ready to get to work. Cloister signaled for her to wait as he stood up, the suit jacket dangled from one hand and the lead looped around his wrist.
“Unfortunately, nobody let you and Miles know about that,” he explained. “So Miles had no reason not to keep his usual routine and take his morning run.”
Reid took a deep breath and made a dramatic gesture.
“And when he didn’t come home, I didn’t know I should panic.
I mean, I was worried, obviously, but about an accident or an episode.
Not about…God, I don’t even know what I should be worried about.
Some crazy homeless man killed my husband because I have a house? ”
That was an impressive bit of guilt-dodging on the fly. Javi didn’t point that out.
“Don’t assume the worst,” he told Reid. “An accident is more likely than anything else. My…partner…does a lot of SAR. You’d be surprised how often the outcome is just a bizarre story for future cocktail parties.”
“But not always,” Reid said. “And Miles…he’s been hurt before. I love him, and he’s so strong in his own way, but I don’t know…”
He broke off and bit his lower lip hard. Fear cracked through the hard shell of resentment and anger for a moment, before he quickly spackled it back over. It was safer to be agitated, in motion. It meant less time to think.
“And the sheriff’s department doesn’t even care,” he said. “They won’t do anything, not even listen to me. Well, if anything does happen, I’m going to sue. Maybe they’ll listen then,”
Cloister gathered up Bourneville’s lead to get a good grip on it.
“He left at five a.m.,” he said. “The clock’s not run down on forty-eight hours yet, so it’s not technically a missing person’s case.”
Ah. So technically, it wasn’t a problem for a private citizen to get involved.
“And hopefully it won’t need to be,” Javi said smoothly. He gave Reid a reassuring pat on the arm. “You should go and get something to eat. Try and rest. We’ll let you know if we find anything.”
Reid snorted and waved his hand angrily in Cloister’s direction.
“Him finding something is what kicked this all off,” he said. “We didn’t know the man was here. He wasn’t doing any harm until your ‘partner’ kicked the door in and arrested him. So, forgive me if I’m not full of faith in the sheriff’s department.”
He stepped back inside and slammed the door.
There was a pause.
Cloister cleared his throat. “The guy was peeping at teenagers, too,” he said.
“He’s just angry,” Javi said. “I get that.”
Cloister nodded. He looked at Bourneville. Bourneville looked at him. It was a moment of connection profound enough that it briefly made Javi doubt his assertion that technology would make the dog obsolete.
“Such,” Cloister commanded, and Bon threw herself at the trail.
The leash was strung taut between Cloister’s hand and Bourneville. She strained against it, eager to move at her own pace as she headed down the street.
“Langsam,” Cloister told her. She huffed at the order, her nose close enough to the ground that her sigh disturbed the dirt, but slowed enough to let the lead go slack.
It was still a brisk pace. Javi could keep up, but he could feel it in his thighs.
He was fit, and he had a gym membership he actually used, but maybe he needed to up his hours on the treadmill.
The idea occurred to him that he could join Cloister on a run, but he put that down quickly.
Cloister ran like he could outpace sleep.
Javi wanted to improve his stamina, not kill himself.
“It was bad timing,” he said. “Joel was Kincaid’s appointment, but she wouldn’t have let him roll over Plenty the way he is. Her disappearance gave him the go-ahead to do pulls he wants under the aegis of protecting his agents.”
Cloister took his eyes away from Bourneville’s ears for a moment to glance at Javi. The quirk of his dirty blond eyebrow was unexpectedly direct.
“You don’t think he set it up?”
Javi lost half a step as he faltered in surprise.
The “Of course not,” came out on autopilot, muscle memory of playing the game brought back by being in an office staffed by Kincaid and his team.
It wasn’t that the question hadn’t occurred to him, he’d just not been ready to say it out loud. Not without a bit more beating around the mental bush.
When Cloister just accepted the answer with a shrug, Javi let himself think about the question a second longer.
At the same time, Bourneville took a quick left onto—Javi took a quick glance at the road sign—Spruce.
A woman at the end of her garden, hand in her mail box to get her letters, smiled as she saw them coming.
The “aww, cute dog” expression curdled slightly as she took in the dog’s body language and single-minded intent.
Even people who didn’t know dogs tended to feel on edge around that sort of focus.
Bon might be the sheriff’s department's go-to dog for public relations opportunities—liked small children, ridiculous ears, and wasn’t going to cock a leg to pee on something awkward—she still triggered the “wolf? button in people’s heads when she was like this.
The big blond guy with the “bar fight” nose on the other end of the lead didn’t tend to help put people’s minds at ease.
The woman pulled her mail, tucked the handful of flyers under her elbow, and quickly grabbed her child off the lawn, ignoring their whine of “doggy” as she headed into the house. The door didn’t slam behind her, but did close firmly.
Javi broke into a brief jog to catch up with Cloister. As he fell into step next to him, the question about Kincaid was still on his mind. After a couple of steps, he admitted, “At least, not directly, but…I think he’s involved somehow. Him or something he did.”
He didn’t know why he expected Cloister to argue, to bring up Kincaid’s career, his commendations, the respect people had for him, but he did. All he got was a “huh” and a nod.
“It would explain why he’s still muddying the waters with you, instead of focusing on her being missing,” Cloister said. “There’s something he wants to distract people from.”
Exactly. It made sense.
Kincaid had gotten his hooks into Joel early in her career.
She wasn’t one of his fast-track prodigies like Javi had been, but that’s why she’d lasted.
Solid enough to be useful, never ambitious enough to be a threat.
The UC line she’d kept active might have predated her crossing paths with Javi, but not her being solidly in Kincaid’s camp by then.
Whatever it was had to have something to do with Kincaid.
And, somehow, Saul.
For a second, Javi felt something bump together in his head.
Before the edges could click into a realization, Bourneville took a sharp turn onto someone’s drive.
She loped up the dried-out concrete and sniffed at the bottom of the garage door.
Then she pawed at it with one foot, scraping off flaking strips of white paint, and gave two sharp, insistent barks.