Chapter 16
Chapter Sixteen
Kincaid liked motels.
Javi tried to open the sliding window, but it would only open a finger’s width before it jammed. Possibly on the mummified bodies of flies caught in the window track. He grimaced and left it, fastidiously pulling a handkerchief out of his pocket to wipe the greasy, dusty film off his palm.
“It helps me sleep at night to think how many criminals I’ve made uneasy staying here,” Kincaid said as he stepped out of the bathroom.
His words were mumbled around the blue plastic toothbrush he was scrubbing his molars with.
He leaned against the chewed-up door frame and raised an eyebrow. “So what’s so important?”
He was shirtless, his tank top damp and sticking to his wiry body, and barefoot. Sandy hair stuck up carelessly from behind his ears. Javi looked at him and tried to wonder what he’d ever found attractive about the man. It didn’t work. He knew.
The guilt of that could wait until later.
Javi had already been back to the suboffice. Now that he knew what to look for, he’d not even needed to ask Sue for help navigating the archival records. He held up the printout for Kincaid to see and then tossed it on the bed.
“I always wondered why you had such a hard-on for Luka Horvat,” he said.
It had been a while since he’d said that name out loud.
The sour mixture of guilt, anger, and his desire to move on had made him dodge the name like there was some sort of intrinsic power in it.
“Out of every criminal and trafficker who crossed your desk, why make him your nemesis?”
Kincaid pulled the toothbrush out of his mouth. “He’s a handsome man,” he said with a shrug of one wiry shoulder. “If you like them Slavic.”
He disappeared back into the bathroom to spit into the sink.
Water ran as he rinsed his mouth. Javi knew better than to let Kincaid’s petty games bother him, but it still did.
He took a shallow breath of muggy air and glanced around the room.
There was a paperback on the bedside table, spine cracked and place marked with a gas station receipt.
A photo of Kincaid’s kids was blu-tacked to the fly-spotted mirror over the rickety, line-scored desk against the wall.
It was a new one. The last time Javi had seen a photo of them, they’d still been pre-teens, with gappy grins and cartoon T-shirts. In this Polaroid, they were solidly invested in adolescence, with braces and wolf-cuts. There was a year—or maybe two?—between them, but they looked like twins.
Kincaid came back out of the bathroom, towel draped over his hands.
“Alice has a boyfriend,” he said. “Can you believe that?”
Javi looked away from the Polaroid. “I can’t remember which one is Alice,” he said.
It was just the truth. Today had left him too off-balance to try and play the game at Kincaid’s level. For some reason, that landed better than any jibe he’d tried to needle under the man’s guard. A quick frown creased Kincaid’s face.
“She’s the oldest,” he said shortly, wiping toothpaste off his mouth onto the corner of the towel.
“The academic one. They’re both clever, but Ellie doesn’t apply herself as much.
You ever thought about having kids yourself?
I imagine it’s a daunting thought when your partner’s stepdad might have murdered his own nephew. ”
Kincaid flicked the towel over his shoulder.
“It was never about Luka, though, was it?” Javi asked. “It’s Vesna that you want to hurt, because of what she did to Jessie Sandoval.”
Javi had read the file before he came over.
It had been easy to see why neither of Lara’s parents had wanted to tell the child version of her the truth about what happened to a woman she’d liked.
Empathy wasn’t one of Javi’s virtues, and the list of what the Horvats had done to the young agent had still made him flinch.
The worst of it had been that, from what was in the file, it hadn’t even been for any advantage. They had just wanted to prove that the FBI wasn’t untouchable.
The muscles in Kincaid’s jaw clenched under the scruff of light stubble. He looked down at his hands and pushed the cuticles of his nails back.
“Special Agent Andrea Sandoval,” he corrected Javi, with a thin, spare smile. “You weren’t her friend.”
“Neither were you,” Javi said. “From experience. Did she think you were?”
The smile twitched on Kincaid’s face. “No,” he said. “Annie never liked me much. She was Saul’s little protege, not mine.”
“I know,” Javi said. “So why do you care?”
Kincaid flicked at a tag of skin with his thumbnail. The quick, fidgety gesture felt more like a real tic than one of his cultivated fidgets. “She was a federal agent. I don’t have to have a personal relationship with her to care about her.”
“You could have a personal relationship with her and not care about her,” Javi said. “What’s the truth?”
Kincaid didn’t drop the mask often. The reason he did it now was because he thought there was some benefit in it for him. It still felt oddly intimate, in the same way his bare feet did, to see the stillness settle over the man. The shark peered out through pale blue eyes.
“Because that simple bitch Vesna Horvat thought she could hurt me,” Kincaid said. “The fact that it didn’t work wasn’t a deterrent from someone trying again. Maybe someone with better judgment about who I do care for.”
He nodded quietly at the photo of his kids. Javi didn’t know if that was true, not really, but he knew Kincaid believed it.
“And Saul?”
Kincaid put his hands in the pockets of his slacks.
He raised an eyebrow. “Do you care?” he asked.
His shoulders twitched in a shrug. “I can give you the blow-by-blow of how far he went outside the lines for that girl, how deep in the bottle it sent him, and how his wife dragged him out. Or…I can just tell you why he helped you. That’s what you care about, right?
Moral indignation aside, you want to know if another mentor was just using you? ”
For a second, Javi felt the emotional crash he’d fended off with procedural details and the investigative process wash over him. He could feel the cracks in his self-control start to give as an almost physical ache in the bones of his skull.
He sat down on the corner of the bed and reached out to put his hand on the stack of printouts.
“It was guilt,” he said flatly. The words were dry and felted in his mouth. “Because he knew that I’d not been responsible for Eric’s death, but he let me take the fall anyhow.”
Kincaid tilted his head as he thought about that. “If it makes you feel any better,” he offered with the clear assumption he was being magnanimous, “Saul did object to that. It was just too late to stop me by then. Your guilt helped sell our lie.”
“It doesn’t,” Javi said. He took a deep breath of motel-sour air and tried to get his brain back on track. Whatever he felt could wait. The investigation had a timer on it. “Where is he?”
“Eric?” Kincaid said. He gestured at his chest. “Oh, I don’t know.
I’ve not known since Saul died. The only one who does know is waiting for me at a black site outside of town.
You can come along if you like, but Vegas rules.
No telling the boyfriend what the two of us get up to when he’s not around. ”
The text was from Cloister.
Javi hovered his thumb over the notification for a moment, but he ended up leaving it unread. He turned the phone off instead and tucked it into his inside pocket. The car hit another pothole, and he shifted in the seat, reaching up for the grab handle to steady himself.
“You couldn’t have just commandeered an interrogation room at the station?” he asked.
Kincaid slung his arm out of the open driver’s side window. The sun pinked his pale skin as he tapped his fingers idly against the side of the car.
“I’ve not exactly gotten off to a ‘turn a blind eye’ start with Plenty’s LEOs,” he said. “People like your boyfriend.”
“He’d be surprised to hear that,” Javi said.
Kincaid chuckled. “He would too,” he said. “What I could get away with if I was that likeable, and it doesn’t even register for Deputy Witte. That’s childhood neglect for you. But you did the same psych classes as me at Quantico. You’ve probably put that together yourself.”
When they’d been…whatever that had been…Javi had enjoyed this. He’d thought that keeping up with Kincaid’s manipulation-forward observations about colleagues and suspects alike proved something. It probably had, just not what Javi had thought it did.
Now it was just exhausting.
“I don’t want to talk about him with you.”
Kincaid glanced at him. “What? I like him too,” he protested. “None of this was personal. His reputation was just in my way.”
He took the bend in the road too wide. The tires skipped off the finished concrete and caught the soft shoulder, kicking up a spray of dirt and gravel. Pebbles clattered against the undercarriage as Kincaid course-corrected.
Ahead of them, there was a glimpse of blue along the horizon. It looked like the ocean, but it was in the wrong direction. Javi watched the strip of the All-American Canal for a deliberate count of five, letting Kincaid blow past the speed limit sign before he said, “You missed the turn.”
Kincaid eased up on the gas. He glanced at Javi and then squinted into the mirror. As he picked out the dust-covered track up into the hills, the sun-bleached concrete the same color as the desert around it, he made an annoyed sound.
“This is why I like cities,” he grumbled as he hit the brakes. “People put a premium on finding where you’re going in cities.”
He threw the car into reverse, bumped onto the soft shoulder for a second time, and then back into drive as he manhandled the car into a U-turn.
“You’ve been here before?” he said and made an annoyed sound in the back of his throat. “And Benson told me it was disused. I know how far a handsome face and a mother with pull can get a man, but if he can’t charm someone into doing his job for him, he needs to do it himself.”