Chapter 20 #2
“Obviously,” Marion repeated, each syllable clipped off and irritated.
Then she remembered the situation and almost audibly reined her temper in.
When she tried again, her voice was more even.
“They thought it was good for him to be able to use his talents, his intelligence. Except that’s never been good for Brian.
People always think it will be…that if he can just put being ‘gifted’ to use, it will make him realize he’s wasting his time with mental illness. ”
The snap had crawled back into her voice at the end. Javi didn’t pull her on it. The sun through the windscreen was making him squint and sweat. He got out of the car and leaned back against the side of it as he watched a semi swing in off the road and pull in across a handful of spaces.
Habit made him clock the license plate and scan down the side of the trailer for any telltale mods or scraped off lettering. After the last sweep of drugs coming through the desert, the cartels had pivoted to local production with van-life drug labs on the rise.
This one looked clean enough, but Javi still kept half an eye on it as he refocused back on Marion.
“Alice mentioned he’d been in contact with a lot of activists online,” Javi said. “Would he have been vulnerable to—”
Marion didn’t need him to finish the question.
“Yes,” Marion said. “He would have. Is my brother OK, Agent Merlo?”
That was a loaded question. The last time Javi had seen Fowler, the man had been propped up in a chair as Kincaid leveraged a bottle of painkillers for information.
“He’s in a lot of trouble,” Javi answered, honestly if not fully. “But he’s in custody, so we have the chance to stop it getting any worse.”
In the background of the call, Javi heard a car door slam. When he’d called, Marion had said she was in her office. He supposed this wasn’t the sort of call she’d want to have with her co-workers in earshot.
“The chance to stop it getting worse was when I called for a wellness check,” Marion said. Music flicked on, something high-pitched and cheerful for a kid, and off again. “If you had done your job then, this wouldn’t have happened.”
“A wellness check?” Javi repeated.
While Marion snorted impatiently in his ear, he reopened the car to grab his tablet from the sleeve in the door compartment. He flicked it on and tapped at the screen as he checked his memory. There was nothing about a wellness check on Brian logged.
Which, he supposed, meshed with what Marion was saying.
“They just brushed me off,” she said. The rhythms of her speech shifted into an almost good-enough-to-recognize mimicry of an officious cop.
“They’d been to the address and spoken to the resident, and my ‘son’ claimed not to be in distress or need any assistance.
For god’s sake, they couldn’t even remember he was my brother.
I tried to tell them that he will look fine, that he sounds fine.
It’s exactly what his old roommates said, right up until he set them on fire.
It’s what my parents said, right up until they died. ”
Javi’s finger paused mid-swipe.
“Are you suggesting—”
“No. Never. He loved them,” Marion said. “But they never understood that he could be completely fine 95 percent of the time and still be crazy as a shithouse rat 100 percent of the time.”
She stopped and swallowed, the click of spit in her throat audible.
“That’s not how I talk about him,” she said. “I just… Nobody ever listens.”
“I am.”
“Only because it’s too late,” Marion said. “Can I talk to him?”
“Not right now,” Javi hedged. “Did you say you have Brian’s address?”
It took a second. Javi imagined that Marion was trying to work out what she could try and get for the information.
“Things could still get worse for Brian,” Javi said.
He tried to sound like he had any sympathy for the man.
It should have been easy. From what he’d put together, Brian had been a vulnerable target for a sophisticated international cartel.
Maybe if Javi got Eric back alive, that would matter.
For now, the gentleness in his voice was just a tool.
“I’m trying to stop that from happening. Just like you were.”
“Twenty-two Cuyamaca Road,” she said. “Not Cuyamaca Way. It came later, and we never got our mail again. It was…I’m sorry. That’s not what you asked. Twenty-two Cuyamaca Road. It’s our parents’ house. I never sold it, just so he’d… That’s where he’s staying.”
“Thank you,” Javi said. “We’ll keep you updated.”
He hung up before she could push for that update now and called Kincaid.
The call dragged out until he expected the flick to voicemail, but with a couple of rings to go, Kincaid picked up.
“Anything?” Kincaid asked
“The sister is probably on her way,” Javi informed him. “She’s in Phoenix. I get the feeling she was expecting some sort of call, so she was ready to go. We’ve probably got about three hours.”
“Isn’t it nice to be back in the fold?” Kincaid said lightly, and Javi could suddenly taste the sourness of “we” on his tongue. Before he could say anything, Kincaid jumped back in. “Older sister? Younger?”
“Older.”
Kincaid sighed. “Enough she was parentified?”
“Not really,” Javi said. “She was anyhow.”
“Shit,” Kincaid sighed. “What did she tell you about Fowler? Anything I can use to get him to talk?”
Javi rubbed the back of his neck. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the truck driver jump down from the cab and start toward the restrooms. He mentally crossed that off his list of things to keep track of.
“He’s paranoid, delusional, and smart enough to think he’s more likely to be right than most people he meets,” Javi said.
“When he’s having an episode, he’s very sure he’s right, but both the administrator at the farm and his sister said he’s vulnerable to anything that feeds into that delusion.
In this case, the Horvats were able to use the fact that Eric’s new house was a foreclosed property to trigger—"
Kincaid interrupted him. “So the crazy isn’t just a bit?” he said. “That means that he probably doesn’t know anything real about the Horvats. They’ll have just fed him whatever nutcase slogans needed to trigger him.”
It was what Kincaid would do.
“He still knows where Eric is,” Javi said. “Or was. If you can convince him that you’re on his side, that might be enough to—”
“Yeah,” Kincaid said. “You’re right. He could still be useful if I take another approach. Get back here. I want a proper report on my desk, and when the sister gets here, you can take point on that. You already have a rapport with her.”
He hung up.
Javi leaned back against the car and tilted his head back, eyes closed and sun warm on his face. He clenched his jaw and just imagined screaming instead.
Back in Phoenix, there had been a graveyard of abandoned hobbies in Kincaid’s office. He’d take up something focused and fiddly, then just lose interest and leave it half-finished on a shelf.
Unfinished model planes, a book nook, a handful of sports memorabilia from the UK.
He was the same with people. Once he was done, he just cut the strings and didn’t even bother to clean up the mess.
That’s what he’d done to Javi. He didn’t like Kincaid much these days, but he could still remember how addicted he’d been to the heat of Kincaid’s consuming, mercurial interest. And the way it had just switched off between one breath and the next.
It felt like Kincaid had just done the same thing to Eric.
The “we” hadn’t lasted long.